But even he admits that now, looking back, “Something wasn’t right.”

“No good has come from this. This isn’t the America we envisioned.”

Explaining how the building was bought down, Mr. Howard says, “It was a classic controlled demolition with explosives. We used super-fine military grade nanothermite composite materials as explosives. The hard part was getting thousands of pounds of explosives, fuses and ignition mechanisms into the building without causing too much concern. But almost every single office in the Building 7 was rented by the CIA, the Secret Service, or the military, which made it easier.”

Mr. Howard explains that WTC 7 was “loaded with explosives in strategic places” in the month leading up to the day that changed the course of American history. On September 11th, while the North and South towers burned, fuses were ignited in World Trade Center 7, and nanothermite explosions hollowed out the building, destroying the steel structure, removing the reinforcements, and allowing the office fires to tear through the rest of the building, hollowing it out like a shell.

World Trade Center 7 collapsed into its own footprint at 5:20pm, seven hours after the destruction of WTC 1 and 2. The building shocked witnesses by coming down at the speed of freefall, indicating that it encountered zero resistance on the way down.

Mr. Howard and his colleagues had done their job.

“When the building came down, it was such a rush. Everything went exactly to plan. It was so smooth. Everybody was evacuated. Nobody was hurt in WTC 7. We were celebrating. We kept watching replays of the demolition, we had the whiskey and cigars out, and then all of a sudden the strangest thing happened. We all started to worry that it looked a bit too smooth.

We watched the tape again and again and again and we started to get paranoid. It looked like a controlled demolition. We thought shit, people are going to question this. And then we heard that people from the street were reporting that they heard the explosions during the afternoon.

When we were told that the BBC botched their report and announced to the world that the building collapsed 20 minutes before it actually did… At that point we really thought the gig was up.”

According to the official 9/11 report issued by the government, WTC 7 collapsed due to “uncontrolled fires” that were caused by debris that floated over from WTC 1 and 2, which had been hit by passenger planes. If the official narrative was true, WTC 7 would be the first tall building in the world to ever collapse due to uncontrolled fires, and the only steel skyscraper in the world to have collapsed into itself, due to “office fires.”

Mr. Howard and his colleagues feared the public would see through the official narrative and rise up against the government, demanding to be told the truth.

“There were so many loose ends, so much evidence left behind. We thought the public would be all over it. We thought there would be a public uprising that the media couldn’t ignore. They’d be funding investigations and demanding to know why they were being lied to. We thought they’d find chemical composites in the area that would prove Building 7 was blown up. 

“We thought there would be a revolution. It would go all the way to the top, to President Bush. He’d be dragged out of the White House.

“But none of that happened. Almost nobody questioned anything. The media shot down anyone who dared question anything they were told.”

Follow the money

Mr. Howard claims he has “no direct knowledge” about the destruction of North and South Towers of the World Trade Center, explaining that “CIA operations are very specific” and that it is common to be working on a larger project while only understanding a small piece of the puzzle.

But he has advice for investigators seeking to understand the entire puzzle and work out who was behind the most devastating attack on American soil in history.

“Follow the money.”

“When you want to find out who is behind something, just follow the money. Look at the trades made just before 9/11. These are the guys that knew what was coming. The sons of CIA agents, government officials. Close relatives of the most powerful men in America. Cheney, Rumsfeld. They all got rich. It wasn’t just the contracts awarded to their friends in the construction business and the wars and the kickbacks.”

“It was insider trading.”

Many countries including Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Monaco launched insider trading investigations in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, believing that if they could prove Al-Qaeda operatives profited on the stock market then they could prove the terror organization was behind the attacks.

And all the evidence pointed to heavy insider trading around 9/11.

Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio Martino, said: “I think that there are terrorist states and organizations behind speculation on the international markets.” German central bank president, Ernst Welteke, said his researchers had found “almost irrefutable proof of insider trading.”

Even CNN reported that regulators were seeing “ever-clearer signs” that someone “manipulated financial markets ahead of the terror attack in the hope of profiting from it.”

Mr. Howard says that a serious study of who profited on the stock market from 9/11 would “tear the heart out of the oligarchy in America.”

“There is only one organization that spans the entire world, and let me tell you now, it isn’t and it never was al-Qaeda.”

It’s the CIA.

“There could never be a real investigation. The entire shadow government, as you call them now, are implicated.”

The 79-year-old, spending his final weeks at home, said he doesn’t expect to be taken into custody following his confession because “then they’d have to go after everyone else. They will just use the media to attack me. They are all on the payroll to suppress everything around 9/11.”