The Terrorist Next Door?

By Daniel Eisenberg

Adam Yahiye Gadahn, A.K.A. Abu Suhayb, could be just the kind of prospective terrorist that intelligence analysts in Washington are most concerned about these days--a personification of what Attorney General John Ashcroft calls the changing face of al-Qaeda. Gadahn, 25, is an American through and through, born and bred in California, a speaker of unaccented English, intimate with the country's habits and thus able to move about without arousing suspicion. Brought up and homeschooled on his parents' goat farm, Gadahn was an introspective teenager who went looking for meaning and found it in Islam. Eventually, he also found his way to Pakistan and, according to U.S. authorities, Afghanistan, where they claim he attended al-Qaeda training camps and has acted as a translator for the group.

The FBI's announcement last week that it was seeking Gadahn for questioning conjured memories of John Walker Lindh, the young Californian convert to Islam who in 2002 was sentenced to 20 years in prison for serving in the Taliban army. But it also called to mind the cautionary tale of Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield, another American convert, who just a week before had been released from jail after U.S. officials mistakenly tied him to the March bombings in Madrid. Had al-Qaeda found a gateway through an American recruit, or were authorities again overreaching?

Americans could be forgiven for wondering, given the confused, conflicting signals the government sent with its latest terrorism alert. Besides asking citizens to be on the lookout for Gadahn and six other alleged al-Qaeda associates, Ashcroft repeated the claim of an al-Qaeda--related group that preparations for a massive attack inside the U.S. were "90%" done, although he acknowledged that officials had not picked up any specifics about a plot. Intelligence officials questioned the credibility of the group but insisted there was ample support for Ashcroft's warning. The same day that Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller were making their case, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge was on TV declaring that the intelligence was "not the most disturbing that I have personally seen during the past couple of years."

Some officials at the Department of Homeland Security said they felt blindsided by Ashcroft's dire warning, though a senior Administration official says Ridge "was in the room when the decision was made" to deliver the announcement. But they were so upset with what they viewed as the alarmist tone of the information--which had leaked out in an Associated Press story the night before--that they got the White House to call and complain to the Justice Department. "There was a concern within the intelligence community about the characterization of the information," says a federal official involved in the discussions. "If you don't know who, what, where and when, how do you get to 90%?" FBI and intelligence officials defended the warning, saying there has been a striking repetition from many diverse sources--some of them better and more insistent than ever--that something big is imminent. In an effort to regain the appearance of unity, Ashcroft and Ridge issued a public statement saying "We are working together." That terrorism is a relentless threat was driven home the next day when gunmen attacked a business complex and two residential compounds of expatriate oil workers in the Saudi city of Khobar, killing at least a dozen foreigners and Saudis and taking many hostages.

The fact that six of the seven wanted individuals named by Ashcroft and Mueller had previously been identified as suspects brought criticism that the Justice Department was recycling old news. But what the two men meant to do, their aides say, was underscore the point that al-Qaeda is likely to rely on operatives who can move easily into and around the U.S. Apart from Gadahn, they highlighted two people with Canadian passports and two others who had spent years in the U.S. The two remaining suspects have been indicted for the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Ashcroft and Mueller made no effort to link the seven to intelligence about a coming attack, and Mueller noted there was no evidence that any of the seven were working in concert. FBI counterterrorism experts, in fact, believe that for any new plot, al-Qaeda would pick "clean" operators rather than people whose pictures are posted on the FBI website. But officials hope some of the seven may be found somewhere in the world and point the way to others yet unidentified.

Meanwhile, U.S. officials took consolation from the arrest in London of Abu Hamza al-Masri, the outspoken one-eyed cleric who once preached at the city's radical Finsbury Park Mosque, where the likes of so-called shoe bomber Richard Reid and al-Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui worshipped. Abu Hamza has long been suspected of having ties to terrorism, but British authorities took him in only after U.S. investigators got Muslim convert James Ujaama to testify in Seattle that he had communicated with the cleric about plans to build a terrorism training camp in Bly, Ore., in 1999. In a bargain with prosecutors, Ujaama in mid-April pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to help the Taliban. Besides the training-camp plan, Abu Hamza was charged in the U.S. with aiding a deadly kidnapping plot in Yemen in 1998 and supporting Taliban and al-Qaeda--training operations in Afghanistan. British officials indicate they are willing to hand him over to the U.S. as long as the U.S. agrees not to seek the death penalty in the case. Abu Hamza is fighting extradition.

While the Ashcroft press conference sparked thousands of calls to FBI and police offices from tipsters who thought they had spotted the suspects whom some officials have sarcastically dubbed the Magnificent Seven, Adam Gadahn's relatives say they haven't seen him since 1998 or even heard from him since he called almost two years ago from Pakistan. He said that he was married to an Afghan refugee there and that they had a child. A bookworm who eagerly read about religion and history as a teenager, Gadahn got an early introduction to Islam, courtesy of his dad's goat-farming business, which mainly sold to an Islamic market in downtown Los Angeles. In an online posting apparently written by Gadahn in 1995, he says that from an early age, he "knew well that [Muslims] were not the bloodthirsty, barbaric terrorists that the news media and the televangelists paint them to be."

Before he rejected his parents' nondenominational brand of Christianity and found Islam, teaching himself Arabic in the process, Gadahn had other passions. For a brief spell in the early 1990s, he became a big fan of so-called death-metal music, contributing reviews of bands with names like Damnation and Autopsy to a fanzine. After he embraced Islam, he went to work as a security guard at an Orange County mosque. But he fell asleep on the job and was fired, then started a fistfight with one of the mosque's elders and was convicted of assault. Gadahn served two days in jail but failed to turn up for five days of community service. That was the last chapter of the young man's public life until John Ashcroft put his name in the spotlight. --Reported by Elaine Shannon, Viveca Novak and John F. Dickerson/Washington; Bruce Crumley/Paris; J.F.O. McAllister/London; and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles, with other bureaus

With reporting by Elaine Shannon, Viveca Novak and John F. Dickerson/Washington; Bruce Crumley/Paris; J.F.O. McAllister/London; and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles, with other bureaus