A long-lost relative of the reclusive heiress Huguette Clark, who could have inherited $19 million of her $300 million fortune, has been found dead under a Union Pacific Railroad overpass in Wyoming.

Children sledding found the body of Timothy Henry Gray, 60, Thursday afternoon in Evanston, a small mining town in southwestern Wyoming near the Utah border. The coroner said it appeared he died of hypothermia. The low temperature that day was 10 degrees, and had hit zero in the previous week. Lt. Bill Jeffers of the Evanston Police Department said there was no evidence of foul play, and Gray was wearing a light jacket. Gray's siblings said they hadn't heard from him since their mother's funeral in 1990, when he disappeared without a word.  It wasn't clear whether Gray was living under the overpass, where transients have been known to camp.

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Tim Gray was an adopted great-grandson of former U.S. Sen. William Andrews Clark, known as one of the copper kings of Montana, a banker, a builder of railroads and the founder of Las Vegas. The senator's youngest daughter, Huguette Clark, was a recluse who died in 2011 in New York City at age 104, after living in hospitals for 20 years while her palatial homes sat unused. Gray was her half great-nephew.

In her will, Huguette Clark left no money at all to her family, leaving it instead to her nurse, goddaughter, attorney, accountant, hospital, doctor, favorite museum and various employees, as well as  to an art foundation to be set up at her oceanfront estate in Santa Barbara, Calif.  None of her relatives had seen Clark in at least 40 years, though some had been in touch with her through holiday cards and occasional phone calls.

Nineteen of Clark's relatives have stepped forward to challenge her will in a New York court. A public administrator joined the challenge on behalf of Gray. When lawyers tried to find him to let him know about the Clark estate battle, they found his belongings had been abandoned in a storage locker, according to court records, and private investigators were not able to find him.

If the relatives win their court challenge, Gray's estate would be entitled to about $19 million before taxes, or 6.25 percent of Clark's copper mining fortune, which has been conservatively estimated at $307 million by the administrator of Huguette Clark's estate. If Gray, who apparently had no spouse or children, died without a will, his siblings would receive his share in addition to their own.

Gray was not using the money he already had. The coroner said Gray's wallet contained a cashier's check, from 2003, for "a significant amount."

Gray's older brother, Jerry, said Tim had worked as a cowboy and lived in the Rocky Mountain states. "He was homeless essentially. If we had proper mental health services in this country, we could have been notified and known to do something."

Huguette Clark attracted the attention of NBC News in 2009 because of her vacant but well-manicured mansions and questions about the management of her money. The battle over her estate could go before a jury in 2013, though settlement talks have begun.

The archive of Clark stories, photos and videos is at http://nbcnews.com/clark/.

Do you have information on the Clark family?
Reporter Bill Dedman is co-authoring "Empty Mansions," a nonfiction book about Huguette Clark and her family. If you have documents or information, you can reach him at bill.dedman@msnbc.com.

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Editors' note: This story has been updated to clarify Apollo CEO Leon Black's stock holdings. The company had declined to comment for this story before publication.

When Apollo Global Management bought Momentive Performance Materials, a chemical factory in upstate New York, in 2006, it administered a lesson in modern-day economics at what had long been one of the biggest and most stable employers in the Albany area.

Private equity companies like Apollo make money through debt. In a leveraged buyout, a firm hones in on a company, often one that is publicly traded, and struggling, and takes it private. The acquisition is financed by borrowing against the company itself. The goal is to take the company public again, ideally in three to five years, and net a profit for the investors and the firm. The debt remains with the company.

The debt load can translate to major belt-tightening at the acquired company. The buyer is looking to increase productivity, reduce inefficiencies and, as jargon would have it, create synergies. That often means a private equity firm will buy up a few companies in a particular industry, mash them together and eliminate the overlap. That often means eliminating jobs.

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Whether private equity firms, on average, create or destroy jobs is a matter of debate. Buyouts by private equity firms have a generally positive effect on the financial performance of the acquired companies but are “associated with lower employment growth,” according to a 2008 report by the Government Accountability Office. A more-recent academic paper found that post-buyout, companies see increases in both layoffs and jobs created. On balance, the authors write, there is a 1 percent net loss of jobs when a company is taken over by a private equity firm.

But the loss of jobs is often not the only toll for workers caught in the middle of a leveraged buyout, as Momentive workers learned soon after Apollo purchased their company from General Electric. (GE is a part owner of NBCUniversal.) 

Apollo cut the wages for most of the production and maintenance workers at its Waterford plant. The National Labor Relations Board investigated and tentatively concluded that the company had violated the contract. But with other locals rallying behind a new contract offer, hundreds of the production workers were forced to accept drastically reduced pay.

In the months after the contract vote, the stress level at the plant was through the roof, said one worker, who, like his colleagues, spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared retaliation from company officials. His doctor treats lots of Momentive workers, he said, “and she says Xanax should be in our drinking water.”

The anxiety “was affecting my stomach,” another worker said. “I can’t eat. I’m drinking more than I’ve ever drank in my whole life.”

Since the wage cuts, workers said, attracting qualified hires has been difficult. The new contract, they said, has brought more responsibility for less pay. They alleged that new hires are asked to perform dangerous tasks with inadequate training. And longtime workers are taking second jobs to make up for lost pay, several men said.

“There’s a guy near me who has a part-time job at Wal-Mart,” one man said, adding that in his unit people work seven afternoons in a row, with one day off, then seven straight days of midnight shifts.

“He often says he’s only got three hours of sleep” before returning to work, he said.

“This is suicidal,” another man said.

Momentive, in a written statement, says it “seeks to attract a world-class workforce through competitive compensation and benefits, while providing a safe work environment.” The company also notes that since 2006, when Apollo took over, the Waterford site has shown improvement on two of OSHA's key measures of worker safety. 

Still, the union has raised safety concerns. For years, the Waterford plant was part of a special program at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration that honors workplaces with exemplary safety and health records and procedures. Waterford was a VPP Star site, the highest rank within the Voluntary Protection Program. The benefits of the VPP star aren’t just a nice flag to fly in front of the factory. Once in the program, the site is exempt from random checks by OSHA inspectors.

In late 2010, the union withdrew its support for the VPP program in Waterford, which is required for the certification. Such a loss of union support is rare, according to OSHA. In January 2011, the plant lost its VPP status.

That withdrawal from the program was a long time coming. In November 2008, the membership of Local 81359 had sent a letter to Momentive’s management, saying the company’s “actions and tactics have created this hostile work environment and we fear for the health and safety” of the plant workers.

After that warning, OSHA inspectors found eight serious violations at the plant over several months in 2010, each resulting in a $4,500 fine.

One of the violations involved “an uncontrolled release of sulfuric acid,” exposing employees to “inhalation and burn hazards.” Momentive did not furnish employment “free from recognized hazards that were causing or likely to cause death or serious physical harm,” according to the violation notice. (Four of the violations were later “deleted” by the agency during discussions with the company of fines and penalties.)

“The night of the sulfuric acid release there were some young new guys there, and a guy who had been there for a long time,” said Dominick Patrignani, a union official. “He kept people from getting burned. We would have been reading about it in the obit section, possibly.”

“The knowledge base of the people they’re bringing in is nothing like we’ve ever seen before, because you can’t get highly skilled workers at $14 and $15 an hour.”

On May 25, 2011, two workers on the night shift were severely burned in a flash fire at the plant. In the early morning, the men were preparing to clean some equipment, according to one worker with knowledge of the incident. But when they started to take apart a piece of pipe, gas somehow ignited. The men were severely burned and were airlifted to the Burn Center at nearby Westchester Medical Center. Both survived, but now face a long recovery.

“This whole event could have been prevented,” Patrignani said, adding that he had raised safety concerns about that area of the plant to the operations manager the week before the accident.

In November 2011, an OSHA investigation of the May accident resulted in $81,000 in additional fines for Momentive, for 10 serious violations and one repeat violation. The company is appealing the fines and OSHA has yet to issue a final determination.

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For Momentive’s Waterford workers, the wage changes are a done deal. A group of workers filed additional complaints with the National Labor Relations Board, but those went nowhere. Some organized a vote to decertify the union — essentially, to fire the union as their representatives — but that failed.

They have received their settlement checks, and most are resigned to the drastically lower pay, new responsibilities and the tension. But resignation doesn’t mean the living is easy.

I met with one Momentive worker, his fiancée and their young daughter at a Dunkin’ Donuts off Route 9. When I mentioned that someone told me I should talk to the wives if I want to get the real picture of the pay cuts and their impact, she nodded. “We almost lost him, you know,” she said. “He had a heart attack from the stress.” He was now seeing a therapist and a psychiatrist, and was taking multiple anti-anxiety drugs, she said.

Over coffee and a box of doughnut holes, the couple laid out what they’ve been through since the pay cuts took $400 a week out of his paycheck.

First they got jammed up on bills and they cut down to one car, a hardship in an area where you can’t hail a cab or catch a bus, and you can’t get a gallon of milk without driving to a store.

The man had to ask a friend for a ride to work. “It was hard to do that,” he said quietly. “I’m not used to asking for help.”

Since then, they’ve scaled back a lot.

“We’re OK with that,” his fiancée was quick to say. She doesn’t get her hair done any more, or her nails, things they took for granted before. They don’t go on vacation, or to the movies. But the furnace is on its last legs, she said, and they don’t know how they would pay for repairs if it conks out.

And it’s not just the little things. When his wages were cut, they fell behind on their mortgage, and the bank wasn’t willing to lower their rate, now at 8.5 percent. They couldn’t refinance with another lender, because their credit was bad. “Of course it was bad,” she said. “We lost a huge chunk of our income.”

When they couldn’t refinance, and couldn’t get a loan modification, they said they got tangled up with a foreclosure rescue scam, which took cash up front and advised them to fall further behind on their loan. Efforts to work with government programs didn’t pan out. Now they’ve declared bankruptcy and the house is in foreclosure.

“It’s all I’ve ever wanted, to work. To provide for my family. I didn’t want El Dorados and Rolexes,” the Momentive worker said, worrying the sleeves of his brown work jacket.

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As the workers and their families settle in to their new reality, more changes may lie ahead. Momentive continues to “pursue various cost reduction initiatives” across its sites, including “sourcing through low-cost countries, overtime reduction and other labor efficiency,” according to its 2010 annual report. Whether that means moving more production to China, where the company expects to “generate future growth,” remains to be seen.  Momentive said in its written statement that “Waterford continues to be an important facility” in the company's “North American network.”

The company has also been making moves in the United States, merging Momentive with competitor Hexion in late 2010.

Then, in April 2011, Momentive filed the paperwork for an $862 million initial public offering that  would have brought the company out of Apollo’s hands and return it to public trading. But the company is, as its 2011 annual report notes, still a “highly leveraged company,” owing $2.9 billion at the end of the year. By June 2012, that figure had grown to nearly $4 billion. In August, Standard & Poor’s downgraded Momentive’s debt from B- to CCC. A month later, Momentive withdrew the IPO filing.

Read part 1: A buyout, a reorganization and the new face of job security

 While Momentive may not go public, its owner, Apollo Global Management, did. Following in the footsteps of industry giant Blackstone, Apollo launched an IPO in March 2011. At the time of the IPO, Apollo CEO Leon Black held more than 90 million shares, according to the company's prospectus, worth almost $1.8 billion when the IPO launched. A company spokeswoman, Melissa Mandel Kvitko, said none of Apollo’s management, employees, affiliates, or strategic investors sold shares in this offering.

As for Momentive workers, they still take home a nice paycheck. They know that. They work hard at their union jobs, and they get paid enough to support themselves and their families, maybe save enough to survive into old age. But something besides the pay has changed.

“I don’t like what’s happening. I don’t think it’s right. I don’t think it’s fair. But at the same time, I still have mixed feelings. I’m probably paid better than 90 percent of people,” one man said. It’s the principle, he said: It’s as if he had $10 in his pocket, and Apollo came along and took $2. He still has eight bucks, but that doesn’t make it right. And while he makes more than most people, he said, being able to retire comfortably after decades of work is what’s supposed to happen. It’s not an outrageous luxury, nor should it be.

Now, though, the canceled IPO and the debt load have him wondering about the plant’s future, and the future for young workers at Momentive. “I realize they’re a good employer, and they provide a lot of good jobs,” he said. “I don’t want to see them fail.”

He goes to work every day, he said, and does the best he can. But the contract fight has changed his relationship with a job he once loved. “It’s like being betrayed by a spouse,” he said. “It’s awful hard to go back. It’s never going to be the same for me.”

The Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, is a nonprofit, professional newsroom that pairs experienced professional reporters and editors with graduate students, and co-publishes with mainstream media partners and nonprofit newsrooms.

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WATERFORD, N.Y. -- Momentive Performance Materials sprawls near the banks of the Hudson River, just outside Albany, N.Y., its silver silos and windowless sheds nestled in the low, rolling hills. Men who work there see deer on the road as they drive their pickups to work.

Inside the plant, the tranquility vanishes. It’s not just that the workers are handling toxic, explosive chemicals. That’s par for the course in silicone manufacturing. Many Momentive employees have been at the company for decades, back when it was part of General Electric. They accept the risks in exchange for a steady, sizable paycheck.

The problem is that the paycheck is neither as steady nor sizable as it used to be.

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Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm, bought the former GE Advanced Material (Silicones & Quartz) in 2006 and renamed it Momentive. Two years later, in the middle of a three-year contract, Apollo slashed the wages of some 450 union workers by up to 40 percent. Suddenly, workers found themselves being paid what they had made 10 or 20 years earlier.(GE is a part owner of NBCUniversal, the parent company of NBC News.)

The Momentive workers were standing still, but the world was changing around them. A contract isn’t what it used to be. The men — and they are mostly men — at Momentive have what millions of unemployed Americans covet: a job. And not just any job, but a union job in manufacturing, the kind of job likely to get increasingly rare as right to work laws spread. But that job pays less than it did a decade ago, and many Momentive employees say they’re slipping backward. Some are losing their homes. This is job security in 2012, the new face of stability in the American workplace.

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Momentive produces silicones for dozens of familiar brand names. Its customers include Goodyear, Motorola, L’Oreal and The Home Depot. Its silicones are in caulks, gaskets, carpets and bedding. They’re the conditioning ingredient in “2-in-1” shampoo. When Neil Armstrong took his one giant leap, the sole of his moon boot was made of silicone rubber produced at the Waterford plant.

Workers used to make 700,000 pounds of silicone gum every week at the factory, according to one longtime Momentive worker, who like many others interviewed for this story spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing retribution from the company. Now, he says they make less than 200,000 pounds.

It’s not clear if the overall production has declined or been shifted elsewhere. In addition to its factory in New York, Momentive has factories in Ohio and West Virginia, Japan, Germany and Italy. A finishing plant started up in Chennai, India, in 2010, as did a joint venture in Jiande, China. Another Chinese plant is slated for completion in 2013.

Momentive declined to share production information, but in a statement it said, “Waterford continues to be an important facility in our North American network and we have recently consolidated our Silicones and Quartz divisional headquarters at this site. It is also critical that we continue to strengthen our global footprint, which will allow us to meet the needs of our geographically diverse customer base.”

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When GE spun off its silicones plant six years ago, the Waterford workers were apprehensive. They had a pretty good thing going, and most weren’t excited about a change. Back then, it wasn’t uncommon for a Momentive worker to take home $100,000 a year – serious money for seriously skilled labor. “I make more than some husbands and wives combined,” one man told me. But, he said, “It’s not a perfume factory down there.” The plant operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The men say they regularly worked 60- to 70-hour weeks, including overtime. Schedules of seven days on, one day off, seven days on again were common, they say.

As the union negotiated its first contract with Apollo, it was bracing for major cuts, said Dominick Patrignani, president of IUE-CWA Local 81359, part of the Communications Workers of America, which represents workers at the Waterford plant. Apollo’s $3.8 billion acquisition of the company, completed in December 2006, was financed with more than $3 billion in debt, and workers figured the company would be tightening the belt.

To their surprise, the agreement reached was nearly identical to the previous contract under GE. The three-year contract, which covered two locals at the Waterford plant and workers at a Momentive facility in Ohio, was signed in October 2007. A company newsletter praised it, saying it “locks in gains in pay and pensions” and “retains key job security provisions.”

That didn’t last.

In December 2008, days before Christmas, more than 400 hourly workers at Momentive’s Waterford plant were called in to speak with their supervisors. One by one, workers were told that their pay would be cut, workers say. They would be assigned to new jobs, with new duties and wages.

In its written statement, Momentive said it has had to make “difficult decisions regarding our operations in a challenging economic environment to remain competitive on a local and global basis.”

Workers were told that the pay cuts sought to bring their wages in line with the prevailing wage in the region, they said. But as several noted, others in Saratoga County don’t work with toxic and dangerous materials. Their wages should be compared to those of workers in the chemical sector, they said.

Those new wages also varied wildly, according to documents obtained through a Freedom of Information request to the National Labor Relations Board. One man, a 35-year veteran of the plant, dropped from $29.11 an hour to $17. Another, closing in on 20 years at the company, dropped from $29.11 to $19.50. A man with two years on the job kept his $29.11 wage rate. The longest-tenured worker, with more than 39 years of experience, went from $29.11 to $24. A plant services operator, hired in 1978, found himself earning $14 an hour — a cut of almost $12 from his previous wage.

“Guys with a year or two of service ended up with a higher rate than I did,” said one longtime worker who has two children in college. Before the cuts, he earned $27.31 an hour His new hourly wage was $19.50.

The wage cuts were like “an attack on my family,” another Momentive employee said. He has two children, too, and he regularly worked 70-hour weeks to “give them a good opportunity to go to a good school, get a good education, without going into debt.”

If the company had proposed a 5 to 10 percent pay cut for all workers, including management and technicians, that would have been easier to swallow, several men told me. “It was the arbitrariness that really pissed everyone off,” one said.

In fact, Momentive executives did take a 10 percent pay cut, in April 2009. But in January 2010, just as the workers’ pay cuts took effect, the executives’ “temporary pay reduction” was reversed, “as a result of the recovery in our business,” according to the company’s 2010 annual report.

As the Momentive workers saw it, the abrupt wage changes violated the contract signed in 2007, less than 18 months before the pay cuts were imposed. The local representing the affected workers filed 477 separate complaints with the National Labor Relations Board in January 2009, one for each affected worker. They asserted that Momentive “has been engaging in unfair labor practices,” by changing wages, promotion, how people got overtime — all things spelled out in the original contract.

The company argued asserted that negotiating wage and rate changes at the local plant level was allowed, under the terms of the national agreement. The company said the changes were needed to stay competitive and bring wages in line with the skills required. 

More than a year later, following months of investigation, the NLRB responded. The board’s regional director found that Momentive had indeed “failed to continue in effect all the terms and conditions of the National Agreement.”  In other words, it had broken the contract. The order also found that Momentive had failed to bargain collectively with the union in violation of the law. 

The board sought an order requiring the company to restore the wage scale, rate, progression, job descriptions, and several other points. The board also wanted the company to pay interest on any back pay or other monetary awards.

The NLRB scheduled a hearing for April 5, 2010. That hearing got pushed to June, in hopes that the union and the company would reach a settlement, a common move in such cases.

But June 2010 was also when the original three-year contract — the one Momentive had broken with the wage cuts — was slated to expire. When Momentive executives proposed a deal, the union found itself negotiating a settlement and a new contract at the same time.

The proposed settlement was simple: the 400-plus workers whose wages were cut would get back pay covering their lost earnings. Going forward, though, they’d all be getting the new, lower wage, in their newly defined positions. The company agreed to a $2 an hour bump — on the reduced pay. The NLRB case would be closed, ending any negotiation over job descriptions or the other issues in dispute.

Workers said the company dangled the settlement payments at the vote on the contract, held in the company firehouse at the Waterford plant. “They had a box of envelopes, and the envelopes had statements in them with a number, how much money each worker would get in back pay, under the settlement,” one recalled.

They also warned that “if you keep going with the NLRB action, it could take years,” several employees said.

By the time of the settlement proposal, which called for payments of more than $10,000 for many of the workers and more than $30,000 for some, many whose wages had been cut were struggling. “They were just so desperate,” one said. “They were just in a hole,” another added.

Still, workers in Local 81359 say they voted down the contract, preferring to move forward with the NLRB action.

But they weren’t the only local voting. The contract covers three bargaining units, including another local in the plant, representing salaried and technical workers, and workers at an Ohio branch. Although those workers didn't have their pay cut, and weren’t covered by the settlement, they had a say in whether it would be approved or rejected, because it was tied to the contract. Those locals voted to approve the proposal, and the contract was ratified. The Local 81359 workers got back pay with interest, but the wage cuts would stand.

Not everyone at Momentive took a pay cut.

Steven Delarge, a Momentive executive, received a bonus of more than $400,000 in 2010, in part for his role in “the successful completion of collective bargaining agreements” with union workers, according to the company’s annual report. He also got a raise, bumping his salary from just under $400,000 to $450,000 in 2011. He has since left the company.

Momentive CEO Jonathan Rich received a bonus of $1.3 million for the year, The bonus was based on “the achievement of applicable performance targets,” according to the company’s annual report, which stated, “The Company achieved its primary environmental objective and, although it did not achieve its safety objective, the results were improved over the prior year.” Rich, who left the company in October 2010, also received severance payments of $975,000, and an additional $350,000, the reasons for which are not spelled out in company filings. His total compensation for the year was more than $6.5 million, according to company documents.

The current executives, Craig Morrison and William Carter, are well-compensated, too. Morrison’s total compensation was nearly $3.5 million in 2011, Carter’s more than $2.6 million.

Apollo Chairman and CEO Leon Black is also doing well. Last year, he celebrated his 60th birthday with a blowout at his Hamptons home, featuring “a seared foie gras station” and a $1 million performance by Elton John, according to the New York Times. Apollo Global Management declined to comment for this article.

Read Part 2: After buyout, workers get a lesson in modern economics.

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A landmark Environmental Protection Agency report concluding that children exposed to toxic substances can develop learning disabilities, asthma and other health problems has been sidetracked indefinitely amid fierce opposition from the chemical industry.

America’s Children and the Environment, Third Edition, is a sobering analysis of the way in which pollutants build up in children’s developing bodies and the damage they can inflict.  

The report is unpublished, but was posted on EPA’s website in draft form in March 2011, marked “Do not Quote or Cite.”  The report, which is fiercely contested by the chemical industry, was referred to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), where it still languishes.

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For the first time since the ACE series began in 2000, the draft cites extensive research linking common chemical pollutants to brain damage and nervous system disorders in fetuses and children.

It also raises troubling questions about the degree to which children are exposed to hazardous chemicals in air, drinking water and food, as well exposures in their indoor environments – including schools and day-care centers – and through contaminated lands.  

 

In the making since 2008, the ACE report is based on peer-reviewed research and databases from federal agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, Housing and Urban Development and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Public health officials view it as a source of one-stop shopping for the best information on what children and women of childbearing age are exposed to, how much of it remains in their bodies and what the health effects might be. Among the “health outcomes” listed as related to environmental exposures are childhood cancer, obesity, neurological disorders, respiratory problems and low birth weight.  

The report cites hundreds of studies -- both human, epidemiological studies that show a correlation between exposure to certain chemical pollutants and negative health outcomes, and animal studies that demonstrate cause and effect.  In some cases, the authors note, certain chemicals have been detected in children, but not enough is known about their effects to draw conclusions about safety.

In a section on perfluorochemicals (PFCs), for example, which are used to make nonstick coatings, and protect textiles and carpets from water, grease and soil, among other things, the draft notes that they are found in human breast milk. 

The report said that “a growing number of human health studies” have found an association between prenatal exposure to PFCs and low birth weight, decreased head circumference and low birth length. It also stated that based on “emerging evidence suggests that exposure to some PFCs can have negative impacts on human thyroid function.”

Furthermore, it noted that animal studies produced similar results, although exposures were typically at higher levels than people are exposed to. 

The EPA’s website still notes that the report will be published by the end of 2011.  But after a public comment period that was marked by unusually harsh criticism from industry, additional peer review and input from other agencies, the report landed at OMB last March, where it has remained. No federal rule requires the OMB to review such a report before publication, but EPA spokeswoman Julia Valentine said the agency referred it to the OMB because its impact cuts across several federal agencies.

The spokeswoman said EPA had no idea when OMB would release it, allowing publication. 

A spokeswoman for the White House Office of Management and Budget said she would not discuss the review process or give an estimated release date.   

Some present and former EPA staffers, who asked not to be named for fear of losing their jobs, blamed the sidetracking of the report on heightened political pressure during the campaign season.  The OMB has been slow to approve environmental regulations and other EPA reports throughout the Obama Administration — as it was under George W. Bush according to reports by the Center for Progressive Reform, a nonprofit consortium of scholars, doing research on health, safety and environmental issues, which generally advocate for stronger regulation and better enforcement of existing law.

“Why is it taking so long? One must ask the question,” said a former EPA researcher who works on children’s health issues. “It is an important document and it strikes me that it’s falling victim to politics.”  

The EPA states that the report is intended, in part, to help policymakers identify and evaluate ways to minimize environmental impacts on children.

That’s an unwelcome prospect to the $674 billion chemical industry, which stands to lose business and face greater legal liability if the EPA or Congress bans certain substances mentioned in the report or sets standards reducing the levels of exposure that is considered safe.

Among other findings, the report links numerous substances to ADHD, including certain widely available pesticides; polychlorinated biphenyls  (PCBS), which were banned in 1979 but are still present in products made before then and in the environment; certain polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), used as flame retardants; and methyl mercury, a toxic metal that accumulates in larger fish, such as tuna.  The draft also cites children’s exposure to lead, particularly from aging lead water pipes, as a continuing problem (See previous coverage, Toxic Taps.) 

Among the other widespread contaminants linked to learning disabilities is perchlorate, a component of rocket fuel , fireworks and other industrial products, which has polluted water around the country.  The Department of Defense, which wants to avoid paying to clean it up, is alarmed by research showing that the chemical interferes with thyroid function and otherwise damages the nervous system, according to R. Thomas Zoeller, a biology professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and an expert on perchlorate.

Zoeller, who has served on EPA advisory panels studying the issue, said the Pentagon’s concern was evidenced by the Air Force’s hiring of two consultants – Richard Mavis and John DeSesso --  to help shape its response to the research.  He noted that in 2009, after their consulting contract had ended, Mavis and DeSesso wrote a letter to the editor of Environmental Health Perspectives, a publication of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, attacking an EPA scientist’s study showing that perchlorate may damage the brain.  “I don’t like my tax dollars going for one federal agency to refute the work done by scientists at EPA,”  he said. The Defense Department and the Air Force declined to comment on the publication, but spokeswoman  Melinda Morgan wrote that, “The DoD is aware that there are many differing opinions on the science related to perchlorate health effects,” and believes the current level permitted by EPA is safe.

One of the new sections of the report notes that children may be widely exposed to pollutants in schools and day-care centers. Among them are pesticides; lead; PCBs; asbestos, a mineral fiber long used as insulation and fire-proofing;  phthalates, chemicals that are used to soften vinyl and as solvents and fixers, and are found in numerous consumer goods, among them: toys, perfumes, medical devices, shower curtains and detergents; and perfluorinated chemicals, which are used in non-stick and stain-proof products.  The study notes that these substances are (variously) associated with asthma, cancer, reproductive toxicity and hormone disruption. 

The American Chemistry Council (ACC) , the chief industry trade group, has accused EPA of lacking objectivity and vilifying its products. It has filed dozens of pages of comments accusing the EPA of ignoring certain studies – including some funded by ACC itself — that would help businesses make the case that their products are safe. The ACC also contends that EPA has not included enough positive comments about the role of chemicals in society.   

“ACC members apply the science of chemistry to make innovative products and services that make people’s lives better, healthier and safer,” wrote ACC senior toxicologist Richard A. Becker. … “The exclusive focus on exposure is particularly problematic as it may lead to the incorrect conclusion that exposure to chemicals (e.g. phthalates) at any level is not only cause for concern, but also a direct source of negative health effects.”

Becker also expressed the ACC’s contention that EPA was painting too bleak a picture of children’s health in America.  

“It is troubling that the draft ACE report seems to make such little effort to provide a complete overall picture of child health in the United States,” Becker wrote. “For example, the draft report does not refer to The Health and Well-Being of Children: A Portrait of States and the Nation … which concludes the health and well-being of children in the U.S. is improving overall with 84.4% of children in the United States listed as being in excellent or very good health, an increase from 83% in 2003.” Other ACC members, representing manufacturers of BPA, phthalates and other substances, also weighed in against the report.

Nsedu Witherspoon, executive director of the Children’s Environmental Health Network and a member of the EPA Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee, which oversaw the report, called it a major accomplishment, reflecting the explosion of science since the first ACE was published. She also praised EPA chief Lisa Jackson for standing behind it.

Industry critics, Witherspoon said, “in many cases are the same ones out there trying to debunk the original research,” that the study cites.  

Rena Steinzor, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law, and president of the Center for Progressive Reform, said the ACE report need not have gone to OMB for review in the first place. Steinzor notes that Executive Order 12866 states that proposed significant regulations — generally defined as those that could cost more than $100 million — need be reviewed by OMB, but studies do not.  

The Executive Order gives OMB up to 60 days to review such proposals — although it allows for extensions. In practice, OMB has missed numerous such deadlines.  But the ACE report, which is not a proposed regulation, falls into a gray area.

“If it’s not a rule, I don’t know what it’s doing there,” Steinzor said. “And even if it were a rule, there would be a deadline and they’d be violating it.”

In an email statement to the Investigative Reporting Workshop, EPA spokeswoman Julia Valentine said, “The report was provided to OMB so that they could conduct an interagency review process to ensure accuracy and consistency.”

She noted that because the report addresses children's health, it includes issues that are the focus of many departments and agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services -- including the Centers for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Cancer Institute.   

Steinzor, whose organization has studied OMB under numerous presidents, doesn’t buy it. 

The report should be released now, she said, “ because to protect children adequately we need all the information we can get… I guess I understand why there was great anxiety and paranoia before the election … (but) why would you not do it now? It’s sad that things have gotten so polarized that we’re afraid to release scientific information.”

The Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, is a nonprofit, professional newsroom that pairs experienced professional reporters and editors with graduate students, and co-publishes with mainstream media partners and nonprofit newsrooms. Sheila Kaplan is a fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.

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On the afternoon of June 3, an aging Lockheed Martin P2V air tanker crashed near the border of Nevada and Utah, killing the pilot and co-pilot.

The same day, one landing gear on a P2V failed to deploy, forcing the plane to circle a landing strip in Minden, Nev., burning off excess fuel before making an emergency landing and skidding to a halt.

Both planes were more than 50 years old.

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The day highlighted the dangers that come with piloting one of the U.S. Forest Service’s aging air tankers, which average more than a half-century old.

Six people died in air tanker crashes during firefighting missions this year, and at least 22 have perished in the past decade, according to a review of accident reports from the National Transportation Safety Board.

Critics say it’s no surprise the air tankers are not fit for the rigors of 21st-century firefighting. Many were designed for other missions, then scavenged from the fields of the Pentagon's massive aircraft "Boneyard" in Arizona, and retrofitted to battle wildfires across the country.

“This is the third generation of old military aircraft that have ended up causing multiple deaths,” said Jim Hall, former head of the National Transportation Safety Board. He also was co-chair of a federal commission that issued a critical report on the state of the U.S. Forest Service’s aerial firefighting capability in 2002 recommending the agency modernize its aging fleet.

But a decade later, many of those planes continue to fly -- and crash – often in some of the most difficult flying environments in aviation: remote, mountainous forests and valleys where planes can be jolted by swirling winds and turbulence and forced to fly through heavy smoke and ash.

Pilots say they have seen giant rocks and tree stumps thrown into the air – sometimes hitting planes – due to the powerful convection forces created by intense forest fires. And the weight of planes rapidly shifts as they dump thousands of pounds of water or retardant in mere seconds. The extreme conditions also can prey on the weaknesses of the tankers: Wings have fractured and separated from aircraft bodies. Engines have caught fire. Hydraulic system lines have ruptured.

“I have serious concerns about both the size and age of the aging air tanker fleet, and fear that it isn’t up to the job of stopping wildfires that grow larger every year,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., chairman of the Forestry Subcommittee. “That’s what I have repeatedly told the Forest Service, as I have pushed them to address this crisis.”

Both congressional and Forest Service leaders recognize the need to update the fleet, but Congress has never allocated funding to pay for new aircraft. President Barack Obama’s 2013 budget proposes $1.97 billion for wildland fire management, down from about $2.2 billion in 2011. It includes $24 million to modernize the air tanker fleet, but that’s a fraction of the cost needed, critics say. Congressional  budget proposals, meanwhile, do not include any money for the fleet’s modernization.

Since 2007, one-third of the 79 forest firefighter deaths have occurred in aviation accidents,  more than any other cause, according to the National Wildfire Coordinating Group, a coalition of federal and state fire agencies.

“I’ve been on fires in California where people have had their houses burned underneath them twice before- - they rebuilt the third time in the same spot,” said Dick Mangan, a former program leader at the Forest Service’s Missoula Technology and Development Center with more than 30 years experience in wildland firefighting. “The only thing that doesn’t come back are dead firefighters. Grass grows back, the trees come back, houses come back. Dead firefighters don’t come back.”

And as wildfires have grown in size in the last decade – 2012 has seen more than 9 million acres burn, the third-highest amount this century – the number of available air tankers has been halved. Some have been retired from services; others have been destroyed in crashes. The Forest Service estimates its needs 18 to 28 “next-generation” large air tankers, but did not seek a congressional appropriation last summer because of budgetary constraints. 

“It is a monetary issue, absolutely,” said Ron Hanks, head of aviation safety with the Forest Service. “The cost, the engineering and the development – they’re costly.”

Industry leaders defend the safety records of the planes. They note that age itself does not disqualify a plane from meeting the Forest Service’s requirements, and properly maintained planes can continue to be airworthy even as they pass 50 years in age.

Dan Snyder, the president of Neptune Aviation Services in Missoula, Mont., said his company has begun buying and retrofitting former British passenger planes to replace the older aircraft. But Snyder, whose company has the biggest air tanker contract, defended the safety records of planes like the P2V.

“It’s an airframe that has really worked well for us,” Snyder said. “It’s taken the stress and strain quite well.”

Still, Snyder acknowledged that many airframes are fast-approaching their life limits. “They can only fly so many takeoffs and landings, which we call ‘cycles,’ and those cycle limits are starting to approach,” he said.

For old sub chasers, the mission has changed
Captain Todd Neal Tompkins understood the risks.

The Boise pilot had flown over wildfires for years, and firefighting often took him away from his family for extended periods during the wildfire season, said his friend, Brian Walp.

“He was in touch with the fact that when he left in the spring to go to work, it may be the last time he’d see his kids,” Walp said. “I think he lived with that idea.”

At 1:47 p.m. on June 3, Tompkins was in a Lockheed P2V that crashed into mountainous terrain while dropping retardant in a shallow valley north of Modena, Utah. Tompkins and co-pilot Ronnie Edwin Chambless died in the crash. The NTSB has not released its final report on the cause.

The P2V has long been the workhorse of the Forest Service’s aerial firefighting fleet. Designed to track submarines in the 1940s, the P2Vs remained in military use until the Vietnam War.

In the years after Vietnam, the tankers were given a new job: dropping fire retardant on wildfires. Retrofitted to carry retardant but with relatively few other changes, the planes – and similar planes like the Lockheed P3 Orion -- were deployed across the American West.

“Many of these aircraft – P2 and P3s, old submarine search planes – come from the Korean War and Vietnam era,” Mangan said. “They do not have the greatest track record.”

In the past decade, P2V crashes alone have resulted in at least 10 deaths. On Sept. 1, 2008, a P2V crashed and killed the pilot and two passengers after the left engine caught fire during takeoff near Reno, Nev. The following spring, a P2V crashed while attempting to navigate foggy, windy weather in Utah’s Oquirrh Mountains, killing all three people onboard.

“Clearly, those aircraft were not designed for the missions they are flying,” said Hall, the former NTSB chairman. “We recommended a purpose-built aircraft for the types of missions being flown 10 years ago. It could have easily been accomplished during that time.”

The P2V isn't the only plane that has critics worried.

In July, the U.S. Air Force grounded all firefighting-equipped C-130s on loan to the Forest Service from the Department of Defense after one of the turboprop planes crashed in South Dakota, killing four people. While many of the C-130s are significantly younger than the P2Vs, Hall said they simply were not designed to handle the dangerous conditions above wildfires.

But newer, better-designed planes are out of the Forest Service’s reach due to cost.

The Forest Service’s modernization strategy, published in February, includes contracts for next-generation civilian aircraft like the BAe-146, which cost about $7 million apiece and carry 3,000 gallons of fire suppressant  -- much less than larger, more expensive tankers. Retrofitting adds $1 million to $4 million to the price tag.

Other retrofitted planes can be even costlier: A new C-130J, for example, which can deliver 4,000 gallons of fire suppressant, costs about $80 million, according to the Forest Service report. Or the agency can lease a C-130 flown by military pilots from the Air Force for $13,740 a day, plus $6,600 for every hour it’s in the air.

All of these options would put a significant strain on the Forest Service’s budget. But inaction also carries a price too: About $55 million was spent each year from 2009-2011 to maintain the current fleet, said Jennifer Jones, a spokeswoman for the Forest Service.

Dug up from the Boneyard
After World War II, the U.S. Air Force established a storage facility near Tucson, Ariz., where dry conditions kept aircraft from corroding. Today, it is officially known as the 309th Aerospace Maintenance Regeneration Group.

But many refer to it by its more colloquial name: the Boneyard.

Since its inception, the Boneyard’s fleet has grown to include planes like the P2Vs and C-130s. Now, with more than 4,400 aircraft and 13 aerospace vehicles from all branches of the military and NASA, the Boneyard operates as a stockpile for military units and government agencies to take parts or entire planes for their own use or to sell to U.S. allies.

For years, these mothballed planes have been called into action to battle wildfires. In 2002, the federal firefighting commission took a closer look at the Boneyard, condemning the Forest Service's practice of using retired military planes salvaged from the facility.

One of those planes was a Lockheed C-130A, registration number N130HP. Built in 1957, the plane was retired from military service in 1978, spent a decade in the boneyard and then was retrofitted with retardant tanks to battle wildfires.

On June 17, 2002, as the plane swept low over a fire in California, its wings separated from the body of the plane, sending it plummeting to the ground. The accident, which was filmed by a witness, killed all three people on board. An examination of the wreckage found fatigue cracks in the right wing, a problem that had been found in other C-130s, according to the NTSB.

The dramatic footage sparked concern about the aging fleet. And in December of that year, the federal commission called its safety record “unacceptable.”

The C-130 crash is not the only example of structural failure. On July 18, 2002, a Vultee P4Y-2 air tanker’s left wing ripped off, sending the plane spiraling into a Colorado mountain and killing two crew members. Cracks in the frame of the aircraft, which was manufactured in 1945, went undetected because they were hidden behind the retardant tank, according to the NTSB report on the crash.

Hall, the chair of the federal commission, said the Forest Service is gradually phasing out these older planes, but not quickly enough, and without funding for newer planes.

“In the same period of time since this report was published, we have fought two wars,” but made virtually no progress in updating the federal firefighting fleet, he said in a recent interview.

At the same time, he said, the fleet has shrunk steadily. In 2002, the agency contracted for more than 40 air tankers.

“Right now, we have 17 aircraft, and that includes the Canadian aircraft that we have borrowed,” Hanks said.

Building for the future but relying on the past
In a hangar in Missoula, Mont., the past, present and future of the air tanker industry can be found side by side.

All nine of Neptune’s planes -- seven P2Vs, and two BAe-146 passenger jets that are being refitted to fight fires -- are under government contract., but the fleet of P2Vs has dwindled in recent years. Neptune will retire two of its P2V Neptunes this year and replace them with BAe-146s.

“The P2Vs that Neptune operates were built in the late 40s, early 50s – so they’re 60, 70-year-old aircraft,” said Ron Hooper, a former government contracting officer who now works for Neptune. “The BAe-146’s were in passenger service over in England, and they’re 15, 16-year-old aircraft.”

Neptune is one of only two remaining air-tanker contractors in the U.S. Last year, the Forest Service ended its contract with Aero Union, a California company that operated P3 Orions. The Federal Aviation Administration said the company failed to follow the scheduled inspections of its air tankers. (Aero Union CEO Britt Gourley said in a letter published in January by Wildfiretoday.com that the company’s “aircraft have always been meticulously maintained and continuously airworthy. He also stated that Aero Union had appealed the contract termination through the judicial process, but in the meantime had been forced to sell the aircraft and lay off its 60 employees.)

In June, the Forest Service announced it would contract with four U.S. companies to lease seven new air tankers, some of which could have been in the air this year. But two bidding companies that lost out protested, saying the contract requirements were vague, delaying the process. The Forest Service requested updated bids, which were due Nov. 1, from potential contractors. The agency has not announced new contracts.

Both Neptune and Minden Air Corp. -- the two current federal contractors --  have begun phasing in retired civilian airliners to replace the military planes. Neptune’s BAe-146s, built by British Aerospace in the mid- to late-1980s, are more nimble than the P2Vs, Snyder said. The planes foster a safer flying experience for pilots and flight crews, he said.

But they aren’t cheap. The BAe-146 cost $20,000 per day to have available plus $10,000 for every hour of flight, according to the USFS. But greater speed and greater suppressant capacity – about 1,000 gallons more than the older tankers – will help offset that.

“It flies twice as fast,” Hooper said. “Our maintenance cost will go down relative to the P2V.  So there are a number of advantages for the Forest Service from an operational standpoint, as well as for Neptune, from an operational maintenance standpoint to be upgrading our fleet.”

Minden is building a new BAe-146 service that should be ready in about a year, said Matt Graham, the company’s maintenance director.

In Missoula, Neptune hopes to have four BAE’s available next spring. The remaining P2Vs are scheduled to be phased out within the next five years, Hooper said.

The Murrow News Service provides local, regional and statewide stories reported and written by journalism students at the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University.

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NEWTOWN, Conn. -- The three guns carried by the gunman in the bloody Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting were all purchased by his mother since 2010, law enforcement sources told NBC News on Tuesday.

The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that Nancy Lanza, who friends described as a gun enthusiast, purchased the weapons legally over a three-year period, beginning in 2010 with a Bushmaster XM-15  .223-caliber semi-automatic assault-style rifle -- the weapon that authorities say 20-year-old Adam Lanza used to mow down the victims in Friday’s rampage. She then bought a 9 mm Sig Sauer pistol in 2011, followed by a 10 mm Glock pistol in January 2012. Both weapons also were in Adam Lanza’s possession during his attack on the school, and he used the latter to kill himself when police arrived on the scene, authorities say.

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Adam Lanza killed his 52-year-old mother at the home they shared before driving to the school and forcing his way in. Once inside, he killed 20 children and six adults before committing suicide, authorities say.

In addition to the weapons recovered at the crime scene, including a shotgun recovered from the trunk of the car the gunman drove to the school, the Associated Press reported that authorities investigating the shooting recovered three other weapons -- a Henry repeating rifle, an Enfield rifle and a shotgun. It was not clear where those weapons were found.

Meantime, the sources said investigators have found no evidence that Adam Lanza visited area shooting ranges in the last six months.

Federal agents have been examining records at the ranges to see if Adam Lanza had been practicing his marksmanship in the months leading up to the attack, which could indicate that he had planned the massacre well in advance of carrying it out.   

Michael Isikoff is NBC News national investigative correspondent; NBC News’ Justice Correspondent Pete Williams also contributed to this report.

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The federal government has formally notified Paula Broadwell's lawyers that she will not be charged with cyberstalking in connection with the sex scandal that led to the resignation of David Petraeus as CIA director.

"The United States Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Florida has decided not to pursue a federal case regarding the alleged acts of 'cyber-stalking' involving Paula Broadwell," a spokesman for the office said Tuesday in a written statement.

Petraeus, a highly decorated four-star general, resigned his CIA post on Nov. 9 after acknowledging an extramarital affair. Government and law enforcement officials have told NBC News that the 60-year-old former commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan and coalition forces in Iraq was involved with Broadwell, 37, his biographer.

Petraeus’ extramarital affair was exposed after Tampa socialite Jill Kelley went to an FBI agent to complain about anonymous harassing emails she was receiving warning her to stay away from Petraeus.

---

Investigators determined the emails came from Broadwell and also uncovered evidence that she had an affair with Petraeus, government and law enforcement officials have told NBC News.

The decision not to prosecute was made "after applying relevant case law to the particular facts of this case," the U.S. Attorney's Office statement said.

"The decision on whether to bring a prosecution is always a serious matter, and one that should never be undertaken without the most thoughtful deliberation. As federal prosecutors, we are guided in the discharge of our responsibilities by considerations of fairness and justice. The prosecution of a case is undertaken only after the most careful review and analysis of the evidence and applicable law," the statement said.

The public statement was issued Tuesday after Broadwell’s lawyers disclosed that they had received a letter from the U.S. Attorney's office in Tampa indicating that she would not be prosecuted for cyberstalking.

“We are pleased with the decision, and are pleased with the professionalism of the Tampa United States Attorney’s Office, particularly Assistant United States Attorney W. Stephen Muldrow,” said one of Broadwell’s lawyers, Robert Muse of Washington.

The letter to Muse, dated Dec. 14, read in part, “We believe it is appropriate to advise your client that our office has determined that no federal charges will be broad in the Middle District of Florida relating to alleged acts of cyber-stalking.” 

The FBI also investigated whether Broadwell improperly possessed classified information.  While the letter to her lawyer mentioned only cyberstalking, it would be unusual for prosecutors to send a letter indicating that a person was off the hook for one potential charge if it was also considering another. Justice Department officials declined to comment about the documents issue. 

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NEWTOWN, Conn. -- New details about the private lives of Sandy Hook gunman Adam Lanza and his mother, Nancy, emerged Monday, including details of a 2009 divorce settlement that resulted in annual payments to her of nearly $300,000 and gave her ultimate authority to make all decisions on behalf of her troubled son.

While the divorce was granted on the grounds that "the marriage has broken down irretrievably," the parting of the ways between Nancy Lanza and her ex-husband Peter was relatively amicable, according to records obtained by NBC News.

There was no custody dispute over Adam, then a teenager, when the couple split. Peter Lanza, a vice president for taxes at GE Energy and Financial Services, agreed to solely finance the cost of his two sons' college and graduate school education and to provide a car for Adam if he should want one. He also maintained joint legal custody with visitation rights and vacations with Adam. (GE is a minority owner in NBCUniversal.)

---

There was a check mark in a "limited contest" box on one form -- meaning there appeared to be some financial or property disputes -– but the final settlement reflected no obvious friction.

Nancy Lanza got the Newtown, Conn., house, which she was required to sell or refinance by February 2011 so he would no longer be liable, and the couple kept their own jewelry, and divided photos, personal property -- even season tickets to Boston Red Sox games.

Friends say that Nancy Lanza, a former financial trader, had not been working in recent years. The terms of the settlement could explain why: She received $289,800 in alimony in 2012,which was to increase each year to reach $298,000 in 2015.

But sources close to the family tell NBC News that beneath the apparently cordial separation, which dated to 2001, animosity was growing between the father and his youngest son.

By 2010, Peter Lanza was dating a new woman, whom he later married, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, and Adam Lanza cut off all communication with his father. Peter tried to see Adam, but his son refused, they said.

Authorities say Nancy Lanza was the first victim in Friday’s murderous rampage, slain by multiple gunshots in her Newtown home shortly before Adam Lanza, 20, drove to Sandy Hook Elementary School and blasted his way in. By the time police responded, 20 young children, six adults and Adam Lanza were all dead from gunshot wounds, his being self-inflicted.

Friends of Nancy Lanza in Newtown on Monday shed new light on Adam Lanza’s at-times strange behavior in the years before the shooting, but said she did not indicate that it had changed in recent months.

Ellen Adriani and Russell Hanoman, both of whom said they were close friends of Nancy Lanza’s, said the 52-year-old single mother was devoted to her youngest son, whom they described as intelligent, mild-mannered and socially awkward. He also had an aversion to human contact, they said.

Hanoman, who said he had met Adam on several occasions, recalled him as a “very mild-mannered” young man who was interested in technology and engineering and liked to maintain his distance from other people.

“I remember when I first met him, he deliberately stood maybe 6 feet away from me and took three exaggerated steps toward me … stuck out his hand, shook (mine) … put it back and (took) three exaggerated steps back.”

Adriani, who never met Adam, said Nancy Lanza told her of a time when Adam was ill while he was in high school and didn’t want her to enter his bedroom.

“But yet he still wanted Nancy there for him, so she camped out all night outside his bedroom door,” she said. “Periodically through the evening, he would ask her, ‘Are you there? Are you still there?’ and she’d be, ‘I’m here. I’m here.’ So he needed to have that security that she was there but not in his space.”

Hanoman also remembered Nancy Lanza as a devoted mother.

“Everything that she did in life … was devoted to making sure that he was taken care of,” he said.

Adam Lanza also was “an organic vegan” with a conservative worldview, he said.

“He was actually politically aware for a teenager,” he said. “… He was always very free-market economics and capitalism, as I think most people are in this country.”

He also was interested in target shooting, sometimes accompanying his mother to local shooting ranges to practice. (Federal agents investigating the school massacre said Monday that they have found evidence that Adam Lanza visited more than one range and "engaged in shooting activities."  And they say they know that he visited some ranges with his mother.)

In addition to his technological and weapons prowess, Adam Lanza was an excellent dancer – at least within the confines of the Dance Dance Revolution video game.

“It’s an arcade game as well as on the home systems where you basically dance around to a pattern on the screen,” Hanoman said. “And he was extremely good at it. He would often accumulate an audience of people around watching him…. (But) because it’s a two-player game … if anyone tried to come on the platform with him, no matter what he was doing, he would just turn around and walk out of the arcade.”

Despite such anti-social behavior, Hanoman said that mother and son had over the past several years looked at a number of colleges where Adam Lanza might be able to make a fresh beginning.

“He wanted to go back to school, so they were looking at colleges all over the country, looking for an ideal environment for him,” he said. “… He wanted to become more socialized. He didn’t want to stay trapped in his home the rest of his life.”

NBC News Justice Correspondent Pete Williams, Today Investigative Correspondent Jeff Rossen and Today Producer Robert Powell contributed to this report.

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NEWTOWN, Conn. -- The mother of the suspected Sandy Hook Elementary School gunman, herself slain at the outset of the murderous rampage, was an avid gun enthusiast who liked to take her sons to the shooting range to practice their marksmanship, a friend tells NBC News.

Dan Holmes, a local landscaper and a friend of Nancy Lanza, mother of 20-year-old suspected gunman Adam Lanza, said she also was a collector.

 “She had a pretty extensive gun collection,” Holmes said. “She was a collector, she was pretty proud of that. She always mentioned that she really loved the act of shooting.”

---

Holmes recalled that she said she was able to “focus in” while shooting.

Federal officials tell NBC News that Adam Lanza took three weapons with him to the school – two pistols, a Glock and a Sig Sauer, and a Bushmaster .223-caliber semi-automatic assault-style rifle – all of which were registered to Nancy Lanza.

It is unclear whether all the guns were used in the attack. At a news briefing on Saturday, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. H. Wayne Carver II, who led the team that autopsied the victims, said, “All the (injuries) … I know of were caused by the rifle.”

The Associated Press reported that authorities investigating the school shooting later recovered additional weapons -- a Henry repeating rifle, an Enfield rifle and a shotgun. It was not clear where those weapons were found.

Holmes, Nancy Lanza’s friend, said the 52-year-old single mother also frequently talked about how she was worried about Adam.

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She talked about “how he was an unstable kid,” he said. “She would talk about that. “She was very protective of him. I don’t … think she ever got major help for him. She just tried to handle it on her own. It was something she was definitely disturbed about.”

Meantime, federal agents visited a gun shooting range near Newtown, Conn., in an effort determine if Adam Lanza visited in the months before the attack, which could indicate he was planning or practicing for the bloodbath he carried out early Friday.

Dean Price, director of the Wooster Mountain Shooting Range near Newtown, told NBC News that he was visited by agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol ,Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives on Friday night and that they searched through his records for any evidence that the younger Lanza had signed in there in 2012. They also checked to see if he had used the name of his older brother, Ryan, Price said.

There was no indication that Adam Lanza had used the shooting range, which requires customers to sign in and show identification prior to using the facility, Price said.

Agents also have been checking local firearms dealers to see if Adam Lanza purchased or attempted to purchase weapons or ammunition prior to the shooting.

Law enforcement officials said members of the public reported they thought they saw Adam Lanza trying to buy a rifle at a Dick’s Sporting Good store in Danbury, but investigators have yet to confirm that.   

NBC News' Senior Investigative Correspondent Lisa Myers and Justice Correspondent Pete Williams contributed to this report.

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North Korea does not appear to be making preparations for a nuclear weapons test following Tuesday’s test of a space launch vehicle, which was believed to be cover for a long-range missile test, U.S. intelligence analysts told NBC News.

South Korean and Japanese officials had feared that a nuclear weapons test — its third after previous detonations in in October 2006 and May 2009 — would quickly follow the launch.

But word that the North isn’t thought to be preparing for a test is providing little solace for Seoul or Tokyo, mainly because recent intelligence suggests that the North has made significant advances in its nuclear weapons program.

---

According to a recent analysis, North Korea has a weapon stockpile that could threaten both countries and, in longer term, the United States. Some of the weapons have already been deployed, say U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity. Moreover, the North has begun research into more advanced and dangerous weapons, possibly even thermonuclear weapons, they say.  

 

At the high end of the stockpile range, U.S. officials and other researchers said North Korea may already have up to "a few dozen" nuclear weapons that could be fitted atop its vast fleet of ballistic missiles. Those missiles are limited to an intermediate range, capable of hitting targets in Japan, South Korea or elsewhere in the northern Pacific, including U.S. military bases as far south as Guam, the officials believe.

'Highly provocative'
The U.S. believes the space launch test is part of a development plan for an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of reaching the continental United States with a payload of several hundred kilotons — 10 to 20 times the size of the bombs that destroyed the Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland hinted about that Wednesday, calling the launch "highly provocative" and a "threat" to regional security. The U.S. is "concerned that all of this launching is about a weapons program and is not about peaceful uses of space," she added.

More North Korea coverage from NBC News

For the past several years, the U.S. also has been monitoring North Korean research into thermonuclear weapons — hydrogen bombs and bombs known as boosted fission weapons, in which plutonium and uranium are combined for a higher energy yield. (The problem is that if the North conducted a test and claimed that it was thermonuclear, the U.S. would have difficulty determining if the North was telling the truth. The test site at Kilchu is far enough inland that the U.S. would not have access to the particulate matter needed to make an accurate determination, experts say. )

David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, or ISIS, a nonpartisan nuclear arms research group, said earlier this year that any tests in the future may also be about ensuring the reliability of North Korea's current weapons design.

"Once you get beyond a dozen, it makes sense to test type and reliability of your weapons," he said. Albright said then that his group's estimate of North Korea's weapons stockpile is a bit less than those provided by the U.S. officials, but that ISIS, too, believes Pyongyang has "missile-deliverable weapons."

The design of the weapons is believed to be based on Chinese models (as were the first generation Pakistani nuclear weapons). The design is basic, and was developed in the 1960s with help from the Soviet Union, which used it to produce a whole line of nuclear warheads.

ANALYSIS: 'Spoiled child' North Korea snubs key ally China with rocket test

While some analysts suggest that the North is using its space rocket launch to gain attention ahead of next week’s presidential election in South Korea -- and possibly to force talks with the U.S. — some in the U.S. non-proliferation community think otherwise. They expect that once the North feels comfortable with its ICBM technology, it will deploy the missiles.  They point to the Musudan intermediate range missile which was tested in middle of the last decade, then deployed — presumably with nuclear warheads — and aimed at Japan. 

Once the North has confidence in the long-range missile based on the space rocket, U.S. officials believe they will deploy it as well, making North Korea the third nation to have nuclear weapons targeted at the United States, after Russia and China.

Many in the Obama administration see that as a more frightening prospect than Iran gaining nuclear weapons, believing that Tehran is a rational actor that will serve its own national interest and preserve the regime, compared to successive generations of North Korean leaders who have shown that they are unpredictable and erratic.

But would it force the U.S. turn to conduct face-to-face talks with the North? Nuland said Wednesday that the North has a better option.

Speaking of the North’s 27-year-old leader Kim Jong Un, Nuland said: "He can plot a way forward that ends the isolation, that brings relief and a different way of life and progress to his people, or he can further isolate them with steps like this. He can spend his time and his money shooting off missiles, or he can feed his people, but he can't have both."

Robert Windrem is a senior investigative producer for NBC News.

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Despite outraising its Democratic counterpart by a 2-to-1 margin, the Republican Governors Association won only four of 11 races in the 2012 election, a far cry from the success it enjoyed two years ago.

The Washington D.C.-based political organization raised almost $100 million, according to recently released Internal Revenue Service data. The group targeted six states it considered winnable, losing five of them. Democrats won seven of the 11 contests, but the GOP managed to pick up one seat in North Carolina, long held by Democrats.

---

The top donors to the so-called “527” organization, which can accept unlimited contributions from billionaires, corporations and unions, are familiar Republican Party patrons — No. 1 is Bob Perry, a Texas homebuilder and perennial RGA supporter, who gave $3.25 million. That’s a little more than half of what he gave in 2010.

Billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson is No. 2, with $3 million in donations between him and his wife. According to the latest Federal Election Commission reports, Adelson is the top donor to super PACs in 2012, doling out more than $93 million along with his family.

Conservative billionaire David Koch — who has not made any contributions to super PACs — was the organization’s third-highest donor, writing two checks totaling $2 million. Koch is co-owner of the second-largest privately held company in America, Koch Industries, an energy conglomerate.

Seven of the RGA’s top 10 donors are corporate executives who gave at least $1 million. Two of them, Paul Singer and Kenneth Griffin, are hedge fund managers.

Six of the Democratic Governors Association's top donors were unions. The American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees topped the DGA donors list, giving about $1.3 million. The Service Employees International Union gave about $1.1 million, while the American Federation of Teachers gave at least $772,000.

Top corporate donors to the DGA included pharmaceutical giants Pfizer, which gave almost $700,000, and AstraZeneca, which contributed nearly $600,000. The companies also gave comparable sums to the RGA. The DGA also got corporate support from health insurer United Healthcare Services Inc., and AT&T.

The DGA raised nearly $50 million, the organization's "strongest fundraising year ever," according to spokeswoman Kate Hansen. 

'Enormous impact on state elections'
The DGA and RGA have devised national strategies for collecting unlimited funds from unions, corporations, and wealthy individuals, and funneling the money into state races. Both have used networks of state-based PACs to maneuver around various state limits on campaign giving.

“They’ve had an enormous impact on state elections across the nation,” said Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, an election law expert at Stetson Law School. “In many states they were consistently a top spender.”

The circuitous methods used by both organizations to inject corporate and union cash into state races and mask the identity of its donors have raised legal questions, prompted lawsuits, and tested the capacity of state election boards to enforce limits on outside spending.

Both organizations have told the Center for Public Integrity that they fully comply with campaign finance laws, and that they report their donors and spending to the IRS.

The RGA set up a federal super PAC called RGA Right Direction, and fed it with $9.8 million in contributions. The super PAC — another type of organization that can accept unlimited donations from individuals and corporations — then made a large contribution to Indiana Republican candidate Mike Pence, and bought ads in tight state races in Montana, Washington, New Hampshire, and West Virginia.

Super PACs are normally used to spend money on federal campaigns. By passing the funds through the super PAC, which reported its sole donor as the RGA, the association effectively shielded the identities of the donors who paid for ads in the state races.

In North Carolina, the RGA spent millions of dollars, directly from corporate treasuries to win in a state long led by Democratic governors. The unlimited contributions from dozens of corporations across the country went toward ads supporting Republican candidate Pat McCrory, who won convincingly over Democratic Lt. Gov. Walter Dalton.

The DGA, too, used a network of state-affiliated PACs, to fund ad campaigns in battleground states like Montana and North Carolina. It was the primary funder of a PAC called North Carolina Citizens for Progress, which purchased ads attacking McCrory.

While America’s wealthiest corporate executives tend to prefer the RGA, and unions give almost exclusively to the DGA, some donors played both sides this election.

Agricultural giant Monsanto, credit card company Visa and health insurance company Humana were large donors to both the RGA and DGA — each giving about $100,000 to both groups.

Despite the Republicans' win-loss record, RGA spokesman Michael Schrimpf called 2012 "a successful year by any standard" with Republicans now in control of governorships in 30 states. Most of those gains, however, came in 2010. The North Carolina win and the failed effort to recall Scott Walker, Wisconsin's Republican governor, in June, were high points for the GOP this year.

In addition, in five states targeted by the RGA where it lost, the Democrats held advantages unrelated to fundraising. 

Missouri and West Virginia featured Democratic incumbents. Three other states — Montana, Washington and New Hampshire — had open seats where a Democrat had previously been in power.

The two organizations will put their fundraising powers to the test again in 2013, when Virginia and New Jersey choose their next governors.

Michael Beckel contributed to this report.

The Center for Public Integrity is a non-profit independent investigative news outlet.  For more of its stories go to publicintegrity.org

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A United Nations panel has called on Cuba to immediately release jailed American contractor Alan Gross after finding that his detention was “arbitrary” and violated international human-rights standards, according to a report obtained by NBC News.

The 16-page decision by the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which has not yet been publicly released, is a  victory for the legal team working to free Gross, a State Department contractor who was arrested three years ago for allegedly smuggling sophisticated satellite equipment to Cuba’s tiny Jewish community.

---

The Cuban Foreign Ministry dismissed the findings as a result of “pressures exerted by the United States” and vigorously defended its detention of the 63-year-old American. Gross “was sentenced for committing acts against Cuba’s national security and public order, not for promoting freedom,” the ministry said in a statement also obtained by NBC News. A Cuban official said that the working group reached its findings without visiting Cuba or interviewing Gross. The official also noted that the same U.N. panel has in the past criticized as “arbitrary” the detention of five Cuban agents prosecuted in the U.S. on espionage related charges.

Gross’ imprisonment and the 15-year prison sentence imposed on him last year by a Cuban court has become a new flashpoint in U.S.-Cuba relations. Last week, the U.S. Senate passed a unanimous resolution calling for Gross’ immediate release. The dispute over his detention has been further heightened by assertions by Gross’ family that he has lost over 100 pounds in prison and that his health is failing. 

The working group, an arm of the Geneva-based U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, conducted its investigation in response to a petition submitted by Gross’ lawyers. Its findings can now be  submitted to the U.N. General Assembly and, if adopted, put further international pressure on Cuba over its treatment of the jailed American. A spokesman for the High Commissioner did not respond to a request for comment.

According to lawsuit he recently filed against the U.S. Government and the contractor that employed him, Gross has charged he was a “pawn” in a larger U.S. government program to change Cuba’s government and was never advised about the dangers he faced. (The State Department has declined comment; the contractor, Development Alternatives Inc., has said only that Gross’ release is its “highest priority.” ) Gross made five trips to Cuba between March 30, 2009 and November 2009, delivering telecommunications equipment that he said was designed to “increase Internet access in Cuba,” according to the lawsuit.

The  U.N. panel’s report found that Gross’ detention near the end of his fifth trip was “arbitrary”  and that  he was tried and  convicted after a two-day trial by a Cuban court that did not operate in an “independent and impartial” manner. It  further found that he was charged under a Cuban law – prohibiting “acts against the independence and/or territorial integrity of the state” – that was too vague by international standards. The panel also concluded that  Gross should have been released on bail during the 14 months between his arrest and his conviction by the Cuban court.

“On those grounds, the Working Group requests the Government of the Republic of Cuba order the immediate release of Mr. Alan Phillip Gross,” the report states.

Chris Fletcher, a lawyer for Gross, said in an email: “If what is being reported is accurately quoted from the U.N. Working Group opinion, then it reaffirms what we said previously: the government of Cuba is violating its international legal obligations. It should therefore immediately release Alan Gross from prison and allow him to return to the United States to be reunited with his family.  Moreover, regardless of the outcome of the case, Alan’s health is declining and it has long been clear he should be immediately released on humanitarian grounds.”

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In its response to the U.N. report, the Cuban Foreign Ministry condemned the United Nations working group for its “hasty” analysis. 

“Mr. Gross was detained, prosecuted and sentenced for illegally and covertly introducing in Cuba communication equipment using non-commercial technology, which is only meant to be used for military purposes and for creating clandestine networks.” He did so to implement a U.S. government program “with the aim of subverting Cuba’s constitutional order," to overthrow the Cuban government, the foreign ministry statement said. 

A senior Cuban official, Ricardo Alarcon, recently told NBC News that the Cubans would consider releasing Gross, but want the U.S. government to take similar “humanitarian” steps by releasing the so-called Cuban Five, the convicted Cuban agents in the U.S. whose prosecution the U.N. had also criticized. 

Michael Isikoff is NBC News' national investigative correspondent.

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When the flight from London landed in Philadelphia on Oct. 15, 2009, the pilot asked everyone to stay seated. A passenger was ill, he explained, and paramedics needed the aisles clear.

It didn't take long for passengers to realize the ruse. Federal agents entered the plane and made straight for the short woman in a full burka.

Colleen LaRose, the woman who called herself Jihad Jane, didn't resist when they handcuffed her.

---

FBI agents drove her to their offices two blocks from Independence Hall. When she complained of a headache, they gave her three Tylenol and a Sprite. Then they asked her to tell her story.

LaRose, a former teenage prostitute with a heavy history of drug abuse, mangled some facts. But mostly, she told the truth:

She became intrigued by Islam after a one-night stand with a Muslim man in 2007. She converted a short while later and became radicalized watching YouTube videos of atrocities against Palestinian children.

Online, she met a man who called himself Eagle Eye and who claimed to work for al-Qaida. Eagle Eye convinced her that she could travel to Sweden and use her appearance -- her white skin and her blonde hair -- to blend in. That way, she could get close enough to assassinate Lars Vilks, a Swedish artist who had blasphemed the Prophet Mohammad by drawing his head on a dog.

Agents asked her why she had returned to the United States. LaRose, 46, said she had been concerned about her mother. When she talked with her Pennsylvania boyfriend on the phone, he had said her mother was deathly ill. Not true, an agent assured her. Her mother was fine. It had been a trick intended to get LaRose back to the United States.

Did you give up your jihad because you got scared? an agent asked.

No, LaRose insisted. She gave up, she said, because Eagle Eye's men in Holland and Ireland moved too slowly. She felt "let down," she told the agents.

During her initial interviews, she didn't tell the agents that she also felt homesick. Or that, even as her host in Ireland -- the man who called himself Black Flag -- had driven her to the airport, she had feared she might be killed because she knew too much.

One agent pressed. Are you sure you didn't abandon the jihad because you got cold feet?

No, she insisted. And if they let her go, she told them, she planned a suicide attack against U.S. soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The agents asked about Jamie Paulin Ramirez, another blonde American woman who had travelled to Europe with her son. LaRose said she lived with her briefly in Ireland but didn't know much about her.

The agents also asked about a U.S. passport they found in LaRose's luggage. It belonged to the Pennsylvania boyfriend. But it was expired. Where, an agent asked, was the valid one?

LaRose knew the answer: For safekeeping, she had mailed it months earlier to the youngest member of the conspiracy, a high school junior in Maryland named Mohammed Hassan Khalid.

She didn't give Khalid up. Instead, she lowered her eyes and asked for a lawyer.

The FBI kept her arrest quiet as they checked out her story.

'Sex slave'
About a week after LaRose's arrest in Philadelphia, Ramirez, the other blonde American woman, sat before a laptop in a southern Ireland apartment and let her emotions flow.

"I wish I was never stupid enough to come here," Ramirez typed in a note to herself.

A recent Muslim convert, Ramirez, 31, had arrived just six weeks earlier with her young son. On the very day they landed, she married Ali Damache, the man others knew as Black Flag.

He had wooed her by promising to teach her Arabic and Islam. But his lessons ended soon after they mastered the alphabet and a few basic prayers. He rarely spoke with her, except to bark orders about cooking and cleaning. She wanted to be a good Muslim wife, but if he wouldn't help her, how could she?

"This man has no intentions to make this relationship work, ever," she wrote.

"I am just a sex slave to him," she concluded. And later, she wrote: "… I cry because I always wanted a person in my life who could love me for who I am."

Ramirez felt trapped, afraid that if she returned to the United States her estranged mother might try to wrest custody of her son. Still, she took tentative steps to try to leave. When her husband was away, she began reconnecting by email with friends and family in Colorado.

Then in January, she learned she was pregnant by Damache. How could she possibly leave now?

Irish police answered the question two months later. On the morning of March 9, 2010, police raided the small flat in Waterford, detaining Ramirez, Damache and five of his associates for questioning. Later, Ramirez was whisked past a mob of journalists and into a closed courtroom. There, she stood before a judge for a brief session, bewildered beneath her burka.

During questioning, she told the detectives what she knew, which turned out not to be much. She had come to Ireland to live with this man; he spoke of jihad but she couldn't offer specifics -- in part because Damache had never offered any himself.

Damache refused to cooperate. In fact, he played coy with the police, deflecting questions by posing his own. He almost seemed to relish the interrogation.

The discovery
Hours after the raids in Ireland, the FBI announced terrorism charges against LaRose, who remained in custody in the United States. U.S. officials called her by the online name she had chosen, Jihad Jane, and the story would lead the network news.

Near Baltimore, LaRose's teenage accomplice, Mohammed H. Khalid, found the indictment online. He had known the FBI was after LaRose, but he hadn't heard from her in seven months, since shortly after she had arrived in Ireland.

Now, he read the government's statement on the case:

"LaRose -- an American citizen whose appearance was considered to be an asset because it allowed her to blend in --  is charged with using the Internet to recruit violent jihadist fighters and supporters, and to solicit passports and funding," U.S. Attorney Michael Levy said in his statement. "It demonstrates yet another very real danger lurking on the Internet. This case also demonstrates that terrorists are looking for Americans to join them in their cause, and it shatters any lingering thought that we can spot a terrorist based on appearance."

Scanning the indictment, Khalid came to paragraph 18. It cited an unnamed co-conspirator and quoted excerpts from online posts that Khalid recognized.

He had sent them.

Not long after, FBI agents arrived at his parents' small apartment in Ellicott City, Md. They carried a search warrant. As some of the agents began rifling through the family's possessions, others took the teen into his bedroom.

"Tell us about it," one of the agents said to Khalid, who had turned 16. "There's no benefit in lying."

The FBI agents later showed Khalid lengthy transcripts of his chats in jihadi forums. They explained that LaRose was a former prostitute and drug addict. They told Khalid that everyone in the plot had turned on him. They told him that he would be smart to cooperate. They were, they said, the only friends he had left.

Khalid believed the agents when they said he was in big trouble. So he told them that he was no longer a jihadist. The people in those forums were misguided, he said. He had reformed.

The agents asked about the passports. LaRose had mailed them to Khalid before she left for Europe. Although he had sent one of the passports to Damache in Ireland, he had hidden the other at his school, he told the FBI. Now he claimed they were missing.

During the next few weeks, the boy met with agents a half dozen times, without a parent or attorney present. He believed he was a witness, not a suspect.

By then, Khalid had already acceded to his parents' wishes to seek counseling. A local Muslim scholar was teaching him that he was misinterpreting the Quran, and Khalid also met regularly with an imam who preached peace. He stopped posting on his blog. But it was all a front.

Khalid continued to live a double life, assembling a strong resume for college applications while secretly translating jihadi videos. He entered two high school writing contests. For one, he chose as a subject the Dalai Lama. For the other, Malcolm X.

The arrest
Months passed without any public word on the case, and that fall, Khalid began his senior year of high school.

In October, he aced the SAT college entrance exam and submitted an early decision application to prestigious Johns Hopkins University. By now, he had bought another laptop. He also found ways to sneak back into jihadi forums.

His writing turned darker.

That fall, Khalid struck up an online friendship with a troubled, 21-year-old neo-Nazi-turned-jihadist who lived in the Pittsburgh area.

During an online chat on Nov. 22, Khalid told the man that he had daydreamed about "doing martyrdom operations together in my school."

"Like Columbine?" the man asked.

"Na'am," Khalid said, using the Arabic word for yes. "It was like we both were in a big truck and had guns and we were shooting randomly at a huge crowd of kids. Subhan'Allah how great would it be. I live in Maryland … and the kids who study in my school proudly state that their parents work in NSA and FBI."

A few weeks after that exchange, news arrived inside a fat envelope.

"Congratulations!" began the letter from Johns Hopkins. Not only had Khalid won early admission but the school offered a full ride -- a $54,000 scholarship. It was quite an achievement for any student, let alone an immigrant who spent high school feeling alienated.

In June 2011, Khalid graduated from high school. A month later, while still 17, FBI agents quietly arrested him.

Why they chose then, months before he legally became an adult and months after his reference to Columbine, remains unclear. But that fall, shortly after his 18th birthday, the government indicted Khalid for his role in the Jihad Jane case.

The teenager became the youngest person to face U.S. terrorism charges.

The future
Three years have passed since Jihad Jane's arrest. And despite the guilty pleas by LaRose, Ramirez and Khalid, the Jihad Jane conspirators still await sentencing.

All confessed to conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists. LaRose also pleaded guilty to conspiracy to kill in a foreign country, lying to the FBI and attempted identity theft --  for stealing her boyfriend's passports.

The long delay in sentencing can be attributed to several factors: a continuing FBI investigation, extended psychological evaluations of some defendants, a government filing indicating that some evidence in the case is classified, and unexpected legal maneuvers in Ireland.

Ali Damache, the man who called himself Black Flag, caused a sensation in Irish legal circles by successfully contesting the police search of his Waterford apartment.

U.S. prosecutors have indicted him on terrorism charges and have asked Irish authorities to extradite him. Today, he remains in Ireland, awaiting trial on charges unrelated to the Jihad Jane conspiracy. His lawyers declined to comment.

The five acquaintances detained with Ramirez and Damache were released without facing any terrorism charges.

U.S. authorities won't say if they know the whereabouts of Eagle Eye, the al-Qaeda operative who instructed LaRose to kill, or Abdullah, the man who was supposed to train her in Amsterdam.

In U.S. District Court, sentencing for LaRose, Ramirez and Khalid has been postponed a handful of times. The most recent dates set: Ramirez and Khalid for early next year, and LaRose for May 7.

Until then, the three remain locked in the same federal prison in downtown Philadelphia, cut off from each other and from the tool that brought them together -- the World Wide Web.

LaRose has been held in solitary confinement for three years; even so, on rare outings, she says she has caught glimpses of Ramirez, though the two women haven't spoken.

Ramirez, who miscarried the baby she conceived with Damache, may face the shortest sentence of the three. Her crime: traveling to Ireland to meet Damache with a vague promise to live and train with jihadists. Authorities say she never knew about the plot to kill Vilks. Her young son now lives with her mother in Colorado.

"I'm not saying that I like being in prison but I am very grateful for this time to be able to reflect and study," Ramirez says in a statement provided by her court-appointed lawyer, Jeremy H. Gonzalez Ibrahim. "I was a parakeet. I just repeated what other people said."

Khalid's admission to Johns Hopkins was rescinded. His court-appointed lawyer, Jeffrey M. Lindy, says his client now realizes that his virtual friends did not love him the way his parents and teachers did. He also says Khalid regrets translating videos that may have led others astray.

"If you take away Jihad Jane and the ridiculous plan to kill the cartoonist" Vilks, says Lindy, "what you have is a teenager becoming fascinated with and learning about and adopting a radical ideology."

The lead prosecutor in the Jihad Jane conspiracy, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennifer Arbittier Williams, says she cannot comment on the cases until after sentencing. But FBI officials in Philadelphia emphasize that they cannot afford to discount possible terrorism suspects, no matter how incompetent or intelligent they might seem.

Once a plot matures, they say, authorities might be too late to stop an attack.

"The more sophisticated that capability becomes, we may not be able to control the outcome," said Richard P. Quinn, the FBI's assistant special agent in charge for counterterrorism. "If you get shot by someone with a seventh-grade education versus someone with a Harvard education, does it matter?"

'My destiny'
During an exclusive interview from jail, LaRose says she still believes that Islam saved her.

"I survived a lot of things that should have rightfully killed me," she says of drug use, rape and incest. "I also thought there was a purpose for me to be alive and then when I found Islam, I thought… ‘This is why I have lived so long.'"

U.S. sentencing guidelines suggest LaRose could be jailed for 30 years to life.

Her intended victim, the Swedish artist Lars Vilks, says he believes LaRose has served enough time already.

"They should let her go," Vilks says. "Now that she is known, they can keep an eye on her."

Ollie Avery Mannino, the counselor who helped LaRose confront her father about childhood rapes three decades ago, also urges leniency.

Mannino says LaRose's harrowing past doesn't excuse her conduct as an aspiring terrorist. "But when you think about punishment, you have to consider the whole person," Mannino says.

"I don't want people to have sympathy for Colleen," she says. "I want them to try empathy."

Today, in jail, LaRose expresses few regrets. "I did everything I did for the love of my ummah", the Muslim community, she says. "Whatever happens to me, it's my destiny. Whatever time they give me, it's already predestined for me. So I'm not worried."

With limited access to media in prison, LaRose says she hadn't heard that the U.S. government held up her case as one that "underscores the evolving nature of violent extremism" and demonstrates a "very real danger lurking on the Internet."

LaRose also hadn't realized that her arrest caused so much buzz back in 2009 -- that Katie Couric had opened the CBS Evening News with her story, declaring that prosecutors were warning that this "petite woman from the Philadelphia suburbs" now "represents the new face of terrorism."

"Wow," LaRose says, almost tickled by the characterization. Then, after a momentary pause: "Well, they're right."

Confined to a cell, often for 23 hours a day, LaRose has nonetheless found a new path toward love.

Read previous installments

Part 1: From abuse victim to terrorist wannabe

Part 2: A vow is confirmed; a terror plot grows

Part 3: The FBI visits; plot's wheels set in motion

She has discovered a makeshift Internet that exists within the walls of the federal prison in Philadelphia: If she scoops enough water from her toilet bowl, LaRose can communicate with other inmates by speaking through the sewer pipes -- they call it "talking on the bowls."

By talking on the bowls, LaRose fell for a new man. She knows little about him other than what he has told her. But she finds him wise, compassionate and righteous. He is not a Muslim but promises to convert when he gets out. That way, they can marry and be happy.

Colleen LaRose believes him.

More from Open Channel:

 

'Jane's' jihad: The FBI visits, a murder plot's wheels are set in motion

'Jane's' jihad: A vow is confirmed, a terror plot grows

Senior al-Qaida leader killed in Pakistan by drone, jihadis, US officials say

Adelson, other big super PAC donors continued spending in race's final days

Secret Service says it lost two computer backup tapes in 2008

'Jihad Jane' begins strange journey from abuse victim to wannabe terrorist

Gang tactic -- shared 'community guns' -- challenges police, prosecutors

New device lets crooks crack many hotel locks

 

 

Follow Open Channel from NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook

 

 

 

 

 

Colleen LaRose answered the door of her duplex near Philadelphia to find an FBI agent standing on the porch. 

He had questions about her interest in Islamic websites.

For LaRose, whose online name was Jihad Jane, it was the second time the FBI had questioned her that summer. Weeks earlier, she'd spoken with an agent by phone and offered a series of lame lies: She had denied any interest in jihadist forums, denied wiring money overseas, denied that she went by Jihad Jane.

This time, on Aug. 21, 2009, LaRose lied less.

---

Yes, she visited Muslims websites, she said. As a recent convert to Islam, she wanted to learn as much as possible. Yeah, she said, maybe her political views had angered others online. But she denied raising money for al-Qaida or having any connection with extremists.

Lying to the FBI is a crime, the agent told her.

OK, she said.

Then he asked if she planned to travel to Holland.

She was thinking about it, she told the agent, but there had been a death in the family -- a heart attack had just taken her boyfriend's father. His funeral was the next day.

When the agent asked for a way to keep in touch, LaRose gave him her cell number. Call anytime next week, she told him.

A day later, LaRose attended the funeral. The day after the service, Aug. 23, she pulled the hard drive from her computer and stashed it in a box. She gathered $2,000 in cash and packed three suitcases. With a bargain plane ticket to Amsterdam in hand, LaRose persuaded an acquaintance to drive her to the airport.

She was moving ahead with the plan conceived by the al-Qaeda operative in Pakistan, the man she knew only as Eagle Eye. Already, she had pledged to kill the Swedish artist Lars Vilks. He had blasphemed Islam by drawing the Prophet Mohammad's head on a dog.

As she headed to Europe with plans to murder in the name of Allah, LaRose left her boyfriend and mother with the impression she was running a quick errand.

Mary Richards
Landing in Amsterdam, Colleen LaRose felt euphoric. She had shed her old life -- 46 years scarred by rapes, prostitution, drugs and failed marriages -- for this new one full of promise.

At the airport, LaRose donned a full burka for the first time. More firsts awaited: She would meet her first jihadist, enter her first mosque and learn how to pray.

She gave the taxi driver the name of the mosque, and as the cab pulled away from the airport, a song from childhood popped into her head.

“Who can turn the world on with her smile? Who can take a nothing day, and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile?”

It was the theme from the 1970s TV series, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show." LaRose imagined herself as the lead character, Mary Richards. If she had been wearing a hat instead of a burka, LaRose thought, she would have stepped from the cab with a huge smile and acted out the show's classic opening, twirling around and tossing her hat in the air.

“Well, it's you girl and you should know it!

“With every glance and every little movement, you show it …

“You're gonna make it after all. ...”

When the taxi driver found the mosque, no one was waiting for LaRose. For nearly an hour, she stood outside in a full hijab with her luggage. Then it began to rain.

Finally, another Muslim woman arrived and took LaRose to see her contact, a man named Abdullah. LaRose had expected him to introduce her to fellow jihadists, to train her for her mission, to teach her the ways of Islam.

None of that happened. Now that LaRose had actually arrived and it was time for action, Abdullah the terrorist was suddenly hedging, dodging, equivocating, pleading for patience.

Two weeks into her visit to Amsterdam, LaRose concluded that Abdullah was a poseur. It was time for her to leave, she told him, and Abdullah quickly agreed. He suggested that she visit his associate in Waterford, Ireland, the man who called himself Black Flag.

LaRose packed her bags.

Calling 911

Back in the United States, one of LaRose's most trusted allies was struggling, too.

Mohammed Hassan Khalid had lost access to his primary weapon of jihad: his computer. His parents took it away.

It happened a few weeks into the boy's junior year in high school, after Khalid's parents confronted him about the long stretches he spent alone in his bedroom with his laptop. They suspected he was trolling for porn.

When Khalid refused to explain what he was doing, his parents grabbed his computer. Khalid threw a tantrum but they wouldn't give it back.

Then, this aspiring jihadist, who knew that his friend LaRose had twice been visited by the FBI, made an odd and impulsive choice: He dialed 911 and invited law enforcement into his home. His parents, he told the dispatcher, were abusive.

When police arrived, the officers backed the parents. Only after authorities left and Khalid gave his parents his password would they begin clicking through his computer. They discovered his al-Qaida translation projects and jihadi videos.

As the teenager later wrote to a friend, they "saw the beheadings, which scared the crap out of them."

Stripped of access to his online life, Khalid soon became despondent. He refused to eat. He slept all day. After a few days, his parents dialed 911 themselves and had Khalid admitted overnight to a psychiatric facility.

The boy told no one about Eagle Eye, Jihad Jane, Black Flag, or the stolen passports LaRose had sent him for safekeeping - including the one he had forwarded to Black Flag in Ireland.

‘No matter the risk’
Waterford seems an unlikely place to launch a jihad.

Founded by Vikings and renowned for its crystal, the southern Irish city is far more tranquil than Dublin or Cork. Only a few hundred Muslims live there, many who immigrated for jobs at the regional hospital. To create a mosque, local Muslims converted a suburban home near the hospital.

Yet the city became the confluence of the Jihad Jane conspiracy. Here, in September 2009, Black Flag met his two prized recruits in person for the first time: LaRose and Jamie Paulin Ramirez, the lonely Colorado woman whom he had persuaded to come by telling her that Allah had willed it in a dream.

Both women were Americans -- white, blonde and recent converts to Islam. And though they had often chatted online, neither knew that the other was coming.

Short but thin and handsome, Black Flag was known in Waterford by his given name, Ali Damache. Born in Algeria in 1965, Damache grew up in central France. After high school, he sold perfume and cosmetics in the women's section of a Paris department store for many years. Around 2001, he moved to southern Ireland.

Damache bounced from sales job to sales job -- he worked at a drug store, a telephone call center, a real estate agency and an insurance firm. To comply with Irish welfare and immigration law, each time he lost a job he enrolled in computer-training programs, giving him access to computers and a reason to spend a lot of time online.

He wed an Irish Catholic woman, a marriage that lasted about seven years. In 2007, Damache began regularly going to mosque and, about a year later, wearing Muslim attire.

By 2009, Damache was calling himself Black Flag. Online, he made contact with Eagle Eye, LaRose, Ramirez, Khalid, Abdullah and others whom the FBI has linked to al-Qaida cells.

Throughout the summer, even after LaRose tipped him that the FBI was watching, Damache continued to send online messages that U.S. authorities say place him at the hub of the conspiracy.

"The job is to knock down some individuals that are harming Islam," Damache explained to a friend in Europe. He was busy building "an organization," he wrote, divided into a "planning team … research team … action team … recruitment team … finance team."

Damache wrote breathlessly of his plans for LaRose. "We have already organized everything for her. We are wil(ing)l to die in order to protect her no matter what the risk."

‘So close'
LaRose and Ramirez each landed in Ireland within days of the other, during the second week of September. On the day she arrived, Ramirez married Damache.

There would be no honeymoon.

Instead, with Ramirez's young son, they all stayed in a one-bedroom apartment Damache rented in the heart of Waterford. The flat stood steps from upscale Italian and Chinese restaurants and the city archives, on a neat, narrow street close to the central shopping mall, riverfront and Catholic church.

The sleeping arrangements proved awkward. At times, the women stayed with the boy in the living room; Damache took the bedroom for himself.

Despite the unorthodox accommodations, LaRose remained committed to the notion of killing the Swedish artist. With little direction, she was doing what she could, tracking her target the only way she knew how: online.

To try to learn more about Vilks, for example, she signed up for a virtual community he had created. Filling out the online form, LaRose typed a false name - - Sally Jones -- and created a new Gmail account.

She also left a clue that underscored her sloppiness. In the postal code section of the online form, she typed 48174 -- the zip code for Romulus, Mich., her childhood home.

Damache gave LaRose a key to the Waterford apartment, and she was free to come and go. Ramirez focused on supporting her new husband's activities, whatever they were. She didn't get a key and was instructed to remain at home, to cook and to clean.

Local Muslim women took LaRose to the mosque and taught her how to pray. The first time she rose after praying, LaRose experienced what she believed to be a minor miracle. A persistent pain in her stomach, one that had bothered her for years, simply vanished. LaRose was astonished. What more proof did she need that Islam could heal her?

Her faith in the jihad was another story. In the weeks that followed, nothing materialized the way Damache had promised. No training, no planning, no brothers and sisters waiting to join her in assassination. To LaRose, the great Black Flag seemed nearly as unmoored as she was -- chronically unemployed, spouting verses from the Quran to justify whatever he chose to do, hiding his cowardice behind his beard.

LaRose still refused to give up her jihad. On the last day of September, she emailed Eagle Eye to let him know she remained on task and that it would be "an honor & great pleasure to kill" the artist.

"Only death will stop me here," LaRose wrote. "I am so close to the target!"

She hadn't trained as an assassin and she hadn't traveled to Sweden. But she was back on Muslima.com, the Islamic dating site, hoping to find someone who might put her up in Sweden  -- should she ever get there.

The epiphany
Two weeks after promising that "only death" would stop her plans to kill for Allah, Jihad Jane decided to head home.

The epiphany came while she waited with a Muslim woman in a delivery truck outside a grocery in Waterford. The two women were covered head to toe. Only their eyes showed. The woman's husband was inside shopping.

Sitting in the truck, LaRose considered the woman's life. She had a husband, children, a family and a bond with Allah. The woman seemed happy, LaRose thought. And she wanted that sort of happiness, too.

LaRose considered Damache and Abdullah again. Online, the men were aggressive, tough-talking jihadists, romantic, almost heroic. In person - - in reality - they were tentative, chauvinistic and, perhaps most telling, hobbled by pedestrian struggles like finding enough cash to pay the electric bill.

LaRose asked the woman waiting with her in the truck what she thought of Damache. The woman replied that her husband believed LaRose was a lost soul and that Damache had misled her. Perhaps Vilks, the Swedish artist, did deserve to die, but that was up to Allah, not Damache, to decide, she said.

The woman and her husband were the first Muslims LaRose had met who did not advocate violence. They were wonderful, deeply religious people, and they held a starkly different version of Islam than the likes of Eagle Eye and Black Flag.

LaRose considered all this, sitting in the truck. Again, she felt torn. She wanted to please Eagle Eye, but nothing, not a single thing she had been promised, had worked out.

She was also growing lonely and missed her longtime boyfriend back in Pennsylvania. She wondered who was caring for her elderly mother. She thought about her cats, Fluffy and Klaus.

Jihad Jane was homesick.

She emailed her boyfriend with her new Irish mobile number. A short while later, he called. Come home, he urged. Your mother is ill, near death.

Today, LaRose insists that she wasn't abandoning her jihad, only pausing to visit a sick relative.

If so, what this budding terrorist did next is perplexing: She visited the FBI's website, located the send-a-tip section and let agents know she was heading home.

Read previous installments

Part 1: From abuse victim to terrorist wannabe

Part 2: A vow is confirmed; a terror plot grows

The reason? She hoped the FBI would pay for her flight.

When LaRose got no response, she called her boyfriend back and he bought her ticket.

Damache tried to talk her out of leaving. He pleaded for patience, but LaRose insisted she needed to return to care for her sick mother.

LaRose said goodbye to Ramirez and her son, and reluctantly, Damache agreed to drive her to the airport in Cork. It was a two-hour trip along scenic and often rural roads.

Unannounced, Damache brought a husky friend along for the ride, a man LaRose had never met.

As the car left Waterford, LaRose grew suspicious. They were never going to let her go back to the United States, she thought. She knew too much  -- where they lived, what they were planning, everything.

They weren't driving her to the airport, she thought. It was all a setup.

They were going to make Jihad Jane disappear.

Read Part 4: ‘It's my destiny'

More from Open Channel:

 

• 'Jane's' jihad: A vow is confirmed, a terror plot grows
• Senior al-Qaida leader killed in Pakistan by drone, jihadis, US officials say
• Adelson, other big super PAC donors continued spending in race's final days
• Secret Service says it lost two computer backup tapes in 2008
• 'Jihad Jane' begins strange journey from abuse victim to wannabe terrorist
• Gang tactic -- shared 'community guns' -- challenges police, prosecutors
• New device lets crooks crack many hotel locks

 

 

Follow Open Channel from NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook

 

 

Colleen LaRose, the middle-aged American woman who called herself Jihad Jane, hurried to the computer in her duplex near Philadelphia -- the place where she had spent months entertaining murder.

Minutes earlier, an FBI agent had left a card on her door, requesting a call, and LaRose had known precisely what to do. She emailed her al-Qaida handler for advice.

It was July 17, 2009, and almost four months had passed since LaRose had agreed to kill in the name of Allah. Now, the FBI left a calling card on her doorstep. How had they found her? And what did they know?

Her al-Qaida handler, Eagle Eye, lived in Pakistan. He was wise. He was pious. He would guide her.

---

LaRose, now 46, had never seen his face, but during online chats, he had seen hers. Her blonde hair, fair skin and green eyes made her a prized recruit, especially for the undertaking Eagle Eye had ordered. She would blend in nicely, avoiding suspicion. Eagle Eye's plot called for her to travel to Sweden and murder Lars Vilks, the artist who had blasphemed the Prophet Mohammad.

When LaRose reached Eagle Eye, he told her to call the agent back. Find out how much the FBI knows, he said.

Obediently, LaRose dialed the number. The agent picked up.

Have you ever visited extremist Islamic forums? he asked.

No, never, she lied.

Have you ever solicited money for terrorists?

No. Another lie.

Do you know anyone who goes by the online name Jihad Jane?

No, LaRose said.

The call didn't last long, and the FBI agent didn't reveal much. She couldn't tell if the FBI had seen her YouTube posts supporting al-Qaida and violent jihad.

For more than a year, LaRose had clashed online with YouTube Smackdown, a group that flagged and reported hate speech and jihadist activity. Maybe they had contacted the FBI. But so what? Her YouTube rants couldn't be considered a crime.

Then again, what if the FBI knew more? What if agents had read messages LaRose exchanged with Eagle Eye in Pakistan or his associate Black Flag in Ireland? The men were al-Qaida -- that's what they said, anyway.

What about her jihadi friends inside the United States -- the woman in Colorado and the teenager in Maryland? Did the FBI know about them? Or about her pledge to kill the Swedish artist?

Despite the concerns, LaRose plunged forward. Without disguising herself, she began contacting fellow jihadists online. She warned them of the FBI's visit and asked them to delete anything that might prove incriminating.

Then LaRose took the next step on her path to martyrdom - an act she later described as one of the proudest moments in the conspiracy to kill the artist in Europe.

She found a bargain flight to Amsterdam for $400.

"I went straight to the airline," she says today. "I didn't use no middle person. I also made it two weeks ahead of time."

The plot, loose as it was, was advancing. Jihad Jane booked the flight for Aug. 23.

The honor student
Shortly after the FBI agent left her duplex, LaRose emailed a high school student who lived near Baltimore, about 150 miles away.

Please contact jihadi forum administrators, LaRose begged the teen. "Ask him to PLEASE remove ALL my posts … because I told the FBI guy I don't know that site."

The teenager, who went by Hassan online, did as asked. "She is being threatened by the FBI," he explained in a message to the forum administrators.

Hassan wasn't a creative pseudonym like Jihad Jane. It was simply the middle name of Mohammed H. Khalid, a gangly Pakistani immigrant who lived with his parents, older brother and two younger sisters in Ellicott City, Md.

Khalid, 15, had met Jihad Jane on YouTube months earlier and their online friendship had grown quickly. By now, they were talking to some of the same people overseas: an al-Qaida operative named Eagle Eye and a Muslim man in Ireland who called himself Black Flag.

Like LaRose, Khalid had become radicalized watching videos of Muslim children maimed or killed in attacks by Israeli or American forces. Khalid was not a convert. He had been born a Muslim in Dubai and raised in Pakistan from age 11 to 14.

His family, classic American immigrants seeking a better life for their children, had arrived in Maryland in 2007. Khalid's father delivered pizzas. His mother kept the home.

The family of six squeezed into a modern-day tenement, a tiny two-bedroom apartment selected for its location inside the best school district his parents could afford. In one bedroom, Khalid and his brother shared a mattress. In the other, his sisters lived beside stacked boxes of perfume the family peddled at a weekend flea market. Their parents slept on a mattress in the dining room.

Khalid excelled during his first two years at Mt. Hebron High School. He earned A's in English, Algebra, Science and U.S. History. He joined the chess club and later became an administrator for the school website.

Although his parents were thrilled with Khalid's grades, they began to notice subtle changes. He seemed withdrawn and spent so much time alone in his bedroom on his laptop. They worried he might be downloading porn.

If only.

Eager to learn more about his Muslim heritage, the 15 year old had stumbled onto violent jihadi videos and become addicted. The anti-American rhetoric proved intoxicating to an immigrant boy struggling to find an identity in a place that embraced neither his race nor his religion.

Khalid began translating from Urdu to English sermons and violent jihadi videos -- snuff-style images of U.S. soldiers in the throes of death, and beheadings of Americans Nick Berg and Daniel Pearl. Khalid posted the videos and began to solicit money online for al-Qaida. He never aspired to kill anyone personally. He later described himself as a "keyboard warrior."

"I will be a great facilitator," he wrote to a friend.

To shield his identity, Khalid studied basic terrorist tradecraft -- how to use programs such as Pidgin to encrypt chats and Tor to cloak his location. He learned to use code words - for example, "HK" in place of "jihad." The letters were chosen because J falls between H and K on the keyboard.

Now, in mid-July 2009 -- around the time Jihad Jane warned him about the FBI -- Khalid launched a new online endeavor. It was brimming with teenage bravado. He called the blog Path to Martyrdom/Resisting the War Against al-Islaam. From the blog, Khalid linked to hundreds of videos of al-Qaida sermons and violent attacks.

He intended Path to Martyrdom to be anonymous. His keystrokes betrayed him.

Pivoting between maintaining the school's website and his new jihadist blog, he inadvertently linked the "About Me" section of Martyrdom to the wrong web page -- the page for his high school track team.

Jamie joins
On Aug. 1, 2009 -- around the time LaRose found her bargain ticket to Europe -- a 31-year-old woman sat before a laptop at her mother's kitchen table in the remote town of Leadville, Colo.

Jamie Paulin Ramirez felt stifled. Her young son, Christian, bounded past every now and then, and her nosy mother kept making excuses to stroll by.

As discreetly as she could, Ramirez tried to shield the screen. She and her mom had clashed about her conversion to Islam. It wasn't that her mother objected to the religion; she had married a Muslim herself. She just thought her daughter was overzealous.

Ramirez feared her mom would launch into a tirade if she caught her chatting with her new Muslim friends, just as her mother criticized her for wearing a head scarf, or hijab.

"When I would pray she would scream at me," Ramirez recalled in a document reviewed by Reuters. "When I would wear my hijab to work and to the store, she would say it was embarrassing."

One of Ramirez's new online friends was another recent convert to Islam, a woman from Pennsylvania who sometimes called herself Jihad Jane. They seemed a lot alike - they were both white, blonde, Americans. And each had gravitated toward Muslim men in Europe, including one man in Ireland. He had been trying to persuade Ramirez to bring her son and join him there.

On this day, Jihad Jane wrote with big news: "Soon, I will be leaving for Europe to be with other brothers & sisters. When I get to Europe, I will send for you to come be there with me. … This place will be like a training camp as well as a home."

"I would love to go over there," Ramirez replied.

Their chat turned to politics. And, years later, the brief exchange that followed would become part of the government's case against both of them.

Jihad Jane: "When our brothers defend our faith their homes, they are terrorist. Fine, then I am a terrorist and proud to be this."

Ramirez: "That's right … If that's how they call it, then so be it. I am what I am."

Ramirez was raised a Methodist, but she had become embittered toward God and abandoned religion years earlier following her sister's death from cancer.

Thrice divorced, Ramirez had moved in with her mother to save money. But they quarreled often, especially about her young son -- what he should read, how he should pray, what he should eat for dinner, whether he should wear his hair short or long.

Ramirez had been looking for a reason to leave.

Her turn toward Islam had begun the year before, while researching a paper for a college class. Intrigued by what she learned about the religion, she continued reading. After a few months, she slipped down to a Denver-area mosque and converted.

Now, her new, nonjudgmental friends on Islamic forums were enticing her to join them. The man in Ireland -- the one Jihad Jane knew as Black Flag -- pressed Ramirez hardest.

Ramirez knew the man only by his real name, Ali Damache, and in his latest message to her, he persisted: Bring your son. Marry me. I will teach you Arabic and the mystical beauty of the Quran.

Ramirez hesitated. Men had burned her so many times. She liked what she knew of Damache. He was nice - he complimented her on the color schemes of her hijabs. Even so.

Damache urged her to ask Allah for guidance. Pray for a week, each night before bedtime, he said, then consider the colors of the dreams: If the dreams come in white or green, it is a sign that she should to fly to Ireland with her son; if the dreams come in red or black, she and her son should stay in Colorado.

Ramirez struggled to recall her dreams, but it wouldn't matter. Damache told her he had prayed, too, and his dreams were glowing green -- the color of Islam, and of Ireland.

OK, Ramirez agreed, that must be a sign from Allah. She began shopping for two plane tickets to Ireland.

The passports
In the weeks leading up to her own flight to Europe, LaRose grew excited about what lay ahead.

Finally, she would meet some true Muslims -- men more righteous than she was, people wholly committed to the cause. They would teach her to pray and the ways of Allah. More important, they would accept her as one of their own.

It would be an honor to fly to Amsterdam for training, then travel on to Sweden to carry out the killing.

Her instructions: to shoot the artist Vilks six times in the chest. "That way," LaRose recalls today, "they know it was not an accident. It was intended."

A short while before her flight, LaRose stole her boyfriend's passport and birth certificate, presumably to provide false identification for the terrorists. LaRose located two of the boyfriend's passports, one current and one expired, as well as several birth certificates.

Following her handler's instructions, LaRose mailed everything to young Khalid near Baltimore.

Then, days before the flight to Amsterdam and the start of her new life, the realities of her old one intervened: Her boyfriend's father suffered a heart attack. Soon after, he died.

Read Part 1: 'Jihad Jane' begins strange journey from abuse victim to wannabe terrorist

LaRose wasn't deterred. She let her al-Qaida associates know she was still coming. "I will be away from here in a couple days," she wrote. "… Then…I will get to work on important matters." 

Within hours, LaRose heard a knock on the door of her home near Philadelphia.

The FBI had returned. This time, LaRose answered.

Read Part 3: The jihad begins

More from Open Channel:

Senior al-Qaida leader killed in Pakistan by drone, jihadis, US officials say

Adelson, other big super PAC donors continued spending in race's final days

Secret Service says it lost two computer backup tapes in 2008

'Jihad Jane' begins strange journey from abuse victim to wannabe terrorist

Gang tactic -- shared 'community guns' -- challenges police, prosecutors

New device lets crooks crack many hotel locks 

Cuba pushes swap: its spies jailed in US for  American jailed in Havana

 

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A senior al-Qaida official and potential successor to the group’s leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed Friday morning in a Predator drone strike, according to reports on jihadi web forums and U.S. officials.

Sheikh Khalid Bin Abdul Rehman Al-Hussainan, aka Abu-Zaid al Kuwaiti, was killed in Pakistan while eating breakfast, according to the accounts.  The 46-year-old cleric was seen as part of the “very top tier" of al-Qaida's remaining leaders in the wake of the death of Osama bin Laden, according to one expert on the terror group.

---

The news was first announced on an al-Qaida web forum early Friday. “We celebrate to you the news of the martyrdom of the working scholar Shaykh Khalid al-Hussainan (Abu Zaid al-Kuwaiti) while eating his Suhoor (dawn time) meal, and we ask Allah to accept him in paradise," a post said.

Evan Kohlmann, an NBC News counterterrorism analyst, said al-Hussainan was at the forefront of a new wave of al-Qaida leadership.

“That's a big gap in the leadership,” said Kohlmann, who is also a Justice Department consultant. “He was the last senior Al-Qaida leader in the Afghanistan-Pakistan area who was, one, from the Arabian Peninsula and, two, who had serious clerical credentials.  Now there is no obvious publicly recognizable candidate left to succeed Zawahiri.”

In recent years, al-Hussainan was seen in numerous al-Qaida videos offering religious training to the group’s operatives. The videos were widely circulated by al-Shabab, al-Qaida’s media wing. He also authored several books of religious thoughts.

The U.S. killed three other up-and-coming members of the terror group’s next generation leadership in the months after bin Laden was killed in a raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, by U.S. Navy SEALs in May 2011. Ilyas Kashmiri, the leader of a Pakistani group associated with al-Qaeda was killed June 3. Atiyah Abd-al Rahman, bin Laden’s chief of staff, was killed on Aug. 22 and Ayman al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who was a leader of Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, was killed Sept. 30. US officials say that hints about their whereabouts were found in materials gathered by the Navy SEALs in the raid on bin Laden’s compound.

Al-Hussainan is the highest ranking al-Qaida official to be killed since those leaders were killed.

Mike Leiter, the former director of the National Counter Terrorism Center and an NBC News analyst, said it’s important to keep going after top officials to keep al-Qaida off balance.

“We are taking out the generation following those left from the 9-11 era leadership,” Leiter said. “If you can get into this level of leadership consistently, it becomes very difficult for al-Qaida in Pakistan to become a serious threat to the homeland.”

The fact that the attack was carried out by a Predator shows that the US intends to keep using the drones to kill al-Qaida, despite criticism from Pakistani officials and U.S. critics, said Roger Cressey, former deputy director of the White House counter terrorism center and an NBC News analyst.

 “Anyone who believes that the drone program has run its course needs to know that people like al Kuwaiti are still out there,” he said.

Robert Windrem is a senior investigative producer for NBC News.

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Adelson, other big super PAC donors continued spending in race's final days

Secret Service says it lost two computer backup tapes in 2008

'Jihad Jane' begins strange journey from abuse victim to wannabe terrorist

Gang tactic -- shared 'community guns' -- challenges police, prosecutors

New device lets crooks crack many hotel locks

Cuban official accuses US of 'lying' about health of jailed American contractor

Foreign tech companies pitched real-time spy gear to Iran

Cuba pushes swap: its spies jailed in US for  American jailed in Havana

 

 

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Billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson gave $1 million to a super PAC active in Michigan’s U.S. Senate race during the campaign’s final days, a fact unknown to voters until long after polls closed.

Adelson supplied the bulk of funding for the “Hardworking Americans Committee” with the Oct. 19 donation, Federal Election Commission records show.

The super PAC spent more than $1 million on ads in a futile, last-minute attempt to boost former Republican Rep. Pete Hoekstra in his bid to oust incumbent Sen. Debbie Stabenow, a Democrat.

---

Liberal super PACs spent little – just $1,700 -- attacking Hoekstra,  according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The deadline for reporting donations made since Oct. 17 was Thursday.

Last-minute contributions are not unusual in politics, but thanks to the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and a lower court ruling, the amount a donor can give to outside groups’ electoral efforts is unlimited. Furthermore, donations to political action committees during the final three weeks of the election need not be reported until December.

The reporting gap should be closed, say watchdogs.

“Congress should amend our disclosure laws to give voters the information they need to make informed decisions on Election Day,” said Paul S. Ryan, an attorney at the Campaign Legal Center. “With current technology, disclosure is easier than ever for super PACs and other political players.”

Adelson, the top donor to super PACs in the 2012 election by a large margin, along with wife Miriam, also provided all $2 million of Republican Jewish Coalition Victory Fund’s war chest. The super PAC, which did not report any receipts before Election Day, pumped more than $1.7 million into advertising opposing President Barack Obama.

The Republican Jewish Coalition is a lobbying organization that seeks to “foster and enhance ties between the American Jewish community and Republican decision makers,” according to its website. It was started in 1985 and Adelson serves on the group’s board of directors

Similarly, “Freedom Fund North America,” a GOP-aligned super PAC established on Oct. 15, spent $990,000 in the final weeks of the 2012 race, mostly attacking incumbent Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., and former North Dakota Attorney General Heidi Heitkamp.

Both Democrats prevailed in their hotly contested races.

Adelson did not return a call seeking comment.

The entirety of Freedom Fund's $1 million budget came from Texas businessman and Republican mega-donor Bob Perry, according to FEC reports.

New records further show that billionaire New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg provided nearly $10 million to the “Independence USA PAC,” whose priorities include gun control, marriage equality for same-sex couples and education issues. It was launched on Oct. 18 and reported spending $8.2 million on five House races.

Two of its favored candidates — Democrat Gloria McLeod of California and Democrat Dan Maffei of California — won.

Super PACs can accept donations of unlimited amounts from corporations, unions and individuals.

FEC Vice Chairwoman Ellen Weintraub, a Democrat, stressed the importance of people having such information before they cast their votes.

“I always think the public benefits from and is entitled to transparency about the sources of political funds,” she said. “As the Supreme Court said in Citizens United, ‘The public has an interest in knowing who is speaking about a candidate shortly before an election.’”

Republican attorney Brad Smith, a former FEC chairman who founded the Center for Competitive Politics, however, argues that the lack of disclosure of last-minute super PAC donations is not a "real catastrophe or something that is harmful to the election process."

The government's interest in “preventing corruption or its appearance” is served just as well "if information is released afterward," he said.

The only other large contributions that went to the anti-Stabenow super PAC came from Amway President Doug DeVos and Michael Jandernoa, former president and CEO of pharmaceutical company Perrigo, who each donated $100,000 to the group in October.

Ads from the super PAC accused her of dodging taxes on her “ritzy Washington, D.C., home,” voting for tax increases and “failing Michigan for years.”

Despite the spending, Stabenow easily captured nearly 60 percent of the vote. Yet the last-minute deluge earned ire from her campaign.

“The fact that secret money can be dumped into races like this, with no one knowing where the money came from until a month after the election, is awful for our democracy,”  said Stabenow spokesman Cullen Schwarz.

Hoekstra did not return a call seeking comment about the super PAC spending on his behalf.

The Center for Public integrity is a non-profit, independent investigative news outlet.  To read more of its stories go to publicintegrity.org.

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"Kill him."

The American who called herself Jihad Jane read the words on her computer screen. Colleen LaRose was fiddling on the Internet, passing time in her duplex near Philadelphia, when the call to martyrdom arrived from halfway around the world.

The order came from an al-Qaida operative. The date: March 22, 2009.

This was it, she thought. Her chance. At 45, LaRose was ready to become somebody.

---

A compact woman with a seventh-grade education, LaRose was a recent convert to Islam. She found a place for herself quickly, raising money and awareness online for the plight of her Muslim brothers and sisters. They were underdogs, just like her.

During her darkest days, LaRose had endured incest, rape and prostitution. She surrendered her life to drinking and drugs, from crack to crystal meth. Now, if she accepted the order to kill, she would surrender her life to a higher power: Allah.

 

The man who issued the directive called himself Eagle Eye. LaRose knew him only by his online messages and his voice, and he claimed to be hiding in Pakistan. Eagle Eye wanted her to fly to Europe to train as an assassin with other al-Qaida operatives, then to Sweden to do what few other Muslim jihadists could: blend in.

The terrorists believed that her blonde hair, white skin and U.S. passport, even her Texas twang, would help her to get close enough to the target: Lars Vilks, a Swedish artist who had blasphemed the Prophet Mohammad by sketching his face on the head of a dog.

"Go to Sweden," Eagle Eye instructed LaRose. "And kill him."

A year later, when U.S. authorities revealed the plot, they repeatedly described the Jihad Jane case as one that should forever alter the public's view of terrorism. The conspiracy "underscores the evolving nature of the threat we face," one official said at the time. A second said the case "demonstrates yet another very real danger lurking on the Internet" and "shatters any lingering thought that we can spot a terrorist based on appearance."

The case was so serious, authorities said, that they charged LaRose with crimes that could keep her in prison for the rest of her life.

The court filings and press releases draw a frightening portrait of the Jihad Jane conspiracy. But an exclusive Reuters review of confidential investigative documents and interviews in Europe and the United States -- including the first interview with Jihad Jane herself -- reveals a less menacing and, in some ways, more preposterous undertaking than the U.S. government asserted.

"I got so close to being able to do this," LaRose says today of the plan to kill Vilks.

In truth, what happened proved more farcical than frightful, more absurd than ominous.

The conspiracy included a troubled trio of Americans, each a terrorist wannabe: LaRose; a Colorado woman named Jamie Paulin Ramirez; and a Maryland teenager named Mohammed Hassan Khalid. All have pleaded guilty to breaking U.S. terrorism laws, but only LaRose was charged in the plot to kill Vilks. Her sentencing was recently rescheduled to May 7 from Dec. 19.

Since the 9/11 terror attacks, the FBI has investigated hundreds of cases similar to the Jihad Jane conspiracy. With each investigation comes a challenge: how to prevent acts of terrorism without violating civil rights or overreacting to plots that are little more than bluster.

"We are going to err on the side of caution," says Richard P. Quinn, the FBI's assistant special agent in charge for counter-terrorism in Philadelphia. "We will go after operatives and operations that are more aspirational than operational because to do otherwise would almost be negligent."

At least at the outset, authorities had no way to be certain how much of a threat LaRose might pose, given her resolute conviction and her unique attributes - primarily the way she looked. No one disputes that LaRose and Khalid managed to make contact with overseas al-Qaida operatives and with a loose affiliation of young American-born male Muslim jihadists inside the United States.

Quinn says the case exemplifies al-Qaida's new approach to terrorism. He says the Jihad Jane conspiracy -- from recruiting to planning -- "represents the many new faces of the terrorist threat."

But some civil rights advocates say the U.S. government has exaggerated the danger posed by aspiring terrorists -- in this case and scores of others.

"You can't say these people are totally innocent -- they aren't, and there's something wild and scary about them -- but almost all of them seem to be incompetent and deluded in some way," said Ohio State University Professor John Mueller, who has written extensively about how the government has handled terrorism cases. "When you look closely, many of these cases become interestingly cartoonish."

Interviews and documents, many composed by those involved in the Jihad Jane case as the conspiracy unfolded, often reveal their innermost thoughts. They also show the gullibility of the main players or the ways that they botched almost every assignment along the way.

Khalid, a troubled high school honor student who lived with his parents in Maryland, inadvertently linked his secret jihadist blog to a page on his school website.

Ramirez, a lonely Colorado woman known as Jihad Jamie, headed to Europe to train for holy war. She was lured to Ireland by a Muslim man promising a pious, married life but soon came to believe that all he really sought was a cook, a maid and a sex slave.

Perhaps most intriguing is the story of LaRose, the aspiring assassin whose devotion and naiveté left her susceptible to recruitment but prone to failure.

In the only interview she has given, LaRose says she became devoted to the Muslim men she met online and blindly followed their instructions because they seemed righteous. "I just loved my brothers so much, when they would tell me stuff, I would listen to them, no matter what," she says. "And I also was ... lost."

Indeed, just weeks into her jihad, she became homesick. And days before returning from Europe to America, she emailed the FBI -- to see whether the government might spring for her airfare home.

Despite the media attention the case has received, many details haven't been previously disclosed. Among them: how LaRose, Khalid and Ramirez became radicalized; how they found one another; how they repeatedly bungled the plot that authorities say posed a "very real danger;" and how they came to sacrifice everything for a group of strangers who promised immortality but delivered ignominy.

"Jihad Jane is a perfect figure in some ways because it's like a soap opera," says her intended victim, the artist Vilks. "This is today's most interesting part of terrorism -- the amateurs."

The encounter
Colleen LaRose's path toward terrorism began with what devout Muslims would consider a sin -- a one-night stand.

Her tryst occurred in 2007, two years before LaRose agreed to kill Vilks. At the time, she was in Amsterdam on vacation with her longtime boyfriend, Kurt Gorman, and the two were arguing.

They had dated for five years and were living in suburban Pennsylvania. They had met when Gorman, a radio technician, was dispatched from Pennsburg, Pa., to repair a 307-foot radio tower that stood near cotton fields south of Dallas. LaRose was living beneath the tower in a single-wide trailer she shared with her sister, her mother, her stepfather and two ducks named Lewis and Clark.

Gorman, who declined to talk to Reuters, was a few years younger than LaRose. Colleen found him mellow, gregarious and adventuresome. He fell for her loud, infectious laugh and her penchant for practical jokes. He flattered her with attention and spoiled her with generosity. When she told him that she wished she had bigger breasts, he paid to get them enlarged. Her new size DDs came to dominate her 4-foot-11 frame.

One night during the Amsterdam vacation, the two were at a bar and LaRose got loaded. She could be a mean drunk and she lit into Gorman. He left the bar. LaRose remained.

A short time later, a man approached her. He was Middle Eastern, a Muslim -- and handsome. She went home with him, in part to spite her boyfriend, in part because she was curious.

The decision would change her life.

The conversion
The Amsterdam dalliance with the Muslim man sparked an interest in Islam, one that LaRose kept secret from her boyfriend Gorman when they returned to Pennsylvania.

To learn more about the religion, she began visiting Muslim websites. To meet Muslim men, she signed up for a popular dating site, Muslima.com.

She used Gorman's credit card to pay for access to the site. When Gorman saw the bill, LaRose laughed it off as a lark.

LaRose believed in God but she had never followed any particular religion. As she continued to explore Islam online, she met a man in Turkey who became an especially helpful mentor. He explained the Five Pillars of Islam, and LaRose learned the wudu, the Muslim washing ritual. She ordered a Quran.

After a few weeks, she discovered that converting was easy; she didn't even have to visit a mosque. All she had to do was recite the Shahada, a pledge to accept Allah as her only God and the Prophet Mohammad as his messenger. Just months after her one-night stand in Amsterdam, while chatting with a Saudi Arabian man, LaRose typed the Shahada and converted to Islam via instant messenger.

Sitting before the Dell desktop computer, an unusual feeling washed over her. Happiness.

"I was finally where I belonged," she recalls.

She took as her Muslim name Fatima, after one of the Prophet Mohammad's daughters. "That's the prophet's favorite daughter," she reasons, "and I was my dad's favorite daughter."

By "dad," LaRose meant her stepfather. Her biological father -- she dismissively calls him "nothing more than a sperm donor" -- was, by his own admission, a monster.

The clearest documentation is contained in a series of archived juvenile court records reviewed by Reuters.

On Nov. 6, 1980 -- when LaRose was 17 -- she wandered into Runaway House, a shelter for teens in Memphis, Tenn.

The girl's platinum-blonde hair desperately needed a wash. Her hollowed eyes betrayed cocaine and heroin use. She carried venereal disease.

Colleen told a counselor that she had run away from home at age 13 and lived on the streets as a prostitute. She became pregnant and suffered a miscarriage that left her unable to have children. At 16, she married a man twice her age.

Runaway House routinely saw its share of cruelty. But Colleen's story deeply shook the counselor, Ollie Avery Mannino.

Colleen's parents, heavy drinkers, divorced when she was 3. Growing up near Detroit, she struggled in school and had to repeat the first grade. Once, she came to school with mouse bites on her fingers.

There was more. When Colleen was 8 and her sister, Pam, was 11, her biological father began to rape them, Colleen told the counselor. Her father, Richard LaRose, would appear at their door at night with a bottle of lotion, a silent signal that it was time to undress. The rapes started when Colleen was in the second grade; they continued until she ran away.

Mannino promised to help but explained that the law required her to notify a minor's parent that a runaway was safe. Colleen gave Mannino her father's number. When the counselor reached Richard LaRose, she told him that his daughter was in Memphis. Then she told him what Colleen had said.

"Yeah," Richard LaRose replied without hesitation, Mannino recalls. "I raped her."

He said it sharply, without remorse, and in such a prideful, guttural tone that Mannino snapped her head, stunned. The confession -- or boast -- is memorialized in the confidential report Mannino wrote to the court shortly after the call. To this day, Mannino, who spoke to Reuters with Colleen's permission, vividly remembers what happened next.

Colleen took the phone. Angry, her face flushed and tears flowing, she screamed at her father: "Look what you've done to me! You did this to me! It's your fault! Why? Why?"

A moment later, Colleen hurled the phone at a bulletin board, scattering notes and pictures. Then she crumpled into the chair.

The counselor bundled the girl off to a hospital for psychiatric treatment.

Mannino said she reported Richard LaRose to local authorities but, inexplicably, he never was charged with raping either daughter. He died in 2010.

"He never did say he was sorry for what he did to us," says Pam LaRose, now 52, who described the rapes recently in her first media interview. "I still have a lot of anger. Colleen feels the same way. We don't talk about it a lot. Too much pain is involved."

The cause
LaRose remained infatuated with Muslim men and Islam throughout the first half of 2008. But shortly after she converted, she stopped taking her new religion seriously. Pledges to stop drinking fell away. She never visited a mosque. She never learned how to properly pray.

Her waning interest fit an often flighty personality. In Texas, she had worked in a nursing home. But living outside Philadelphia, she held no job and struggled to pass the time while Gorman traveled.

She had her cats, Klaus and Fluffy, chatted on the phone with her sister in Texas and played games on web sites like pogo.com. She also flirted with men in chat rooms and became obsessed with fantasy warrior stories -- she read Shogun and watched the movies Spartacus, Braveheart, 300 and Troy.

Not until six months after her online conversion to Islam would she re-engage. In addition to passing time watching action movies, LaRose became riveted by violent YouTube videos of Israeli attacks on Palestinians and American attacks on Iraqis.

The videos of dead and wounded children moved her most. Sometimes while she watched, she could hear the young American children in the duplex below hers, laughing and playing. The disconnect infuriated her. No one seemed to know or care about the plight of the Palestinians. It was so unfair.

By summer 2008, LaRose was posting jihadist videos on YouTube and MySpace. She used various names online, including Sister of Terror, Ms. Machiavelli and Jihad Jane. During the next year, she exchanged messages with avowed jihadists -- people with codenames such as Eagle Eye, Black Flag, Abdullah and Hassan -- as well as with a woman in Colorado who seemed a lot like her.

LaRose didn't try to hide her posts. She didn't know how. Whenever she wanted to have a private discussion with Eagle Eye, she simply let him take remote control of her computer so he could ensure the secrecy of their chat.

Eagle Eye seemed careful, brave and righteous. He claimed to be on the run from Pakistani authorities and to have participated in the 2008 Mumbai attacks in which terrorists killed 166 people. In mere months, LaRose grew to trust him implicitly. She asked what she could do to help.

His first request seemed innocent enough: Send money to your Muslim brothers and sisters, he told her. So she did, dipping into cash that her boyfriend gave her.

LaRose knew that sending money to people who might be jihadists could be illegal, but who was watching her? Among those she helped: a Cairo cab driver who wanted $450 to fix his broken taxi.

At one point, she also tried to send $440 to a Somali man who wanted to start an online forum for an al-Qaida cell. She soon discovered that Western Union didn't serve war-torn Mogadishu.

The pledge
In January 2009, al-Qaida operatives asked LaRose to do more. They wanted her to become a martyr.

She agreed, and by February sent an online message pledging to use her blonde hair, green eyes and white skin to "blend in with many people… to achieve what is in my heart."

A month later, LaRose also agreed to an overseas rendezvous with Eagle Eye, to marry him and help him get "inside Europe."

Finally, in late March, Eagle Eye asked LaRose to commit her words to deeds. Travel from Pennsylvania to Europe, he said. Find Vilks, the Swedish artist who has blasphemed the Prophet Mohammad. Then shoot him -- six times in the chest.

LaRose felt torn.

She wanted to say yes to Eagle Eye instantly. It would be an honor to become a martyr, she thought. Few sisters received such an opportunity. Plus, she wanted to make Eagle Eye proud. He was so religious, and though she had never seen his face, she had come to love him -- not in a romantic sense but more like a brother.

But there were other considerations. Her elderly mother had recently moved to Pennsylvania to live with her, and her boyfriend's ailing father also lived in the duplex. Whenever her boyfriend traveled for work -- often -- she was left to care for them.

Sitting before the keyboard, she read and reread Eagle Eye's message: "Go to Sweden…And kill him."

She would have to choose one path or the other - an exciting life as jihadist or a mundane one as caretaker.

She chose jihad.

"I will make this my goal," she promised, "'til I achieve it or die trying."

Patiently, she awaited further instructions from Eagle Eye. But she didn't keep a low profile.

Throughout the spring and into mid-summer, LaRose drew more and more attention to herself, posting jihadi videos, anti-Zionist rants and solicitations to raise money.

Then, on a humid day in mid-July, a stranger approached the duplex near Philadelphia and rapped on her door. LaRose didn't answer, and the man left his business card behind. When she picked it up, she rushed to her computer.

LaRose sent two messages -- one to a high school student 150 miles away and another to her al-Qaida handler on the other side of the world.

The messages were the same: The FBI was onto her.

Read Part 2: A vow confirmed; a terror plot grows

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The Secret Service confirmed Friday that it lost two computer backup tapes in 2008 but said it knew of no fraud that had been committed using the information on them.

The tapes were left on a Washington Metro subway train in February 2008 by a contract employee who was taking them to a storage facility, the agency said in a statement. It said that the tapes weren't "marked or identified in any way" and that they couldn't be accessed without proper codes and equipment.

The inspector general's office of the Department of Homeland Security, to which the Secret Service reports, was notified of the loss at the time, the agency said.

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Watch US News videos on NBCNews.com

"The Secret Service complied with all guidelines related to loss of information," the agency said, but Fox News, which first reported the loss, quoted sources it didn't identify as disputing that claim and saying the inspector general had opened an investigation:

Sources said the "personally identifiable information" — or "PII," in government-speak — on the tapes includes combinations of the following: Social Security Numbers; home addresses; information about family members; phone numbers; dates of birth; medical information; bank account numbers; employment information; driver's license numbers; passport numbers; and any biometric information on file with the Secret Service. ...

Congressional and law enforcement sources told FoxNews.com that the Secret Service failed to comply with strict DHS-wide procedure for reporting and responding to privacy incidents where personally identifying information is lost, released or otherwise compromised. 

Congressional investigators and the Homeland Security inspector general are already reviewing the Secret Service for its handling of an incident in April, when 13 employees were implicated in a prostitution scandal during a presidential visit to Cartagena, Colombia, where President Barack Obama was visiting.

Eight of those Secret Service employees have been forced out of the agency and three were cleared of serious misconduct. At least two others were fighting to get their jobs back.

The inspector general's report into that incident is expected in the spring.

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Criminal gangs in parts of New York City are getting increasingly savvy at carrying out violent crimes and eluding police detection, thanks to a practice of hiding and sharing so-called "community guns," police and prosecutors say.

“They don’t want to keep the weapons on them but want to have access to them,” said Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance. “It poses challenges in terms of prosecution, to the police on the street. It all puts the weapon in the hands of a larger number of people."

---

Community guns are often used by gang members to enforce drug territory. But several recent shootings have resulted in the deaths of innocent civilians, including children.  Four-year-old Lloyd Morgan was hit by a stray bullet last summer while on a Harlem basketball court with his mom; Zurana Horton, a pregnant mother, was killed by a bullet fired from a community gun last summer. 

Law enforcement surveillance video obtained by the News 4 I-Team shows suspected gang members sharing weapons and hiding them in public places like building mailboxes, garbage cans or under the wheel of a car. 

”They have unique ways of hiding these guns," said Inspector Kevin Catalina. "Every gang member has access.  It can be in a garbage can, under a tree. They go get it, bring it to a location and then carry out the shootings.”

Catalina said gang intelligence units have made more than two dozen arrests and seized more than a dozen guns this past year.  As a result, crime is down – but the community gun problem continues.

“We have a couple of gangs that pose a particular problem for us over here,” said Catalina. He pointed to one crew that uses a .45-caliber weapon to shoot rivals. In one recent shooting, a 10-year-old child was caught in the crossfire in Claremont Park near Webster Avenue, though the child was able to escape unharmed.

Police said gang members know they are under increased surveillance so they take the added measures to try to hide their weapons. Some use children as young as 12 years old to carry weapons for them because they believe police are less likely to stop and question a teen or child. 

“This is the way they operate. It is very rare that one individual will have access to a gun full time,” Catalina said.

Ballistic tests can often match a community gun to a shooting, but finding the shooter can be more difficult, according to Sgt. Richard Zacarese. 

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“Often you’ll recover the gun, and if that gun was used in numerous shootings, the person you caught with it isn’t necessarily the person who used the gun, since it was passed to hand to hand to hand,” said Zacarese.   

Vance highlighted the recent case of Afrika Owes, a 17-year-old prep student who admitted she stored and carried weapons for a violent Harlem drug gang. In prison recordings of phone conversations she had with a gang leader on Rikers Island, she boasted of carrying three guns for the gangs, including a 9 mm. 

Police and prosecutors are now using conspiracy laws to bring cases against suspected gang members who are caught with or are known to have used community guns.

“We are always confronted with a changing crime dynamic,” Vance said. “I think the community gun circumstance is an adaptation to effective prosecution and police action. It’s designed to try to insulate themselves from being caught with weapons on their person."

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When you lock your hotel door, you assume you're safe and your stuff is safe. Don't be so sure: Thieves have invented a small, simple device that can unlock hotel doors at some of the most popular chains. Some hotels have known about this security problem for months -- so why hasn't it been fixed? Watch Today investigative reporter Jeff Rossen's report or click here to read the story.

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