The arrest and trial of alleged al-Qaida spokesman Suleiman Abu Ghaith may resolve a long-standing debate inside the U.S. intelligence community on what Iranian officials did with members of the terrorist group who snuck into the country shortly after 9-11, hoping they would be treated, if not warmly, then as "the enemy of my enemy," as one U.S official put it.

Abu Ghaith, who was arraigned on Friday in federal court in New York on charges he plotted to kill Americans, described the conditions under which al-Qaida officials' were confined in Iran in a 22-page statement signed after his arrest last week in Jordan.

The statement, which was referenced in his court appearance, is expected to shed light on the accuracy of intelligence gathered by the U.S. in months after 9-11 indicating that the so-called al-Qaida “management council” detained in Iran was still conducting business, even discussing procurement of nuclear weapons.

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The debate among U.S. intelligence officers and agencies centers on how Iran treated the al-Qaida leaders and bin Laden relatives following their capture in Iran in early 2002, and how much it they were allowed to communicate with other members of the terrorist group. The faction in Iran, which with family and bodyguards numbered in the hundreds, bribed their way into the country but was rounded up not long afterward. As one U.S. official told NBC News Thursday, what happened next occurred inside the "blackest of the black boxes" of Iran's intelligence apparatus.

Some analysts believe that members of the group were more or less placed under house arrest. Iranian officials denied that, saying they were "in jail."

Another question is whether the group had significant operational communications with other al-Qaida leaders. One high-ranking former U.S. official told NBC News this week that he was unaware of any contact regarding al-Qaida operations.

But George Tenet, director of the CIA following the 9-11 attacks, painted a different picture in his memoirs, "At the Center of the Storm," written with William Harlow.

In the book, Tenet described incidents in which he learned that the group was not only communicating with Saudi-based al-Qaida leaders on operational matters, but also trying to obtain nuclear weapons. 

"From the end of 2002 to the spring of 2003, we received a stream of reliable reporting that the senior al-Qaida leadership in Saudi Arabia was negotiating for the purchase of three Russian nuclear devices,” Tenet wrote. “Saudi al-Qaida chief Abu Bakr relayed the offer directly to the al-Qaida leadership in Iran, where Sayf al-Adl and (Mohammed) Abdel al-Aziz al-Masri (described as al-Qaida’s “nuclear chief” by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) were reportedly being held under a loose form of house arrest by the Iranian regime.

Tenet wrote that the al-Qaida leaders had learned lessons from previous attempts to procure nuclear devices in the nuclear black market in the early 1990s.

“Saif al-Adel told Abu Bakr that no price was too high to pay if they could get their hands on such weapons,” he wrote. “However, he cautioned Abu Bakr that al-Qaida had been stung by scams in the past and that Pakistani specialists should be brought to Saudi Arabia to inspect the merchandise prior to purchase.

"As soon as I got wind of al-Qaida negotiations to purchase nuclear components in Saudi Arabia, I contacted the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar, and gave him all the details we had," Tenet said.

The CIA also communicated its intelligence to the Iranians, being uncertain of what the Islamic Republic knew of the communications, according to the former CIA director’s account.

"One senior al-Qaida operative told us that Mohammed Abdel al-Aziz al-Masri, who had been detained in Iran, managed al-Qaida’s nuclear program and had conducted experiments with explosives to test the effects of producing a nuclear yield. We passed this information to the Iranians in the hope that they would recognize our common interest in preventing any attack against U.S. interests."

Another U.S. security official told NBC News that Tenet's message did get attention in Tehran and that, in 2003, the group in Iran’s communications with other al-Qaida leaders were down.

Beyond the historical debate, U.S. officials want to know what happened to the other leaders in the management council. Apart from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is awaiting trial before a U.S. military court, the whereabouts of the others are unknown. There have been  intermittent reports over the years that Saif al-Adel, the Egyptian-born military director of al-Qaida, was permitted to leave Iran, but they have not been confirmed.  

 

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U.S. officials say Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, captured last month in Turkey and now in New York, has spent most of the last decade in Iran, in some sort of confinement.

Back in late 2001, as U.S. troops and Afghan tribal forces were dismantling the Taliban control of Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden made a decision.

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He sent his operators, people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Abu Zubaydah to the cities of Pakistan where they were to hide out and plan further attacks against the US.  All of the key players were captured or killed, with the exception of Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaida's No. 2 who remains at large, having survived at least three Predator attacks.

At the same time, bin Laden sent his top managers, al-Qaida's Management Council, to Iran, arming them with money to bribe their way across the border, according to multiple US and Iranian officials. Bin Laden apparently hoped that the Iranians would see the group not as Sunni terrorists but as "an enemy of my enemy," as one senior U.S. official put it.

Among those who made their way into Iran were Saif al-Adel, al-Qaida’s military director; bin Laden's son Saad; and Abu Ghaith, the group's communications director ... and also bin Laden's son-in-law.

At one point not long after its arrival, this group, numbering in the hundreds with family members and bodyguards, was captured by Iranian authorities. Although senior U.S. officials have told NBC News they did not know the conditions of their confinement — "it was the blackest of black boxes," one former senior U.S. official told NBC News — Iranian officials said the group was "in jail."

One Iranian official, former U.N. ambassador Javad Zarif, told NBC News in the mid-2000s that "no nation has captured as many al-Qaida members as Iran." US officials admit that other than some mundane communications, they were unaware of any significant roles played by the group while in captivity.

"Every once in a while, we would intercept non-operational communications from them to relatives back home. That was it," said a former high-ranking U.S. official.  

The U.S. didn't know where the group was held nor all of the members’ identities. On occasion, there would be reports that all or some had been released, but there was little confirmation. Many in U.S. intelligence believed Iran held onto them for use as bargaining chips and not just with the U.S. They were in effect hostages. If al-Qaida carried out attacks in Iran, as it had in the 1990s, the group could face harm.

On occasion, flurries of intelligence would lead to further investigation, but again without any resolution.

In 2009, Saad bin Laden was killed in a Predator attack in Pakistan, leading to speculation that others had been released. But again, U.S. officials could not determine how many, if any, had been let go.  Moreover, it was not a high priority for the U.S. because the individuals were no longer considered much of a threat since they had been out of action for so long.

Last month, Abu Ghaith was detained in Turkey then was being sent to Kuwait via Jordan. But he was intercepted in Jordan and brought to the U.S., according to U.S. officials. 

According to court documents, he has been charged with conspiracy to kill Americans, including actions related to the 9/11 attacks.

Officials say that Abu Ghaith is unlikely to have any operational information because he has been in Iran for so long.  Now, they admit his intelligence value may be more about his captivity in Iran and whether he was released or escaped.

NBC News Justice Correspondent Pete Williams contributed to this report.

Related:

Bin Laden son-in-law captured, whisked to NY on terror charges

GOP protests bringing bin Laden son-in-law to NY

Read the federal indictment of Abu Ghaith in PDF

 

 

 

Osama bin Laden's son-in-law, who acted as a spokesman for al-Qaida, has been apprehended, transported to New York and charged with conspiracy to kill Americans, according to court documents unsealed Thursday.

Sulaiman Abu Ghaith appeared alongside bin Laden in a 2001 video in which they took responsibility for the 9/11 attacks and warned of more, before he dropped out of sight for more than a decade before his arrest.

"I commend our CIA and FBI, our allies in Jordan, and President Obama for their capture of al-Qaida spokesman Sulaiman Abu Ghaith," said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., a member of the Homeland Security Committee, who first announced the news. 

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"I trust he received a vigorous interrogation, and will face swift and certain justice," added King, who is also chairman of the Sub-Committee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence.

Prosecutors say from at least May 2001 to around 2002, Abu Ghaith served alongside bin Laden, appearing with him and his then-deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, speaking on behalf of the terrorist organization and in support of its mission, and warning that attacks similar to those of September 11, 2001 would continue.

The government says around May 2001, Abu Ghaith urged individuals at a guest house in Kandahar, Afghanistan, to swear allegiance to bin Laden. On the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, after the terrorist attacks on the United States, bin Laden summoned Abu Ghaith and asked for his assistance. He agreed to provide it.

On the morning of Sept. 12, 2001, Abu Ghaith appeared with bin Laden and Zawahiri, and spoke on behalf of al-Qaida, warning the United States and its allies that "[a] great army is gathering against you" and called upon "the nation of Islam" to do battle against "the Jews, the Christians and the Americans," the court document says.

Also, after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Abu Ghaith delivered a speech in which he addressed the then-U.S. Secretary of State and warned that "the storms shall not stop, especially the Airplanes Storm," and advised Muslims, children, and opponents of the United States "not to board any aircraft and not to live in high rises."

Abu Ghaith arranged to be, and was, successfully smuggled from Afghanistan into Iran in 2002, where he spent most of the decade, U.S. officials said.

Even as government officials applauded the arrest of Abu Ghaith, his transport to the United States stirred controversy among lawmakers who were apparently caught by surprise by the news.

"We believe the administration's decision here to bring this person to New York City, if that's what's happened, without letting Congress know is a very bad precedent to set," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who held a press conference with Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H.

"And when we find somebody like this, this close to bin Laden and the senior al-Qaida leadership, the last thing in the world we want to do, in my opinion, is put them in civilian court. This man should be in Guantanamo Bay," Ayotte said.

"So we're putting the administration on notice," said Graham. "We think that sneaking this guy into the country, clearly going around the intent of Congress when it comes to enemy combatants, will be challenged."

Earlier, in an interview on MSNBC, House Intelligence Chair Mike Rogers, R-Mich., strongly criticized the administration for bringing Abu Ghaith to the United States.

Rogers, a former FBI agent, said that Mirandizing a top al-Qaida suspect and bringing him to the United States for trial creates a host of problems — instead of sending him to the facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which was built to handle high value prisoners.

"Al-Qaida leaders captured on the battlefield should not be brought to the United States to stand trial," Rogers said. "We should treat enemy combatants like the enemy. The U.S. court system is not the appropriate venue."

The Obama administration has been trying to clear out Guantanamo and not bring any new prisoners there.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said it's fine with him if Abu Ghaith is put on trial in New York because key state and city officials had been consulted in advance, unlike in the case of terror suspect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

"Unlike with KSM, Kelly and others had been consulted ahead of time about this and they gave the green light to do it. As you know, (Police Commissioner) Ray Kelly, Mayor (Michael) Bloomberg and I opposed the trial of (Mohammed) in New York and we successfully made sure that didn't happen," said Schumer. "On issues like this, I defer to Commissioner Kelly, and I think the mayor does as well. And he thinks it's OK to do it here, and I'll go by that," Schumer said. 

Jordanian sources confirmed that Abu Ghaith was sent by Turkey via Jordan to Kuwait, and intercepted in Jordan and brought to the U.S.

According to the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Turkish officials captured Abu Ghaith in the capital Ankara, where a court ruled he had entered the country illegally with a fake passport. The Turkish government then ostensibly deported Abu Ghaith to his birthplace Kuwait, but arranged for him to transit through Jordan where he was ultimately taken into custody by U.S. law enforcement, the officials said.

U.S. officials told NBC that prior to his interception in Turkey, Abu Ghaith, who dropped out of sight after 2002, had spent most of a decade in Iran.

"Nobody's heard a peep. Some people thought he was being held prisoner in Iran, others thought he might be dead," said Evan Kohlmann, an American counter-terrorism analyst for NBC News. 

NBC News chief Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski and Moufaq Khatib NBC News producer in Jordan contributed to this report.

 

This story was originally published on Thu Mar 7, 2013 11:47 AM EST

A new al-Qaida “guidebook” for extremists aims to incite homegrown “lone wolves” into carrying out small-scale terrorist attacks inside the United States and other Western countries, using materials as easily obtainable as motor or cooking oil, sugar and matches to trigger massive traffic accidents, devastating fires and deadly explosions. 

Titled the “Lone Mujahid Pocketbook” and published by in the spring edition of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula’s “Inspire” online propaganda magazine, the guidebook uses a breezy style that borrows from social media speak and rap lyrics to encourage Islamic extremists in the West to commit acts of violence. 

“R U dreamin’ of wagin’ jihadi attacks against kuffar?” is asks, using a derogatory Arabic term for non-Muslims. “Have u been lookin’ 4 a way to join the mujahideen in frontlines, but you haven’t found any? Well there’s no need to travel abroad, coz the frontline has come to you.” 

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Among other things, it offers detailed instructions for torching parked cars, causing vehicular accidents by pouring motor oil on highway curves, starting forest fires, “making a bomb in the kitchen of your Mom” and using a pickup truck with blades welded on the front “as a mowing machine, not to mow grass but (to) mow down the enemies of Allah.”

Evan Kohlmann, a senior partner at the threat-assessment firm Flashpoint Global Partners and an NBC News analyst, said he says he sees the recommendation for aspiring terrorists to think small in a positive light. 

“Despite crafting elaborate terrorist plots in far-away hideouts, al-Qaida has not been able to execute a major attack inside the U.S. since 9/11,” he said. “Homegrown terrorism costs al-Qaida nothing, and it garners the same amount of public attention as "real" terrorism. It's a no-brainer.” 

He also said that the new guidebook shows that AQAP’s efforts to recruit terrorists in the West suffered a serious setback with the death of American al-Qaida recruit Samir Khan in Yemen in a U.S. drone strike in September 2011. 

“The quality of these publications from AQAP specifically has taken a significant nosedive since the death of Samir Khan,” Kohlmann said. “Quite a bit of this latest guide seems to have been baldly rehashed from the former work of Khan.  Apparently, it wasn't as easy to replace Khan's creative instincts as AQAP first suggested.”

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In Texas on Tuesday, the FBI told Erin Lovelady that her father was one of three Americans who had been killed in the terrorist assault on an Algerian gas facility last week. The news destroyed a bit of his daughter's faith.

"My whole life he always told me that good things happen to good people and that I was a good person and good things were going to happen for me," she said Tuesday.

The grief of the Lovelady family is a poignant reminder of the growing concern among U.S. counterterrorism officials that the amorphous al-Qaida-affiliated groups contesting swathes of northern Africa are increasingly coordinating their strategy with al-Qaida central in Pakistan –  the remnants of the terrorist organization founded by Osama bin Laden.

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Victor Lovelady had gone overseas because the month-on, month-off schedule gave him more time to be with his family.

"He felt 100 percent comfortable going there and he wanted that, it was never about money, it was never about that, he was going to retire and you know ...," Erin Lovelady said, her voice trailing off.

Victor Lovelady was one of at least 37 foreign hostages executed by their captors or killed in the Algerian rescue mission.  The government in Algiers, aware that Western governments were angered by what they perceived as hurried decision-making on its part, released videotape on Tuesday of kidnappers carrying out executions.

"It should have been no surprise that the Algerians were going to be aggressive," said Michael Leiter, former director of the U.S. National Counter Terrorism Center and now an NBC News counterterrorism analyst. The Algerian government  couldn't afford to have prolonged hostage crisis in the midst of their southern gas fields that are crucial to its economy, he said. 

While analysts noted that the attacks did not affect the price of natural gas, they pointed out that the price of gas has already dropped and that any instability in Algeria would make negotiating with prospective partners or financiers more problematic.

“They had to consider that," Leiter said.

Now, with the Algerian standoff ended in a bloody massacre, U.S. and other Western officials are wondering where the terrorists will strike next. They note that with the death of the three Americans in Algeria, and the killing of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others in Libya, al-Qaida in the Islamic Magreb (AQIM) has suddenly become the most active of the "affiliates" of the central terrorist organization founded by bin Laden.

They point to October's video message from bin Laden’s successor, al-Qaida central leader Ayman al-Zawahri  to al-Qaida affiliates, in which he suggested that they engage in kidnappings to free prisoners held in the West, particularly Omar Abdul Rahman. Rahman, the so-called blind sheikh imprisoned in the U.S. for his role in the 1993 conspiracy to topple the World Trade Center, was one of two convicted terrorists the Algeria hostage takers demanded in return for Americans they held and later killed.

The other was Aafia Siddiqui, convicted of planning attacks on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

Mokhtar bel Mokhtar, whose Signatories in Blood group claimed responsibility for the Algerian attack, has said that his organization been in touch with al-Qaida in Pakistan and that the assault on the natural gas plant was conducted on the umbrella group’s behalf.

Although there's no indication that AQIM is planning attacks on the U.S., there is intelligence suggesting that its members have planned attacks in France. That's one reason that France decided last week to move troops and arms into Mali to stop fundamental Islamists from reaching the capital of Bamako.

On Tuesday, the U.S. took another step in helping the French. American C-17s began transporting French troops and equipment to near the front line of the fighting in Mali.    

Richard Engel is NBC News' Chief Foreign Correspondent. Robert Windrem is a Senior Investigative Producer.

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Whatever its artistic merits, the movie “Zero Dark Thirty” is giving Americans a shocking first-hand look at the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used by the CIA on suspected terrorists and rekindling that most polarizing of national security debates: Did waterboarding and other practices amount to torture and were they even effective?

The movie, which opens in wide release on Friday, is unlikely to resolve those issues, particularly given that critics – including acting CIA Director Michael Morell -- say it misrepresents the role the interrogations played in the eventual tracking and killing of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

But more than a decade after the harsh techniques were authorized, the movie does offer an opportunity to examine the methodical, legalistic, bureaucratic process that led to the use of waterboarding and other physically and mentally stressful interrogation techniques.

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Their development illustrates what former CIA Director George Tenet wrote in his memoir, “At the Center of the Storm”: “Despite what Hollywood would have you believe, in situations like this, you don’t call in the tough guys; you call in the lawyers.”

Interviews over three years with former high-ranking U.S. officials, and a review of documents and memoirs of participants by NBC News, provide a detailed picture of the how the intelligence community and Justice Department crafted the “enhanced interrogation techniques” – known as EITs in CIA jargon -- that were used on some of America’s most wanted terrorists.

The approval process for the techniques – many of which are prohibited for use on battlefield adversaries by the Geneva Conventions – created not just a list of those that were permitted, but included detailed instructions covering everything from the dimensions of the waterboard to how long detainees were to be strapped down and their airflow restricted.  Specific legal procedures also were prescribed before each technique could be administered.

The process of developing a “menu” of interrogation techniques that could be used on suspected terrorists began in the spring of 2002, and moved quickly -- even feverishly – at first.

The CIA, which lacked interrogation expertise, needed to develop a plan for questioning alleged al-Qaida terrorist training camp operator Abu Zubaydah, the first major jihadi captured after the 9-11 attacks. 

Wounded in a shootout in Pakistan at the end of March 2002, Zubaydah was initially interrogated by FBI agents. But CIA agents soon joined the questioning and the bureau withdrew its agents by June out of a concern that the agency’s interrogators had crossed the line. (That suggests that Zubaydah’s harsh treatment began even before enhanced interrogation techniques were approved in August 2012, since the 9-11 Commission’s final report included references to at least five CIA interrogations between late May and early July.)  

“Interrogation wasn’t a big deal till we got a big deal guy,” said one former intelligence official who spoke with NBC News on condition of anonymity.  “We had reporting from prior to 9-11 as well as afterward that Abu Zubaydah might well know about future operations.  So … we get him in our clutches…we figure we might need to do something to find out what he knows.”

'Zero Dark Thirty' torture controversy: Filmmakers stand their ground

To come up with a “menu” of harsh interrogation tactics, the agency turned to the Pentagon’s SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) program, which trains U.S. servicemen to resist harsh treatment that might be inflicted on them by an enemy that doesn’t abide by the Geneva Conventions. In other words, torture.

Agency officials made first contact with the SERE trainers in April 2002, not long after Zubaydah was captured, according to staff investigators with the Senate Armed Services Committee. Richard Shiffrin, the Defense Department’s deputy general counsel for Intelligence, later confirmed in congressional testimony that the purpose was to “reverse engineer” the techniques that U.S. servicemen were being subjected to for use on al-Qaida detainees.

Some techniques were demonstrated to CIA officials in an initial two-day tutorial on July 1-2, 2002, with SERE instructors playing the roles of both prisoner and the interrogator. A CIA lawyer decided following the tutorial that "significantly harsh techniques” would have to be approved by the Justice Department.

In late July, Dr. John “Bruce” Jessen, then a senior psychologist at the Defense Department agency that administered SERE training, was sent to the CIA “for several days” to discuss the techniques, according to congressional investigators.  

Immediately after the assignment ended, Jessen resigned from the Air Force and, along with another recently retired colleague, Dr. James Mitchell, founded Mitchell Jessen & Associates.

The business -- co-owned by seven individuals, six of whom either worked in the SERE program as employees or contractors – quickly signed a  contract with the CIA, a deal that provided the two men with $1,000-a-day tax-free retainers, according to ABC News. 

At roughly the same time, starting July 13, 2002, White House and Justice Department lawyers began drafting the memos approving the techniques. By July 22, John Yoo, then deputy assistant attorney general in the DoJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, had prepared his eventually famous secret memo to Alberto Gonzalez, then counsel to President George W. Bush. In it, Yoo suggested that the Geneva Conventions don't apply to terrorism cases.  Furthermore, he wrote, international law “lacks domestic legal effect, and in any event can be overridden by the president.” 

Meanwhile, within days of hiring Mitchell Jessen & Associates, the CIA asked the Defense Department for a rush “list of exploitation and interrogation techniques that had been effective against Americans” in the SERE training.

The Pentagon quickly replied with a memo, “Physical Pressures used in Resistance Training and Against American Prisoners and Detainees,” according to the Senate investigators. 

Working with Mitchell Jessen & Associates, the CIA soon developed a menu of 20 enhanced techniques – a list that was ultimately whittled down to 10, mainly because some of proposed techniques were considered too harsh even for terrorists. 

“Not everything they proposed was part of the final menu,” said a former senior intelligence official, also speaking on condition of anonymity. “They came up with some stuff people didn’t like and were not approved. … There were legal tests. … Does it shock the conscience?  Does it lead to deep long-lasting injuries?” 

The official said he was unaware specifically which techniques had been rejected or why.  Two other Bush administration officials familiar with the approval process for enhanced interrogation techniques, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said they were unaware that any techniques had been rejected prior to approval of the final “menu.”

Approval of the 'menu'
By Aug. 1, 2002, only five days after the Pentagon’s memo had been delivered to the CIA, use of the 10 techniques was approved in a memo signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, now a federal appeals court judge.  The approved techniques were: “attention grasp,” “walling,” “facial hold,” “facial slap (insult slap),” “cramped confinement,” “wall standing,” “stress positions,” “sleep deprivation,” “insects placed in a confinement box” and “waterboarding.”  

Waterboarding, probably the most controversial of the techniques, was at the time only used by the U.S. Navy SERE school and  prohibited by the Army and Air Force, according to the committee. The Navy has since abandoned waterboarding.

While the techniques were undeniably harsh, senior CIA officials were comforted by the fact that they had been used by the U.S. against its own servicemen, said the former intelligence official.

“A big factor in people’s thinking was that these techniques were used in the training of U.S. Special Operations Forces,” the ex-official said. “If it was something that had been done to U.S. forces … although admittedly very tough … then it couldn’t be considered torture.”

Indeed, Jose Rodriguez, who as director of the CIA’s clandestine service ultimately controlled the EIT program, has written in his memoir, “Hard Measures,” that “waterboarding had been used on 26,829 U.S. Air Force personnel between 1992 and 2001.” Eventually the Air Force stopped using it, he added, because “the airmen subjected to it found it impossible to resist.”

While waterboarding received most attention, “walling” also was controversial because of reports that detainees’ heads would be thrown against the wall. 

Rodriguez, however says that was not the case.  In his memoir, he wrote that “special ‘rooms within rooms’” were constructed with flexible plywood walls to prevent injury.

Among the proposed interrogation techniques that didn’t make the cut were “smoke,” “immersion” and “grounding,” according to Senate investigators. 

In “smoke,” detainees were to have been blasted for up to five minutes with “an extraordinary amount of thick, sickening smoke” created by a mechanism that used dry tobacco as fuel. “Immersion” called for detainees to be placed in a makeshift cold water bath where “depending on wind and temperature, the subject may be either fully clothed or stripped.” In “grounding,” detainees were to be “forcefully guided…to the ground, (with the interrogator) never letting go.”

While no evidence exists to suggest that “smoke” or “grounding” were ever used against the al-Qaida detainees, the International Red Cross Committee has reported that at least three of the detainees claim they were subjected to “immersion” and their description of the technique precisely matches what was laid out in the original menu the Pentagon provided the CIA.

Rodriguez, who oversaw the use of EIT program, has offered some of the most detailed descriptions of how the techniques were applied.

Writing in “Hard Measures,” he said the 10 approved techniques were broken down into the three categories, “neutral probe,” “corrective” and “coercive.”

Under “neutral probe,” detainees were subjected to sleep deprivation, dietary manipulation and enforced nudity. 

If detainees refused to cooperate, Rodriguez said the “corrective” measures were introduced. “Attention grasp,” “facial hold” and finally “insult slap” met the definition of “corrective.”

In the final stage, “coercive,” detainees were placed in a confinement box, at least once with insects (only non-deadly varieties permitted), “wall standing” – where a detainee was directed to stand four or five feet away from a wall with his arms in front of him, fingertips resting on the wall,

Waterboarding was the final technique, only to be used “should all else fail,” Rodriguez wrote. It was to be carried out only with “specific headquarters approval,” and in keeping with a detailed description laid out in the memo drawn up by the Bush Administration DOJ Legal Counsel’s office, one that specified the dimensions of the board (“approximately 4 feet by 7 feet”), the time air flow should be restricted (“20 to 40 seconds”) and the desired effect (“perception of suffocation and incipient panic.”)

It appears from the Bybee memo that the CIA used “experts” in determining whether the techniques had long lasting health effects, something that even administration lawyers understood to be a violation of the Geneva Conventions.   In one reference, Bybee noted that an expert “who has 10 years of SERE training … stated that … insofar as he is aware, none of the individuals who completed the program suffered any adverse mental effects.” In another instance, Bybee wrote, an expert cited by the agency “expressed confidence that the training did not result in any long term psychological impact.” (One Bush administration official theorized that “smoke” had not been approved because tobacco smoke could have had long lasting health effects.)

Also embedded in the documentation of the use of the interrogation techniques is the CIA’s meticulous record-keeping of things like waterboarding.

CIA interrogators used common everyday bottled water in their waterboarding of high value detainees, according to several former and current U.S. officials, both inside the intelligence community and Bush administration. 

Rodriguez reported the same thing in a recent Washington Post review of “Zero Dark Thirty.” He wrote, “Instead of a large bucket, small plastic water bottles were used on the three men,” who were subjected to waterboarding.

“The public was only given (quite literally) a cartoon version of what others imagine the technique was like,” he wrote in his memoir. “Irresponsible animations showed detainees practically being dowsed by a fire hose.”

Officials added that each pour from a bottle constituted a single waterboarding procedure. 

A one-pint water bottle takes about seven seconds to empty, so four or five bottles would empty in 30 or 40 seconds, the time prescribed by the Justice Department memo approving the process. (Larger two-liter bottles might have been more efficient. Each takes a full 30 seconds to empty.)

Alleged 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, reportedly waterboarded 183 times, Zubaydah and Abdelrahim Hussein Abdul Nashiri, a Saudi who allegedly ran al-Qaida operations in the Arabian Peninsula and once planned to assassinate Vice President Al Gore, all told the Red Cross that bottled water was used in their waterboardings.

'It was hopeless'
Zubaydah described to the Red Cross an experience mostly faithful to the technique prescribed in the Bybee memo, albeit less clinical:

“I was then dragged from the small box, unable to walk properly and put on what looked like a hospital bed, and strapped down very tightly with belts. A black cloth was then placed over my face and the interrogators used a mineral water bottle to pour water on the cloth so that I could not breathe. After a few minutes the cloth was removed and the bed was rotated into an upright position. The pressure of the straps on my wounds was very painful. I vomited.”

He continued: “The bed was then again lowered to horizontal position and the same torture carried out again with the black cloth over my face and water poured on from a bottle. On this occasion my head was in a more backward, downwards position and the water was poured on for a longer time. I struggled against the straps, trying to breathe, but it was hopeless. I thought I was going to die.”

Nashiri said he had the same experience, except the water used was cold.

“Injuries to my ankles and wrists also occurred during the waterboarding as I struggled in the panic of not being able to breathe,” he told the Red Cross.

Not everything was approved by the CIA General Counsel’s office.  According to both former intelligence officers and Iraqi Survey Group officials, the Office of the Vice President Cheney wanted to use enhanced interrogation techniques on a recalcitrant Iraqi intelligence officer who they believed had information on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. 

The office angrily refused, according to another former agency official familiar with the request.

Charles Duelfer, the former chief of the Iraq Survey Group, and the man ultimately in charge of interrogations, said at the time that he considered the request reprehensible.

In his 2009 book, “Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq,” Duelfer wrote that he heard from “some in Washington at very senior levels (not in the CIA),” who thought the intelligence officer’s interrogation had been “too gentle” and suggested another route, one that they believed has proven effective elsewhere.

“They asked if enhanced measures, such as waterboarding, should be used,” Duelfer writes. “The executive authorities addressing those measures made clear that such techniques could legally be applied only to terrorism cases, and our debriefings were not as yet terrorism-related. The debriefings were just debriefings, even for this creature.”

Duelfer did not disclose who in Washington had proposed the use of waterboarding. But in a recent interview, a former CIA officer, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that agency’s acting general counsel John Rizzo refused to permit the use of waterboarding because those same memos that authorized it for al-Qaida detainees said nothing about it being used in Iraq.

It is just the kind of detail that is missing from the movie. But the back-story of the bureaucratic process that changed the way the American government viewed the parameters of torture is in some ways even more dramatic than the hunt for bin Laden. 

“The torture displayed in ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ was the result of systematic legal and policy reasoning at the highest levels of government,” said Karen J. Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School and author of “The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days.” “Which techniques, how they would be applied, and with what specific legal authorities were all part of the detailed, cold, bureaucratic trail that methodically removed torture from the realm of illegal and forbidden and placed it in the realm of national policy.”

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• Exclusive: DEA agents arranged prostitute for Secret Service agent
• Rossen Reports: Metal water bottles can endanger kids
• John Brennan, Obama's pick for CIA director, has deep roots at agency

Follow Open Channel from NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook 

 

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

 

 

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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

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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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"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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• 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
• Behind high court racial cases, a little-known conservative recruiter 
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• Toll authority quick to seek payment, not so good at refunding overpayments 
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• American held in Cuba wants US to sign 'non-belligerency pact' to pave release 
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• Cuba pushes swap: its spies jailed in US for  American jailed in Havana 
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• Livestock falling ill in fracking regions | Industry insider offers rebuttal

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