Jihadist websites, with their heroic militaristic videos and messages promising everlasting life to martyrs, have shown themselves capable of inciting would-be holy warriors to action. But an expert on Islamic terrorism says less attention has been paid to another breeding ground for radicalization that is even harder to police – the family dinner table.  

Familial indoctrination and recruitment for terrorism emerged as a theme in a study of 50 high-profile terrorist attacks since 2001 by Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School. In at least eight of those cases, radicalization occurred within families, most often involving an “elder-younger relationship,” she said.

"Several terrorism prosecutions in the United States have included fathers and sons, brothers, and even cousins,” Greenberg said. “The importance of this is to underscore the way in which the personal and the political often intersect in these cases -- and also the importance of the effect of an influential often older person or figure in pushing the radicalization along -- extending what might otherwise be a lone-wolf narrative to a slightly larger circle.”

---

With family members -- and reportedly even Dzhokhar Tsarnaev himself -- telling authorities that his older brother, Tamerlan, encouraged him to embrace radical Islam, the blood-relative scenario may now be playing out in the Boston Marathon bombings.

While Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, reportedly was himself led down the radical road by a mysterious man known to family members only as “Misha,” he in turn exerted tremendous influence over younger brother, Dzhokhar, 19,  according to some relatives.

"They all loved Tamerlan. He was the eldest one and he, in many ways, was the role model for his sisters and his brother," Elmirza Khozhugov, 26, the ex-husband of Tamerlan's sister, Ailina, told the Associated Press. "You could always hear his younger brother and sisters say, 'Tamerlan said this,' and 'Tamerlan said that.' Dzhokhar loved him. He would do whatever Tamerlan would say.”

If investigators gather evidence to support that scenario, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s defense is likely to play the under-the-influence card in an effort to paint their client in a sympathetic light and, if he is convicted, possibly mitigate what could be a death sentence.

Whatever the outcome, Greenberg said she sees similarities between the Tsarnaev case and eight that preceded it – a list that doesn’t include three sets of Saudi brothers involved in the Sept. 11, 2011, terror attacks on the United States: the al-Ghamdis (Ahmed and Saeed), al-Shehris (Mohand, Wail and Waleed) and al-Haznis (Nawaf and Salem).

Among the other high-profile cases cited by Greenberg, all of which resulted in convictions on material support for terrorism charges at a minimum:

• The 2007 plot to attack the Army’s Fort Dix in New Jersey, in which six radicals planned an attack on the Fort Dix military reservation in New Jersey. The plot, "to kill as many soldiers as possible," including three brothers -- Shain Duka, Eljvir Duka, Dritan Duka – ethnic Albanians who were born in Macedonia. All were sentenced to life in prison for conspiracy to commit terrorism.
• A 2006 Toledo plot which two cousins, Zubair Ahmed and Khaleel Ahmed, and three other men were convicted of plotting to train jihadists in Ohio for eventual missions against U.S. troops in Iraq. They were sentenced to 10 years and eight years and four months in prison, respectively, in 2010.
• The so-called Portland Seven plot, in which Oregon residents and brothers Ahmed and Muhammad Bilal, were among seven militants who traveled to China in hopes of crossing into Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban against U.S. troops. In this case, prosecutors said the older brother, Ahmed, radicalized his younger brother. They received sentences of 10 years and eight years, respectively.

• A 2009 Quantico, Va., plot, in which a father, Daniel Patrick Boyd, and two of his sons, Zakariya and Dylan, were among eight men convicted of plotting “to advance violent jihad, including supporting and participating in terrorist activities abroad and committing acts of murder, kidnapping or maiming persons abroad.” Prosecutors said the men traveled to Gaza, Jordan and Kosovo after training in North Carolina, in an effort to “commit jihad.” The elder Boyd, a convert to Islam, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to kill people overseas and of material support for terrorism and was sentenced to 18 years in prison. Zakariya and Dylan Boyd pleaded guilty to conspiracy to provide material support to terrorism and received sentences of nine and eight years, respectively.
• A 2005 case in Lodi, Calif., in which a father and son, the Hayats were charged with training in Pakistan to commit jihad. The son, Hamid, a 24-year-old cherry packer, was ultimately found guilty of international terrorism and sentenced to a 24-year prison term. His father, Umer, charged with two counts of making false statements to the FBI, ultimately pleaded guilty and was ordered released for time served.

While family ties have lured some into terrorism, some have used their influence to warn family members away from jihad.

Osama bin Laden himself reportedly warned his 24 children not to follow his path.

In a four-page will published by a Kuwaiti newspaper shortly after his death on May 2, 2011, the elder bin Laden tried to justify his terrorist activities against the United States and Israel, but warned his kids against emulating him.

Unfortunately for them, three younger bin Ladens – Khalid, Hamza and Sa’ad – already had entered the family business.

Khalid died with his father in the Navy SEAL raid on their compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan; Saad was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan in 2009. The whereabouts of Hamza bin Laden, who was reportedly being groomed to be his father’s successor after Saad’s death, are unknown.

Robert Windrem is a fellow at the Center on National Security. 

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Texas authorities are beginning a sweeping review this week of the state's dominant public school curriculum under pressure from critics who charge that it indoctrinates the children of Texas with communist, pro-terrorist propaganda from behind a shield of secrecy.

The State Board of Education will hold the first of a series of public meetings to organize the review in Dallas on Friday, three days after the state attorney general's office told NBC News that it has been looking into "potential improprieties" that raise "significant legal concerns about the program's operations."

It didn't specify those concerns, but legislative hearings have questioned the program's nonprofit status and the locking of some materials behind passwords accessible only to teachers and other "authorized users."

The designers of the curriculum — which is used in 875 of the state's 1,028 districts — say the program is closely aligned with standards mandated by the State Board of Education and is based on educational principles proven over decades. Critics, they say, are taking isolated parts of lessons out of context, equating simply teaching a controversial issue with endorsing it.

---

Even so, the parent organization of the program, called CSCOPE, has agreed to several demands by opponents, including opening its board meetings to the public, allowing teachers to post curriculum materials online, dropping its nonprofit status and creating a new website so parents can learn about the lessons from home.

CSCOPE — it's not an abbreviation for anything — is a Web-only repository of 1,600 lesson plans, study materials and other curriculum components. It's supposed to help teachers make sure pupils are taught what they need to know for the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills test.

"We live in a very mobile society," said Anne Poplin, chairwoman of the board of the Texas Education Service Center Curriculum Collaborative, or TESCCC, which administers CSCOPE.

Watch the top videos on NBCNews.com

CSCOPE means children who move from one school or district to another can be confident they'll pick up where they left off in their old classrooms, she told NBC News.

But since it began in the 2006-07 school year, CSCOPE has been a target for activists and conservative websites. Pressure has grown in recent months as critics have published details of its lesson plans.

"CSCOPE Teaches ALLAH is God" and "CSCOPE Promotes Communism," proclaim two of several dozen articles on Texas CSCOPE Review.

Glenn Beck's TheBlaze has run at least five "exposés" this year with headlines like "CSCOPE: Exposing the Nation's Most Controversial Public School Curriculum System," while Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller last month ran a story listing "egregious examples of the curriculum's inadequacies and absurdities."

'Design a flag for a new socialist nation'
Critics fall into two camps.

The first is teachers who say the curriculum is flawed in general and that their districts require them to rigidly follow the program, even though CSCOPE says it's meant to be revised and "refocused" to serve local needs. 

As part of a transparency agreement it worked out last month with Dan Patrick, the Republican chairman of the state Senate Education Committee, TESCCC said it would remind districts that lessons are simply resources for teachers, not meant to be taught verbatim.

The second group is larger and more vocal: parents, activists and lawmakers who say CSCOPE is a Trojan horse sneaking liberal ideals of socialism and cultural relativism into the classroom.

Several examples have circulated around Texas in the past few months. One asks pupils to design a flag for a new socialist nation, using "symbolism to represent aspects of socialism/communism." Texas Conservative News called that an "attempt at secretly indoctrinating Texas children."

Another unit depicts a hiker walking up a staircase of money. "Free enterprise (capitalism)" is the bottom step; "Communism" is at the top. Ginger Russell of the widely read blog Red Hot Conservative wrote that the graphic was "all about portraying communism in a positive light."

Perhaps the most controversial lesson asks pupils to discuss this news report (PDF):

A local militia, believed to be a terrorist organization, attacked the property of private citizens today at our nation's busiest port. Although no one was injured in the attack, a large quantity of merchandise, considered to be valuable to its owners and loathsome to the perpetrators, was destroyed. The terrorists, dressed in disguise and apparently intoxicated, were able to escape into the night with the help of local citizens who harbor these fugitives and conceal their identities from the authorities.

Not until later, during a discussion period, do teachers reveal that the report describes the Boston Tea Party.

"Like our Founding Fathers at Concord, that was pretty much the opening shot that started this," Patrick said.

Critical thinking and perspective
Poplin said lessons like those under scrutiny are meant to challenge students to critically examine the world from others' perspectives — not to adopt the beliefs the lessons describe. With the Boston Tea Party unit — which has since been removed as "outdated" — the point was to teach sophisticated thinking and the existence of multiple viewpoints, she said.

"It might have been an act of terrorism in King George's mind, but it wasn't an act of terrorism in the minds of Americans," she said. "The lesson wasn't teaching the Boston Tea Party. The lesson was teaching perspective."

Mason Moses, a spokesman for 20 regional public school agencies that created TESCCC, said: "Down here in Texas, we're pretty patriotic. There is absolutely no way we would ever teach" that the Boston Tea Party was an act of terrorism.

That may be true, Patrick said, but "what all of this underscores is how our education system is changing rapidly because of technology."

"In the old days, which weren't all that long ago, textbooks were reviewed by boards of education," he said, but "today, as we move to this online learning, there are no checks and balances."

Keeping 'strategic decisions' private
And that is a big part of the problem, critics say — CSCOPE has been secret, making it hard to get a clear picture of what it's really teaching. Before the transparency agreement, parents could see materials, but only by visiting their children's school; anyone else was barred unless they were cleared as an "authorized user."

Poplin said CSCOPE was tailored for teachers, which means it includes performance assessments, tests and answers, which shouldn't get into students' hands. As part of the agreement with Patrick, TESCCC is removing that information and hopes to have the instructional material online by the middle of April, she said.

More clarity could emerge from administrators' decision to relinquish nonprofit status.

As recently as December, TESCCC asserted that some of its records should be exempt from disclosure under state open records laws, both because it's an independent nonprofit entity and because it competes with for-profit curriculum companies.

In addition to proprietary business information like bidding data from vendors, the materials TESCCC wanted to keep private included "how strategic decisions are made with respect to the development of the CSCOPE product" itself.

Poplin said TESCCC has begun discussions to dissolve the nonprofit corporation, and she said she was eager to hear from the State Board of Education. Because the state school board has no formal connection to CSCOPE, however, the coming review is non-binding.

Patrick has an answer for that: His committee is holding a hearing next week on legislation that would give the school board oversight of CSCOPE.

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He had sent them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His writing turned darker.

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

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

"Like Columbine?" the man asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read previous installments

Part 1: From abuse victim to terrorist wannabe

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

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

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

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

Colleen LaRose believes him.

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'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

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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'

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

 

 

Follow Open Channel from NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook

 

 

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

Have you ever visited extremist Islamic forums? he asked.

No, never, she lied.

Have you ever solicited money for terrorists?

No. Another lie.

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

No, LaRose said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

She found a bargain flight to Amsterdam for $400.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If only.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ramirez had been looking for a reason to leave.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The FBI had returned. This time, LaRose answered.

Read Part 3: The jihad begins

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

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'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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"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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GILGIT, Pakistan -- About 20 men dressed as Pakistani soldiers boarded a bus bound for a Muslim festival outside this mountain town and checked the identification cards of the passengers. They singled out 19 Shiites, drew weapons and slaughtered them, most with a bullet to the head.

The shooters weren't soldiers. They were a hit squad linked to the Sunni Muslim extremist group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, or LeJ. They had trekked in along a high Himalayan pass that hot August morning to waylay a convoy of pilgrims.

---

Here and across Pakistan, violent Sunni radicals are on the march against the nation's Shiite minority.

With a few hundred hard-core cadres, the highly secretive LeJ aims to trigger sectarian violence that would pave the way for a Sunni theocracy in U.S.-allied Pakistan, say Pakistan police and intelligence officials. Its immediate goal, they say, is to stoke the intense Sunni-Shiite violence that has pushed countries like Iraq close to civil war.

More than 300 Shiites have been killed in Pakistan so far this year in sectarian conflict, according to human rights groups. The campaign is gathering pace in rural as well as urban areas such as Karachi, Pakistan's biggest city. The Shiites are a big target, accounting for up to 20 percent of this nation of 180 million.

In January, LeJ claimed responsibility for a homemade bomb that exploded in a crowd of Shiites in Punjab province, killing 18 and wounding 30. LeJ's reach extends beyond Pakistan: Late last year, LeJ claimed responsibility for bombings in Afghanistan that killed 59 people, the worst sectarian attacks since the fall of the Taliban government in 2001.

"No doubt - (LeJ) are the most dangerous group," said Chaudhry Aslam, a top counterterrorism police commando based in Karachi, whose house was blown up by the LeJ. "We will fight them until the last drop of blood."

For an outlawed group accused of fomenting such mayhem, the leader of LeJ is surprisingly easy to find.

Malik Ishaq spent 14 years in jail in connection with dozens of murder and terrorism cases. He was released after the charges could not be proved - partly because of witness intimidation, officials say - and showered with rose petals by hundreds of supporters when he left prison in July 2011.

Although Ishaq is one of Pakistan's most feared militants, he enjoys the protection of followers clutching AK-47 assault rifles in the narrow lane outside his home. There, in the town of Rahim Yar Khan in southern Punjab province, Reuters visited him for an interview.

"The state should declare Shiites as non-Muslims on the basis of their beliefs," said Ishaq, calling them the "greatest infidels on Earth." Young supporters with shoulder-length hair in imitation of the Prophet Mohammad hung on every word.

Following the trail
To assess the LeJ threat, Reuters followed the group's trail across Pakistan -- from Ishaq's compound, to Gilgit in the foothills of the Himalayas, recruiting grounds in central Punjab and the backstreets of Karachi on the Arabian Sea coast.

In interviews, police, intelligence officials, clerics and LeJ members described a group that has grown more robust and appears to be operating across a much wider area in Pakistan than just a few years ago. But it had a head start.

The LeJ once enjoyed the open support of the powerful spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence. The ISI used such groups as military proxies in India and Afghanistan and to counter Shiite militant groups.

Since being outlawed after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, LeJ has worked with Sunni radical groups al-Qaida and the Pakistani Taliban in several high-profile strikes. Among them were assaults in 2009 on Pakistan's military headquarters and on Sri Lanka's visiting cricket team. Washington says LeJ was involved in the killing of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl in 2002.

Now it is gathering strength anew. The risks are heightened by Pakistan's long-standing role as a battlefield in a proxy war between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran, which have been competing for influence in Asia and the Middle East since the 1979 Iranian revolution.

That competition has heated up since the United States toppled secularist dictator Saddam Hussein in Iraq and left the country under the control of an Iranian-influenced Shiite government. Intelligence officials say the LeJ is drawing financial support from Saudi donors and other Sunni sources.

"Unfortunately, the state for strategic reasons turned a blind eye to the LeJ for a long time," said a retired army general. "Now we have a situation where it has become Pakistan's Frankenstein."

Interior Minister Rehman Malik, who is in charge of internal security, told Reuters that "we always take action" against the LeJ when the group is suspected of murder or terrorism. "We track people and arrest them."

When asked why those arrested are often freed, he said: "Look, my job is to arrest people, not to let them go. We all know who lets them off the hook and why," he said, referring to local politicians and elements of the military who turn a blind eye to their activities or even support them in some cases.

Sacred calling
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, whose name means Soldiers of Jhangvi (after its founder, Haq Maulana Nawab Jhangvi), isn't the only lethal militant group that once enjoyed patronage from the spy agency.

One is Lashkar-e-Taiba (Soldiers of the Pure), which fights against Indian control in disputed Kashmir. It is blamed for several deadly attacks on Indian soil, including the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai, and an audacious raid on India's parliament in December 2001 with another Kashmiri militant group, Jaishi-e-Mohammad (Army of Mohammad). That raid brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war.

Another is the Pakistani Taliban. Its attack this month on 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai in Swat was only the most recent in a long list of strikes on civilian and military targets, mainly in the unruly tribal area along the Afghan border.

What makes LeJ particularly dangerous, however, is that the group is based in Pakistan's Punjab heartland. And it is not just attacking targets in Pakistan's neighbors, but has also targeted the state, including the 2009 attack on Pakistan's military headquarters.

LeJ was established as an offshoot of another anti-Shiite organization called Sipah-e-Sahaba (Soldiers of Mohammad's Companions).

LeJ believes it has a sacred calling -- to protect the legacy of the companions of the Prophet Mohammad - and it sees Shi'ites as the main threat.

Mahmood Baber, educated in a madrassa, was drawn by LeJ's call to holy war against Shiite infidels. His 16-year career in the movement ended in October, when he and other LeJ members were arrested.

Handcuffed and with a cloth thrown over his head at a Karachi police station, Baber described for Reuters the "great satisfaction" he felt killing 14 Shiite "terrorists" over the years. His voice choked with emotion when he said that for 1,400 years Shiites had insulted the companions of the Prophet.

"Get rid of Shiites. That is our goal. May God help us," he said, before intelligence agents led him away for a fresh round of interrogation.

The schism between Sunnis and Shiites developed after the Prophet Muhammad died in 632 when his followers could not agree on a successor. Sunnis recognize the first four caliphs as his rightful successors; the Shiites believe the prophet named his son-in-law, Ali. Emotions over the issue have boiled through modern times and even pushed some countries, including Iraq five years ago, to the brink of civil war.

Demonizing Iran
The LeJ's leader, Ishaq, lives in a house whose gate bears a sign inviting residents of the town to debate whether Shiites are infidels.

These days Ishaq calls himself a leader of Sipah-e-Sahaba, the LeJ parent group. Pakistani officials say he still runs, or at least inspires, LeJ. Ishaq denies any wrongdoing, repeatedly saying: "I've been acquitted." He has indeed been acquitted 34 times on charges of culpable homicide and terrorism.

He does not hide his feelings about Shiites, his voice growing strident as he opened a plastic folder filled with printouts from what he describes as Shi'ite Internet sites.

One contained a photo of a pig, an animal considered by Muslims to be dirty, and is accompanied by an insult to Sunnis. Another alleges the Prophet Mohammad's wife committed adultery -- all proof, he says, that Shiites are blasphemous, and deserve punishment.

"Whoever insults the companions of the Holy Prophet should be given a death sentence," Ishaq declares.

Ishaq and other hardline Sunnis believe that Iran is trying to foment revolution in Pakistan to turn it into a Shi'ite state, though no evidence for that is offered.

The Saudi connection
In the Punjab town of Jhang, LeJ's birthplace, SSP leader Maulana Mohammad Ahmed Ludhianvi describes what he says are Tehran's grand designs. Iranian consular offices and cultural centers, he alleges, are actually a front for its intelligence agencies.

"If Iranian interference continues it will destroy this country," said Ludhianvi in an interview in his home. The state provides him with armed guards, fearful any harm done to him could trigger sectarian bloodletting.

The Iranian embassy in Islamabad, asked for a response to that allegation, issued a statement denouncing sectarian violence.

"What is happening today in the name of sectarianism has nothing to do with Muslims and their ideologies," it said.

Ludhianvi insisted he was just a politician. "I would like to tell you that I am not a murderer, I am not a killer, I am not a terrorist. We are a political party."

After a meal of chicken, curry and spinach, Ludhianvi and his aides stood up to warmly welcome a visitor: Saudi Arabia-based cleric Malik Abdul Haq al-Meqqi.

A Pakistani cleric knowledgeable about Sunni groups described Meqqi as a middleman between Saudi donors and intelligence agencies and the LeJ, the SSP and other groups.

"Of course, Saudi Arabia supports these groups. They want to keep Iranian influence in check in Pakistan, so they pay," the Pakistani cleric said. His account squared with that of a Pakistani intelligence agent, who said jailed militants had confessed that LeJ received Saudi funding.

Saudi cleric Meqqi denied that, and SSP leader Ludhianvi concurred: "We have not taken a penny from the Saudi government," he told Reuters.

Saudi Arabia's alleged financing of Sunni militant groups has been a sore point in Washington. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned in a December 2009 classified diplomatic cable that charities and donors in Saudi Arabia were the "most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide." In the cable, released by Wikileaks, Clinton said it was "an ongoing challenge" to persuade Saudi officials to treat such activity as a strategic priority. She said the groups funded included al-Qaida, the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba.

The Saudi embassy in Islamabad and officials in Saudi Arabia were unavailable for comment.

Shiite revenge
Some Shia groups do look to Iran's clerical establishment for spiritual leadership, but insist they have no aims beyond protecting members from Sunni attacks.

In the offices of a Shiite organization in Karachi, images of the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini are featured on a wall clock. There, a Pakistani Shiite woman named Shafqat Batool described what happened to her son, a judge, when he left for work on August 30.

Minutes after Sayid Zulfiqar stepped out of the family home in Quetta, she said, witnesses told the family three men on a motorcycle opened fire with Kalashnikov rifles. One of the assailants then grabbed a weapon from Zulfiqar's bleeding driver and pumped more bullets into her son.

It prompted Zulfiqar's family to move to Karachi. "We are not safe anywhere in the country," his mother said. "People are horrified, people can't sleep."

The fear is palpable in Quetta, the mountainous provincial capital of southwestern Baluchistan. LeJ has unleashed an escalating campaign there of suicide bombings and assassinations against ethnic Hazaras - Persian-speaking Shiites who mostly emigrated from Afghanistan and are a small minority of the Shiite population in Pakistan.

At least 100 Hazaras have been killed this year, according to Human Rights Watch, leaving some 500,000 Hazaras fearful of venturing out of their enclaves.

"We are under siege; we can't move anywhere," said Khaliq Hazara, chairman of the Hazara Democratic Party. "Hazaras are being killed and there is nobody to take any action.

In Quetta and Karachi, Shiite leaders say they are urging young men to exercise restraint and buy weapons only for self-defense.

"We are controlling our youth and stopping them from reacting," said Syed Sadiq Raza Taqvi, a Karachi cleric, seated beside a calendar with images of Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

But with each killing, the temptation to take revenge grows.

Shiite extremists have not adopted the kind of attacks favored by LeJ. But they have hunted down members of the SSP.

One such case was an attack survived by Sohaib Nadeem, 27, son of an SSP member. Men he described as "Shiite terrorists backed by Iran" opened fire on the Nadeem family in their car. Nadeem survived nine gunshot wounds but his father and brothers were killed. "The Shiites are our enemies," Nadeem said.

Confederation of militants
When the Taliban and al-Qaida want to reach targets outside their strongholds on the Afghan border, they turn to LeJ to provide intelligence, safe houses or young volunteers eager for martyrdom, police and intelligence officials said.

"Lashkar-e-Jhangvi is the detonator of terrorism in Pakistan," said Karachi Police Superintendent Raja Umer Khattab, who has interrogated more than 100 members. "The Taliban needs Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. Al Qaeda needs Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. They are involved in most terrorism cases."

The massacre of Shiite bus passengers outside Gilgit has had a profound impact on this mountaineering hub in the Himalayan foothills. Never before had Sunni extremists asked for identification to single out Shiites and then kill them on such a large scale.

Sunnis and Shiites, who had lived in harmony for decades, now cope with sectarian no-go zones.

"Sunnis can't go to some areas and Shiites can't go to others," lamented Gilgit shopkeeper Muneer Hussain Shah, a Shiite whose brother was killed in a grenade attack.

When violence erupts, text messages circulate rallying one sect or the other. Shops and schools close. Authorities have banned motorcycles to stop drive-by shootings.

Law enforcement itself is a victim of sectarianism in Gilgit, said police chief Usman Zakria. Shi'ite officers are reluctant to investigate crimes committed by Shi'ites, and the same is true of Sunnis.

"They are in disarray," said Zakria. "None of this has happened before."

Additional reporting by Imtiaz Shah in Karachi, Mehreen Zahra-Malik in Islamabad and Matthew Green in Quetta. 

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The FBI in San Francisco used a public relations program billed as "mosque outreach" to collect information on the religious views and practices of Muslims in Northern California and then shared the intelligence with other government agencies, according to FBI documents obtained by civil rights groups.

The heavily redacted documents, released after a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, raise "grave constitutional concerns," said Hina Shamsi, director of the National Security Project of the American Civil Liberties Union.

"In San Francisco, we have found that community outreach was being run out of the FBI’s intelligence division and was part of a secret and systematic intelligence gathering program,” conducted without any apparent evidence of wrongdoing," said Shamsi. "The bureau’s documentation of religious leaders' and congregants' beliefs and practices violates the Privacy Act, which Congress passed to protect Americans’ First Amendment rights."

---

The Privacy Act limits sharing of personal information among government agencies and the length of time it can be retained. In this case, the information shared included religious beliefs and affiliations, which the ACLU argues is entirely out of bounds.

The ACLU is calling for the Department of Justice’s inspector general to investigate alleged violations of the Privacy Act in the San Francisco Division and determine the scope of such activity nationwide.

The FBI San Francisco defended its agents' actions, saying the information "was collected within the scope of an authorized law enforcement activity."

The ACLU of Northern California filed the FOIA lawsuit with the Asian Law Caucus and the San Francisco Bay Guardian newspaper, leading to the release of the FBI documents on Tuesday.

Meant to foster trust
The documents indicate that FBI was keeping records of conversations and activities within mosques and other Muslim organizations from 2004 through 2008, information that was provided by employees engaged in the outreach programs.

The announced intention of the FBI outreach programs is to foster trust between law enforcers and members of the Muslim community so they can work together to fight crime and avert terrorism.

An earlier ACLU report on community outreach prompted FBI national headquarters to issue a release stating that its policy requires separate operations and databases for intelligence gathering and community outreach programs.

A large proportion of the information was labeled "positive intelligence," which indicates that the FBI intends to keep it in its intelligence database, the ACLU report explained.

Many documents were marked "secret," even though they appeared to include only mundane information. Some documents were marked "disseminated outside," but did not specify the recipients.

Among the findings contained in the FBI documents:

• A 2005 FBI memorandum from a meeting with a congregant at Islamic Center of Santa Cruz, documented his name and religious affiliation and detailed other worshipers' financial contributions to the center and community support for Islam.
• The subject of a sermon and congregants' discussions about a property purchase for a new mosque were gathered by FBI agents during five visits to Seaside Mosque in 2005.
• Documents based on four "outreach" meetings between FBI personnel and representatives of the South Bay Islamic Association note discussions about the Hajj pilgrimage and "Islam in general."
• Documents based on FBI contacts with representatives of the Bay Area Cultural Connections — formerly the Turkish Center Musalla — describe the group’s mission and activities, and the ethnicity of its members. A memo indicates the FBI searched for the cell phone number of one participant in the meeting in the LexisNexis records database and Department of Motor Vehicle records, obtaining detailed information about him, including his date of birth, Social Security number, address and home telephone number.

There is no indication that the subjects were informed that the information was being collected or shared with other law enforcement agencies, the ACLU said.

The FBI in San Francisco declined a request for an interview, but released a statement by Assistant Director Michael Kortan. In addition to stating that the information gathering abided by laws and agency rules, it indicated that it had adjusted its outreach program since the period covered by the documents.

"Since that time, the FBI has formalized its community relations program to emphasize a greater distinction between outreach and operational activities," Kortan said.

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Outreach to 'generate goodwill'
"FBI San Francisco dedicated a full-time, non-agent employee to community outreach efforts in the fall of 2007," said a second statement from Stephanie Douglas, FBI special agent in charge. "The community outreach program is designed to generate goodwill and foster relationships with a wide-range of groups in the communities we serve."

But documents still under analysis by the ACLU indicate FBI San Francisco continued to mingle outreach and intelligence gathering through 2011, according to Shamsi.

The documents undermine trust for genuine outreach programs, said Farhana Khera, executive director of Muslim Advocates, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that makes policy recommendations to lawmakers and leaders.

"I think the recent documents further underscore how well-intentioned community leaders who talk with the FBI are instead the targets of this broad, intelligence-gathering effort," she said. "It’s easy to see then how that community leader who had a conversation with an FBI agent finds himself being harassed when traveling or crossing borders."

"These documents are illustrating the actual experiences of American Muslims that we have been hearing for a number of years now," she added.  

The findings are the latest  from an ACLU examination of how the FBI has conducted surveillance in the wake of 9-11 and a campaign to expose cases that they say threaten civil liberties.

In FBI documents obtained through other Freedom of Information lawsuits, the rights groups has highlighted systematic surveillance of Muslim student organizations and individuals and what it considers anti-Muslim bias in training materials being used by the FBI —now the subject of internal FBI investigation, according to published reports.

'Count the mosques'
In a separate case, documents uncovered by The Associated Press revealed that the New York Police Department conducted an extensive surveillance campaign of the Muslim population there, keeping secret files on individuals, businesses, mosques and organizations. Those findings have provoked outrage from many Muslim and civil rights groups, which have called on the Obama administration to intervene.

Greater FBI scrutiny of Muslim communities goes back to shortly after the 9/11 attacks, when then FBI Director Robert Mueller instructed field offices across the country to "count the mosques" and set up investigative goals accordingly, according to an article by investigative reporter Michael Isikoff.

Rules governing FBI surveillance were relaxed in 2008 to give more leeway to FBI "assessments" — a stage of surveillance that takes place before the opening of a formal investigation. These more lenient standards, critics say, allow information gathering on individuals without probable cause.

Rights groups are asking the Department of Justice to restore stricter rules on surveillance and to prohibit racial and religious profiling in all cases.

"What we need is for the FBI to go back to the standards set after the Hoover-era abuses.… guidelines put in place that required the FBI to engage in surveillance only if there’s evidence of wrongdoing," said Khera of Muslim Advocates.

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