The Border Fence, Brownsville 
The Traitor Next Door
His name was Wadih el-Hage. He had an American wife and American kids, a home in Arlington, a job at a tire store in Fort Worth, and a secret past that led straight to Osama bin Laden.
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WHEN WADIH EL-HAGE MET the family of his future bride he must have been stunned at his good fortune: They were Americans, but they were also all devout Muslims. He had found his fiancée through the budding Islamic-American grapevine—an imam in Tucson had put out the word that April Brightsky Ray was available for marriage proposals, and Wadih had written to her mother, Marion Brown, for permission to meet. His bride to be was just eighteen; sweet and accommodating, she was a soft, round, moonfaced girl with an infectious giggle. In school, April had played the trumpet with abandon, a single sign of impetuousness. Like Wadih, Marion was a convert to Islam. She found him eager to please—"a good boy." His letter read more like a job application than a proposal, with his goal being "to live life according to the Koran."
Because Wadih was not from America, he failed to recognize the particular type of Westerners he was dealing with. April's was not the West of American promise—of the movies Wadih had loved as a child—but the West of last hopes. Marion, a scrappy, weathered woman, had come to the Muslim faith by way of several others—Judaism, Buddhism, and Protestantism. She could trace her ancestors back to seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts, but her own life had been a rocky journey from man to man and cause to cause; she had had five husbands and ten children. April was unformed, impressionable, with no father figure in her life. Her fiancé appeared absolute and steady, sure of himself and his cause. Safe.
Or so it appeared. After the wedding, Wadih took her back to Louisiana so he could finish school. In a tiny apartment near campus, April kept house and learned to cook. She complained to her eldest brother about Wadih's unexplained absences, but she was only eighteen, and good Muslim wives were obedient and unquestioning, so she went along. Besides, Wadih had the power to lift her spirits with a single, silly gesture: One night he caught her parked in front of the television, bored, watching the Miss America pageant. He jumped in front of the screen, a slight man wearing the broadest smile, his eyes dancing as he flexed his muscles, inserting himself into the picture. At such moments he was not a stranger but someone she could love, fully and desperately.
Wadih's commitment to jihad galvanized his new family, who saw in his zeal something lacking in their own histories. When he moved back to Pakistan in 1986, he took not only April but also Marion and her husband, all at Abdullah Azzam's expense. The el-Hage home in Quetta was always full of people, partly because of a Muslim tradition that dictates hospitality to fellow Muslims and partly because Wadih naturally welcomed all comers. "He was like Will Rogers," Marion said. "He never met a man he didn't like." A cardiac intensive-care nurse, she worked in a hospital while her husband fought against the Russians. "The Russians bombed the houses, and when people ran out, they'd shoot them," she told me. "The Afghanis loved the Americans. Everyone wanted to come to America." When April gave birth to their first child, she and Wadih made a pilgrimage to the U.S. embassy in Islamabad to register him as an American citizen.
Even so, life in Pakistan could be difficult for an American family, even one deeply committed to Islam. Marion and Wadih argued over her place in a society that believed women should be hidden behind the veil, and she departed. Soon April's life was punctuated once more by Wadih's absences. She understood that Wadih was crossing into Afghanistan to do some kind of relief work for Azzam's Office of Services for the Mujahideen, an organization for the Islamic resistance and their families, but his explanations were vague. He carried a pistol, and she was often frightened that he would not return.
Wild, Wild West
WADIH AND APRIL TRIED TO BALANCE their faith with their financial survival. For a year they stayed near the fighting, until according to April, "we had no choice but to leave. When we ran out of money, we went home." That meant Tucson, whose harsh, imposing mountains, scrubby desert, clear skies, and cool summer nights were all reminders that it shared a latitude with southern Afghanistan. April's family was there, and the city also had a growing Muslim community. Wadih, now a father of two, worked for the city as a janitor without complaint. "Allah says that all work is valued," April explained to me. But just because he worked for an American government in an American city did not mean that Wadih was assimilating. Instead, he built a Muslim world within his American world and retreated into it. He was active in his local mosque, and he raised his children in strict accordance with Islamic law. April's siblings began to avoid her, weary of lectures about their lack of faith. For her own children, there were no birthday parties and no holiday feasts other than the two major Islamic celebrations.
In fact, Wadih made only one crucial concession to his adopted country: In 1989 he became an American citizen. "He had so many reasons for wanting to be an American," April told me, slightly at a loss for specifics. "As many reasons as you can think of. He could practice his religion openly."
But halfway around the world, other factors may have affected his choice. The same year Wadih became a citizen, the Soviets retreated from Afghanistan. The mujahideen—young, armed, fearless—were not inclined to stop fighting; they turned on the holdover government in Kabul and on each other. Abdullah Azzam turned on a different enemy: America, a country he saw as inhabited by shallow, pleasure-seeking infidels who supported corrupt, secular regimes in the Islamic world. But before he could take action, he was assassinated by a car bomb in Pakistan, and his organization was absorbed by another group—Al Qaeda, led by another Azzam protégé, Osama bin Laden.
The heir to a seemingly unlimited Saudi fortune, bin Laden launched an immediate expansion campaign, opening training camps and stockpiling weapons. He also began recruiting Afghan war veterans with American passports, who could travel the world without arousing the suspicions of law enforcement. Wadih, of course, was the perfect candidate. In fact, it was around this time that he became a sort of Zelig-like figure in the burgeoning world of international terrorism—never directly linked to violent acts but often nearby.
According to terrorism expert Steven Emerson, the author of American Jihad, Tucson had become home to the first Al Qaeda cell in the U.S. It was in Tucson that Azzam's old Office of Services opened its first American branch, now renamed the Alkhifa Center. Many figures associated with radical Islamic organizations passed through town: Two plotters of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing would be linked to the Al Bunyan Islamic Information Center in Tucson, as was Wadih, who had reporter's credentials from the organization's publication. The Islamic Association for Palestine, a group with links to Hamas, had an office in Tucson too. In those days, Wadih had access to an AK-47; he told the authorities he used it for hunting.
One day, in 1990, a stranger with a long beard and eyeglasses appeared at Wadih's home. He asked many questions about a local imam named Rashid Khalifa, a liberal Muslim cleric who was considered a heretic because he allowed men and women to pray together in his mosque. Wadih would later tell a grand jury that he fed his visitor lunch and drove him to the mosque, where the man observed services. Soon after, Khalifa was murdered by a member of a black Muslim fundamentalist group who would later be linked to the first World Trade Center bombing. Wadih was never tied to the crime, though authorities would later question him about why he never reported the visit to the police. It didn't occur to him to do so, he said.
Violence followed Wadih when he moved with his family to Arlington, where one of April's brothers lived, a year or so later. He had trouble finding work and began brokering the sale of used cars to the Middle East to support his family. An old friend called, looking for a favor; it was Mahmud Abouhalima, another veteran of the Afghan war. He asked Wadih to buy him a few weapons—two Seminov rifles and an AK-47. Wadih bought the guns from April's eldest brother, a sometime gun dealer who had also served in U.S. military intelligence. Abouhalima never picked them up. Eventually he would be convicted of conspiracy in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Then, in 1991, a friend asked Wadih to move to New York to run the Brooklyn branch of Alkhifa. Wadih agreed, but when he arrived in New York, violence had preceded him: The friend was dead, murdered in a crime that remains unsolved. Wadih wept when he gave April the news, but before returning home, he took the time to visit a man named El-Sayeed Nosair in jail. Nosair was being held for the murder of radical Jewish rabbi Meir Kahane.
As supportive as Marion Brown was of her son-in-law, she was becoming uneasy. She mentioned to one of April's brothers that she had heard a group of Wadih's friends talking about hijacking an airplane. On another occasion, the brother heard Marion address Wadih as Abdul Sabbur. "Who's that?" he asked. Wadih turned ashen and immediately changed the subject.
Soon after, he accepted a job offer overseas. His employer: Osama bin Laden.
Bin Laden's Man
WADIH EL-HAGE AND OSAMA Bin Laden had a lot in common. Close in age, they had made similar, profound sacrifices for the same cause; their allegiance to Islam had forced them into exile from their families, and that loss fueled their titanic zeal for jihad. But bin Laden, from a family of rich, cultured Saudis, was a gifted, charismatic manipulator, while Wadih was a follower. Wadih's pacific mien made him, in fact, a perfect front man for bin Laden's deadly goals. "Wadih is a person who, once he has made a decision, obligates himself," one of his lawyers told me. Service to Al Qaeda and service to Islam were one in the master's mind, so every order to Wadih became a matter of his loyalty to not just bin Laden but also Allah.
The two probably had met in Peshawar, where both had worked with Azzam. But while Wadih was in the U.S., struggling to make ends meet, bin Laden, with unlimited funds, was building Al Qaeda. Like any CEO, he needed a secretary he could trust implicitly; Wadih's loyalty, discretion, and history made him a perfect candidate, and even better, as an American citizen, he would not be suspected of terrorism. According to April, Wadih went to the Sudan for a job interview and returned to tell her to start packing. "He seems fair," Wadih said of bin Laden. "Let's do it." Bin Laden offered Wadih $1,200 a month—a king's ransom in the Sudan.
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