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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The Sudan in 1992 was a terrorist's paradise. Ruled by an Islamic fundamentalist regime, its government gave Al Qaeda favored status among several terrorist newcomers; it was bin Laden's money and bin Laden's companies that contributed to the construction of much of the country's infrastructure. The government reciprocated by allowing bin Laden to build training camps, smuggle in weapons, and establish charities—fronts—with impunity. He traveled through the streets of Khartoum in a shimmering black Land Cruiser with tinted windows.
The old army was reforming, invisibly, against a powerful but oblivious enemy in the West. Wadih was reunited with men with whom he had shared the most meaningful days of his life. The lowly U.S. janitor now ascended to a job that was the jihad equivalent of vice president of corporate development. Wadih's office sat just outside bin Laden's at a tasteful compound in Khartoum. When he wasn't drafting letters or controlling access to the boss, Wadih was circling the globe, searching for markets for the Sudan's corn and sesame seeds, and buying asphalt for new construction. Other bin Laden associates had different sorts of assignments: One scoured the world for uranium, the critical component of nuclear weapons.
Working for Al Qaeda was in some ways like working for any underfunded organization with a demanding boss. Bin Laden was full of ideas: once he had wanted to set up Wadih's father-in-law in the aromatic oil business in the U.S.; now he wanted Wadih to buy him an airplane to transport Stinger missiles from Afghanistan to the Sudan. Wadih found one with the help of his contacts in the U.S., a pilot he'd known in Louisiana and the imam of his mosque in Arlington, who was once an aviation expert. Wadih would never refuse bin Laden, who, he liked to say, had the ability to make the world live according to the Koran.
Echoes of Loneliness
EVEN SO, LIFE IN THE SUDAN BECAME increasingly problematic. Wadih was not a natural businessman—everyone took advantage of him, according to his mother-in-law—and April, like many corporate wives, was souring on the demands placed on her husband. Khartoum wasn't Tucson or, for that matter, Peshawar. Primitive and isolated, its rains turned the roads to muddy, impassable lakes of red clay, and the sandstorms exacerbated her asthma. And then there was the Al Qaeda boys' club. One night Wadih came home to face the prototypical angry spouse demanding an answer to the universal question: "Where have you been?" Wadih wouldn't meet her eyes. "What would you say if I told you I got married?" he said.
It had been bin Laden's idea. There were so many widows in the Sudan, Wadih explained, parroting the boss. For once, April would have none of it. She reminded Wadih that their marriage contract prohibited him from taking another spouse. Like any shrewd American wife, she threatened divorce. The second marriage was dissolved. "I could not have handled my own jealousy," April said.
In 1994 the family moved to Nairobi. Family members say Wadih was trying to break with bin Laden, but intelligence sources believe that he was simply transferred to Kenya after another operative attracted too much attention from the local police. In Nairobi Wadih tried to establish himself as an international gem dealer—Why don't you just sell them on eBay? his mother-in-law wanted to know—and as the head of a charity with the obtuse name of Help Africa People.
By then Al Qaeda's violence was intensifying. Following attacks on U.S. soldiers in Somalia in 1993, the Sudanese government, under pressure from Washington, expelled bin Laden from the country in 1996. That same year, from his new home in Afghanistan, he declared war on America, though he limited his death threats to military personnel occupying Saudi Arabia. "[T]he main disease and the cause of the affliction is the occupying U.S. enemy, so efforts should be pooled to kill him, fight him, destroy him," he wrote in one of his increasingly frequent fatwas.
Wadih was getting in deep. An Al Qaeda document written in February 1997 describes him returning from a trip to Afghanistan with instructions to begin military operations in East Africa. Wadih had traveled there with a top Al Qaeda official—bin Laden's military commander, Muhammad Atef—who was killed by U.S. bombs in Afghanistan last fall. As bin Laden became ever more vocal in his criticism of the U.S., one of Wadih's associates in Nairobi fired off a frantic missive: ". . . there is an American-Kenyan-Egyptian intelligence activity in Nairobi working to identify the locations and the people who are dealing with the sheikh [bin Laden] . . . I am 100 percent sure that the telephone is tapped after Wadi's [sic] wife told me that . . . she heard strange voices in the television when she was trying to adjust the speaker."
Wadih was troubled. His business correspondence from that time remained cheerful and resolute ("Peace be upon you, and God's blessings and mercy"), but entries in his journals, written in English, grew uncharacteristically bleak, as if he was torn between two choices, or two worlds. "[E]veryone will encounter pain whether he believes or not, except that the believers will encounter pain in this life only but will be rewarded in this life and the next," noted a religious essay on jihad. "[N]on-believers will feel the pleasure in this life but will end up with everlasting pain." Something continued to haunt him in a poem that appears a few pages later:
The children are sleeping and quiet
is the night
Alone I sit in the dim light
Echoes of loneliness are all I hear
Thinking and waiting, I look towards
the door
Hoping for a visitor but no one
once more.
Sleepy and tired I walk to my room
Perhaps tomorrow someone will
break through my gloom
Echoes of loneliness linger through
the night
Tossing and turning from side to side
Sleep comes, long after I've cried.
Ten Green Papers
AS U.S. INTELLIGENCE OFFICIALS REALIZED that they were engaged in a desperate game of catch-up against well-funded, highly organized terrorists, the name Wadih el-Hage began to turn up routinely. He was linked with a participant in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and in Al Qaeda's attack on U.S. soldiers in Somalia that same year—and, of course, he had worked for bin Laden. The agents tapped Wadih's phone and recorded conversations that were often coded. Once he called April and asked her to send "ten green papers, okay?"
April: Ten red papers?
Wadih: Green.
April: You mean money.
Wadih: [sarcastically] Thank you very much.
April: [laughing] That's only for you. Nobody else is listening.
Wadih: Okay, you don't know that.
What Wadih didn't suspect was that the feds hoped he might become a double agent. He was an American citizen, with an American wife and American children, and he had himself been nonviolent, all of which suggested to U.S. intelligence—still ignorant in the ways of radical Islamic fundamentalism—that he might be a willing convert.
In 1997 several investigators from U.S. and Kenyan intelligence burst into Wadih's house in Nairobi, claiming to be looking for stolen property. Wadih was gone—away on business again—but April was there, as was Marion, the children, and another couple who had been living with them. Agents pored over the papers and notebooks that Wadih had stacked, willy-nilly, throughout the place. They packed up a computer and then gave April a warning: Nairobi wasn't safe for them anymore. Wadih could be killed at any time. Would she like to leave immediately? No, April told them. She would not leave without her husband.
When Wadih returned and learned of the search, he was, in Marion's words, "frightened and intimidated." In a panic, the family sold everything they owned to raise the money for airfare back to the U.S. But if Wadih thought he would be safe in America, he was quickly proven wrong. After a 24-hour trip to New York, Wadih and his family were met at the airport by federal agents wielding subpoenas to appear before a grand jury investigating bin Laden and his associates. Prosecutors interrogated him late into the night and brought him before the grand jury the next morning. If he lied, they warned him, he could go to prison and never see his family again.
He was faced with a critical choice: his family and his country or Al Qaeda and jihad. Whether out of loyalty to old friends or fear of retaliation or his belief that his American citizenship would protect him, Wadih claimed to have known bin Laden only briefly and testified that the rest of the men the prosecutors mentioned to him were strangers. He didn't know about any operations in Africa. He denied writing a letter to a man named Ali Mohammed, who, it was determined, performed surveillance for the Nairobi embassy bombing and is now in prison for life.
The prosecutor asked Wadih whether he recognized the handwriting on the letter.
"Very close to mine," he allowed.
"Very close to yours?" the prosecutor responded.
"Yes."
"Could it be yours?"
"I don't think so."
The prosecutor tried again. "Have you ever seen handwriting that close to your handwriting in your entire life on a letter you did not write?"
"I have."
"Who writes like that besides you?"
"I don't know who it is, but I have seen handwriting very close to mine."
Wadih had made his choice. He completed his testimony and was allowed to go free.
Texas Is Wow
HE SETTLED WITH HIS FAMILY BACK in Arlington, which by the late nineties made for a perfect refuge. A faceless, sprawling suburb of malls, theme parks, chain restaurants, and hotels, it also had an international airport in the area that made coming and going easy. "I love Texas. Texas is wow," April told me. "It's out there. The people are wonderful. It's beautiful. We both wanted Texas." Then too Arlington now boasted a substantial Muslim population. Old friends quickly came to the rescue of Wadih and his family. The imam of the mosque introduced Wadih to the owner of Lone Star Wheels and Tires, a Palestinian immigrant who had once been a pilot in Pakistan. (The tire business was then a favorite of immigrant Muslims; it didn't require much starting capital—$10,000, compared with at least $50,000 for a convenience store—and workers didn't have to sell pork or alcohol.) Wadih became the manager at a salary of $400 a week.
The Center Street Mosque, where Wadih had worshiped before, remained as rigid in practice as it had been when jihad fighters had recruited there during the Afghan war. The women still covered themselves from head to toe in hijabs and were separated from men at prayer. The modern world was scorned: When a guest speaker showed up in Western dress, he was driven from the podium.
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