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.
The small wood-frame building sits next to a seedy fifties motel on a forlorn stretch of Fort Worth's East Lancaster Avenue, looking dilapidated despite a recent whitewash. Today it is home to a thrift shop stocked with goods that would appeal only to the poorest scavengers. That several years ago this building was the home of Lone Star Wheels and Tires seems, on its face, unremarkable; so too the fact that Lone Star went out of business after a relatively short run. East Lancaster is a haven for marginal enterprises that come and go, just like the immigrants who work there. But in one way, Lone Star was different from the others: Instead of Thais or Mexicans or Central Americans, it happened to be run by deeply religious Muslims from the Middle East. The average customer would have taken little notice of the slight, soft-spoken manager with the dark hair and eager smile except, perhaps, to marvel that he could change tires with a misshapen right arm. He was friendly, agreeable, not unhandsome—the kind of man a customer might thank for a job well done and forget about before he had pulled back into traffic.
Or maybe the man was sipping coffee at the Griddle down the street. The regulars rarely noticed him; he barely spoke to the coots who collected at the homey dive almost every morning. But sometimes he would issue a warning: something about the United States' favoritism toward Israel, maybe, or the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia and that terrible things might happen if America didn't change its policies. If the customers had paid attention, they might have noted the certainty in his eyes or the urgency of his words, but no one was paying attention. He was just another guy with an opinion, and the Griddle attracted a lot of those.
But there was something extraordinary about this seemingly ordinary man: Once, halfway across the world, he had been the personal secretary to Osama bin Laden. His name was Wadih el-Hage, but members of Al Qaeda also knew him as Abdul Sabbur, Abu al Sabbur, Wa 'da Norman, or sometimes just plain Norman. Before he was changing tires and sipping coffee and taking his seven American children to their Islamic school, he was using his American citizenship in the service of bin Laden's business enterprises. According to law enforcement sources, he bought equipment—ships and planes, along with seeds and cement—and falsified passports and generally helped to grow the organization. As he moved from the U.S. to Pakistan and Africa and back again with his American-born family, he and his cohorts left behind a nearly invisible trail of associations and deaths.
And then his string ran out. One year after el-Hage returned with his family from Nairobi, Kenya, to Arlington, in August 1998, Al Qaeda operatives killed 213 men, women, and children in an explosion at the U.S. embassy in Nairobi. Soon after the bombing, federal prosecutors subpoenaed el-Hage to testify before a grand jury about his involvement; caught in lies, he was arrested for perjury, subsequently indicted for conspiring to kill Americans, and convicted of that crime. Just after the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he was sentenced to prison for life without the possibility of parole.
The men who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon remain strangers to us—they were angry zealots with whom most Americans have nothing in common. But Wadih was one of us. He lived among us for years, received his education at an American university, took American citizenship, was loved by his American family, and was more grateful than the average American for the myriad freedoms extended to him. "He always put Islam first," his mother-in-law, Marion Brown, told me. Yet, as his faith deepened, his resentment of this country grew; he embraced the privileges of being an American but not the obligations.
In doing so, Wadih el-Hage became the traitor next door, and no one knew a thing—until it was too late.
The Convert
IN THE WAKE OF SEPTEMBER 11, much was written about the emergence of a new, highly toxic strain of anti-Americanism, one born not in the hopeless villages of the Middle East but within comfortable middle-class families, where devout, educated young Muslims were outraged by the corrupt, secularized regimes propped up by the American government. This was Wadih's story—with one significant variation: His family was Christian.
Born in 1960 to a Catholic family in Lebanon, he was much loved, the only son and the eldest of three children. But at Wadih's birth, the doctors had mangled his right arm while trying to remove him from the womb with forceps, an injury that set him apart early. He grew up more thoughtful and observant but also more desirous of fitting in.
His family was westernized in a country that took pride in being the progressive jewel of the Middle East. Wadih's father was an engineer who worked for an American oil company; the family went to American movies and watched American television programs. Wadih's favorite was Little House on the Prairie. His future must have seemed assured: He would enjoy the prestige of an American education and return to take a prestigious place in a country run by people of his own Christian faith.
But then Lebanon was riven by a religious-based civil war, and the oppressed Muslim majority was willing to level the country to gain control of the Christian-dominated government. The family, which had divided their time between Lebanon and Kuwait, settled permanently in the latter. In Kuwait, however, Christians were in the minority, and as Wadih grew up, he was drawn to Islam. He must have resisted at first; the hatred between Muslims and Christians was centuries old and to switch sides would shame his family deeply.
Whether from peer pressure, youthful rebellion, or true belief, Wadih finally converted in secret, at age fourteen. He wanted to do good, and Islamic fundamentalism had an answer for every question and strict guidelines for virtuous behavior. He was an outsider no longer; as a Muslim among Muslims, Wadih was instantly accepted. Or rather, he was accepted everywhere but at home: When Wadih hinted about converting, his father, furious, chased him around the house with a knife. And when Wadih's father learned the truth, he cut his son out of his life. He was a traitor to his family.
Wadih left the Middle East and headed for the University of Southwestern Louisiana, as planned. But with two part-time jobs, he could only afford to take two classes. His hopes for an American education evaporated. That is, until a holy man in Kuwait heard of his plight and, as faith dictated, offered financial help. To an impressionable eighteen-year-old, the mentor's grace would have appeared nothing less than providential; Wadih's journey of secrecy, rebellion, and redemption would shape the rest of his life.
The Invisible Man
THE USL CAMPUS, IN LAFAYETTE, was oak-shaded and intimate, but it was provincial too. To most white USL students in 1978, all the foreigners from the Middle East looked alike. Wadih was, to them, invisible.
But they were not invisible to him. To Wadih, Lafayette was replete with riches, temptations, and of course, inequities. The jobs open to him were the same marginal jobs open to poor Americans—he worked at Burger King and Tastee Donuts and gained weight as he gorged on sweets. In class he studied urban planning. In his free hours he was offered a curriculum of life on the fringes: how to get by in the U.S. without attracting notice.
But mostly, Wadih prayed. Free of his father's disapproval, he rejoiced in practicing his religion openly. A less dedicated young man might have drifted away from his faith, dating American girls and eating pepperoni pizza. But Wadih persevered with a convert's zeal, using Islamic fundamentalism as a shield against Western temptations and his own loneliness.
Wadih eventually became a leader in Muslim youth groups, in which a nascent anti-Americanism had already taken hold. The preface to the constitution of the Muslim Arab Youth Association, for instance, stated, "In the heart of America, in the depths of corruption and ruin and moral deprivation, an elite of Muslim youth is holding fast to the teachings of Allah." Wadih was moving into conflict with his adopted country: He loved the U.S. for the personal freedom that allowed him to be a Muslim without fear, but he loathed the secular, often profane consequences of that freedom.
Then, in 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. To the Islamic world, a godless country was despoiling a Muslim paradise, and the loose associations on college campuses quickly constellated into an intelligence-gathering, recruiting, and fundraising network. But Wadih felt compelled to do more. Stirred by the call to jihad, he abandoned his hard-won education and moved to Peshawar, Pakistan, a dusty, mountainous border city that had become the staging area of the mujahideen, the Islamic guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan. He couldn't fight because of his arm, but that only deepened his conviction: Every day, he distributed Korans in hospitals and refugee camps.
In Pakistan Wadih also came under the influence of a new mentor, Sheik Abdullah Azzam, a stocky, bearded, hyperbolic Palestinian who believed feverishly in the restoration of Islamic glory. Focused entirely on finding allies intent on beating the Russians, the U.S. overlooked—or Azzam concealed—his virulently anti-Western feelings and his propensity for violence, which he linked directly to the Koran. "Every Muslim on earth should unsheathe his sword and fight to liberate Palestine," he urged in one speech. "The jihad is not limited to Afghanistan. . . . Jihad means fighting. . . . It does not mean to fight with the pen or to write books or articles in the press or to fight by holding lectures." For Wadih, Azzam's exhortations would forever link war with Islam's survival. He experienced, in essence, a second conversion.
Wadih returned to school in Louisiana in 1984, a 24-year-old Islamic militant. Emboldened, he wrote letters home to his father, complaining about American arrogance in the Middle East. He received in reply a warning to keep his opinions to himself. Wadih responded like any American. "This is the U.S.," he wrote. "You can say whatever you want."
Love and War
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