Author:
Publication: ABC News
Date: January 1, 2005
URL: http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Investigation/story?id=352268&page=1
A California woman reveals to ABC
News that she unknowingly married a Muslim extremist who helped set up
what authorities say was one of the first al Qaeda sleeper cells out of
their Orange County apartment complex.
Saraah Olson says she watched as
her then-husband, Hisham Diab, and his group transformed local teen Adam
Gadahn into an America-hating fanatic who she says is the masked man who
promised in an al Qaeda video message released in Pakistan in late October
that the "streets of America will run red with blood."
"I was just a steppingstone to a
green card," Olson said. "I married a terrorist. I married somebody who
did not like America, who didn't like Americans."
Gadahn, who met Olson's former husband
at a local mosque, was "fresh meat," she said. "Someone they could control.
Not only that, he's very unassuming-looking, he can do a lot of their tasks."
The voice, gestures and rhetoric
of the video's "Azzam the American" were all familiar to Olson, especially
the phrase "red with blood," which was one of the group's favorite sayings,
she said.
And over the course of six years,
Olson said, some of Osama bin Laden's top deputies would stay with her
and her husband, including blind Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, who would later
go to prison for life for his role in organizing terrorist plots against
the United States.
Olson said she repeatedly tried
to notify the FBI of her husband's suspicious activities, but that she
was never taken seriously. "I'm in hell," Olson remembers thinking after
she recognized Abdel-Rahman in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center
bombings. "I have entered the bowels of hell and I'm going to be here forever.
And I've only been married seven months. I've got a terrorist in my house."
The FBI said in a statement that
counterterrorism is its top priority. "Whenever we receive credible information
pertaining to terrorist threats against the United States, the FBI acts
immediately to thoroughly pursue all such leads," the statement read.
Federal authorities say the couple's
neighbor Khalil Deek, considered a major al Qaeda figure, ran the Orange
County sleeper cell operation.
Diab, who obtained a U.S. passport
after marrying Olson, left the country suddenly in June 2001. He is now
being sought by U.S. authorities and is believed by intelligence officials
to be hiding in Pakistan with top al Qaeda leaders.
"I was the wife," Olson now says.
"So it looked like a typical guy married to an American girl with the little
blond-haired, blue-eyed boy in tow."
Blinded by Love
But when she first met Diab 13 years
ago, while working at a local university issuing foreign student visas,
she thought the then-32-year-old Diab had more honorable intentions.
"I really loved him," she said.
"I was 22 years old and I was in love."
Diab introduced himself as an Egyptian
national who had overstayed his visa and needed to switch visas, said Olson.
She then explained that the school's program was not applicable to him,
that he could not switch visas.
"He seemed fine with it," Olson
said. "He left. No problems. Came back the next day, 'Will you go out with
me?'"
In just a few months, they were
married and settled in an apartment complex in Anaheim. Olson and her 4-year-old
son from another relationship, Ryan, both converted to Islam.
'Follow the Rules'
The honeymoon was short-lived, however.
First, she said Diab insisted she wear the hijab, a head scarf worn by
certain devout Muslim women, and conform to other strict Islamic customs.
And the beatings came next, she
said, provoked by what were deemed violations of her husband's strict rules,
which including forbidding physical contact with any man. She says he hit
her the first time just weeks after their wedding for accidentally bumping
into the manager of their apartment building.
"You have to listen to me and I
am God," she said Diab told her. "Follow the rules."
Olson's son, now a college freshman,
says he was beaten almost daily when he did poorly in the Arabic lessons
he was forced to take.
"I mispronounced something and that
set him off," Ryan said. "And I remember he clasped both his hands together
and just hauled off and hit me right square in the back. I remember the
wind, you know, getting knocked out of me, crying out."
Ryan said Diab's cell tried to recruit
him into their group and he would be brought to small meetings where the
men would rail and plot against America.
"He wanted me to be just as extreme
as he was you know, hate America, anything that his little group didn't
like," he said. "I just can't really say I ever believed it. I just went
along, just nodded my head."
And Saraah Olson admits she played
a role in drawing up the papers for a fake charity, called Charity Without
Borders, that the cell used to funnel money overseas. The organization
would not be discovered or shut down until after the Sept. 11 attacks.
It was an act of desperation, Olson
said. "I'm not proud of it. Not proud of it at all," she said. "I just
knew that I lived in hell and I wanted out. And if helping him do whatever
it was that he was doing meant that I wouldn't get hit, I was willing to
do it at that point."
Falling Into Al Qaeda's Web?
Olson's story is confirmed in detail
by the imam of the Islamic Society of Orange County, Haitham Bundakji.
He said Diab and others in the cell were disruptive troublemakers who caused
the most harm by recruiting innocent others, especially Gadahn.
"And I blame myself and my people
for not embracing him [Gadahn] and not making more efforts to gain him,"
Bundakji said. "He fell in the wrong hands and he became as aggressive
as they were."
Olson explained why she now feels
it is the time to come forward.
"Because it's the right thing to
do," she said. "These are dangerous people and a lot of people were hurt."
