So I Married a Terrorist . . .

Olson says her husband's behavior changed when Deek returned from a trip to Jordan in August 1992, just a month after her wedding. They had moved to Anaheim from Garden Grove to stay in his apartment while he was gone, and when he returned, Deek moved into another unit in the same building. "Suddenly, everything is very strict," she says. "You can't speak to other men or even acknowledge their presence."

She says Diab and Deek spent every Friday night at the mosque leading a discussion circle for single men, many of whom would often drop by their apartment complex. But the biggest crowd, she recalls, arrived when Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman dropped by for a visit. At the time, she says, her husband simply told her that the cleric was a famous religious scholar from Egypt who had been charged—and cleared—with an assassination attempt against Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

At least 30 people gathered in Deek's apartment while she prepared food for the guests. "Khalil had no furniture," she says. "He just had a carpet on the floor and big pillows. I could see the whole thing through his window."

Ryan also remembers Rahman's visit. "I remember the great many people showing up, the huge amount of food that was made and how excited everyone in Hisham's circle seemed to be about it," he says. "I didn't understand. I was much too little to know anything about him. I just remember how excited everyone was."

Olson says she eavesdropped on the cleric while she sat in her bedroom or prepared food. Since she didn't speak Arabic, she wrote down phonetic approximations of the phrases he seemed to repeat—phrases that included the word "America." She called a friend who spoke fluent Arabic and asked what they meant. The woman told her to keep her mouth shut.

Three months later, the day that Islamic terrorists who were later tied to Rahman attempted to blow up the World Trade Center, Olson says she called the FBI and unsuccessfully tried to alert them to her husband's activities. The FBI didn't arrest Rahman in connection with the bombing until July 1993. In March of that year, Diab told Olson that Rahman was coming back to town.

"He comes here to our house, and it's all hush-hush," she recalls. "They put a big robe over him. Usually, he gives this big Billy Graham-type inspired sermon, but this time, he's quiet, and I'm like, 'Ooh. He's guilty. The guilty don't speak. If you're innocent, you say, it wasn't me.'"

According to Olson, Diab and Deek arranged to sneak Rahman from Anaheim to West Covina. "They figured out the FBI is going to start following people that have an association with him," she says. "They set it up to have all these people go to this house in Pomona in the same car."

In Pomona, she claims, several identical cars—white Chrysler four-doors—arrived at the house. "They put the blind sheik in the back seat of one of the cars and made him lie down," she says. "They were trying to make it hard for the FBI to follow him. They were trying to get him out of the country. Hisham told me about it when he came home, and they were laughing their heads off."

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In August 1994, Diab traveled to Bosnia to help defend Muslims being subjected to ethnic cleansing at the hands of Serbian and Croatian militiamen during the brutal Balkan civil war. Deek had already gone there, and Diab joined him. It's unclear exactly what Diab and Deek were doing in Bosnia. Diab told Olson they were performing missionary work, helping set up sanctuaries for women who had been raped and providing food and clothing to refugees.

When Diab returned, he claimed he and Deek had worked for "some people from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan," and that they lived in a well-furnished building complete with heat, a telephone and running water—luxuries unavailable to most residents of the war-ravaged country. Years later, after the FBI finally started taking her telephone calls, Olson claims she learned that both Diab and Deek actually set up a terrorist training camp in Bosnia.

Her first hint that her husband's trip to Bosnia was for less-than-humanitarian reasons came in a telephone call from her sister's brother-in-law several weeks after Diab went overseas. "He said, 'Do you know what kind of a fucking idiot your husband is?'" Olson recalls. Without going into details, the man told Olson he thought he was going to Bosnia for charity work, but that once he arrived, he was horrified by what Diab and Deek were doing there. He asked her not to tell Diab that he called her. "I did not come here to be a terrorist," he said. "I don't want anything to do with this shit."

Moazzam Begg is a British citizen who went to Bosnia in the winter of 1994, intending to join the Muslim militias. Begg later tried to fight against the Russians in Chechnya but never got inside the country. He ultimately traveled to Afghanistan to help establish a girl's school with cooperation from the Taliban; Begg was arrested in Pakistan and handed over to American authorities shortly after the U.S. ousted the Taliban from Afghanistan. He spent three years in detention, first at Bagram Air Force Base and then at Guantanamo Bay, before being released without charges.