So I Married a Terrorist . . .

In an interview last year, Begg told the Weekly he never saw any fighting in Bosnia—the weather was too cold—but would have fought if he had the opportunity. While there, he met Deek, whom he insists did a lot of talking but no fighting. "It seemed to me he wasn't involved in the foreign forces; he was just living there," Begg recalls. "He was talking politics, more of an analyst. It was vague to me. I wasn't fluent in Arabic. . . . He didn't seem physically active."

Whatever Diab and Deek were up to in Bosnia, Olson says she'll never forget what happened when her husband returned to Anaheim. It was, she says, the first time she heard the name or saw the face of Osama bin Laden. Both Diab and all of his belongings needed a good wash. "He smells awful," she recalls. "Everything in his bag smells bad. I throw it all in the wash to wash it, but I didn't realize there's a picture of Osama bin Laden in his pocket. And he freaks out because I accidentally washed it."

According to Olson, her husband panicked because he was supposed to use the photo to make a phony passport for bin Laden. "At this time, Hisham and Khalil had become perfectionists [in making] fake IDs, Social Security cards and passports," she says. "They were supposed to make a U.S. passport for Osama bin Laden. . . . Hisham told me he's a very important Saudi, he did very good work in Afghanistan and is very respected in Bosnia, and I don't love him because I washed this picture."

Olson claims she told Diab to call Deek in Bosnia and arrange for Deek to send another photograph of bin Laden. She listened as her husband called Deek long-distance. "Khalil says, 'Don't worry about it. I can send you another one. I'll e-mail it to you.'" Diab worried aloud they'd get in trouble if they used the Internet to send the photo, but Deek reassured him that he could send an encrypted copy of the file.

"I got the crap kicked out of me for days for that," Olson says.

In temperament if not in politics, Deek seems to have been the polar opposite of Diab. According to Ryan, Deek was as quiet as his stepfather was loud. "Khalil was a calm man, quite the contrast to Hisham," he recalls. "He spoke to me only when necessary, but mostly it was praise that Hisham was raising a great Muslim son. In his discussions with Hisham and others, he would speak about the 'Great Satan,' the usual mantra about American deviance and corruption, as well as what it meant to be a good Muslim by shunning these things."

Olson only recalls one occasion when Deek seemed angry. "He was very soft-spoken," she says. "I only heard him raise his voice once, when he was mad at someone in my living room who wouldn't renounce his Christian family. Hisham and Khalil were telling him you have to reject the fact that your family is Christian—they all should die." The person responded that his father had actually converted to Christianity from Judaism. "That just set them off even more," she says.

The person Diab and Deek were yelling at, she claims, was Adam Yahiye Gadahn.

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The future propagandist for Al-Qaeda—the first American citizen to be charged with treason in five decades—was the son of peace-loving hippies. In the 1960s and 1970s, Gadahn's father, Phil Pearlman, had been a leader of several Southern California psychedelic rock groups that are still considered musically genius today: Beat of the Earth, the Electronic Hole and Relatively Clean Rivers. After becoming a born-again Christian, Pearlman changed his last name to Gadahn and gave Adam the middle name Yahiye, which is Arabic for John the Baptist; he raised his son on a goat farm with no indoor plumbing. Adam sought to escape his family's Luddite existence, first through death-metal music and later through Islam.

Olson says her husband and Deek befriended Gadahn in May or June of 1994, when Gadahn was still listening to death-metal and living with his grandparents in Santa Ana. She believes Diab and Deek were responsible for converting him to radical Islam. "They turned him into that little troll he is today," she says. "They set him up with an apartment across the street from the mosque so he had a place to live."

Olson often cooked food for him. Once, Diab and Deek brought Gadahn home for tea. "He said, 'Wow, thank you very much; that's really good,'" Olson recalls. "Khalil said, 'Don't ever speak to her again. Women are nothing.' . . . He was just this nice kid. He looked like he could be anybody's kid."

Ryan also remembers Gadahn as a gentle-seeming teenager. "He was different," he says. "Whereas others in Hisham's circle would treat me as a servant, he would treat me as a human being. He would say 'please' and 'thank you.' He didn't fit in. He shouldn't have tried to fit in with those people."