So I Married a Terrorist . . .

"Maybe somebody misled her to believe that," he says. "I like Saraah. She is a good woman, an honest woman. But she gets too excited and exaggerates. Maybe not intentionally, but because of her bad experience, her sad story . . . maybe all these things lead her to daydream a little bit more than what really happened."

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If, as Saraah Olson insists, it is true that she called the FBI to warn them about her husband and his involvement in a pre-9/11 Orange County sleeper cell, it's possible the FBI did find her story too strange to believe. One FBI agent who asked not to be identified said his office gets telephone calls from people who seem crazy all the time. "The trick is not to assume everyone's crazy," he said.

By her count, Olson claims she called the FBI about 30 times. She says she became increasingly worried about Diab shortly before 9/11 when she ran his credit and saw that all his credit cards were overdue. "Once, I didn't pay a Discover card bill and got 12 percent interest and the shit kicked out of me," she says. "Now he's got 14 cards overdue for 60 days—something bad is about to happen."

So Olson called the FBI. "The FBI is like, 'You have no proof.' In September, when the World Trade Center was [attacked], I called the FBI that morning and said, 'My ex-husband has something to do with this. I cannot prove it, but I swear to you that I am not a vindictive ex-wife.'"

According to Olson, the FBI didn't return her telephone calls until December 2001—three months after 9/11. "They sent one agent out to meet with me for half an hour," she says. Olson told her the story about how Hisham Diab and Khalil Deek tried to evade the FBI with Sheik Rahman in tow. "I tell her about the car chase," Olson says, "and she says, 'I was one of the agents in the car. I've been chasing Hisham and Khalil for a long time.'"

The agent, Pauline Falk, recently retired from the FBI. She did not respond to interview requests. But according to Olson, the FBI removed Falk from the case and put her in contact with other agents who insisted she keep her mouth shut. Olson says the agents didn't believe her when she said Diab beat her up for dashing his effort to procure a phony U.S. passport for Osama bin Laden by washing the photo. "They said, 'Saraah, we believe you,'" she recalls. "'You don't have to pad your story.'"

That remark didn't anger Olson nearly as much as the fact that in late 2004, she discovered that, more than three years after 9/11, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security still hadn't placed Diab on its no-fly list. She says she called the FBI, and they confirmed they were using her as bait to lure Diab back to the United States, so they could arrest him. Shortly after that conversation, Olson agreed to appear on television, after which she never spoke to anyone in the FBI again.

"They hung me out to dry," she says. "They were using me as bait. They want him to come back." The prospect terrifies her. She never stays in one location longer than a week or so. "Hisham would never let anybody else kill me," she explains. "He would do it himself. He said that to me once."

Meanwhile, Olson says, it takes her at least an hour to board an airplane because, unlike her ex-husband, she and every member of her immediate family have been placed on the no-fly list. "Going on vacation is a nightmare," she says. "It takes me an hour and a half to board a 45-minute flight to Las Vegas. When I fly, I wear flip-flops, pull-on pants, no underwear or bra, and a T-shirt because I don't want to beep. It's better that way. If I get killed and they try to fly my body back to Washington, it's going to be hell."

nschou@ocweekly.com