It’s a long way from Anaheim, a rough town swirling out from its magical, colorful core at Downtown Disney, to Peshawar, a remote city of muted grays and browns, bristling with guns, the gateway to the famously violent Khyber Pass in Pakistan’s snowcapped Hindu Kush.

There, in May 2001, Khalil Deek, a computer programmer a few years removed from Anaheim, kissed his wife and young children goodbye, and began the eight-hour drive to Islamabad. From the highlands of northern Pakistan, he motored along the Grand Trunk Road, navigating past steep cliffs, spectacular valleys and ancient terraces, dusty towns built up around sparkling white mosques. He entered Islamabad, a well-manicured center of government and corporate glass towers. He rang the buzzer outside the heavily fortified American Embassy.

Deek was preceded by a letter from Congressman Dana Rohrabacher. The Huntington Beach Republican had asked embassy staffers to help Deek bring his family back to the United States. Instead, speaking through an intercom at the gate, a staffer refused even to let Deek enter the embassy. “Come back in two weeks,” said the disembodied voice.

Deek made the long drive back to Peshawar and called his younger brother Tawfiq, a chemical engineer in Anaheim, and complained that he had no idea how he was going to get his family to America.

It was just four months beforeSept. 11, and Deek, a man who had already been described in newspapers across the world as a “top deputy” of Osama bin Laden and a computer-savvy “travel agent” for Al Qaeda, just wanted to return to Orange County. Given that the U.S. government already considered him a dangerous man, it’s not surprising that embassy officials weren’t eager to provide him with travel visas. But it is weird that they didn’t let him inside the building and simply arrest him.

In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, mounting evidence suggested that, even before he moved to Pakistan, Deek may have been part of a terrorist cell in Anaheim that included Adam Yahiye Gadahn, a heavy-metal fan who grew up with hippie parents on a Riverside County goat farm. Gadahn and Deek attended the same mosque; Gadahn followed Deek to Pakistan in the late 1990s. There, like Deek, Gadahn disappeared. FBI officials believe Gadahn has resurfaced as “Azzam the American,” a mysterious figure who appears in several Al Qaeda videotapes claiming America will soon face terrorist attacks that will dwarf 9/11.

Meanwhile, Tawfiq, a married father of two and a prominent member of Orange County’s Islamic community, has received regular visits from FBI agents and, occasionally, local TV camera crews. His visitors inevitably ask the same questions: Is your brother a terrorist? Have you spoken to him recently? Tawfiq always gives the same answer: I haven’t spoken to my brother in years, not since the phone call in May 2001, right after he visited the embassy in Islamabad.

That visit to the embassy is Deek’s last confirmed sighting. After that, he vanished.

Khalil Deek first made headlines on Dec. 11, 1999, when Pakistani police arrested him at his home in Peshawar and put him on an airplane to Amman, Jordan. They were acting on orders from Jordanian King Abdullah II, whose government had information tying Deek to several men just arrested for plotting to bomb hotels in the Jordan capital that catered to U.S. and Israeli tourists, including Amman’s Radisson Hotel. A few days later, Deek, the only U.S. citizen arrested in the case, and more than a dozen other defendants were indicted as members of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network.

According to press accounts at the time, Deek, who ran a computer repair shop in Peshawar, had helped encrypt Al Qaeda’s Internet communications and smuggled recruits to terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. Some reports identified him as a former Afghan resistance fighter in the war to boot Soviet Red Army troops, a U.S. Army veteran and a close associate of Osama bin Laden who had visited the Saudi Arabian millionaire in Afghanistan. When Pakistani police arrested Deek, they found bomb-making instructions on his laptop—diagrams culled from the pages of Encyclopedia Jihad, an idiot’s guide to global jihad. They also discovered he had shared a bank account in Peshawar with Abu Zubaydah, the alleged ringleader of the Jordan plot, who was later captured in Pakistan and is now in U.S. custody at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Also charged in the plot and later sentenced to death in absentia was Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who would go on to become infamous for his stewardship of Al Qaeda atrocities in American-occupied Iraq, including a string of beheadings of Americans and a campaign of bombings that resulted in thousands of slain Iraqis. Last week, al-Zarqawi perished when U.S. planes dropped two 500-pound bombs on his safe house north of Baghdad.

Clinton administration officials hailed Deek’s arrest and extradition to Jordan as a major victory against Al Qaeda. But unlike the rest of the defendants in the Jordanian case, Deek was transferred from the maximum-security prison in Amman to a minimum-security facility in Zarqa. Deek insisted he was innocent and even staged a hunger strike to draw attention to his case. Back in Orange County, Tawfiq hired Federico Sayre, a local civil rights attorney, and lobbied the U.S. Embassy in Amman to ensure Deek was being treated well behind bars. He also tasked Younis Arab, a high-profile Jordanian defense attorney, to represent Deek in court. Neither lawyer responded to interview requests for this story.

I first wrote about Deek’s case in July 2000, after Ian Sitren, a private investigator in Santa Ana, contacted the Weekly with the scoop that Deek had lived in Anaheim. Besides the local hook, my interest in the story was the civil-rights angle: Deek, a U.S. citizen, had been imprisoned for months without seeing a lawyer and nobody at the U.S. Embassy in Amman had lifted a finger to help him. When I called the State Department about Deek, an official who asked not to be identified told me, “We cooperate closely with the government of Jordan, and we strongly applauded the way they handled this.”