So in 1993, you were encouraged to go for training to a camp in Afghanistan. While there, you befriended Ahmed Omar Sheikh -- the same man who was convicted Monday and sentenced to death for his role in the kidnapping and execution of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. How did you come to know him?

He showed up in the camp in Afghanistan I was in a couple of weeks after I had gotten there. At this camp, I was just going through what you could roughly call basic training -- it was just how to fire an AK -- and most of the people in this camp were then going on to Tajikistan to fight the communist government up there. That was before the Taliban -- and again, that wasn't to get involved in Afghan conflicts. As I viewed it, the people of Tajikistan were tired of this communist government, which everyone could relate to. And I guess Islam was the only viable alternative to the oppressive regime up there. So that was my intention. When Omar showed up, it was just someone from the West, because he was basically raised in London and he spoke English so we took to hanging out together just because of that reason. At the time, he appeared to be a fairly normal guy. I didn't sense, like, anything really radical from him.

But he discussed with you the possibility of doing some kidnapping?

Yeah, later on in our stay there, when I finally decided to call it quits, he started talking about, as an idea -- he wanted to go to Kashmir and possibly take hostages. And I'm assuming that by some twisted logic, he thought this would somehow bring some kind of attention to the cause there in the media. As far as I know he never expressed any desire to actually hurt anyone. It just seemed kind of like a twisted idea to get attention. Like I say, that's when I decided to call it quits as far as that area, because things were starting to get murky and I didn't want to be involved in anything like hostage-taking. I'd come to fight in Tajikistan and that wasn't panning out.

Were you surprised to see him emerge in the Daniel Pearl case?

Yeah. I didn't even know he was out of prison from his 1994 scheme, where he was caught after a shootout with the Indian military. I thought he was still in prison. I didn't find out that this was the same Omar that I knew until I saw a picture of him in the newspaper.

You were a little bit vague in the book about why you decided to become an informant for the CIA and the FBI. In one passage you mentioned fear of terrorism; in another passage you said: 'As long as Arabs control the way the jihad was handled, it will never progress or accomplish anything. I felt that big changes were needed.' What did you hope to accomplish in turning to the FBI and CIA?

Looking back, here I was coming out of the war in Chechnya, fighting on the front lines for our religion, for our people, for the true jihad. And there was true terrorism going down in Egypt at the time. Tourists were killed and whatnot. I just saw that the real mujahedin and those in the real jihad are against those terrorist attacks. The point being that [the Arabs] weren't doing anything to try to prevent it, to police their own, so to speak. I don't think it was that they didn't want to, but if you have a small group of people in Chechnya fighting the Russians, they're kind of overwhelmed with that problem. So I looked at myself as being in kind of a unique position. I could get into places and groups that probably no other Westerner could. I looked at that as a way to help the CIA, the FBI, whatever, combat true terrorism.

Did you feel that your effort was successful?

Ultimately, in the end, I hate to say it, but I don't think so. I tried my hardest; I risked my life, literally, for almost four years. I've complicated my life a great deal by writing this book and coming out -- it doesn't take much imagination to think there are probably a few people out there right now who would like to get their hands on me. But ultimately, what did I accomplish? I never saw that the FBI or the CIA did fight true terrorism. From what I saw they spent their time and their resources infiltrating mosques that were of no interest to anyone.

What is it in the makeup or the mind-set of the CIA and FBI that caused the kind of failures that you describe in the book?

I don't know enough about anything to really say. Just looking at them, it's their whole mind-set, their whole culture -- most of them are like middle-aged, upper-middle-class white American guys and they think that only their way is right. And like I was saying before, that no one else in the world has a right to fight for independence or anything like that. So they're confusing true terrorism and a true fight for independence somewhere and they're mixing the two together. That's why, first of all, that they're not able to stop terrorist acts, because they don't know where to start looking. They're always barking up the wrong tree, so to speak.

During the time you were an FBI informant, you also knew Hani Hanjour, one of the pilots who later flew a jet into the Pentagon in September. How did you get to know him, and what did you tell the FBI about him?

A friend of mine who is also a pilot, but who has no involvement in all of this, was roommates with Hani back in maybe late '97, '98. This was a mutual friend -- I worked for some Arabs who owned some liquor stores in the valley, in Phoenix. This friend of mine also worked for them, and he worked at another store. So sometimes when I would get off duty working security at the main store in Phoenix, I would go out to their smaller store in Mesa where my friend worked. And Hani being his roommate, he would sometimes come around and hang out behind the counter, which was common with a lot of the Arabs there. All of the guys who became involved in flight training were in this little circle, and it wasn't uncommon to go there on any night of the week and find three or four guys hanging out behind the counter at this store. That's where Hani came into the picture.

I never had any direct relationship with him. I never even had many conversations with him -- he was always there in the crowd. I reported on him [to the FBI] just like I reported on everyone else who came around that was new. If some Arab would come around that I wasn't familiar with, I would pass that information on to the FBI as a matter of practice and then they would further the investigation from there. Usually people just turned out to be people, and not anyone who was worth an investigation. Obviously, that wasn't the case with Hani.

On Sept. 11 or 12, when you learned that he was one of the pilots -- what was your reaction?

This is why I find it funny that the FBI emphatically denies that I ever reported on him or anything like that. Because I forget what day it was exactly after the 11th, but when the first picture of him came out in the newspaper, I called the Phoenix office to talk to a woman there that -- sometimes we had discussions just on a personal level. And I called her and said, 'Hey, do you see who's in the newspaper today?' I didn't say any names, I just said, 'Did you see who was in the paper?' And she said: 'Yeah, I saw him, can you believe that?' And the conversation went on from there. And now they claim they showed me photos after that and that I couldn't identify him. Yet, I called prior to that to see if they'd seen who was in the newspaper.

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