Onetime Clerk Is at Center of Lodi Trial

At the convenience store where he worked in this central Oregon resort town before he became an undercover operative for the FBI in California, Naseem Khan was known to his co-workers as “Mike.”

The picture of Khan that emerges from interviews with friends, co-workers and landlords in Bend, a picturesque former logging town of 70,000 in the shadow of snow-capped Mt. Bachelor, is of a quiet, hard-working, mostly solitary young man with an interest in law enforcement.

Khan is now the key witness in the terrorism trial of a Lodi, Calif., ice cream truck driver and his son. Last week, he shocked the Sacramento courtroom when he said he saw Al Qaeda’s No. 2 figure in 1999 at a mosque in the San Joaquin Valley farming community. He is expected to take the stand today for the first time since he made that claim, which terrorism experts discount as highly improbable.

Khan was first approached by FBI agents in October 2001 in Bend after someone reported him as a possible terrorism suspect, according to friends and court testimony. “He was originally a target,” recalled Anne Kimler, who describes herself as a close friend. “They even confiscated his computer.”

Quickly cleared of those suspicions, the $7-an-hour manager of the K Market convenience store was hired by the FBI to infiltrate the large Muslim community in Lodi, where he once lived, and was paid more than $200,000 in salary and expenses for his three-year undercover assignment.

The clean-cut, square-jawed Pakistani immigrant took readily to the job of secret agent. “He knew the culture and sometimes he objected to what they asked him to do,” said a former girlfriend. “But he really liked the work. It fit his dream of someday going into law enforcement.” The girlfriend, who lived with Khan until a recent breakup, asked not to be named because of concerns for her safety.

Jesse Johal, Khan’s employer at K Market, which caters to skiers en route to Cascade Range slopes, said he was not surprised by Khan’s turn to undercover work. He said Khan took criminology courses at the local community college and sometimes went with police officer friends to the local pistol range. “He was a nice quiet guy,” said Johal. “We were a good team.”

For a few months after the FBI hired him in December 2001, Khan continued to work at the convenience store. Johal said agents would sometimes visit the informant, code-named “Wildcat,” in the store.

Ted and Edie Henderson, managers of the 88-unit apartment complex on Powers Road where Khan lived alone from September 2000 to June 2002, described him as a model tenant who always paid his $420 monthly rent on time.

“He just kept to himself,” said Ted Henderson. “I never saw anyone come in or out of his place.” Edie Henderson said, “When he left I’ve never seen such a clean apartment in my life.”

In his first round of testimony in Sacramento earlier this month, Khan said he was born in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1973, to a Pashtun tribal family. After his father died when Khan was still a child, he was raised by his mother and grandmother.

At 16, speaking very little English, he immigrated to the United States with his mother and two cousins, living briefly in Kentucky, New York and Texas, where he attended high school and took the first in a series of low-paying jobs in fast-food franchises and convenience stores.

Records show he moved to California in 1992, living mostly in the Sacramento Valley cities of Marysville and Yuba City. In 1993, when he was 19, court records show he was convicted in Sutter County on a bad-check charge for which he spent two days in jail and was fined $211.

In July 1999, he moved to Lodi, home to several generations of Pakistani Americans, many of whom share his Pashtun ethnicity -- including Umer Hayat, 48, and Hamid Hayat, 23, who are on trial. The younger Hayat is charged with attending a terrorist training camp in Pakistan in 2003; both are charged with lying to federal agents.

Khan lived alone in an apartment that overlooked the Lodi mosque. He worked at a pizza delivery business and a convenience store.

Separated from other family members living in Texas, Khan lacked the extensive family base enjoyed by many in the town’s Muslim community.

So late one night in 1999 when he was working in the Lodi convenience store, he was open to the suggestion of a garrulous traveler that he come up to Oregon to “check it out.”

The traveler, Kimler, a 50-year-old U.S. Forest Service employee from Prineville, Ore., said she took an instant liking to Khan and invited him to stay with her and her family if he came to Oregon.

“We just liked each other and became friends,” Kimler recalled.

Khan took her up on the offer and stayed with the family in Prineville for several months before he landed a job as assistant manager at a Taco Bell and went out on his own.

On Sundays, Kimler recalled, Khan would cook up Indian curries and sweet Pakistani deserts such as carrot halwa.

“He always said they were something different,” Kimler said of the curries, “but they all tasted the same. Good, but very hot. The kids couldn’t eat them.”

When Khan found his own apartment, Kimler went with him to help him pick out furniture. She became his confidant and advisor in a conservative Oregon community with no mosque and only a handful of practicing Muslims.

“There’s another Muslim in Bend? That’s news to me. I thought I was the only one,” said Mohammed Elwefati, a Libyan American who manages food and beverages at a popular local steakhouse. Elwefati said he never met Kahn.

Kimler thinks it was this cultural isolation in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks that caused a wave of xenophobia in central Oregon that eventually reached Khan.

K Market owner Johal recalled a man buying cigarettes in the store who asked Khan menacingly if he was planning to “make a bomb.”

Kimler suspects one of her own friends, hysterical with fear about terrorism, alerted the FBI about Khan. “I told her, ‘Naseem a terrorist?’ ” she recalled. “ ‘You have to be kidding.’ ”

Whatever the cause, court records show that on Oct. 17, 2001, an FBI agent showed up at Khan’s Powers Road apartment asking about his knowledge of Osama bin Laden and several Muslim fundraising organizations.

Since his testimony in the trial, Khan has been unavailable for comment.

Apparently convinced that he had no terrorism connections and impressed with his cooperation, agents from Oregon and California visited him again on Oct. 26, asking him to review photographs of suspected terrorists and asking him questions about the Lodi community where he once lived.

Khan told agents he remembered seeing Al Qaeda’s No. 2, Ayman Zawahiri, and two other men, Ahmed Mohammed Hamed, a suspect in the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, and Abdelkarim Hussein Mohamed Al-Nasser, a suspect in the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing. He said he saw the three men at the Lodi mosque in 1998 and 1999.

Terrorism experts, even government officials, doubt the accuracy of the Zawahiri sighting, saying that the Al Qaeda figure, Bin Laden’s personal physician, almost certainly did not travel to the United States after 1995.

Nothing has surfaced in the Lodi trial that indicates the agents seriously pursued these leads.

Nonetheless, Khan won the confidence of the FBI’s Sacramento office and was immediately put to work as an undercover operative and sent out to secretly tape-record conversations with members of the Muslim community. Months into the investigation, Khan was trusted enough to transcribe and translate his own secret recordings, which are the foundation of the Lodi case.

Even after he began working for the FBI, Khan continued working part time at the Bend convenience store and living in the one-bedroom apartment. Sometime in the spring of 2002, he met a woman through a computer dating service who became his steady girlfriend.

The couple later moved into a Deschutes County home that the girlfriend bought. Khan, who told his Lodi contacts that he was a computer consultant who traveled frequently, sometimes stayed away from Bend for weeks at a time.

When he came home, the girlfriend said, he worked on landscaping the property. “He would cook Indian food, and we would listen to Indian music,” she said. Other than the fact that he was working undercover for the government, she said, she knew little else about his activities.

She said the couple lived together until about five months ago when she found a goodbye note from Khan wishing her good luck in her future life. She said she contacted the FBI to get in touch with Khan but never heard back from him.

“I loved him. I loved him very much,” she said, talking to a reporter in the slush-covered driveway of her home. “I guess this is what happens when you are in government work.”