Padilla jurors hear taped conversations

In more than 100 wiretapped phone calls played this week in the terrorism case against Jose Padilla, jurors learned how the Muslim convert was recruited by a South Florida man, sent to Egypt to study Arabic and the Koran, and disappeared off his mentor’s radar within two years.

Padilla’s voice is heard in only seven of the calls played for the jury, culled from 14,000 “pertinent recordings” made by U.S. intelligence agents during the decade they had the alleged ringmasters of a North American terrorism support cell under surveillance.

Most of the audiotapes presented in the fifth week of the trial involve Padilla’s alleged recruiter, Adham Amin Hassoun, a Lebanese-born Palestinian who has lived in Sunrise, Fla., since 1989. A frequent speaker at the Sunrise mosque, Hassoun was apparently placed under clandestine surveillance in 1993 after saying the alleged mastermind of that year’s World Trade Center bombing was a victim of injustice in the U.S.

Hassoun implored Muslims at mosques in South Florida to donate money or join forces in aid of beleaguered Muslims in Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya and Somalia, according to the audiotapes and witness testimony.

Under Hassoun’s guidance, Padilla left for Egypt in September 1998; Hassoun’s last contact with him was in spring 2000.

How and where Padilla was allegedly trained for waging jihad and whether that preparation involved taking up arms under the direction of Al Qaeda remained unclear after the prosecution played most of the 123 taped conversations it plans to introduce between Hassoun and a handful of other alleged recruits in Egypt, Kosovo and former Soviet republics near Russia’s restive Chechnya region.

The trial on charges of material support to terrorists and conspiracy to harm innocents abroad is a far cry from the government’s original accusations against Padilla at the time of his arrest in May 2002.

After Padilla was detained at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport on a material witness warrant, then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft announced in a satellite TV appearance from Moscow that Padilla had been plotting to detonate a radioactive dirty bomb in a U.S. city.

The dirty-bomb claim reportedly stemmed from confessions of captured Al Qaeda lieutenant Abu Zubaydah, who was being interrogated at a secret CIA “black site” in the weeks before Padilla’s arrest. Zubaydah, now held at Guantanamo Bay, has since claimed he made false confessions under CIA torture.

Padilla was held in isolation at a Navy brig in South Carolina for 3 1/2 years before the military transferred him to civilian custody and the U.S. attorney’s office indicted him on the conspiracy and material support charges in January 2006.

By the time of Padilla’s arrest, the intelligence probe of Hassoun and another codefendant had all but run dry, according to witnesses. In Padilla’s last contact with his alleged co-conspirators, on April 10, 2000, he is heard complaining to Hassoun about life in Egypt and musing about moving elsewhere, possibly to Yemen.

Hassoun asks Padilla if he is thinking of returning to the United States.

“No, never,” Padilla responds, laughing. Not even “if you told me you had $4 million ... all the money in the world.”

In a conversation three months later, Hassoun asks another of his recruits, Mohamed Youssef, where Padilla has gone. Youssef replies that “he is supposed to be at Usama’s,” which FBI case agent John Kavanaugh told the jury meant that Padilla had gone to an Afghanistan terrorist training camp run by Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network.

In a later call with a South Florida woman who had tried unsuccessfully to deliver money to Padilla in Egypt, Hassoun laments that his recruit has “disappeared.”

Much of the taped conversation was inarticulate and hard to follow, even the recordings in English. Hassoun, Youssef and Padilla spoke vaguely and often seemed not to catch each other’s meanings.

Jurors heard the conversations in their original languages, usually Arabic, with English translations projected onto a screen in the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke. Many had an ominous tone due to a hollow background hum and the participants’ use of coded phrases.

But the tapes also cast Hassoun as a devout man moved by the plight of brothers in faith under attack in faraway conflicts. And Padilla, who left a wife and child in Broward County when he went to Egypt, also is heard asking Hassoun to make things right with his estranged spouse by giving her money a friend was holding for him from a car sale.

The government surveillance was extensive, covering more than 300,000 calls before the FBI took over the accumulated evidence in summer 2002 and began building a criminal case against Hassoun and former San Diego school administrator Kifah Wael Jayyousi.

Padilla was added to the 2004 indictment when his military jailers came under pressure to cease depriving the U.S. citizen of his constitutional right to due process.

carol.williams@latimes.com