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In Alaska, becoming the militants next door

By Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times

FAIRTON, N.J. — A little more than a year ago, he was a weather forecaster at a remote outpost in King Salmon, Alaska, population 442. He and his wife — he with his close-trimmed red beard and shy smile, she with her rosebud cheeks and sweet English accent — lived in a two-story frame house strewn with toys. They were popular dinner companions and regulars at community theater productions.

Now, Paul Rockwood Jr. is a convicted terrorist, serving eight years in a federal prison. His wife, Nadia, is exiled on probation in England after her own criminal conviction. Since their arrest in 2010 — accused by the FBI of drafting and delivering a list of targets for terrorist attacks — friends and neighbors have been left in confusion, wondering how the nice young couple could have turned into the terrorists next door.

The possible answer, provided in Rockwood’s first interview since his arrest, opens a window into one man’s uncertain spiritual journey and radicalization after the Sept. 11 attacks. It also offers a glimpse of the government’s increasingly deep dragnet for suspected domestic terrorists.

To federal authorities, Rockwood, 36, is a man who turned from hard-partying bartender and ex-Navy seaman to Muslim militant committed to killing fellow Americans.

To Rockwood, the plot involving targeted assassinations and bombs was a “pure fantasy” created by a government agent he thought was his friend — a common refrain in the nation’s burgeoning number of “home-grown” terrorism plots prosecuted since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Rockwood concedes he drew up a list of people. He thought they should be punished.

“But … it was all talk,” Rockwood said from a small interview room at the correctional facility he has called home since July 2010.

By his account Sept. 11 stunned and repelled Rockwood and his wife, both raised Catholic and living in Virginia. Rockwood had recently gotten a job as a contractor with the National Weather Service, hoping to eventually land a full civil service position and a more stable future.

“A week later, I was flying back from New Mexico and I was telling my co-workers, ‘I’m not getting on the plane if there’s Arab or Muslim people on the plane,’ ” he said. “But as time went on, I started needing to know why somebody would kill themselves, flying a plane into a building.”

Rockwood was taking medication for anxiety and Meniere’s disease, an affliction of the inner ear that causes vertigo, headaches and nausea. He was also trying to cut back on his partying and had taken a comparative religion class to try to quiet his mind.

He started studying Islam online.

“I was struck by how similar the beliefs in Islam were to Christianity, and at the same time, I guess also the differences made sense to me — it was a straighter path,” he said.

Rockwood said he also felt he was beginning to understand what had driven the Sept. 11 hijackers. “These people felt that they had been under attack,” he said. “They kind of saw it as a self-defense response. It was like you’d be impressed if an American soldier jumps on a grenade to save his buddies — it takes a lot of courage to give up your life like that.”

In December, only three months after the attacks, Rockwood took the shehada, the Muslim affirmation of faith, and not long after began attending the radical Dar al-Arqam mosque in Falls Church, Va. That mosque had frequently served as a platform for Ali al-Timimi, a radical lecturer who would soon be convicted and sentenced to life in prison on charges of soliciting followers to join the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Here, Rockwood was exposed to the teachings of Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni American engineer whose entreaties to U.S. Muslims to engage in jihad made him one of the most influential voices of violent, radical Islam in the West. Al-Awlaki was killed in September in a U.S. missile strike in Yemen.

“I held beliefs that were similar to his beliefs,” Rockwood said. Among them were outrage at the deaths of innocents, fury at war crimes committed by U.S. troops and a conviction that the Iraq war had been started to lock up new oil supplies for the U.S.

Nadia resented the way her husband’s newfound religion consumed him, and the couple separated for a time. Eventually, though, she converted to Islam. Not long after, the couple’s first child was born, and Rockwood took the job in King Salmon — his civil service entree into the weather service.

Nadia integrated easily into the close-knit social life in King Salmon, but it was harder for Rockwood. “Some of the best people I ever met lived in King Salmon. But it was hard for me not to have other Muslims,” he said.

Two years after arriving, and again in 2009, Rockwood traveled to Cairo, hoping to find a way that he and Nadia could move there and enroll their young son in an international madrasa. Nadia, though, didn’t want to live in Egypt. So Rockwood did his best to settle into life in King Salmon, relishing the occasional chance to debate politics and the war in Iraq — especially with his then-boss, whom he described as a devout Christian and a fellow military veteran.

His boss, he feels sure, noticed he was listening to al-Awlaki sermons and using his personal laptop to visit websites such as Revolution Muslim, which praised Nidal Malik Hasan’s deadly 2009 shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, as a “pre-emptive attack.” It was his boss, he believes, that called him to the FBI’s attention — though the government has said its initial tip in the case came from outside Alaska.

By that time, Rockwood was back on prescription meds to counter a flare-up of his Meniere’s disease. He was lonely and thinking again about moving to Egypt.

“I don’t know how to express it. I was depressed about everything. I was upset. I wanted to leave the country, but at the same time, I wanted to change the country. I was confused. I’m still confused. I guess to compare it, I’m kind of sympathetic about how the Japanese-Americans must have felt in World War II,” he said.

That was when one of the leaders at the mosque in Anchorage asked if he wouldn’t like to meet a potential convert. The gentleman was a state trooper, he was told, and wanted to learn more about the religion. Would Rockwood talk about his own experience?

They met and became, Rockwood thought, fast friends. “Every time I came to Anchorage we would go to the mosque, go out to dinner, he’d ask me for help in how to recite the Quran, how to fast. He actually became a Muslim. He took the shehada. He said the words,” Rockwood said, a little incredulously.

“Our conversations for months and months had nothing to do with politics or jihad and the wars. But slowly over time, that was all he wanted to talk about,” Rockwood said. “He’d bring up certain things or ask me certain questions to try to get me riled up. Things like atrocities that were committed during the war. Abu Ghraib, the villages, the rapes. Basically, we’d both share our outrage and ask, what should be done about this? Who should be doing something about this?”

The discussions — often carried out at an expensive hotel where the trooper paid to put up Rockwood in a room — began to grow deadly serious.

“We decided to assassinate certain people. We had these conversations. I’m not going to deny it,” Rockwood said. “I told him that I’d kept news articles with the names of people that were involved in the atrocities and stuff. He said, ‘Great, get me a list of names.’ Part of it was a macho kind of thing. … Also, he was offering me money. He said he was going to give me $8,000 (to get started on the plan).”

Rockwood said the trooper bought cellphones and other electronic devices that purportedly were to be used as remote triggers for bombs.

But at the same time, Rockwood and his wife had been talking about moving to England — his Meniere’s disease had become devastating, and the National Health Service there would provide free treatment. He gave notice at work, and the couple held a garage sale to get rid of most of their possessions.

“I knew I was never going to do anything. I knew I was going to go to England and not come back. But I needed the money. It’s not a redeeming quality, but I was using him for my own purposes. I didn’t realize at the time that he was using me, too.”

It all came to a head on the eve of their intended departure when Rockwood talked on the phone with the trooper, who said from Anchorage that he needed the list of names. Nadia was going to Anchorage, so Rockwood gave her the list. When she arrived, she met the trooper at Wal-Mart — and was filmed by the FBI handing over the envelope.

Rockwood shook his head. “If it was happening now, when I’m clear-headed, I definitely wouldn’t have gone along with it,” he said. “All it would have taken was a conversation to wake me up and snap me out of it.”

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