Here is the
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/01/22/070122fa_fact_khatchadourian?currentPage=all">long version.
Here is the short version:
1) After finishing high school in June 1995, 16 year old Adam Gadahn (his father, a hippy, changed his family's last name from Pearlman to Gadahn) moves in with his grandfather, a successful Jewish physician on the board of the ADL, in Santa Ana, CA. His intention in making this move is to find a job.
"Sometime in the fall of 1995, Gadahn found his way to the Islamic Society of Orange County, in Garden Grove. ... on November 17th, he returned to the Islamic Society and told the imam, Dr. Muzammil Siddiqi, that he was ready to convert." He requested that his conversion be made public in an optional ceremony and posted a message about his conversion on the internet that "gave the impression that his father was virtually a Muslim."
Concerning Siddiqi: "In December, 1992, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a prominent Egyptian cleric and Islamic radical also known as the Blind Sheikh, visited the Islamic Society to lecture about jihad, and Siddiqi sat beside him to translate. Abdel Rahman dismissed nonviolent definitions of jihad as weak. He stressed that a number of unspecified enemies had 'united themselves against Muslims' and that fighting them was obligatory. ... Videotapes of the lecture were later offered for sale at the society’s bookstore. Several months afterward, Abdel Rahman was indicted for helping to plot the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. One of his fatwas, issued from prison in 1998, became central to Al Qaeda’s justification of mass violence. (When I asked J. Stephen Tidwell, the assistant director of the F.B.I.’s Los Angeles division, about Siddiqi’s association with Abdel Rahman, he said, 'We have a very strong relationship with Dr. Siddiqi. You do have to put it into the context of back then.' Siddiqi told me that Abdel Rahman 'was touring, and some people insisted that he should be there.' Three days after September 11th, at the invitation of the White House, Siddiqi led a prayer at the National Cathedral, and later, in the Oval Office, he handed President George W. Bush a Koran and told him that Al Qaeda had nothing to do with what was in that book.)"
2) Haitham Bundakji then gives Adam Gadahn a job as the night shift security guard at the Islamic Society of Orange County's mosque.
Concerning Bundakji: "A stocky man with a goatee and a quick smile, he talks about 'building bridges' with other religious groups. He works closely with the local police department, where he is a chaplain, and believes that Muslim Americans should participate more actively in electoral politics. He is a Sunni, born in Jordan, but his wife is Shiite, so he likes to tell people that he is 'Sushi.' ... Bundakji’s nickname among non-Muslims is Danny, and sometimes, he told me, the men in the group called him 'Danny the Jew.'"
3) After Gadahn begins to successfully ingratiates himself with (reportedly militant) Muslim men who meet late at the mosque, Bundakji fires him from his security job. Gadahn, then moves in with the group of Muslims he has befriended. The two leaders of this group are an Egyptian named Hisham Diab and a Palestinian named Khalil Deek.
Concerning Deek and Diab: "Both were active in the discussion group, and were known to be militant in their political and religious beliefs. Diab had fought in Bosnia, and Deek’s extremist connections were 'well established in the classified intelligence,' a former senior C.I.A. officer told me. According to Qahoush, Deek would often leave the country for months at a time. In the late nineties, the National Security Council, concerned about possible terrorist attacks around the millennium, asked a team of private terrorism analysts to investigate Deek and Diab’s activities.
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/05/29/060529fa_fact?printable=true">Rita Katz, who is now the director of the SITE Institute, a nonprofit group that monitors jihadi communiqués on the Internet, led the investigation. ... Katz suspected that Deek was working as a coördinator for Al Qaeda groups in the West. She discovered that he had collaborated with Diab in California; the two men had set up a bogus nonprofit group, called Charity Without Borders, in Diab’s name, and Diab had even managed to obtain grants for it from the state."
4) In 1997, Gadahn takes his first trip to Pakistan, reportedly funded by Charity Without Borders. He returns "the following spring, suffering from a waterborne illness." His grandfather, physician Carl Pearlman, supervises his medical care.
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