Friends unaware of FBI informant

PRINEVILLE, Ore. – Naseem Khan was a charmer.

After a chance meeting in 1999 at the California gas station he managed, the Pakistani immigrant moved to the high desert of central Oregon, where a family he didn’t know put him up while he found a job as an assistant manager in a Taco Bell.

Marcy Kimler recalls her son deciding, after initial misgivings, that Khan was one of those people you just knew you could trust. Khan smiled so much Kimler used to tell him to stop or people would think he was crazy. And he almost convinced Kimler’s grandmother that he was one of her grandsons.

“I really liked him,” said Kimler, who manages the vehicle fleet for the Ochoco National Forest in Prineville. “My son felt the same way. The way Klayton explained it was you know in your heart when you meet a good person. He said you just connect with certain people.”

Kimler had no idea that while living in Bend, Khan was recruited as an informant by the FBI, code-named “Wildcat,” until he started testifying in the terrorism trial of two fellow Pakistani immigrants in Lodi, Calif.

“He told me (the FBI) offered him a job translating Pashto (the language of northern Pakistan), and he was scared,” Kimler said. “He’d never been involved in anything like that. He didn’t know if he could trust them to protect him.”

A few weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Khan came under scrutiny in the probe of a Muslim charity.

According to trial testimony, he told an agent he knew nothing about the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, but did know of two businesses in California’s Central Valley he suspected were illegally sending money overseas.

The FBI gave Khan, now 32, a sports car and a cover story that he worked for a computer company. Khan left a girlfriend with whom he shared a house in La Pine, a small town south of Bend, and went back to Lodi, the same town where he lived when his chance conversation with Kimler led him to Oregon.

There he told members of the Muslim community that he could send their money to foreign extremist organizations in a way that couldn’t be traced.

Among those whose trust he gained were two people who were also of Pakistani descent: Umer Hayat, a 48-year-old ice cream truck driver who became a naturalized U.S. citizen after emigrating from Pakistan; and his son, Hamid Hayat, now 23, who was born in the U.S..

With Khan as a key witness, Hamid Hayat was tried on charges he went back to Pakistan and attended a terrorist training camp then lied about it to the FBI. His father was tried on charges he lied to protect his son.

In the hundreds of hours of conversations taped by Khan, the elder Hayat called him a son, and the younger called him his best friend and brother. When Hamid Hayat was in Pakistan, Khan exhorted him on the telephone to “be a man” and get some terrorist training.

“From what I know of him, he took his jobs really serious,” recalled Kimler. “The last time I talked to him was four or five months ago. He said his job would be over, and he would like to buy some property somewhere. I had no idea about any trial. It was kind of shocking, actually.”

The government paid Khan about $230,000 for his services.