For someone interested in quietly leading a terrorist's life, the rainy Indonesian hamlet of Cijeruk is a nice place to settle down. Nestled among lush, green paddies and swaying banana trees, an hour's drive outside the chaotic capital city of Jakarta, Cijeruk consists of a single two-lane road lined by a row of well-kept cottages. It's a good spot to hide from the authorities, if you have reason to be on the run--which may be how Omar al-Faruq, a 31-year-old drifter from Kuwait, ended up living there, in a concrete house that belonged to the family of his Indonesian wife Mira Agustina, 24. After moving to Cijeruk last year, al-Faruq tried to fit in with locals, getting by with functional Indonesian-language skills and an ID card that said he was from the eastern Indonesian city of Ambon. His wife says he read and taught the Koran and stayed close to home--until one day in June, when he vanished. "He called at noon that Wednesday to say he was going to the mosque," says Mira. "I never heard from him again."
If she is to be believed, Mira, like the rest of the world, is only beginning to discover the truth about her husband. On June 5 government agents arrested al-Faruq at a mosque in nearby Bogor. Three days later, Indonesian authorities deported al-Faruq to the U.S.-held air base in Bagram, Afghanistan, where CIA investigators have been interrogating suspected members of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist organization. But al-Faruq was no ordinary operative.
According to a secret CIA document and regional intelligence reports obtained by TIME, U.S. officials already had reason to believe al-Faruq was one of bin Laden's top representatives in Southeast Asia, responsible for coordinating the activities of the region's disparate Islamic militant groups and employing their forces to conduct terror attacks against the U.S. and its allies. According to one regional intelligence memo, the CIA had been told of al-Faruq's role by Abu Zubaydah, the highest ranking al-Qaeda official in U.S. custody and a valuable, if at times manipulative, source of intelligence on the terror network and its plans. Initially, al-Faruq was not as cooperative. Though al-Faruq was subjected to three months of psychological interrogation tactics--a U.S. counterterrorism official says they included isolation and sleep deprivation--he stayed virtually silent.