In 1999, a group of reformers ousted Alamoudi as AMC executive director amid questions about the group’s opaque finances and mysterious Middle Eastern funding sources. Alamoudi took a position at the affiliated American Muslim Foundation but remained in control of the AMC through friendly board members, the reformers said. “I had concerns about the reluctance to reveal information about the finances. They said they’re not doing well, that they needed more money, but I looked at their office [in Washington], and it was very big,” said one of the would-be reformers, Ikram Khan, a surgeon in Las Vegas. Khan said he resigned from the AMC board when his friend, Nazir Khaja, a Pakistani-American physician from California who was trying to open the group’s books, told him that Alamoudi was not cooperating. “I said, ‘If this is the case, I cannot continue to serve in the group,’ and I sent in my resignation letter,” Khan said.

Then, last August, a man with a Libyan accent left a suitcase with $340,000 in cash for Alamoudi outside his hotel room in London, according to the October 2003 indictment of the American Muslim leader. Alamoudi was then arrested upon his return to the United States, the indictment said. The Alamoudi mystery deepened on June 10, when the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal reported that he had told authorities he was part of an alleged plot by Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi to assassinate Crown Prince Abdullah, the Saudi leader. Now, the U.S. Justice Department is examining whether Alamoudi was conspiring with a London group the Saudi government says is linked to Osama bin Laden.

“Who is Abdurahman Alamoudi? We really don’t know,” one of the concerned government officials said. “So how can we say there is not a problem with his former aide? He [Gill] has access to information about all our vulnerabilities — aviation, ports. He knows what is protected and what is not.”

The Homeland Security spokeswoman, Petrovich, declined to discuss these issues. Instead, she released this statement: “Prior to Faisal Gill’s employment with the department, the [internal] Office of Security went to great lengths to investigate his background and ensure there were no potential conflicts or inappropriate activities in relation to Mr. Gill. Following a thorough investigation, we found that Mr. Gill exceeded all requirements set forth by the department’s Office of Security for access to classified information, as prescribed by the intelligence community, that allows him to conduct his day-to-day duties for the department.”

Yet some officials remain concerned that Gill apparently enjoys the political protection of Norquist, the architect of the 1994 Republican election sweep that brought Georgia Republican Newt Gingrich to power as House speaker. Norquist speaks of “crushing” his political opponents and dismisses those who don’t agree with his anti-tax, anti-government agenda as “Bolsheviks.” His power derives from a formidable coalition of evangelical, business and other conservative groups that he controls to push favored GOP issues, as well as from his close relationship with White House political chief Karl Rove.

In 1998, Norquist and a former deputy to Alamoudi at the AMC co-founded the nonprofit Islamic Institute as part of a drive to win Muslim voters for Bush in 2000. Alamoudi donated $35,000 to the institute, records show. Soon, the Islamic Institute, the AMC and Al-Arian were all working together on a top priority for American Muslims: an end to the use of classified intelligence to jail noncitizens as national-security threats. Al-Arian’s brother-in-law had been jailed on the basis of such secret evidence linking him to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Al-Arian lobbied heavily on Capitol Hill to end the practice. In October 2000, through the efforts of Norquist and Rove, Bush came out against secret evidence in a debate with Al Gore, and the AMC endorsed Bush for president. Al-Arian would later claim that the Muslim votes he rounded up for Bush in Florida helped decide the election.

Gill was in the middle of these advocacy efforts. As director of government affairs at Norquist’s Islamic Institute, Gill lobbied against the use of secret evidence, according to a May 2001 release on the institute’s Web site. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Gill was quoted in news articles as a spokesman for the AMC. A Washington Post article from May 2001, meanwhile, identified Gill as a spokesman for the “fledgling” Taxpayers Alliance of Prince William County, Va., which is affiliated with Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform. According to the Post article, Norquist was slated to appear with Gill at an anti-tax rally.

Gill is one of several former Alamoudi associates who have shuffled in recent years among Norquist’s operations, the AMC, and government and politics. They include Abdulwahab Alkebsi, a former executive director of the Islamic Institute and a spokesman for the AMC who is now a program director for the National Endowment for Democracy, where he is responsible for administering millions of dollars in grant money for Iraq. What’s more, in 2003 Norquist held a fundraiser at his Capitol Hill home for Alamoudi’s former lawyer, Kamal Nawash, who was running for a Virginia state Senate seat. And Norquist’s co-founder of the Islamic Institute, former AMC deputy director Khaled Saffuri, works closely with the White House on Muslim outreach issues.

These outreach efforts have put Norquist in an unusual defensive position. Former Bush speechwriter David Frum, conservative investigative journalist Kenneth Timmerman, and Center for Security Policy president Frank Gaffney, among others, have criticized Norquist’s alliances.

Gaffney did not respond to my request for an interview. But his feud with Norquist spilled into public view in January 2003 at the Conservative Political Action Conference near Washington. According to an account in the National Review, Gaffney told the conference-goers: “I’m sorry to say there is an active and, to a considerable degree successful, [radical Muslim] political operation aimed not least at the Bush White House.” Norquist responded by calling Gaffney a bigot and barring him from an influential meeting of conservatives that Norquist holds on Wednesdays in Washington.

And there are other unexplained threads connecting Muslim leaders who are under investigation to Norquist’s influence-peddling operation. In 2000 and 2001, for example, a firm with which Norquist has been registered as a lobbyist, Janus-Merritt Strategies, reported that Alamoudi had paid the company a total of $40,000 for lobbying on human rights issues and Malaysia. But in a Dec. 17, 2001, letter to the secretary of the U.S. Senate, which administers public lobbying records, a managing partner of the firm wrote that Janus-Merritt had erred in identifying Alamoudi as its client. The letter said the actual client was another Muslim leader who could be reached at 555 Grove St. in Herndon, Va.

Three months later, dozens of federal agents, with their guns drawn, burst through the doors of that office building in Herndon, seizing evidence in the United States’ ongoing investigation of international terrorist financial networks.