Under the tutelage of a friend known to the Tsarnaev family only as Misha, Tamerlan gave up boxing and stopped studying music, his family said. He began opposing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He turned to websites and literature claiming that the CIA was behind the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and Jews controlled the world.

"Somehow, he just took his brain," said Tamerlan's uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, who recalled conversations with Tamerlan's worried father about Misha's influence. Efforts over several days by The Associated Press to identify and interview Misha have been unsuccessful.

Tamerlan's relationship with Misha could be a clue in understanding the motives behind his religious transformation and, ultimately, the attack itself. Two U.S. officials say he had no tie to terrorist groups.

Throughout his religious makeover, Tamerlan maintained a strong influence over his siblings, including Dzhokhar, who investigators say carried out the deadly attack by his older brother's side, killing three and injuring 264 people.

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The documents describe in extraordinary detail a secret program intended to catalog life inside Muslim neighborhoods as people immigrated, got jobs, became citizens and started businesses. The documents undercut the NYPD's claim that its officers only follow leads when investigating terrorism.

It started with one group, Moroccans, but the documents show police intended to build intelligence files on other ethnicities.

Undercover officers snapped photographs of restaurants frequented by Moroccans, including one that was noted for serving "religious Muslims." Police documented where Moroccans bought groceries, which hotels they visited and where they prayed. While visiting an apartment used by new Moroccan immigrants, an officer noted in his reports that he saw two Qurans and a calendar from a nearby mosque.

It was called the Moroccan Initiative.

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The documents, many marked "secret," highlight how the past decade's hunt for terrorists also put huge numbers of innocent people under scrutiny as they went about their daily lives in mosques, businesses and social groups.

An Associated Press investigation last month revealed that a secret squad known as the Demographics Unit sent teams of undercover officers to help key tabs on the area's Muslim communities. The recent documents are the first to quantify that effort.

Since the 2001 attacks, the police department has built one of the nation's most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies, one that operates far outside the city limits and maintains a list of "ancestries of interest" that it uses to focus its clandestine efforts. That effort has benefited from federal money and an unusually close relationship with the CIA, one that at times blurred the lines between domestic and foreign intelligence-gathering.

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The panicked superintendent dialed 911, sending police and the FBI rushing to the building near Rutgers University on the afternoon of June 2, 2009. What they found in that first-floor apartment, however, was not a terrorist hideout but a command center set up by a secret team of New York Police Department intelligence officers.

From that apartment, about an hour outside the department's jurisdiction, the NYPD had been staging undercover operations and conducting surveillance throughout New Jersey. Neither the FBI nor the local police had any idea.

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the NYPD has become one of the country's most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies. A months-long investigation by The Associated Press has revealed that the NYPD operates far outside its borders and targets ethnic communities in ways that would run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced by the federal government. And it does so with unprecedented help from the CIA in a partnership that has blurred the bright line between foreign and domestic spying.

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Hidden from view, standing just outside the frame of that now-famous photograph was a career CIA analyst. In the hunt for the world's most-wanted terrorist, there may have been no one more important. His job for nearly a decade was finding the al-Qaida leader.

The analyst was the first to put in writing last summer that the CIA might have a legitimate lead on finding bin Laden. He oversaw the collection of clues that led the agency to a fortified compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. His was among the most confident voices telling Obama that bin Laden was probably behind those walls.

The CIA will not permit him to speak with reporters. But interviews with former and current U.S. intelligence officials reveal a story of quiet persistence and continuity that led to the greatest counterterrorism success in the history of the CIA. Nearly all the officials insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters or because they did not want their names linked to the bin Laden operation.

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Shortly after the CIA decided to close the secret prisons, the U.S. intelligence agency returned al-Qaida operative Hassan Ghul in 2006 to his native Pakistan, which had been demanding his release since his capture about two years earlier.

Pakistan held Ghul for at least a year before he was released, eventually making his way back to al-Qaida to help with operations against the U.S., the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because details about Ghul's case remain classified.

Pakistan's decision to free Ghul, a midlevel al-Qaida operative, is yet another troubling revelation in a time when the U.S. is rethinking its relationship with the Pakistan and whether it can be a trusted ally in the war on terror. Members of Congress have talked about ending aid to Pakistan after bin Laden was found inside Pakistan, hiding out in an urban area not far from a military garrison. Last week, CIA Director Leon Panetta confronted Pakistan's intelligence service about tipping off militants running bomb factories aimed at killing U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

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President Barack Obama is going to ground zero in New York to mark the milestone and remember the dead of 9/11.

White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan said the U.S. already was scouring items seized in the raid -- said to include hard drives, DVD's, documents and more that might tip U.S. intelligence to al-Qaida's operational details and perhaps lead the manhunt to the presumed next-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri.

As for publicly releasing photos and video, Brennan said in a series of appearances on morning television: "This needs to be done thoughtfully," with careful consideration given to what kind of reaction the images might provoke.

At issue were photos of bin Laden's corpse and video of his swift burial at sea. Officials were reluctant to inflame Islamic sentiment by showing graphic images of the body. But they were also eager to address the mythology already building in Pakistan and beyond that bin Laden was somehow still alive.

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The military detainee assessments were made public Sunday night by U.S. and European newspapers after the WikiLeaks website obtained the files. The records contain details of the more than 700 detainee interrogations and evidence the U.S. had collected against these suspected terrorists, according to the media outlets.

It's not clear if the media outlets published the documents with the consent of WikiLeaks.

The files -- know as Detainee Assessment Briefs or DABs -- describe the intelligence value of the detainees and whether they would be a threat to the U.S. if released. To date, 604 detainees have been transferred out of Guantanamo while 172 remain locked up.

The disclosures are likely to provide human right activists with additional ammunition that some cases against inmates appear to be based on flawed evidence. However, the DABs show certain inmates were more dangerous than previously known to the public and could complicate efforts by the U.S. to transfer detainees out of the controversial prison that President Barack Obama has failed to close.

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Levinson's fate has been a mystery since 2007. Iran has repeatedly denied knowing what happened to him, but the U.S. has believed he was snatched by Iranian officials.

Current and former U.S. officials say Levinson's family received proof he was alive late last year. The U.S. plans an announcement Thursday and will thank Iran for its help, an apparent sign of improvement in the stalemated relationship. It's still unclear who's holding Levinson, or where.

The Associated Press is not disclosing the nature of the proof because officials believe that would hurt efforts to free him.

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The arrest last month of 36-year-old Raymond Allen Davis has caused an international diplomatic crisis. The U.S. has repeatedly asserted that Davis had diplomatic immunity and should have been released immediately.

But former and current U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to talk publicly about the incident, told the AP that Davis had been working as a CIA security contractor for the U.S. consulate in Lahore.

Davis, a former Special Forces soldier who left the military in 2003, shot the men in what he described as an attempted armed robbery in the eastern city of Lahore.

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But he was the wrong guy.

A hard-charging CIA analyst had pushed the agency into one of the biggest diplomatic embarrassments of the U.S. war on terrorism. Yet despite recommendations, the analyst was never punished. In fact, she's risen in the agency.

That botched case is but one example of a CIA accountability process that even some within the agency say is unpredictable and inconsistent. In the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, officers who committed mistakes that left people wrongly imprisoned or even dead received only minor admonishments or no punishment at all, an Associated Press investigation has found.

And though President Barack Obama has sought to put the CIA's interrogation program behind him, the result of a decade of haphazard accountability is that many officers who made significant missteps are now the senior managers fighting Obama's spy wars.

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Seven CIA employees were killed in the blast set off by a Jordanian double agent inside an Afghan base.

Panetta says separate internal reviews by agency officials and outside experts concluded the bombing may have been preventable. But a patchwork system of responsible officials left no one in charge of vetting the suicide bomber, failing to rigorously check his background and loyalties before he was brought to the base.

In an interview Tuesday, Panetta says the agency would tighten security procedures, improve training for war assignments and create an analytic team to better spot double agents.

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Modeled after U.S. special forces, the Counterterrorist Pursuit Team was set up in the months following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2002 to penetrate territory controlled by the Taliban and al-Qaida and target militants for interrogations by CIA officials.

The 3,000-strong Afghan teams are used for surveillance and long-range reconnaissance missions and some have trained at CIA facilities in the United States. The force has operated in Kabul and some of Afghanistan's most violence-wracked provinces including Kandahar, Khost, Paktia and Paktika, according to a security professional familiar with the program.

The security official and former intelligence officials spoke about the Afghan force on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the sensitive information.

The secret Afghan force has emerged as a new component of ramped-up American counter-terror operations against the Taliban in Afghanistan and against al-Qaida and allies over the mountainous border in Pakistan. The U.S. military, including special operations forces, has been working with the CIA in an intensified crackdown against militants on both sides of the border.

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Officials believe the men were planning attacks with portable but powerful bombs like the ones at the heart of last year's failed suicide attack in the New York City subway, an attack U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has called one of the most serious plots since 9/11. On Wednesday, U.S. prosecutors revealed the existence of a related plot in Manchester, England.

The plots underscore al-Qaida's interest in smaller-level attacks that don't require the intricate planning and coordination of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in which airplanes were hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center towers in New York City and the Pentagon in Arlington, Va. And they follow a trend in which the terrorist group has used operatives inside potential target countries, rather than trying to sneak people across increasingly secure borders.

The three men, whose names were not released, had been under surveillance for more than a year. Two were arrested in Norway and one in Germany. Officials would not say what country or site was the target of the latest terror threat, or even whether they believed the men had selected a target.

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The magazine, called Inspire, is being run by al-Qaida's branch in Yemen, which has been linked to the failed Christmas Day bombing attempt of a U.S.-bound airliner.

The launch suggests that, as al-Qaida's core has been weakened by CIA drone airstrikes, the group hopes to broaden its reach inside the U.S., where officials have seen a spate of homegrown terrorists.

"This new magazine is clearly intended for the aspiring jihadist in the U.S. or U.K. who may be the next Fort Hood murderer or Times Square bomber," Bruce Riedel, a Brookings Institution scholar and former CIA officer, said.

Tuesday's launch did not go smoothly. The magazine was 67 pages long, but all but the first three pages were just garbled computer code, according to SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors jihadist websites and obtained a copy of the magazine.

The table of contents included articles such as "Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom," which promised to be "a detailed yet short, easy-to-read manual on how to make a bomb using ingredients found in a kitchen."

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"I would sacrifice myself to bring attention to what the U.S. military was doing to civilians in Afghanistan," Najibullah Zazi, 25, told a federal judge in a Brooklyn courtroom.

The Afghan native pleaded guilty to conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction, conspiracy to commit murder in a foreign country and providing material support for a terrorist organization. He faces a life prison sentence without parole at a sentencing in June.

Zazi said he went to Pakistan in 2008 to join the Taliban and fight against the U.S. military but was recruited by the terrorist network and went into a training camp.

He admitted building homemade explosives with beauty supplies purchased in the Denver suburbs and cooked up in a Colorado hotel room, then driving them cross-country to New York City just before the eighth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

Zazi told authorities he disposed of the explosives once arriving in New York.

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Law enforcement officials tell The Associated Press that Najibullah Zazi (nah-jee-BOO'-lah ZAH'-zee) had told federal prosecutors he was armed with bomb-making materials when he drove to New York City last September.

But one official says that Zazi flushed the explosives down the toilet in New York after becoming concerned about a traffic stop.

The official wasn't authorized to speak publicly about the case and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.

Two law enforcement officials told The AP Zazi has agreed to enter a guilty plea Monday.

An official says Zazi reached the plea deal after cooperating with authorities.

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Associated Press writer Devlin Barrett in Washington contributed to this report.

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