The Agent Who Might Have Saved Hamid Hayat

Before the wins and losses are tallied up and the war on terror goes down in the books as either wisdom or folly, it might be recalled what took place this spring on the 13th floor of the federal courthouse in Sacramento. There, in a perfectly dignified room, in front of prosecutors, defense attorneys and judge, a tall, gaunt man named James Wedick Jr. was fighting for a chance to testify, to tell jurors about the 35 years he spent in the FBI and how it came to be that he was standing before them not on the side of the U.S. government but next to two Pakistani Muslims, son and father, whose books and prayers and immigrant dreams were now being picked over in the first terrorism trial in California.

Wedick watched the prosecutor from Washington stand up and call him a hired gun for the defense and say that any criticisms he had about the investigation would only confuse the jury and waste the court's time. He wanted to answer back that he had been the most decorated FBI agent to ever work out of the state capital, and for years prosecutors, judges and juries had nothing but time to ponder the way he busted dirty state senators and mobsters and cracked open the biggest health scam in California history. Yet he could only sit and listen as the judge ruled that by the weight of legal precedence, he would have to be muzzled. In eight weeks of trial, 15 witnesses for the prosecution and seven witnesses for the defense took the stand, yet the one whose testimony might have changed everything never got to tell his story. He never got to trace his metamorphosis to a Sunday morning last June, when he woke up thinking he had seen all the absurdities that a life of crime fighting had to offer only to find the FBI videotape--the confession that would become the heart of the terrorism case--on his doorstep.

It had arrived with no small hype: Down the road on Highway 99, the feds had busted up an Al Qaeda sleeper cell in Lodi, a little farm town at the northern edge of the San Joaquin Valley that had gone from the "watermelon capital of the world" in the 1880s to the "Tokay grape capital of the world" in the 1920s to the "Zinfandel capital of the world" today. The community boasted 60 wineries, 36 tasting rooms, a Zinfest in May and its own appellation: Lodi-Woodbridge. Somehow burrowed into the 90,000 acres of grape fields that pleated the rich, flat loam of the Mokelumne River basin was a radical young Muslim carrying a prayer of jihad in his wallet.