The terror soldiers of al-Quaeda move seamlessly from nation to nation, continent to continent, changing names, passports, entire identities time and again.
Osama bin Laden's men shed their own devout customs to elude detection, shaving beards in secular lands and carrying duty-free cigarettes and cologne to throw border agents off the scent.
Some work as fishermen, grocers, or burger flippers, while others carry suitcases bulging with down-payments for Kalashnikov rifles, night scopes, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, and enriched weapons-grade uranium.
Their commitment is unyielding. They film their own suicide videos before they hop into pickup trucks loaded with hundreds of pounds of TNT, turn on audio cassettes chanting praise to those who will die for the cause, and blow themselves to bits to weaken the social foundation of their worst enemy: the US.
The profile of al-Quaeda, Arabic for "the Base", unreels in recorded testimony tucked away in the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan. Largely unnoticed by the public at the time, a trial that ended last June generated insight into the terrorist organisation that ultimately would be linked to the deadly attacks on the World Trade Centre towers and the Pentagon.
A clear picture of al-Quaeda came from testimony from al-Owhali, a young Saudi who told an FBI interrogator why he so wished to die at the US embassy in Nairobi. Other answers came from Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, a Sudani nearly twice the age of the young Saudi. Al-Fadl had defected from al-Quaeda with many secrets. His testimony formed an operative flow-chart of the organisation for US counter-terrorism officials.
The older man was well-acquainted with al-Quaeda's inner roots; the younger man stood as testimony to its bitter fruit.
Al-Fadl offered little evidence against the defendants in the trial. His testimony was aimed squarely at bin Laden, buttressed by similar accounts by two other al-Quaeda defectors and by terror mission documents left on computer discs that were seized by FBI agents in Nairobi after the blasts.
He sketched his own early life as that of a drifter. But in New York, he found religion at the Farouq Mosque, where Emir Mustafa Shalabi was urging all Muslims - young, strong, male and able - to head to Afghanistan and fight the Soviet infidels.
It was a holy call to arms that would become bin Laden's fertile recruiting ground.
He painted a clear picture of the organisation's structure. At the top, al-Fadl explained, is a "shura council", veteran clerics and military leaders from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Yemen and other nations - all freedom fighters who have proved themselves in jihad.
The council sunders into committees. A military group is headed by field commanders. There's a fatwa group of mullahs and religious clerics who mesh Islam with bin Laden's jihad battle plan.
There's even a media group that handles al-Quaeda's public-relations. Al-Fadl said he became a key player in the fourth committee, finance, where trusted aides would buy farms and other businesses to give cover for bin Laden's terror operations.
As for recruits to this new holy army, al-Fadl said, the brutality of the Soviet occupation, the Gulf War's Muslim casualties and oppressive Arab and African regimes took care of that.
Along with their weapons training, they learned to cluster in small cells, operate on scant bits of command information, hew to the discipline of silence.
And, always, al-Quaeda's moles followed bin Laden's exhortation "to be patient".
Thousands of motivated, rootless young Muslims across the globe flocked to al-Quaeda's core.
"You need to be a normal person," al-Fadl was told by one commander.
"If you go with beard and Islamic dress, the intelligence officer (in target countries) ... want to ask a lot of questions."
Leave the Koran and prayer books behind, al-Quaeda's men were told.
On a trip to Egypt, al-Fadl got the standard line from his commander, Abu Talal al Masry: Buy cologne and cigarettes.
"He (would) say if somebody in customs" sees the cologne and cigarettes, "he is not going to think you are in an Islamic group or anything like," al-Fadl testified.
Al-Quaeda also began acquiring ventures, mimicking Western corporations. Al-Fadl bought farms, one for $250,000, to grow sesame seeds, peanuts and corn in the Sudanese countryside.
He sent the crops to Afghanistan in planes that returned with British- and American-made night goggles, rifle scopes and other advanced military gear, he said.
Bin Laden told al-Fadl: "Our agenda is bigger than business." The companies were both fronts for the terror cells and cash cows for future operations. Al-Fadl was given several units to run.
Cash flowed freely for bigger and bigger equipment. Bin Laden acquired an $80,000 satellite phone from Germany - later junked when he discovered it was being monitored by US agents. And he entrusted an Egyptian who took aviation training at a flight school in Texas with $210,000 to buy a Saber-40 jet plane.
Bin Laden was ebullient with the purchase until the jet fell into disrepair and crashed on a Khartoum runway.
Dissatisfied with his $500-a- month salary al-Fadl stole money from the organisation and found himself under threat.
He went to the visa office of an unnamed American embassy in mid-1996, patiently explaining he was among al-Quaeda's founders and feared bin Laden's wrath. He was soon in the protective hands of US intelligence authorities.
That same year Mohamed al-Owhali's career as an al-Quaeda suicide bomber began.
His story is a portrait of an al-Quaeda suicide bomber.
Basic training lasted just a month: light weapons, demolition, communications, religious ideology.
Al-Owhali said he excelled and was given an audience with bin Laden, who "impressed on them the need to fight the Americans and cast them out of the Arabian Peninsula".
Al-Owhali then graduated to the jihad war camp for training in intelligence, information management, kidnapping and hijacking, and explained to US agents that al- Quaeda "is not a particular place, but it's a group, and it stands for the base of God's support, and that bin Laden is ... in charge of al-Quaeda".
Al-Quaeda's top-tier camp, which accepted al-Owhali only after he battled bravely for months alongside the Taliban for control of the Afghan capital, was where recruits earned an advanced degree in the equivalent of terrorist management.
At one point during his final training, one of his superiors said: "There are targets in the US that we could hit, but things are not ready yet, we don't have everything prepared yet.
"First we must ... have many attacks outside the US and this will weaken the US and make way for our ability to strike within the US."
Soon, al-Owhali was ordered to shave his beard and go to Yemen. He was given an official passport identifying him as an Iraqi, Abdul Ali Latif.
Al-Owhali said he spent about two months living with other al-Quaeda camp graduates in the Red Sea nation.
With the help of well-established al-Quaeda operatives there, he got a Yemeni passport with yet another identity: Khalid Salim Saleh Bin Rashid.
Al-Owhali was then ordered back to Pakistan, where a senior al-Quaeda operative told him "that the mission was going to be a martyrdom operation that would result in al-Owhali's own death; that there was going be ... a target against the United States where al-Owhali would be assisting in driving a truck full of explosives."
Finally, al-Owhali was told to make a martyrdom video that "would be played upon the successful completion of his mission". But in the end, al-Owhali didn't die.
The reason, his attorney and Islamic scholars say, is an important nuance in understanding al-Quaeda.
His precise mission was to ride in the passenger seat of the bomb truck. His partner - a close and equally committed friend from the Taliban wars named Azzam - was to drive.
At the embassy gate, al-Owhali was to hop out, throw stun grenades at the embassy's entrance guard, lift the gate for the truck to pass and then blow up with it.
Al-Owhali threw the grenades. The gate went up.
The bomb blew, along with Azzam, and al-Owhali was left with only cuts and bruises.
He went to the hospital instead of paradise, later explaining "to die after your mission had already been complete ... is not martyrdom. It's suicide," which is a taboo in Islam.
When the World Trade Centre towers collapsed on September 11th, al-Owhali and nearly a dozen others charged in the embassy-bombing case were in their cells on the 10th floor of the Metropolitan Correctional Centre, just six blocks away.