Generally sympathetically, putting the most damning facts at the end of the story.
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Mr. Hawash started working for Intel in 1992 as a software engineer on cutting-edge digital video software. With an Intel colleague, he co-wrote a book on advanced video graphics. When his father, a carpenter in Nablus, on the West Bank, became ill, Intel made special arrangements for him to work in 1994 at an Intel facility in Israel, according to a former Intel supervisor. His close friends say that after he returned to Portland about two years later he continued to have Jewish Israeli friends. Intel eliminated Mr. Hawash's division in 2001 and he lost his job. But the company took him back as a contract employee.
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Rohan Coelho, a close friend of Mr. Hawash's -- he introduced Mr. Hawash to his future wife and was best man at their wedding -- said before the charges were filed that he couldn't conceive of Mr. Hawash setting off to do anything violent or anti-American.
But to friends such as Mr. Coelho and Ms. Gregory, it appears that Mr. Hawash was deeply influenced by the recent death of his father, and in the aftermath underwent a religious reawakening.
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According to the criminal complaint, Mr. Hawash allegedly went to China six weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks with a mostly down-on-its luck group of five fellow Muslims from Portland. Those individuals, and the wife of one who is accused only of wiring money to her husband in China, were charged in October 2002 with conspiring to make war against the U.S. by attempting to aid the Taliban and al Qaeda. They have all pleaded not guilty and denied the charges.
The charges stem from an alleged attempt to reach the Taliban to aid the ultra-orthodox Islamic regime in defending Afghanistan against the American military attack. They traveled from Portland to China, but quickly abandoned their plan because they could not reach Afghanistan. Evidence so far made public indicates that they never made contact with the Taliban, and most simply returned home to Portland.
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Mr. Coelho, a former Intel software engineer, said in an interview before the charges were filed that some time around October 2001, Mr. Hawash left the U.S. for "a couple of weeks," telling friends and family that he was going to visit his mother and sister in Nablus. Mr. Coelho said that when Mr. Hawash returned, he said that he hadn't been allowed into the West Bank. He didn't want to talk much about his trip.
The trip followed a marked change in Mr. Hawash, after which he increasingly turned toward his ancestral religion. Until his father's death in early 2001, friends say, Mr. Hawash had routinely fasted during the holy month of Ramadan. But otherwise he seemed to pay little attention to religious observance. After his father died, Mr. Hawash stopped drinking alcohol, grew a beard, and made a pilgrimage to Mecca, according to his friends.
The transformation resulted in strains on his marriage. "As Mike became a lot more Muslim, the change was something Lisa had to struggle with," Mr. Coelho said, adding that she felt that he was no longer "the person she first married." It got so bad, Mr. Coelho said, that one night the couple fought and Mr. Hawash ended up sleeping in his car. Mrs. Hawash could not be reached.
Just before he left on the October 2001 trip, moreover, Mr. Hawash took several steps that suggest he thought he might not return. He paid off the mortgage on his house, for example, and transferred title of it to his wife. But Mr. Coelho says Mr. Hawash said he paid off the mortgage simply because the Koran forbids Muslims to borrow money at interest. And he said Mr. Hawash transferred title to the house because he wanted to get his affairs in order in case he got stuck in the West Bank indefinitely, due to continuing violence and uncertainty about the border.
In an affidavit filed in court with the charges, the FBI said that Lisa Hawash had told them that her husband said he was going to China to look for business opportunities. But the FBI said that his telephone records showed no phone calls to China before he left.
Mr. Coelho and other friends say that Mr. Hawash, like other Palestinians, might have reasons to be angry with Israel and the support it has received from the U.S. When Mr. Hawash was a child, his family was exiled for a time by Israel to Kuwait, the friends say. In recent months an Israeli tank has been stationed in front of Mr. Hawash's mother's house, often firing shells over her roof at Palestinian targets.
Nevertheless, he says he can't imagine Mr. Hawash engaging in violence. He says that as his friend became more religious, Mr. Coelho, a devout Catholic born in India, challenged him about whether Islam, with its requirement for jihad, or holy war, prescribed in the Koran, wasn't a violent religion. "He said actually 'no'," Mr. Coelho recalls. "He said the religion is about peace and charity."
Ms. Gregory, the Intel executive, recalls that when Mr. Hawash returned from making the pilgrimage to Mecca, he complained bitterly about fellow Muslims who he said had pushed and shoved as the pilgrims approached the holy places, in contravention of what he said was supposed to be the religion's spirit of peace and cooperation. "He told me that there was a whole class of people who didn't seem to understand what it was all about," she says.
Friends also say they find it hard to believe that Mr. Hawash would have accompanied the individuals charged in the earlier indictment. While the Portland Muslim community is small, estimated at from 7,000 to 10,000 individuals, and closely knit, the five defendants who allegedly set off to fight for the Taliban were people with menial jobs who associated with few people outside of the Muslim community, and weren't the type Mr. Hawash normally spent time with. They included a nurse's aid, a bagel-maker and someone who sold cellphones and taught physical education part time at a local Muslim school.
But the FBI affidavit states that neighbors told FBI agents that they had seen several of the defendants in the Portland case at Mr. Hawash's house in the month or so before their alleged departure for China and that one of them had done yard work for the Hawash family.
