'I Want to Go Home'

Tony Oulai sat down in a small cubicle and picked up a telephone. Through the plexiglass wall separating him from his visitors, his chocolate complexion was stark against the pale cinder-block walls. Across the back of his forest-green jumpsuit, worn block letters spelled out "PRISONER."

"I don't know how to handle this whole thing," Oulai said into the phone, his deep voice inflected with the French of his native Ivory Coast. "I am not a saint, but I am not a criminal."

The federal government has had Oulai in custody since Sept. 14, the day flight manuals and a stun gun were found in his luggage at a Florida airport and he was arrested as a suspected terrorist. The Alexandria Detention Center is the sixth place in which he has been jailed. There, he shares an address with Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person indicted by the federal government as a conspirator in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and with John Walker Lindh, the young American charged with fighting for the Taliban. Moussaoui and Lindh have become notorious. Oulai is unknown.

He is one of the unnumbered people investigators have labeled "material witnesses," alleged to have information crucial to theprobe into the hijackings, and prosecutors brought him to Alexandria to hear what he has to say. After more than four months, they interviewed him Thursday afternoon.

Since September, the Bush administration has followed a policy of concealment in his case and in those of hundreds of other foreigners similarly detained in the terrorism investigation. Oulai is the first material witness who has managed to talk publicly from detention about his experience -- an experience that has taken him through the immigration system and a series of unconventional legal maneuvers that have kept him within the government's grasp. It includes, in his telling, solitary confinements, unlighted prison cells, abrupt moves to jails up and down the East Coast and one beating by interrogators.

"I've never been an American enemy," Oulai said. "I am not who they say I am."

Exactly who federal officials consider Jean Tony Antoine Oulai to be is difficult to discern. The case of Alien No. 79 079 139 is cloaked in official secrecy.

Oulai's name is nowhere in the public computers of the federal courthouse in Alexandria, where his case now resides. At certain facilities where he has been held, administrators say they are not at liberty to confirm whether he was ever there. His attorneys have been unable to procure copies of some legal documents that government attorneys have drafted to hold him in custody. And his family and a legal representative for the Ivory Coast Embassy have been not been allowed inside the several courtrooms in which government attorneys have pursued their case against him.

At the Justice Department's request, Oulai's case has been legally sealed. "I couldn't address where the judge's order came from," said a Justice spokesman. "There is nothing about this case that we can discuss publicly."

Oulai, however, did so during 10 telephone conversations over the past month, and during a 45-minute visit at the jail one January evening.

Given the Justice Department's secrecy, there is no way to judge whether Oulai is, in fact, a terrorist. The outlines and crucial details of his case have been verified by his attorneys; by local law enforcement officials, relatives and acquaintances; by a half-dozen people who have been questioned about him by the FBI, and by government documents that The Washington Post has obtained.

From such varied strands, however, it remains unclear why an investigation into a terrorist plot carried out by young Muslim extremists has implicated a 34-year-old Roman Catholic from West Africa.

'He Likes to Show Off'

Tony Oulai wanted to be on an airplane Sept. 11 -- returning home to Los Angeles from avisit to his girlfriend in Atlanta. He had booked a bargain Southwest Airlines flight out of Jacksonville, figuring it was worth the 5 1/2-hour drive.

He is not a man known for moderation. "He's very flamboyant," according to his older brother Andre, an orthopedic surgeon living in Michigan. "He can get around with $500 in his pocket . . . He likes to show off." In one conversation, Oulai said the notes he is keeping of his detention -- more than 500 pages -- are destined to become a book, translated into five languages.

"He loves to give the impression he's a person of substance," said one of Oulai's attorneys, David Sontan of Hyattsville, who hired a private investigator last fall to explore his new client's background before concluding that he had a clean criminal record and no detectable terrorist ties.

He is one of 23 children of the late Gaston Oulai, a military hero and one-time Ivory Coast presidential adviser. As a boy, he was obsessed with airplanes, recalls an older sister, Leoncied Ouayouro, who lives now with her family in Fairfax. He did, in fact, receive a commercial pilot's license, according to federal aviation records.

He moved to the United States in 1988, living around Washington the first few years, attending the University of the District of Columbia and going to local tae kwon do clubs. Eventually, he enrolled at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla.

School administrators would not confirm that Oulai had graduated. But Andre Oulai said he visited his brother on campus, and Alvin Hawkins, a close friend during that time, said he attended Oulai's 1994 graduation. A signed letter on Embry Riddle stationery, written in early 1997, congratulates Oulai on admission to the school's graduate program, which he says he attended but did not complete.

In California, Oulai said, he worked for a time transporting air cargo and as an airplane mechanic. For the past few years, he has worked to establish the America Africa Liaison Corp., an organization of professionals across the United States -- African expatriates and African Americans -- to promote aid to the poor countries of West Africa.

Last spring, about 15 people from the group, including the ambassador of Senegal, convened in Washington. Over the Labor Day weekend, Oulai flew to Houston to explore with a local judge whether that city might host a larger convention this year. The next week, he flew to Atlanta.

On Sept. 11, he arrived in a rental car at Jacksonville International Airport for his 12:55 p.m. flight. Air traffic nationwide had already been grounded by the terrorist attacks. Oulai kept driving to drop in on a cousin in Orlando.

When the Jacksonville airport reopened three days later, Oulai got there early. Two Southwest employees, in a random search, picked through the luggage he was checking -- a suitcase and two small packing boxes his Orlando cousin had been storing for him.

Inside the boxes, the airline employees found flight manuals, aeronautical charts, a stun gun and what a federal document would describe as "Arabic books, newspapers, magazines and photographs with Arabic writing on them."

After retaping the boxes, the airline employees handed Oulai his boarding pass. He had just settled into a seat at Gate C-1 when two officers approached, according to a Jacksonville Port Authority police report of his arrest.

Was he a pilot? they asked. Oulai replied that he was, handing them his driver's license and an identification card from Embry Riddle.

The FBI, the officers said, would be arriving soon. Afraid of missing his flight, annoyed that he'd already paid for three nights in motels, Oulai asked, "If I have to spend another night, who's going to pay for it?"

"We'll take care of it," the officers said.

Nine Days, Three Jails

The FBI arrived, then the INS. When Oulai pulled a tape recorder from his briefcase to record the conversation, the FBI agents took it. With his cell phone, he called a paralegal he knew in Philadelphia, another Ivory Coast native, to say he might need legal help. The paralegal, Ibrahim Sanogo, tried to be reassuring. "I told him, 'It's very normal the U.S. government tries to see who is who.' "

Oulai spent three nights in the Nassau County Jail. For the first two days, he said, he was not allowed a shower or a phone call.

That Monday morning, he was driven less than an hour west to another jail. Oulai said he did not know its name, but two government sources identified it as the Baker County Detention Center.

Late that night, Oulai said, two men came to his cell, handcuffed and shackled him, and led him into a small room. They sat him in a chair, one man standing in front of him, the other behind. The man in front asked whether he was a Muslim. Oulai said he was not. The man asked whether he was from an Islamic country. People in the Ivory Coast, he replied, speak French.

The man behind him, Oulai said, hit the left side of his face so hard that Oulai fell to the floor, then pressed his foot into Oulai's neck. "I had a lot of blows on my back, on my legs," Oulai said. About 40 minutes later, he said, the men returned him to his cell and left.

Lt. John Finley, administrator of the Baker County Detention Center, said that, under instructions from the INS, he could not confirm whether his jail had housed Oulai, although he said "we had quite a few INS people brought to us after Sept. 11." Finley also said he could not disclose who might have interrogated those detainees. But he said, "I can assure you, there wouldn't be roughing up here. We've got TVs in every dorm, and microwaves. We are good to the people here."

After the night in Baker County, Oulai was taken to an INS detention center in Bradenton. There, he said, he was kept in solitary confinement and not allowed telephone calls. He was there when the government produced its first legal justification for his detention: an INS form charging him with entering the United States illegally.

That evening, Andre Oulai received a call from a Jacksonville newspaper reporter, wondering if he was related to a man who had been arrested. Andre, who had not seen his younger brother in three years, immediately drove downtown to the FBI office in Kalamazoo and asked what was going on. An agent scanned a list of terrorism suspects, then his computer. There was no sign of a Tony Oulai in custody.

By then, a lawyer was also looking for him: Frank Lindner, a Philadelphia immigration attorney who works with the paralegal whom Oulai had called from Jacksonville. Lindner spoke with INS officials across Florida before confirming that Oulai was being held at Bradenton, and he made an appointment to visit him there on Saturday, Sept. 22.

At 6 o'clock that morning, officers at Bradenton told Oulai that he was leaving immediately. "Where are you guys taking me?" Oulai replied. "My attorney is coming over here this morning." Handcuffed and shackled, he was driven through a woods to a small airport and put on a plane. As Oulai boarded the U.S. Marshals Service jet, he sneaked a glance at a marshal's watch, noting the time.

When Lindner arrived at the Bradenton jail, he was told that Oulai no longer was there. Astounded, he called the INS officer in charge of Oulai's case. The officer "had no idea Oulai had been moved," Lindner said. A sergeant at the jail eventually told him that Oulai had been checked out by the Justice Department, not immigration authorities.

"This was a fairly massive abuse of power," Lindner said. "The fact the INS did not know where he was shows they were not in charge of the detention. When the FBI doesn't have enough to arrest someone on probable cause, they use this fictitious front of INS violations." He pried from one official a hint that Oulai might have been taken to an INS detention center in Miami. The next morning, Lindner drove south.

Oulai was 1,200 miles away.

When his plane landed, Oulai glanced at another wristwatch: Four and a half hours had passed. Oulai tried to calculate where he could have flown in that time. He asked a marshal where he was. Then he noticed the license plate on a waiting van.

When the marshal told him he did not know where they were, Oulai thought, "Well, that's your problem. We're in New York."

Darkness and Lights

The Buffalo Federal Detention Center in Batavia, N.Y., is one of the INS's most modern holding facilities. It has a segregated unit -- the Special Housing Unit, or SHU -- with windowless, solitary cells used mainly to house foreigners who have been convicted of violent crimes or have created disciplinary problems in the center's less-restricted areas. SHU detainees are allowed from their cells for a shower every few days, for occasional phone calls and for exercise two hours a week.

This is where Oulai was taken after the marshal's jet landed.

He said his cell, SHU-115, was kept dark 19 hours a day; a guard switched on the lights from 4:30 to 9:30 p.m. "The darkness is pretty good for meditation," Oulai said. If a guard left open the meal slit in his door, he said, he could make out the pages of his Bible, or scribble notes about his circumstances on days when he was allowed paper and a two-inch pencil.

Frances Holmes, district director of the facility, said Oulai's account of his environment "doesn't make sense." The light switches in the SHU, she said, are controlled by the officers, but the center's policy requires them to comply with the detainees' wishes from 10 a.m. to 11:30 p.m.

Another detainee held in an adjoining cell at the same time as Oulai said his own cell was unlighted exactly as Oulai described. "It was very dark, almost 16 or 18 hours a day," saidMohammed Refai, a Syrian who was one of several Middle Easterners apprehended in the terrorism probe who have been held in that unit. "Just we have lights from 4 to 10 [in the] evening," Refai said by telephone from Batavia, after he had been moved to a less-restricted section.

One other thing Refai recalled: In conversations shouted through their cell walls, Oulai complained of "a big problem in his back, because they had put him in jail."

In early October, two FBI agents showed up to interrogate Oulai. They asked whether he was a Muslim and whether he had any Arab friends while in flight school. He told them he remembered a Saudi student who was a diplomat's son. The agents showed him photographs and asked whether any of the images were familiar. No, he said.

After a half-hour, the agents left.

The same week, some of his relatives drove eight hours from Northern Virginia to see him. Oulai had told them beforehand that he had put their names on a visitors list, in accord with the facility's rules. But at the detention center's front gate, said his sister Leoncied, they were turned away. "It was just, 'Oh, no, you aren't on the list,' " she recalled.

At the same time, the government was taking steps to ensure that Oulai would not be released soon. On Oct. 10, the FBI issued an affidavit that federal prosecutors across the country have used to persuade judges that detainees in the terrorism probe should not be granted bond. Using an unorthodox legal argument, the affidavit, signed by Michael Rolince, chief of the FBI's international terrorism section, says the investigation is "akin to the construction of a mosaic" and the involvement of any one suspect cannot be ruled out until the entire picture is understood.

In Oulai's case, the affidavit also contains what is, to this day, the only public government information about why investigators regard him as suspicious. It focuses entirely on evidence from his arrest in Jacksonville -- the flight manuals, the stun gun and the Arabic-language materials that it says were in his checked luggage.

Oulai said that the manuals were from his days at Embry Riddle and that he had no Arabic literature -- just two Bibles, one in English and one in French. He and his relatives say he does not read or speak Arabic. As for the stun gun, Oulai said he had bought it a few years ago in Florida and kept it in one of the boxes his cousin stored for him.

According to a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration, guns, including stun guns, are permitted in checked luggage as long as they are unloaded, packed in a locked suitcase and disclosed to the airline -- which Oulai conceded he did not do. Violating that FAA rule, said spokesman Bill Shuman, "is a regulatory violation" that carries a fine, "not something that you put somebody in custody for."

Still, an immigration judge at Batavia ordered Oulai kept in custody.

The INS, meanwhile, was moving to deport him.

Oulai's attorneys and family acknowledge an immigration violation on his part -- but not the one the INS alleged. The government charged him with entering the country illegally; Oulai's attorneys have an entry document and work permits showing that he did not. The problem, they said, is that he remained here on a student visa, which was good only as long as he was in Embry Riddle's graduate program.It is the sort of visa violation the INS paid little heed to until Sept. 11.

His lawyers and his family persuaded Oulai to accept deportation. The Ivory Coast's Embassy issued a travel permit and wrote a letter guaranteeing that, if Oulai ever were needed to testify in any law enforcement proceeding in the United States, the Ivorian government would make sure he cooperated.

On Nov. 15, when Batavia's immigration judge ordered Oulai's deportation, Oulai promised he would not appeal. "We did that strategically," says Robert Kolken, a longtime immigration lawyer in Buffalo who handled the hearing, because the law says a deportee must be sent home within 90 days.

That, Oulai and his attorneys thought, would end his legal dance with the U.S. government.

But four days later, federal law enforcement officials in Alexandria issued a new warrant, under seal.

'They've Got No Basis'

That warrant, according to a copy obtained by The Post, is the one that charged Oulai with being a "material witness in a criminal proceeding." An accompanying affidavit described him as "Arabic."

On Nov. 30, David Sontan, Oulai's attorney in suburban Washington, called Michael Rolince, the FBI official whose name is on the affidavit that was originally used to hold Oulai. Why, Sontan asked, was Oulai being held on a material witness warrant -- one that was based on a new, secret FBI affidavit that described him as Arabic when he clearly was a black African?

Sontan said Rolince got off the phone to check, then quickly called back to say that the U.S. attorney in Alexandria had issued the warrant and that it was out of his hands.

Kolken, Oulai's attorney, was incensed by the warrant. "They've got no basis for doing what they're doing," he said.

A material witness warrant usually is used in criminal cases to make sure that elusive witnesses will be available for a trial or a deposition. Using such a warrant so early in a case -- when a grand jury is still investigating, and particularly when the witness already is in federal custody -- was "cute," Kolken said. Moreover, he was worried that if Oulai slipped out of INS custody, it might stop the 90-day clock within which the government must release him to move home.

Nevertheless, neither he nor Oulai's other attorneys could prevent their client's transfer to Alexandria. On Dec. 19, Oulai was handcuffed and shackled and once again put on a Marshals Service jet.

At the Alexandria Detention Center, he is in a dormitory, not an isolated cell. He can control his own light switch. There are chess games, a microwave oven and visits from his family and some friends. And there are newspapers, which he devours.

Sometimes, they prove useful, containing information about the federal investigation of which he is a part. Sometimes, the news makes him angry, such as the day this month he read about Charles Bishop, the teenager who had killed himself by flying a small plane into a Tampa office building, leaving behind a suicide note that praised Osama bin Laden.

"It took the FBI less than three days to find out [Bishop] didn't have terrorist ties," Oulai said. "Now, I'm here for four months."

From this jail, too, he is moments away from the U.S. District Court, where the grand jury meets to investigate the terrorist attacks -- and where yet another judge ruled this month that Oulai must remain in custody. His sister and her family were told to wait outside the courtroom. The windows on the door were papered over.

It was inside the courthouse that -- four months and 10 days after his arrest -- Oulai finally was quizzed Thursday by two FBI agents and an assistant U.S. attorney about who he was and what he knew. For 4 1/2 hours, Oulai said, he wore handcuffs and shackles as he answered questions about his family, his work history, his finances, his immigration status, his travels in this country. Only in the final moments, he said, did the prosecutor mention Sept. 11.

"I did not have anything to do with happened," Oulai said he told them. "I want to go home."

Whether his answers will satisfy investigators or they now will try to bring him before the grand jury is unclear. A judge is scheduled to reconsider his status next week. Reached yesterday, the prosecutor, Dabney L. Friedrich, said: "I can't tell you anything."