Nine Lives: My time as the West's top spy inside al-Qaeda

by Aimen Dean

  Contents

  Map: al-Qaeda’s bases and training camps

  Note from the co-authors

  Prologue: A Wanted Man

  My First Life: The Unlit Candle

  My Second Life: Jalalabad and the Jungle

  My Third Life: The Pledge

  My Fourth Life: Escape from al-Qaeda

  My Fifth Life: Undercover

  My Sixth Life: Jihad for a New Millennium

  My Seventh Life: Something Big

  My Eighth Life: Nicotine

  My Ninth Life: A Graveyard in Syria

  Reflections

  Cast of characters

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Index

  Jihadi training camps in Afghanistan before 9/11

  Loyalty to the treacherous is treachery in the eyes of God.

  The betrayal of the treacherous is loyalty in the eyes of God.

  Imam Ali

  Note from the co-authors

  When any spy emerges from the secret world to tell their story, questions are naturally asked about the veracity of their account. Britain’s intelligence services never comment publicly on such matters; nor is there generally a paper trail.

  In the course of reporting on the threat from jihadi terrorism for the best part of two decades we have developed many trusted sources in and out of government on both sides of the Atlantic. This has allowed us to corroborate key details relating to Aimen Dean’s work for British intelligence. This and our own research has allowed us not only to confirm critical associations and events but establish beyond doubt that there simply wasn’t another informant inside al-Qaeda like him. In the years immediately leading up to and following 9/11, Aimen Dean was by far the most important spy the West had inside al-Qaeda, with his identity among the closest guarded secrets in the history of British espionage.

  Aimen would probably never have contemplated writing a book had his cover not been blown by an intelligence leak in the United States. But he believes now is the right time to tell his story. His experiences and insights shed great light on the evolution of jihadi terrorism and what it will take to confront one of the great challenges of our times. Nobody can recall every last detail of their life perfectly, nor the exact order and date of every encounter. The chronology presented in this book is the result of many hours of research on the events he witnessed and the individuals he met. In describing technical aspects related to al-Qaeda’s efforts to develop explosives, chemicals and poisons we took great care not to go beyond chemistry and details already in the public domain in the news media, academic studies, court documents, government reports and the like. As an extra precaution we consulted with leading experts on these types of weapons.

  This book includes extensive notes. Those which may be of interest to the general reader are marked by stars in the text and included as footnotes. Substantive notes which may be of more interest to the specialist reader – as well as citations – are marked by numbers and are situated at the back of the book in the chapter-by-chapter endnotes. We also include a cast of characters, as well as a map of Afghanistan and Pakistan showing the location of jihadi training camps before 9/11. The exact position of the Khalden camp in relation to the town of Khost has never been definitively established by academic researchers. Our placement is based on Aimen’s best recollection.

  In several cases we have used pseudonyms to conceal the identity of individuals for a variety of reasons and this is made clear each time in the text. We refer to British intelligence officials by pseudonyms. This book includes quotations from the Koran and the hadith (the collected sayings of the Prophet Mohammed). These have been translated by Aimen. Hadith are cited by collection and their order number in the collection. Alternative English translations of the major collections are available on websites such as sunnah.com. The hadith citations in this book refer to the Arabic collections. The English numbering can be different because of the way translators have split up hadith. After the first reference the authors have omitted the prefix ‘al-’ for some recurring names.

  Paul Cruickshank and Tim Lister, April 2018

  Prologue: A Wanted Man

  2016–2018

  I looked out at the broiling haze enveloping Dubai. It was an August afternoon in 2016 and I comforted myself with the thought that the month after next the sapping humidity would begin to ease.

  I was packing for a family wedding in Bahrain, not one I was looking forward to in the mid-summer torpor. But it was the marriage of the oldest son of my eldest brother, Moheddin. I could hardly say no.

  It was to be an all-male affair, in accordance with the conservative customs of my family. My wife wasn’t coming to Bahrain but she was uneasy about my trip.

  My five brothers and I had grown up in Saudi Arabia up the coast and across the causeway from Bahrain, but the tiny pearl-shaped kingdom was our homeland. We carried Bahraini passports and – for different reasons – we had enemies there. Moheddin was a veteran of the Afghan jihad and had held a government job in Saudi Arabia until forced to leave the Kingdom because of an unlucky and unwitting connection to an al-Qaeda suicide bomber.

  Once I had sworn an oath of allegiance in person to Osama bin Laden and worked on al-Qaeda explosives and poisons experiments. But al-Qaeda’s callous indifference to civilian casualties and the madness of a global campaign of terrorism were too much for me to stomach. It had corrupted the cause in which I believed: defending Muslims wherever they might be.

  And so, in the parlance of espionage, I had been ‘turned’ by British intelligence. I was not an unwilling partner. In fact, I welcomed the chance to expiate any misdeeds during my four years as a jihadi. For the better part of a decade I had been one of the very few Western spies inside al-Qaeda until ‘outed’, by description if not by name, thanks to a clumsy leak that the British suspected emanated from the White House.

  Eventually, someone in al-Qaeda joined the dots and worked out that the leaks pointed towards me as the informant. One of the group’s most senior figures denounced me as a spy, and the dreaded fatwah followed. It was a religious command ordering my liquidation.

  But here I was – eight years later – still in one piece. Some days, I even forgot that there were people out there who wanted to slit my throat. Surely by now it was a little late for the fatwah to be carried out? Many of those who wanted me dead had themselves been killed – in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia – or were staring at the walls of a jail cell somewhere between Guantánamo Bay and Kabul.

  ‘My nephew came to our wedding; I have to go to his,’ I told my wife. ‘There’s really nothing to worry about.’

  She looked pale. Three months pregnant, she was more than normally prone to anxiety.

  ‘And look,’ I continued, taking her hand, ‘I’ll be there less than twenty-four hours. The bad guys won’t even know I’m in Bahrain.’

  Tears gathered in her eyes.

  ‘I just don’t want you to go.’

  Then, on the morning of 29 August, three days before the wedding, the groom-to-be called.?‘Uncle,’ he said, sounding less than effusive. ‘Dad says hi, but he’s had a message. The security services called. They said they understood you were planning to come to Bahrain. There’s a threat against your life; they recommend you stay away. They say that in any case they are sending police officers to the wedding.’

  It is rare that I am speechless, but for a few moments I said nothing. The combination of the news and my wife’s intuition had knocked the wind out of me. It’s often at such moments th
at one notices something trivial and irrelevant. I remember looking out of the window of our apartment towards the Arabian Gulf, and tracing the graceful loops of a hang glider drifting towards the beach.

  I turned abruptly to see if my wife was listening. Thankfully, she had gone to lie down.

  ‘It’s unbelievable,’ I said to my nephew. ‘Does your father have any idea who it is?’

  ‘He’s been asking questions. He thinks it’s Yasser Kamal and his brother Omar. They’ve been planning it for six weeks.’

  Yasser Kamal: part-time fishmonger, full-time jihadi. He had enlisted me in an ambitious al-Qaeda plot back in 2004 to attack US Navy personnel based in Bahrain, the home of the US Fifth Fleet. Omar was going to be one of the suicide bombers.

  I had fed all the details to MI6. When Kamal discovered, years later, that I had been working for British intelligence he had requested the fatwah against me.

  ‘But how does Moheddin know about the plan?’ I asked my nephew, still wrestling with my disbelief.

  ‘Well, we can’t be sure,’ my nephew continued, ‘but Omar’s wife has kept on asking about the guest list. Were all the uncles coming?’

  I made enquiries. The Bahraini police had discovered the plot because they were eavesdropping on Yasser Kamal. He had been stupid enough to talk with his brother about my impending visit; they had discussed following me to the airport after the wedding. In essence I would be carjacked. I was led to understand that they planned to use knives or machetes to dispense with me. They had also discussed filming my last moments as a warning to others who betrayed the cause. The gruesome video would then be uploaded to the Internet to mark the fifteenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

  Despite considerable evidence the Bahraini authorities decided not to move against the brothers, a typically pragmatic decision like many others that had allowed militants to operate there with considerable latitude. Firstly, they wanted to continue surveillance on the Kamals in case they were planning something worse than killing me, which was not very comforting. And they didn’t want any awkward questions about a former British agent on Bahraini soil.

  I decided to tell my wife about the plot rather than just pretend I was giving in to her entreaties. To my surprise she took the news calmly – seeing it as vindication of her female intuition. Needless to say, I have heeded such intuition ever since.

  The sudden re-emergence of Yasser Kamal, the discovery that he was at large rather than in jail, gave me pause. But it did not surprise me, nor did I blame him for wanting to kill me. I had betrayed his cause because I had come to see it as an adulteration of Islam and a betrayal of the Prophet’s words.

  We were on opposite sides of a civil war that has consumed and splintered our religion, a conflict with a long and bloodstained history that appears to have plenty of fuel yet.

  In the summer of 2016, the self-declared ‘Caliphate’ of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria had passed its high-water mark: its many opponents were gathering for final assaults on its last redoubts. But its ideology was less delible than its grip on territory. And al-Qaeda – almost forgotten during the subliminal explosion of ISIS – still brooded menacingly, playing the long game. One generation of jihad was passing on its expertise and belief to the next.

  As I write this in the spring of 2018 there are still plenty of men like Yasser Kamal out there, tens of thousands across the globe. Their anger towards the West runs deep. They see Islam under threat. They embrace radical interpretations of their religion that justify violence against anyone they deem not to be a true Muslim. And that includes millions of other Muslims whose interpretation of the Koran or whose customs they denounce as heresy.

  I have witnessed that anger and the longing for martyrdom on battlefields in Bosnia. I have heard the narrow definition of the ‘righteous Muslim’ in Afghan camps and safe houses in Pakistan. I have sat in shabby London flats and field hospitals in Syria listening to young men with glistening eyes talk about prophecies that promised battles marking the approach of the end-of-days and a victorious march on Jerusalem. I have seen the thirst for vengeance after US missile attacks in Afghanistan.

  I know and understand that mindset because two decades earlier I had shared it. I longed for martyrdom in the service of God; I saw Muslims in an epochal struggle of self-defence. I grasped at the noble ideal of jihad, only to be disgusted at its manipulation and indiscriminate application.

  Soon after I was recruited by British intelligence, one of my colleagues joked that I should be called the ‘cat’ – as I appeared to have nine lives. I have used up every one of those lives fighting on both sides of this generational struggle, neither of which can claim a monopoly on decency or righteousness.

  I am thankful for this opportunity to recount those lives and where they have led me, knowing that I may not get another in this world.

  My First Life: The Unlit Candle

  1978–1995

  I don’t remember much of my father’s funeral, but I was very nearly buried with him.

  It was February 1983; I was four years old. He was going to take me out for a treat somewhere and to collect some groceries, perhaps to give me (and himself) some relief from the noise of my five older brothers. But I stepped on some broken glass in the kitchen. I was always running barefoot.

  As my mother fussed over me and cleaned the smeared blood from the kitchen floor, my father picked up the car keys. He was killed minutes later at a junction when a truck ignored a stop sign. A mundane errand and a random accident left six boys without a father and a widow with a lifetime of struggle ahead of her.

  In the days and weeks after my father was killed, I vaguely recall the anxiety of seeing and failing to comprehend my mother’s tear-stained, ashen face. My brothers suffered more than I did; they understood our father was gone forever.

  We were the Durrani family, of Arab, Afghan and Turkish heritage. We were Bahraini citizens but residents of Saudi Arabia. It was enough to confuse anyone’s loyalties. We lived in the ordered suburbia of Khobar, a straggling city on the Arabian Gulf which had one reason for its existence: oil. My father was a businessman, importing construction machinery from Europe and selling it to the Saudi–American oil giant Aramco, a little way up the coast. Aramco crude ran through the family’s veins.

  The Durranis knew no country as their own; we were a polyglottic clan for whom the adventure of new opportunities trumped the security of the familiar. Uncle Ajab had left Peshawar in Pakistan to settle in Saudi Arabia. And before moving to Khobar my father had worked in Beirut, the commercial nerve centre of the Middle East, where he had met my mother in the late 1950s. She was from the town of Chebaa in south Lebanon, a redoubt of Sunni Muslims surrounded by Shia villages. Her family are related to the Hashemites, a noble bloodline descended from the Prophet Mohammed. Being proud Sunnis was – and is – as much part of our heritage as being indefatigable travellers.

  We were conservative Sunni Arabs in a very conservative Kingdom, where women went covered on the rare occasions they left home. But in the sanctuary of their homes, women like my mother exhibited extraordinary determination and resilience. Especially after my father’s death she exercised great influence over her brood of loud sons.

  I was the accidental runt of the family, to be blunt about it. My parents had their hands full with five sons spread across fifteen years; my mother had spent half her adult life pregnant. But I, Ali al-Durrani, was not to be denied, arriving on 17 September 1978. My brothers would affectionately tease me about being the ‘accident’ – the unexpected arrival. Whether it was because I was the cub of the family or I lived in the shadow of my mother, I was a studious child. I had a precocious interest in history and religion. I was slight, not interested in sport, and was rarely without a book in my hand. It should have been a recipe for persecution at school, but there are benefits to having older brothers: bullies soon found themselves dumped in garbage cans.

  The days of my childhood had a rhythm whose measure was prayer:
the five daily prayers of devout Muslims the world over. Each day, I was roused by my brothers before dawn for the Fajr (dawn prayers), which we said at home. Classes at school were arranged around the call to prayer.

  As a child I found the holy month of Ramadan magical. I did not chafe at the daytime fasting; it seemed important and I felt grown-up observing it. And I relished the outpouring of good spirits as night fell. The streets were decorated with lights. In our hundreds, boys and young men dashed from the Maghreb prayer at the ornate Omar bin Abdelaziz mosque to the pastry stalls. It seemed like a month when as a religion we came together in unity and common purpose. But it was a cocoon in a world of gathering violence.

  My earliest experiences nurtured a sense of sectarian identity. My mother was constantly scouring the local news channels for reports on the civil war that was tearing her homeland apart. Watching her furrowed brow and listening to her quietly beseeching salvation for her family made a deep impact on me. I absorbed her obsession with the news. My first memory of world events unfolding on TV was the assassination of Indira Gandhi, India’s prime minister, in 1984. I was six.

  I had endless questions for my mother as I sat next to her on the sofa, working my way through a bunch of grapes or savouring that most valuable of imports, Coca-Cola. Who were the Palestinians? Why did Israel invade? Why couldn’t they stop the fighting? She had few answers; nor did anyone in the mid-1980s as Beirut was demolished.

  There was conflict nearer to home, too, along the hazy, dripping coastline to the north. In the ghastly struggle between Iraq and Iran, my brothers dismissed the fact that Saddam Hussein had started the war. Nor did they much care about his use of chemical weapons on a battlefield that resembled an arid, stony Somme. We saw this as an existential battle between Sunni and Shia (even though many of Saddam’s conscripts were Shia). To the Arabs on the western shores of the Gulf, the Iranian revolution and the Shia theocracy that had followed were deeply disturbing, as was the rise of Shia militancy through groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon.