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

by Aimen Dean

  ‘I travel to learn about exorcism,’ I replied. I invented the name of a religious teacher.

  The reply might seem outlandish, but exorcism fascinates many Pakistanis. The officer was suddenly alert – and impressed.

  ‘Then you are a young Sheikh?’ he asked deferentially and quickly stamped my passport.

  Peshawar International Airport was the usual cacophony of excited families, clamorous porters and incomprehensible PA announcements. I struggled through the crowds and the suitcases strewn across the hall and outside into the cool mountain air, tinged with the smell of smoking garbage.

  I knew the drill. First stop: Abu Zubaydah’s gated safe house. Check in,* deposit passport, answer any questions about travel and future plans.

  As al-Qaeda spread its tentacles across Afghanistan, Abu Zubaydah’s place had become the hub of onward travel while also providing services such as bank transfers and false identity documents.** The all-knowing Pakistani intelligence service turned a blind eye to his work and maybe even assisted it.

  Abu Zubaydah was always on the lookout for spies. I found him as severe and intimidating as before. He was irritated that I had flown into Peshawar, imagining Western intelligence had the airport under scrutiny.

  ‘You should always arrive in Islamabad and get the bus,’ he said like a schoolteacher too often let down by irresponsible students. ‘What’s your plan?’

  ‘I hope to train with the bomb-maker Abu Khabab.’

  Abu Zubaydah stared at me impassively.

  ‘I met him last year at Darunta,’ I stammered. ‘I’ve heard his camp is now fully up and running. I want to make myself useful.’ More silence. He used it as a weapon. ‘The Philippines taught me the importance of bomb-makers.’

  I’d been thinking of what I might learn from Abu Khabab since seeing a young MILF bomb-maker demonstrate his art by setting off a number of spectacular explosions in a jungle clearing.

  ‘We shall see,’ Abu Zubaydah replied.

  It was not what one might call a happy house. Whenever a group of us was engaged in a lively discussion, it would quickly come to a halt when Abu Zubaydah opened the door and peered in – his dark, menacing eyes fixed like a cobra’s behind his spectacles.

  I made my way through the mountains to Jalalabad and a guest house for Arab fighters. I was an object of some curiosity, the only jihadi there who had served on the Mindanao front. Also staying there was a Saudi veteran of the Afghan conflict and now the head of Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard, Abu Hamza al-Ghamdi.

  To younger jihadis, al-Ghamdi was already something of a legend. He’d fought heroically against the Communists around Jalalabad and more recently had led a small band into Tajikistan, a former Soviet republic, to try to ignite jihad there.

  One evening, as we sat on a threadbare rug eating the usual grey meat and rice, I began telling stories about the Philippines. Al-Ghamdi wanted to know more and we were soon deep in conversation. He was a magnetic character with a sly sense of humour and he was perceptive and persuasive in his views about the ‘struggle’.

  He also had plenty of stories to tell about Hekmatyar, who had fled to Iran after the collapse of the coalition in Kabul. Al-Ghamdi regarded him as a blowhard and a scoundrel, inherently untrustworthy. Apparently, Hekmatyar had once lied about bringing down a Soviet helicopter gunship with an AK-47.

  ‘Not even Rambo managed that,’ al-Ghamdi laughed.

  The following day, he gave me a tour of Jalalabad, recounting stories about the fighting around the city. It was an autumn day of stunning clarity; the sun was still warm and even the squalor of Jalalabad could not spoil my good humour. As we walked, al-Ghamdi asked me more about the Philippines: jungle combat, the type of weapons we used, the calibre of our local comrades and of the army. He also took me to meet the Taliban’s governor in Jalalabad. I was flattered to receive so much attention from such an influential figure.

  We ended up in one of the few places that served passable food, and sat down with two banana milkshakes and Afghan fries – the equivalent in Afghanistan of dining at a Michelin-starred restaurant. Al-Ghamdi was candid with me about the rift between Saudis and Egyptians inside al-Qaeda. He felt bin Laden listened too much to the Egyptians, who had persuaded him to establish a base in Sudan and then used it as a launch pad for attacks in neighbouring Egypt. In al-Ghamdi’s view, they were responsible for the group’s hideous financial losses in Sudan.

  ‘The Sudanese government betrayed us,’ he said. ‘They stole the assets we had – investments, land and businesses – worth $165 million altogether. It’s money we will never see again.’

  While not bankrupt, al-Qaeda was no longer brimming with cash, he said. Osama bin Laden had been cut off by his family years earlier, and donations from wealthy individuals in Saudi Arabia were no longer as generous since he had fallen out with the Saudi royal family.

  Then came the pitch: the ‘Gulf’ bench inside al-Qaeda needed strengthening.

  ‘The Egyptians, especially Zawahiri, they’re pedantic.’ He paused as he spat out the words with contempt. ‘They can’t stop going on about a revolution to overthrow Mubarak’ – the dullard who had become president after Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981.

  ‘We need fresh blood: young, well-read, intelligent men like you,’ said al-Ghamdi, looking at me earnestly. If he was trying to flatter me, it was working. It was time, he told me, that I set aside the wandering of youth and devote myself to ‘core’ al-Qaeda here in Afghanistan.

  He put his hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Remember this hadith:

  “A victorious band of warriors from my followers shall continue to fight for the truth. Despite being deserted and abandoned, they will be at the gates of Jerusalem and its surroundings, they will be at the gates of Damascus and its surroundings, they will be at the gates of Antioch and its surroundings, and they will be at the gates of Taleqan and its surroundings. Then God will bring forth his treasure from Taleqan to resurrect the faith after it was made dead.”’1

  Al-Ghamdi punched out the word ‘gates’ for impact, delivering his peroration with dramatic effect. Taleqan was an ancient city in Afghanistan just a few hundred miles north from where we were sitting.

  ‘The prophecies have foretold the armies of jihad will be in Khurasan, the Maghreb, Yemen, Iraq and Syria. Don’t you see Abu al-Abbas? We are the Vanguard, we are the black banners that will march from Khurasan and liberate Jerusalem and restore the Caliphate before the Day of Judgment!’2

  I understood now that Sayyid Qutb had used the term Vanguard because the emergence of Holy Warriors protecting Islam at its time of need had been foretold by the Prophet. The prophecies he was referring to were popular refrains in the camps:

  ‘If you see the black banners approaching from Khurasan, then join them for the Mahdi will be among them.’3

  Al-Ghamdi was spelling out what bin Laden had intimated a year earlier. Al-Qaeda was the long-foretold army of God. Not only did the group seek to defend Islam against unjust forces, but it regarded itself as the Mahdi’s army-in-waiting. That was enticing because the Prophet had foretold that the Mahdi would emerge near the end-of-days and bring about a new order in which justice and fairness would rule supreme.4

  But I still had questions.

  ‘I don’t know, brother,’ I began uncertainly. ‘I expected to be a soldier on the front lines defending the Ummah, not in the kind of war you are describing. I understand that the army of the black flags will come out of here and we’ll end up in a big battle with the Israelis,’ I said hesitantly. ‘But maybe in a few hundred years’ time.’

  ‘No,’ al-Ghamdi said quickly. ‘It was no accident that the Jews returned to Jerusalem thirty years ago. That triggered the age of the final prophecies.’ It was the first time I had heard it argued that Israel’s capture of east Jerusalem and the West Bank in the 1967 war was such a ‘trigger’.

  ‘Recall also this hadith,’ al-Ghamdi went on. I felt as if I was in a seminary.

 
; ‘There will come a time when you shall fight the Jews. You will be east of the river Jordan, while they are to the west of it.’5

  ‘This prophecy refers to a war Muslim armies will wage against the Jews before the arrival of the Mahdi, the emergence of the Antichrist and the return of Jesus Christ.6 The preconditions were fulfilled when the Jews took control of the West Bank and pushed Arab armies east of the river Jordan. The countdown to the arrival of our armies at the gates of Jerusalem and the arrival of the Mahdi has begun.’

  He pressed home his advantage.

  ‘Can it be a coincidence that just a few years later the Godless Soviets came to Khurasan, allowing us to raise the banner of jihad?

  ‘Who else would carry the Black Banners into battle other than us? Martians? We have to do this for ourselves, even if many in our homelands have deserted us and we are few in number. The alternative is simply to be a bystander and watch history flow by.’

  I was struck, amazed even, that to someone so senior in al-Qaeda the fulfilling of the prophecies and the arrival of the Mahdi was not some distant dream but something more urgent, even within our grasp.

  As if I hadn’t understood, he laid his hand on my wrist and added quietly: ‘Either you honour your commitment to God or be a spectator.’*

  It was a calculated appeal to my faith and manhood, delivered with passion (and most likely not for the first time). But it also envisaged an entirely different form of warfare against those identified by bin Laden as our enemies.

  ‘The war in defence of Islam is now everywhere between the earth’s poles,’ al-Ghamdi continued. ‘Sheikh Osama was stripped of his Saudi nationality three years ago because he opposed the American military presence in Arabia.’

  Those same soldiers I had seen defending my hometown after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait were now the enemy.

  ‘If you search within yourself, you will feel this shift too,’ al-Ghamdi said. ‘Gone are the days when you were dressed in military uniform going from trench to trench in Bosnia. There are no uniforms or trenches anymore. These days you and your friends are training on explosives and urban warfare, so you’re subconsciously aware of this shift.’

  ‘But my plan is to train with Abu Khabab al-Masri,’ I interjected. Abu Khabab was not formally part of al-Qaeda.

  ‘This will not be a problem. We can put in a good word so that you can get a place on his next intake.’

  It was a strange feature of jihadi life in Afghanistan in those days that individuals, even once recruited into al-Qaeda, had freedom to roam between camps and alternative centres of gravity.

  There was one small issue, I said. How were we – with AK-47s and an explosives lab run out of a hut in the mountains – expected to challenge the world’s undisputed superpower?

  Al-Ghamdi’s answer was swift and confident: America had grown soft.

  ‘You remember Beirut in 1983? Somalia? The Americans have no stomach for taking casualties. You have to make them bleed, physically and financially.’

  As I walked back to my lodgings that evening under a crescent moon I felt energized by the prospect of joining the struggle al-Ghamdi had described. Al-Qaeda had clearly embarked on a new strategy, putting flesh on the bones of bin Laden’s declaration the previous year – and at the same time embroidering it with religious authenticity. It might seem impossible to anyone steeped in Western secularism, amid the irreligious cynicism of modern life, that Islamic prophecies should be such a powerful driver. But among millions of Muslims – and especially among jihadis – they are imbued with immense spiritual resonance. They are divine sayings vouchsafed to Mohammed by God himself. And they were central to al-Qaeda’s ideological foundation.*

  The thousands of overlapping hadith were fertile territory for theological debate. Handed down by word of mouth, they were scattered and disconnected; it seemed to me that the Prophet had never intended them as a complete picture of the future but as a glimpse into what it might hold. I believe in the purity of the Koran, a compilation of God’s revelations to the Prophet which has been perfectly preserved. But the hadith, on which al-Qaeda and ISIS lean heavily, are sayings attributed to the Prophet, revised and in many cases corrupted in the centuries that followed, and adapted to suit particular moments in history. They provide therefore a minefield of argument.

  Over the centuries Muslims’ belief in the validity of some of these prophecies has been reinforced by events, including the conquest of Persia, Syria and Yemen in the early years of Islam and the capture of Constantinople in 1453.9 But not all hadith are equal; many have been distorted and exploited for narrow ends.

  Al-Qaeda leaders believed the Mahdi** would rule over a restored Caliphate after a period of strife and epic battles, and it was the mission of the Vanguard to work towards that Caliphate and hasten his arrival by bringing about the circumstances foretold to precede it.* Bin Laden’s commitment to liberating Jerusalem was not a rhetorical flourish designed to rally ‘the base’ but at the very core of al-Qaeda’s mission.** Al-Qaeda’s actions were all about accelerating progress towards what the Prophet had described as the glorious end phase of history. By presenting the searing defeat of Arab armies in 1967 as a precursor to the end-of-days, al-Qaeda was turning it into a rallying call for jihad.

  Al-Ghamdi was one of the messengers, but the high priest of the prophecies was the head of al-Qaeda’s Shariah College Sheikh Abu Abdullah al-Muhajir, the Egyptian who had provided religious instruction at Hekmatyar’s camp in Darunta.11 It was he who developed the theological arguments presenting the defeat of 1967 as the dawn of the age of prophecies.**

  His Friday sermons were a weekly highlight for al-Qaeda recruits. I was one of well over a hundred young fighters to attend one of them at a training camp near Khost. The Nazi Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel had been foretold by a passage of the Koran, he maintained, setting the stage for the 1967 war that was the ‘mighty trigger’ for the age of prophecies.12 The mujahideen, the cleric said, had congregated in Afghanistan after years of scurrying to obscure campaigns in the far corners of the globe. I momentarily felt a little guilty about the Philippines. He repeated the Prophet’s words about the Vanguard ‘hurrying from one front to another, never harmed by betrayals, until God’s command descends’.13

  One young fighter stood up and exclaimed: ‘I don’t think I’m worthy of the Prophet’s praise but now I know he was talking about us, comforting us when everybody was standing against us.’

  Sheikh al-Muhajir was providing certainty and eliminating doubt. Certainty has been and will always be the most powerful weapon in the jihadi arsenal. He picked up his thread.

  ‘We are now reaching a crucial phase: the preparation for the “Epic Battles” and the coming of Imam Mahdi. Divine interventions do not just fall into our laps; it is our duty to pave the way for such interventions, so as to meet God halfway.’

  Al-Muhajir knew he was winning over his audience. We could advance the course of history. Perhaps the Mahdi might emerge even within our own lifetimes.

  Sitting next to me was Abu Abdullah al-Maki, the young Saudi I had met soon after arriving in Afghanistan. He was enraptured. For hundreds – thousands – of young men like al-Maki, this was the message that gave their journey purpose, delivered by skilful speakers who could marshal religious texts in the way a brilliant attorney summons case law.

  Nor was I immune. For so many of us – sitting cross-legged before him – al-Muhajir’s elucidation of the Koran and hadith was irresistibly alluring.

  The sense that the prophecies were coming true was the sunshine that cleared away the mists of doubt and illuminated beautiful mountains towards which the road was leading: eternal paradise.

  Al-Muhajir was building towards his conclusion. Finally, in words that echoed Sayyid Qutb’s parable of the unlit candles, he said:

  ‘Each of you are bricks in the Caliphate, but these bricks will only be cemented into the building at the moment of martyrdom.’

  Al-Mak
i burst into tears.

  After the sermon, we congregated for lunch. Prodding the congealed lentils around my plate, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was the Sheikh.

  ‘Can you spare a few minutes?’ he asked. I was hardly likely to say no.

  In his office-cum-library, he asked me what I thought about the sermon, knowing that I was one of a minority with a prior interest in theology.

  ‘It was well delivered and very well received,’ I answered, in an attempt to avoid any in-depth debate. To be honest, my mind was on the dwindling stock of Twix chocolate bars I had smuggled into the camp. Neatly hidden beneath my stack of books, one was waiting for me. And I found al-Muhajir to be somewhat intimidating.

  The Sheikh asked me to carry the message to other fighters.

  ‘You have the intellect to propagate this message wherever you go, to whoever you meet. Please take the opportunity,’ he said.

  In September 1997, al-Ghamdi sought me out again at the Jalalabad guest house.

  ‘Abu al-Abbas,’ he said. ‘If you are ready and committed, it’s time for you to make the journey to Kandahar and make the pledge.’

  We both knew what my answer would be. He was smiling mischievously. Al-Ghamdi had fast-tracked me as part of his mission to dilute the Egyptian contingent. And so, on a warm morning I climbed into a battered minibus heading to Kandahar in the deep south of Afghanistan, the headquarters of both the Taliban and now its honoured guest, Osama bin Laden.*

  Kandahar was hotter, dustier and more crowded than Jalalabad. I made my way through noisy alleyways crowded with donkeys and carts, boys yelling and running, and the ubiquitous white Toyota pickup trucks sagging under the weight of watermelons or bags of rice.

  Al-Qaeda had a training camp at a place called Tarnak Farms on a sun-baked plain near the city’s airport on the south-eastern edge of the city. Bin Laden’s headquarters complex consisted of about eighty small concrete and mud-brick buildings which had been converted into offices and living accommodation for al-Qaeda fighters.15 The now ubiquitous black flags fluttered over the facility to remind us all of our prophetic duty.