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

by Aimen Dean

  We went through more than eighty rabbits and thousands of cigarettes in perfecting our nicotine poison recipe. Abu Nassim volunteered to take the lead on the testing; I had never seen him happier. Darunta was not a place for animal lovers: rabbits were frequently the victims of our experiments. For years afterwards I had dreams of being chased by rabbits as they avenged my cruelty to the species. I did not need to be a dream interpreter to figure out why.

  ‘Join the club,’ Abu Khabab confided to me one day. ‘I see rabbits, puppies, kittens and donkeys. They are always chasing me.’

  One day I took Hindh, the stray cat I had adopted at Darunta, to Jalababad and left her there. I didn’t want her anywhere near Abu Nassim.

  We also experimented with making botulinum, a toxin that attacks the body’s nerves and causes difficulty breathing, muscle paralysis and, in high doses, death. The bacteria that make the toxin occur naturally when foods are stored improperly.21 Abu Khabab found a way to make nature work to our advantage: sealing certain foodstuffs with human excrement and other easily available ingredients inside a container, and allowing the mixture to simmer.

  It fell to poor Hassan Ghul to open the container weeks later to extract the active toxin. He wore kitchen gloves to protect his hands as he scooped out the appalling dun-coloured ooze. The rest of us donned wet scarves covered in charcoal to protect against the noxious fumes.

  Abu Nassim added a few drops into the water bowl of a rabbit. It died about forty hours later from what was essentially extreme food poisoning. Clearly the batch we had concocted was not very potent. Botulinum quickly loses potency unless stored under laboratory conditions. Abu Khabab discontinued our experiments even as others in al-Qaeda dreamed of poisoning water supplies with botulinum. He calculated, correctly, that the chlorine in most drinking supplies would render it quite useless.*

  After I subsequently started working for British intelligence, I would tell them all about these experiments,** and it would be no surprise to read the observations of the US Presidential Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction in 2005: ‘Information in the Intelligence Community’s possession since the late 1990s indicated that al-Qa’ida’s members had trained in crude methods for producing biological agents such as botulinum toxin and toxins obtained from venomous animals.’22

  While fascinated by toxins, Abu Khabab was scornful of the nuclear ‘boosters’ among the al-Qaeda hierarchy.

  ‘You know what I think about these so-called dirty bombs,’ he said one mid-winter evening as we huddled round the fire wrapped in a cocoon of blankets. ‘They’re a waste of our time, more likely to kill us than anyone else.’23 Even the materials for a primitive ‘dirty bomb’ would be hard to come by, he said, and the radiation from such a weapon would cause little harm.*

  For others in al-Qaeda’s orbit, the fear and panic that would be provoked by some sort of workable nuclear capability – however crude – remained the holy grail. And the group went to some lengths to play up its nuclear capability in an effort to sow uncertainty among the intelligence agencies. Abu Hamza al-Ghamdi had told me, in typically subversive fashion: ‘It would be a good thing for our enemies to be afraid that we have them.’**

  Abu Khabab also scoffed at attempts to produce biological weapons and nerve agents. An Egyptian bomb-maker and chemist in his early thirties called Abd al-Aziz al-Masri was talking a big game about producing anthrax25 and even the nerve agent soman, but in Abu Khabab’s view the lack of proper laboratories in the medieval surroundings of rural Afghanistan made such a goal implausible.

  ‘Forget nuclear26 and nerve agents,’27 he said that same bitterly cold and silent night. ‘There are alternatives and they are within our reach.’

  I was instantly apprehensive, as much for my own wellbeing as anyone else’s. I had tested the limits with explosives formulae and didn’t feel like choking to death as an alternative.

  ‘These are the critical chemicals,’ he continued with evident relish, holding up a glass jar containing a white powder with a yellowish tinge.

  His breath shot bursts of condensation across the freezing room. He reached up to a glass jar plastered with ominous warning stickers perched precariously on a shelf. It had an acid inside.

  ‘If you mix it with a strong acid like this you get what?’

  ‘Hydrogen cyanide,’ I said warily, not liking the direction the conversation was taking.

  ‘Exactly,’ he said, the professor proud of his A-grade student. ‘That’s what the Nazis used in the death camps. Another name for it is Zyklon-B,’ he added, almost nonchalantly. ‘And if you mix potassium permanganate with the acid you get chlorine gas. But now,’ he stopped and raised his hand, ‘put together all three ingredients, and you produce a gas.’

  I was falling behind, but didn’t want to show it.

  ‘A very toxic one,’ I said.

  ‘To be sure, cyanogen chloride,’ he went on, now in full flow.* ‘It’s two and a half times heavier than air. It gets into your bloodstream and cuts off the oxygen supply to your organs.’**

  The biggest challenge, he said, was finding an effective delivery mechanism. The actual combination of ingredients was not complicated, but you didn’t want to be standing over them as they mixed. Quite so, I thought.

  Before I could give a lot of thought to the technical challenges I fell seriously ill, thanks to a visit from what was colloquially known in the camps as the ‘Afghan visa’. As the days shortened and the cold seeped into our bones, I suddenly succumbed to a raging fever. Malaria and typhoid were simultaneously invading my body, already weakened by my slow recuperation from being wounded in the Philippines.

  I lay on a thin mattress on the concrete floor of Abu Khabab’s living quarters, slipping in and out of a delirious state, too weak even to sit up. Abu Khabab showed real concern and had a medic of sorts visit from a nearby camp. It didn’t require too much expertise to realize that without proper treatment I might die, and even Jalalabad – a humming metropolis compared to most of eastern Afghanistan – had few medical services.

  I probably owe my life to Abu Khabab. He organized antibiotics, an exotic treatment in that part of the world, and contacted Abu Zubaydah in Peshawar. I was loaded into the back of a battered van that smelled of diesel and animal manure and driven to Jalalabad over rough tracks that jolted my already shaking frame as if administering electric shock treatment. Clammy with a cold sweat, I was poured onto a bus in Jalalabad for the five-hour trip to Peshawar. At times I wanted to be allowed to get off the crowded, stinking bus to die in peace at the side of the road. But exhaustion shut my body down; I had to be woken from a deep slumber of psychedelic dreams in Peshawar.

  I had a night of fitful sleep at the safe house. Abu Zubaydah told me he had called my brother Moheddin to let him know I was very sick. Like other Arab recruits, I had left a family contact number in Peshawar in case I was killed. Moheddin had immediately wired cash to the Faisal Bank account held by Abu Zubaydah, al-Qaeda’s version of the Western Union.

  Abu Zubaydah looked at me with a rare look of genuine concern. However his bedside manners lacked tact. ‘You might be about to die so you should revise your will,’ he said. Leafing through my passport, he said that Qatar was the only safe destination. But I would need someone to meet me. For a moment the fog of my addled brain lifted.

  ‘Ahmed,’* I whispered. I was with him in Bosnia. I had a number somewhere.

  ‘Use this phone,’ Abu Zubaydah said, handing me a battered Nokia. It was a gesture that would ultimately change the course of my life.

  Abu Zubaydah graciously relaxed his rule about no flights in and out of Peshawar and bought me a ticket to Doha.

  It was the longest flight of my life: delirium at high altitude, high fever, dizziness mixed with anxiety about my reception by the Qatari authorities. Looking back at that day, I am astonished I was even allowed to board a plane. I could have been carrying any number of contagious diseases.

  I was either not suspected or looked too
sick to be any risk. Ahmed duly met me at the airport and took me immediately to a hospital, where two weeks of treatment restored my health if not my strength.

  So perilous was my condition that I was told to return in a year’s time for a series of checks. If I’m still alive, I thought as the doctor left the room. Another stamp on my ‘Afghan visa’ or too much cyanide would finish me off.

  I moved to Ahmed’s house to recuperate further, and Moheddin came to visit. We had not seen each other in three years – since I had left Khobar for Bosnia a few days past my sixteenth birthday.

  ‘You look dreadful,’ he said with a grin.

  ‘Thanks very much.’

  ‘I’ve seen it before; Afghanistan can suck everything out of you.

  ‘It’s been a very long time,’ he continued quietly. ‘When you left that morning, I had a sense you were planning some big adventure. It wasn’t a routine camping trip; your wild eyes told me that.’

  He began to laugh; I did, too, though it hurt.

  He had no idea I had been to the Philippines; I had told none of my family and suddenly felt guilty that my wanderlust had been so irresponsible. If Moheddin was hurt he didn’t show it, and he peppered me with questions about everything from the snakes to operating a mortar.

  He also wanted to know about the Taliban, by then into their second year of ruling Afghanistan.

  ‘Well, their ideology really is medieval,’ I said. ‘It’s nothing like the Ottoman Empire. But they have achieved one extraordinary thing. Before they came to power no one ever travelled at night in Afghanistan – too many bandits and rogue checkpoints. Now it’s completely safe.’

  It was in some ways a strange encounter. Here was the man I had always looked up to, now just shy of forty, listening agape to my stories of global travel in the service of jihad. I could tell he was both proud of me and a little jealous.

  Eventually he asked the big question.

  ‘Have you joined Sheikh Osama?’ he asked, referring to bin Laden.

  ‘I still have some reservations,’ I lied. It was forbidden to reveal such information even to family members, and what Moheddin didn’t know couldn’t hurt him.

  Just weeks after being discharged, I was back in the Afghan mountains at al-Qaeda’s Faruq training camp on a barren ridge south of Khost. It was January 1998.

  The panorama was stunning. To the north lay the distant snow-capped peaks of the Spin Ghar and Jaji, where Osama bin Laden had made his name in the jihad against the Soviets in the 1980s. Beyond that was Tora Bora, from whose caves he would escape after 9/11.*

  One afternoon, I sat watching the pale winter sun as it dropped behind hills strewn with scree and boulders. The chill of dusk began to seep through the camp. I had begun to dread another long winter’s evening. Suddenly there was a commotion. A convoy of SUVs roared into the compound, throwing dust into the clear mountain air. Heavily armed fighters jumped from the first and last vehicles and made a show of securing the area.

  Osama bin Laden stepped from the middle vehicle, his saturnine smile greeting chants of ‘Allahu Akbar’ from scores of al-Qaeda fighters. I was as enthusiastic as any to see him; he would only make such an appearance if he had some sort of announcement to make.

  I was not disappointed. As the mustard evening light ebbed, bin Laden led the Maghreb prayer in our makeshift mosque. Then all the fighters were told to gather in the exercise yard. Bin Laden stepped up to a microphone. There was a hush of anticipation.

  ‘Brothers, I bring glad tidings. We are unifying the mujahideen in a new global front against the Zionists and the Crusaders. We will soon announce this to the world.’

  We cheered.

  ‘Finally, we will now have unity. Unity among the Arabs here in Afghanistan and in the Ummah beyond. I have come here today to tell you we are at the beginning of a new era, an era in which we will triumph against the enemies of the Muslims.’

  Bin Laden delivered this momentous news in his typically soft-spoken way. He didn’t need to raise his voice to command the complete attention of his followers.

  ‘We must focus on America, the head of the snake, rather than the tail, the Arab regimes! Cut the head and the tail will die,’ he declared.

  As if on cue, bin Laden’s bodyguards pointed their AK-47s into the air and unleashed a long burst of automatic fire. The tracer lit up the night sky. There was a deafening chorus of cheers. He then led the camp in the Isha prayer, before bidding farewell under an ink-black sky dotted with stars.

  We all knew his announcement was significant; we had no idea that it heralded a campaign of attacks that would change the world.

  The following month, al-Qaeda declared ‘jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders’ and the creation of a World Islamic Front. The ‘Far Enemy’ was coming into focus: the kuffar regime of the United States and its allies, which sought domination over Muslims and occupied their lands.29

  ‘The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies – civilians and military – is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque [in Jerusalem] and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.’30

  In hindsight, the declaration left little room for doubt. But at the time I could not have imagined how it would be pursued.31

  As my health was still too delicate for me to return to Darunta, it was my job to explain to some of the fighters with very basic education (essentially the large and growing contingent of Yemenis) just what this declaration meant and on what it was based. After all, I had promised bin Laden.

  My pupils were dull-eyed and uncomprehending; more than once I felt like yelling at them as they sat and fidgeted. All they wanted to do was ride in the back of pickup trucks with rifles.

  I explained my frustrations one day to Abu Hamza al-Ghamdi, who laughed roguishly.

  ‘You thought I was being less than literal about the Vanguard?’ he asked, one eyebrow raised extravagantly. ‘The Sheikh is guided by the words of the Prophet. Remember the hadith: “An army of 12,000 will come out of Aden-Abyan. They will give victory to Allah and His Messenger.”’32

  That mountainous region in the south of Yemen was indeed where al-Qaeda would soon build up its forces, with hundreds of foot soldiers trained in Afghanistan.*

  As I came across jihadis from different backgrounds, I became fascinated by what had brought them to al-Qaeda’s camps. Some had come to believe in jihad after years of thought and argument. Some – often the less stable – had been radicalized almost overnight, perhaps as a reaction against a form of addiction or in seeking redemption for some terrible sin. They were escaping demons or the tedium of a mundane existence. Still others (like the young Yemenis) were told by preachers that they were needed: hooked and drawn in like helpless fish by a silver-tongued imam. There were many personal journeys, but all sought one end: martyrdom.

  I, too, had taken that journey. I still believed that it was worth dying for the right cause – to defend and protect Muslims. But the doubts were beginning to creep in, almost subliminally, and when I least expected them. There was a bloodlust among some fighters that was alien to my upbringing and beliefs. I had first glimpsed it in Bosnia; now I heard it expressed more often. Abu Nassim, the cruel Tunisian, was just one example. I began to wonder whether it fed on itself in the intense atmosphere of the camps, where adrenalin and testosterone met in a heady mix.

  Some men had been hardened by torture and imprisonment. Among those who would eventually come through the Afghan camps was none other than Yusuf al-Ayeri, my instructor in the Islamist ‘Scout’ group. Since I had last seen him in Bosnia, he had done a stint in jail in Saudi Arabia, for extremist activities. Now, he was on the fast track to higher things in al-Qaeda, carried by a burning anger.*

  So was I, but thanks to entirely different attributes. I was the innocent who could carry money or get
two weeks of hospital treatment without arousing suspicion. But I was also the intellectual who could improvise and find solutions, who could explain himself to hostile questioners. Which is why al-Ghamdi tested me with two sensitive missions.

  The first was to meet with a ‘brother’ in Islamabad, who would take me to a money transfer office. I should ask for Karim. The message was: ‘Doctor Mariam sent me to collect the fee for the operation.’

  Karim turned out to be a middle-aged Pakistani who looked terrified when I passed on the word about ‘Dr Mariam’.

  ‘Come with me,’ he said and led me furtively to a side room. He took a rucksack out of the safe and handed it to me. Inside, in bundles of crisp notes, was half a million US dollars.

  I walked back to the car, sure that hidden eyes were watching my every step. We drove to an Afghan refugee camp outside Islamabad and in a dusty workshop the money was transferred into nylon bags and inserted in a space hollowed out inside the driver’s door. We then made the two-hour drive to Peshawar, during which I was convinced we would be stopped and the loot discovered. We weren’t and I was relieved to entrust the treasure to another courier. Much later I discovered that ‘Dr Mariam’ was a code word used for transfers to Osama bin Laden from one of his sisters, who really was called Mariam.**

  That task accomplished, al-Ghamdi gave me a more ambitious one: go to London to pick up a satellite phone. My Bahraini passport meant I could get a visa for the UK in Qatar, where I had previously travelled without incident.

  I flew into London’s Heathrow Airport on a day of April squalls with slate-grey clouds scudding across the rooftops.

  The immigration officer at the airport asked whom I was coming to visit.

  ‘I have a friend who is a computer scientist,’ I said in my halting English.

  ‘Can you speak good enough English to get around?’ he asked.

  ‘I can order from McDonald’s,’ I said.

  ‘That’s good enough,’ he said with a laugh. Another reminder from the age of innocence.