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

by Aimen Dean

  A quiet and grave Jamaican convert I had briefly encountered in Bosnia picked me up and drove me towards London. Despite the seriousness of my mission, I could not help staring agog at the greenery and the sheer size of the metropolis.

  ‘This is it,’ he said simply.

  We had arrived at a large town house in one of the less salubrious streets of Gipsy Hill, a neighbourhood undergoing gentrification. A British Pakistani opened the door and ushered me in.

  The house was empty apart from a British Egyptian man in his fifties who introduced himself as Safwat. He was elegantly dressed in a cotton suit and had an aristocratic bearing. He told me that he was soon leaving for Afghanistan, and at the recommendation of Abu Hamza al-Masri, the hook-handed cleric of London’s Finsbury Park Mosque, he would train with Abu Khabab.

  ‘You’re making the right choice. I know Abu Khabab; there’s no one better.’

  The next day, the Pakistani gave me £200 and told me to head for the al-Muntada al-Islami mosque in Parsons Green, which had dormitories.

  ‘Make sure you attend the Fajr prayer there every day,’ he said, before setting me on my way. After a week of early morning prayers he finally showed up. We walked to his car and he took out a suitcase with the satellite phone in bubble wrap. It had been paid for in cash; it was not registered to anyone.

  ‘Tell the brothers in Afghanistan there is £25,000 of credit on the phone. After that they need to send me funds to top it up.’

  I enjoyed my brief time in London. Despite warnings that the English would be frosty or hostile I found them polite and helpful. I also delighted in the freedom to jump on and off buses in a random exploration of the city. And both Coke and chocolate tasted so much better than they did in Afghanistan. Cadbury’s became my best friend.

  At that time, jihadis did not see the United Kingdom as enemy territory. In fact, many were taking shelter in London. America was the enemy. But this was 1998, before 9/11 and the Iraq War broadened the battlefield and in so doing stoked a creeping anti-Islamic sentiment across the Western world.

  In Peshawar Abu Zubaydah was very happy to receive the phone; I think it may have been the only time I saw him smile. But in my brief time away, the mood had shifted in the camps. There was talk of martyrdom operations, a first for al-Qaeda. Those who wished to volunteer, the word went, should seek out the group’s operational chief Abu Hafs al-Masri.

  While we all wished to die gloriously in battle, the notion of suicide attacks was hotly debated at a number of levels. Only once had a group affiliated with al-Qaeda carried out such an operation: the attack two years previously on the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad. To me, the Koran had an unarguable prohibition of suicide.35 I believed Zawahiri’s group had crossed a line and my unease deepened.

  Perhaps the Egyptian cleric, a figure of fun in Baku just two years earlier, now prevailed inside al-Qaeda. I thought back to al-Muhajir’s lecture glorifying martyrdom, to bin Laden’s statement about taking the war to the United States, to Abu Khabab’s description of the truck bomb he’d designed. Things were changing, and fast. But I had no inkling that the opening shot in this war was just weeks away.

  * After the Taliban takeover, Hekmatyar had fled to Iran with much of his organization and Abu Zubaydah now enjoyed something of a monopoly when it came to processing foreign fighters entering Afghanistan. The drill was now to leave our passports with Abu Zubaydah, who kept them in a safe in his Peshawar villa.

  ** Abu Zubaydah provided these services to al-Qaeda in return for regular injections of cash. He continued to act as gatekeeper to the independent Khalden training camp in Khost.

  * While the hadith relating to the ‘black banners’ were an intoxicating and effective form of recruitment, serious questions have been raised by Islamic scholars about their authenticity. Their doubts stemmed from the exploitation of hadith by the Abbasid dynasty, which adopted black as its colour in overthrowing the Umayyad dynasty and so had every interest in promoting hadith foretelling the emergence of such an army. The prophecies relating to the black banners are mostly found in less authoritative hadith collections.7

  * Bin Laden’s Abbottabad diary, released by the CIA in late 2017, showed his fascination with eschatology.8

  ** Many Sunni Muslims believe the presence of the Mahdi on earth will set the stage for the return to earth of Jesus Christ (it is foretold to Damascus), who will then vanquish the Antichrist (foretold to first appear between Iraq and Syria). Jesus Christ, according to a prophecy, will then reign for forty years with the final Day of Judgment following some time after his death (Muslim: 2937).

  * Seventeen years later, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared himself the first Caliph of a restored Caliphate. ISIS theologians cited prophecies to argue the Mahdi would be one of his successors. Al-Qaeda leaders argued the new entity did not have sufficient backing among Muslims and was not strong enough or geographically large enough to be a legitimate Caliphate.10

  ** It is not possible to understand al-Qaeda’s strategy without understanding its fixation on fulfilling the prophecies. Creating the preconditions for the arrival of the Mahdi also explained the group’s later establishment of affiliates in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and the Maghreb, which along with Afghanistan are the lands of the Five Armies of Jihad prophesied to fight in the epic battles.

  ** Al-Muhajir, whose real name was (Sheikh) Abdulrahman al-Ali, had taught in various camps in Afghanistan. His profound influence on the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is discussed later.

  * The Taliban had asked bin Laden to move there in case the Northern Alliance under Ahmed Shah Masoud (yes, he was still in business) attacked Jalalabad.14

  * Footage of al-Qaeda operatives doing monkey bar drills at Tarnak Farms later became iconic.16

  * The dreams and visions of leading figures within al-Qaeda had an outsize impact on decision making because they were regarded as divinely inspired.

  * Bin Laden also later spent time with the 9/11 hijackers at al-Qaeda’s headquarters at Tarnak Farms.17

  * Abu Hafs’ real name was Mohammed Atef. He fought alongside bin Laden in the 1980s Afghan jihad and was a charter member of al-Qaeda. Over the years he hardened bin Laden’s views, persuading him of the need for regime change across the Arab world.18

  * Ghul’s capture in northern Iraq early in 2004 would be a critical point in the long trail leading to bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad.

  * Abu Hamza had trained with Abu Khabab around 1993. A Pakistani general had made a farmhouse available near Lahore to train Kashmiri militants. Abu Khabab told me the future Finsbury Park preacher had regarded himself as God’s gift to making explosives after just a few days’ training. When Abu Hamza moved to London he told a rather different story about losing his hands, saying that they’d been blown off while he was working to clear landmines. All the same, Abu Hamza raised considerable funds for Abu Khabab’s Darunta camp.

  * A large Algerian named Assad Allah, who had green eyes and the build of a weightlifter, was also providing training nearby, but Abu Khabab warned me off his courses, saying, ‘He treats explosives like vegetables.’ Indeed, there were plenty of tales of experiments gone awry at Allah’s workshop and around this period he himself lost one of his hands in an accident.

  * I witnessed many jihadis make decisions – sometimes life-altering ones – based on their dreams. I was often asked to interpret dreams because I had studied the meaning of them. I had read an old book called Interpretations of Dreams and Visions by a Muslim scholar called Ibn Sirin (died ad 728) who used the mindset of the dreamer.

  * Abd al-Aziz al-Masri, an Egyptian al-Qaeda bomb-maker who also sought to create WMD, wrote down in an al-Qaeda manual that sixty million people could be killed by poisoning water supplies with botulinum, a ridiculous assertion.

  ** At the Darunta facility we also developed techniques to extract venom from scorpions, which involved trapping them and making them sting an object, thus secreting the venom. Abu Khabab concluded that the significant amoun
t of venom needed to kill even a small rabbit made it a pretty impracticable weapon.

  * Experts on the threat from radiological devices say the biggest impact would be to sow panic. In many cases the blast from a dirty bomb would kill more people than the radiation.24

  ** Al-Ghamdi told me al-Qaeda operative Abu Leith al-Libi had suggested spreading the rumour that the group had several nuclear weapons at a meeting attended by Abd al-Aziz al-Masri and Abu Khabab. Abu Khabab also told me about the meeting. He told me that Chechens and Uzbeks linked to the Russian mafia had several times approached al-Qaeda offering nuclear warheads but they all turned out to be scams.

  * The descriptions of all these chemicals do not go beyond well-known chemistry and details already in the public domain in academic studies, media articles, court documents, government reports and the like.

  ** Hydrogen cyanide and cyanogen chloride are what are called ‘blood agents’. They ‘achieve their effects by travelling through the blood stream to sites where the agent can interfere with oxygen utilization at the cellular level’.28

  * I’m not divulging his last name.

  * I was given a tour of the caves in 1998. Camp Faruq was one of four camps al-Qaeda maintained exclusively for its recruits. Two others – Zhawar (which locals called Jihad Wal) and al-Sadeeq – were part of the same camp complex south of Khost and the fourth was the group’s administrative headquarters in Kandahar. Bin Laden provided significant funding for four additional camps. The group also maintained safe houses in places such as Kabul and Jalalabad. Other camps operated independently. One was the Khalden camp, whose interests were looked after by Abu Zubaydah in Peshawar.

  * In 2009 al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was founded in Yemen, led and staffed by veterans of al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. It was not the first time bin Laden had prioritized building up jihadi forces in southern Yemen. In 1989–90, after the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan, he poured great energy into plans to liberate southern Yemen from Communist rule, but his hope to create a unified Islamic State in Yemen were stymied by a lack of support from some key clerics and the unification of the country in May 1990 under President Ali Abdullah Saleh.33

  * After he was released in mid 1998, Ayeri made several trips to al-Qaeda’s camps in Afghanistan. After the second Chechen war started in 1999 he was a key fundraiser for his friend Ibn Khattab’s jihadi efforts there.34

  ** Bin Laden held his half-sister Mariam Mohameed Awad bin Laden in high esteem. His speeches often drew on her master’s thesis, ‘The role of Ibn Taymiyyah in the jihad against the Mongols’, which she completed in 1983 at the Umm al-Qura University in Mecca. Her thesis presented the famous Muslim theologian’s writings as providing theological justification for Sayyid Qutb’s ideological arguments six centuries later.

  My Fourth Life: Escape from al-Qaeda

  1998

  At 10:30 a.m. on 7 August 1998, a truck arrived at the entrance to the underground car park of the US embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. The occupants demanded the local guards at the barrier allow them access to the garage. They refused, at which point the two men in the truck opened fire and threw flash grenades.

  In the offices above, people came to the windows to see what the commotion was about. For many of them curiosity proved fatal. Seconds later a massive bomb composed of a 2,000 pound mix of TNT and other explosive substances was detonated in the truck. Just four minutes later, a truck bomb exploded outside the US embassy in neighbouring Tanzania.*

  In all, 224 people were killed in the two suicide bombings, but despite the targets only twelve Americans were among the victims. In the first explosion, most were ordinary Kenyans going about their business in one of Nairobi’s busiest neighbourhoods. The force of the blast demolished an adjacent building and seriously damaged both the embassy and the twenty-two-storey Co-operative Bank of Kenya.

  The intelligence community had picked up no chatter, let alone actionable information, about the plot. Nor had there been any whispers in al-Qaeda camps about an impending operation that would declare, in action rather than words, Osama bin Laden’s war against America.

  That day I was at Camp Faruq in eastern Afghanistan, blissfully unaware of the carnage thousands of miles to the west. There was no Internet, no texting in those days. The first I knew of the attacks was when celebratory gunfire erupted. It had a pattern unlike hostile fire.

  I ran towards the main office at the camp, where jihadis were gathering in the crisp mountain air, brandishing their AK-47s aloft and chanting ‘Allahu Akbar’. One fighter climbed into a pickup truck and urged fighters to rejoice.

  ‘The largest CIA station in Africa has been destroyed, thanks to our martyrs,’ he proclaimed.

  Hours before the first indications came from the US that al-Qaeda was the likely perpetrator, there was no doubt among my fellow jihadis. At first I celebrated with them, imagining a surgical operation that had taken out a CIA office. How naive. As details trickled through, thanks to one short-wave radio, the scale of the destruction became evident and I was troubled.

  If this was the war al-Qaeda planned to wage, I had serious misgivings about it. I could not ignore the callous disregard for the lives of innocent civilians. One of my fellow jihadis even dismissed the dozens of African casualties as ‘something that happens’ when you are at war. There was more than a tinge of racism in his attitude; many in al-Qaeda looked down on black Africans. Al-Qaeda’s leadership had chosen mid-morning on a Friday to carry out the attack on the grounds that most Muslims would be on their way to prayers.

  Almost as troubling was the use of suicide bombers in both embassy attacks. I could see no religious justification for the use of such a weapon. In my view the Koran explicitly forbade suicide. At the time I could see why the Palestinians would use such a weapon of despair against occupying Israeli forces. But we – al-Qaeda – had a choice. This was the first time the group had deployed suicide bombers: was this to be the way ahead?* Were suicide attacks to be the foundation of al-Qaeda’s campaign? Under what circumstances – and supported by what theological arguments – could the deaths of civilians be acceptable?

  I thought back to the growing discussions in the camps of martyrdom operations; and how the leadership had put out word that interested candidates should come forward. It began to come together. A few days later, it became intensely personal and even more distressing.

  For several weeks I had been asking others at Faruq where Abu Abdullah al-Maki had gone. No one knew. I assumed he’d chosen to move to another camp, but we were close and I found it odd that he had just vanished without a word. While I wondered, al-Maki was already in Kenya. He had been hand-picked by bin Laden as one of the Nairobi bombers. I imagined him volunteering in a euphoric rush after that impassioned sermon by Sheikh al-Muhajir.**

  Al-Maki had been the driver of the truck. When his co-conspirator had thrown the flash grenades and then fled the scene, he had detonated the bomb.

  Within a couple of days, news footage of the bombing reached the camp. Dozens of fighters crowded around a dusty video recorder to watch it. Many of them cheered at the scenes of devastation and suffering. I was shocked and sickened, haunted by the image of an African businessman immaculately dressed in a khaki suit clutching a briefcase in one arm. His other arm had been blown clean off. One side of his suit was drenched in blood, the other untouched. The contrast was arresting and horrifying.

  My mind was jolted back to my childhood and the videos I had seen of similarly well-dressed civilians in Sarajevo sustaining awful injuries from Serb mortar fire. Those videos had pushed me towards jihad; now we – the jihadis – were inflicting such casualties.

  The expressions on the faces of the dazed and traumatized civilians in Kenya immediately reminded me of the faces I had seen at the bridge in Sarajevo. They had the same look of numb disbelief at the cruelty of mankind as had the women and girls who shuffled across that bridge. I remembered just how I felt then, an infuriating clash of emotions: de
termination to take revenge but also a dispiriting sense that it would achieve nothing beyond another cycle of revenge.

  I still felt that Muslim communities throughout the world needed defending against enemies with overwhelming superiority. That impulse had taken me to Azerbaijan, the Philippines and Afghanistan. If it brought martyrdom, God would be pleased. But I began to ask myself how that defence should be waged and when it might legitimately become attack. And what methods were allowable in what I still perceived as a just cause?

  I still subscribed to the view that the US and the ‘modern Crusaders’ stood in the way of a victorious Islam illuminating a better path for humanity, as had been foretold in the prophecies. We needed to oppose their hegemony. But not this way – through suicide bombings and mass casualties. Did we – al-Qaeda – have the authority to decide on behalf of 1.6 billion Muslims what a just or legitimate war looked like?

  Amid these doubts, the wrangling inside me, I did know one thing for certain. The moral clarity I had felt as a sixteen-year-old setting off for Bosnia was forever gone.

  In the days that followed, I felt increasingly disconsolate, a mood deepened by the jubilation of everyone else. This was not why I had felt the call to jihad in Bosnia, dreamed of reaching Chechnya or even joined Abu Khabab’s laboratory.

  I recalled a heated discussion the previous winter in Abu Zubaydah’s safe house in Peshawar. An article by a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a jihadi faction committed to the overthrow of Colonel Gadhafi, had described how the group had once spared the lives of Libyan soldiers after extracting a promise they would ‘return’ to Islam. Several Algerian al-Qaeda members had argued that the soldiers should have been summarily executed; they were apostates who deserved no mercy. I had disagreed, arguing that in their humanitarian gesture the Libyan fighters had opted to persuade fellow Muslims rather than terrorize. But my perspective had made no impact.

  ‘Why must they be so bloodthirsty?’ I had asked the only fighter who had taken my side. Not for the first time, I felt that some of the men attracted to the al-Qaeda banner were driven as much by psychosis as religious conviction.