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

by Aimen Dean

  After dinner I found myself speaking late into the evening with Abdul Rasheed al-Filistini, a Palestinian al-Qaeda member married to Deek’s sister in law. His favourite topic of conversation was selling honey, which he insisted could finance the future of jihad. He would provide unwitting but valuable cover for me in years to come.

  The next morning, Deek instructed me to meet a new recruit and escort him into Afghanistan. Maybe KSM was right: more jihadis had been energized to make the trek to Afghanistan. During stays in California, Deek had taken a teenage Muslim convert and onetime Death Metal fan under his wing and had radicalized him. That youngster – the recently turned twenty-year-old Adam Gadahn – was now on his way to Pakistan. Deek didn’t want to be seen out and about himself; he was worried about being identified by informants.*

  ‘You go,’ he said. ‘You look young and Afghan.’

  As I walked around Peshawar on my way to meet Gadahn’s flight from Karachi, I was struck by the normality of the place: the street markets, the amiable doctor who gave me a prescription for new glasses, the bustle of people trying to make a living. This was reality for the vast majority of Muslims whose only goals were to take care of their families in relative peace, to choose how they lived and worshipped. It was a normality I suddenly craved. I passed a school and heard the excited chatter of a hundred children on their mid-morning break. Perhaps when all this is done, I thought, I could become a teacher. At the same time I was acutely aware that, with every passing month, I was more indelibly stamped as an al-Qaeda operative. The longer I stayed in the group, the less realistic a return to normality would be.

  After a half-hour wait in the pandemonium of Peshawar airport, I spotted a callow young man emerging from the arrivals hall. He was wearing Afghan clothing and a round white cap but was unmistakably American. I walked up to him and offered the pre-arranged greeting.

  Gadahn had greasy hair and there were traces of ginger in his short beard. His only notable physical features were his bright, cobalt-blue eyes. Nothing about him suggested the young American would one day become one of al-Qaeda’s most recognizable voices worldwide.

  I hugged him and welcomed him to Pakistan. He looked sullen and withdrawn.

  ‘There’s not much good food the other side of the border,’ I joked as we climbed into a motorized rickshaw. ‘How about a pizza before we go?’

  He abruptly refused and said he wanted to eat local food. This was a serious young man, I thought. We went to a place in the Orkazay Plaza which served authentic Afghan fare.

  ‘So when did you convert?’ I asked him.

  ‘I was seventeen. I found out about Islam online and went down to my local mosque. It was there that Abu Ayed [al-Deek] led me to the path of jihad.’

  Gadahn was not remotely apprehensive, but composed and curious. He was pleasant enough on the journey if lacking in the humour department. There was an intensity about him that was slightly unnerving.

  As we took a bus towards the Afghan border, he gazed out of the window while I thought about my route out of al-Qaeda’s orbit. Simply quitting was not an option. I had sworn allegiance and knew too much about the organization’s personnel and camps for them to allow me to ‘retire’. I had also come to know – and be a part of – the ambitious programmes led by Abu Khabab.

  The key problem was that Abu Zubaydah had my passport. I needed a way to extricate myself from al-Qaeda without provoking suspicion. The irony was not lost on me as I dropped off Gadahn in Jalalabad. He was arriving with the burning desire of the true believer; belief in al-Qaeda was seeping out of me daily.

  I retreated to Abu Khabab’s isolated Darunta camp to try to work out my next move. I was relieved to discover he had known nothing in advance about the East Africa bomb plots.

  As always there were only half a dozen or so apprentices in the camp. I was reunited with several members of the 1997 intake, including Hassan Ghul and the psychotic Abu Nassim. The current class included Safwat, the British Egyptian who had entrusted me with the disks, and a stocky recruit in his mid-thirties by the name of Abu Bakr al-Masri. Abu Bakr was a member of Zawahiri’s group and had developed a particular expertise in the electronics and circuitry of bombs. That had made him a useful foil for Abu Khabab, whose forte was bomb chemistry.

  Abu Khabab had continued to experiment with poison gases and I returned just in time for some gruesome practical tests. The poison of choice was hydrogen cyanide, and one cool autumnal morning the experiments got underway.

  With disturbing relish Abu Nassim placed a rabbit in a glass aquarium by the lakeside and started piping in the hydrogen cyanide. White fumes started to fill the aquarium, and within seconds the poor creature started furiously licking its lips. Its breathing quickened and it started scratching furiously at the side of the tank before losing muscle control, rolling onto its back and convulsing. Finally it was dead. The whole process had lasted a minute.

  Subsequently Abu Khabab’s team would use that same aquarium for tests on dogs and videotape the effects.* And it was filled with much more than hydrogen cyanide as the experiments evolved. We tested chlorine and then cyanogen chloride. Then came phosphine, a toxic gas based on a certain type of rat poison, and phosgene, a colourless gas deadlier than chlorine, which smells like musty hay.** It damages lung tissue, causing a build-up of fluid, and in high doses leads to suffocation.

  A macabre contest accompanied the research, in which apprentices competed to kill the rabbits as fast as possible.* I stayed out of it. The technical challenge of assembling a viable delivery system for poison gas confounded Abu Khabab’s apprentices. It was hardly practical to ask an al-Qaeda operative to mix the chemicals just before launching an attack, as they would likely be asphyxiated in the process.

  Hassan Ghul was preoccupied with the problem.

  ‘Abu Abbas – we’ve been thinking of it the wrong way,’ he said to me one afternoon as we headed up the hill after a stroll to the lake. ‘We shouldn’t be thinking in terms of mortars but rather putting a device in a rucksack and then leaving. We should be treating chemical weapons like IEDs.’

  He quickened his pace, entered the empty classroom, grabbed a piece of chalk and began drawing on the blackboard.

  ‘We need some kind of cylindrical container to store the chemicals in, but the problem is the explosion will shatter or ignite the whole thing before the chemicals have had a chance to mix and react.’

  I blurted out the answer.

  ‘So you need a small charge to break glass vials inside the cylinder. Then the substances will mix.’

  I should have remained a sullen, silent observer. I had no desire to add to al-Qaeda’s arsenal if it planned indiscriminate attacks around the world. But for some reason my scientific curiosity and urge to impress had momentarily overcome my qualms. How many times since have I regretted that impulse to show how clever I was?

  At that moment, Abu Khabab and his other apprentices walked in for class. Hassan Ghul blurted out the idea. Predictably, Abu Nassim was excited.

  ‘This will change everything. Imagine if we’d used poison gas in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam,’ he said.

  Abu Khabab responded with a sharpness I had rarely heard in him.

  ‘It’s one thing developing such weapons and quite another using them. The scholars will have to be unified in justifying with a fatwah any use of a device like this.’

  From my conversations with him, it seemed clear that Abu Khabab felt he was developing al-Qaeda’s equivalent of a nuclear device, for use in very defined circumstances. I had clung to the belief that these weapons would only be used as a deterrent, that somehow al-Qaeda would let the world know that it had developed a WMD capability but would hold it in reserve unless attacked. But my grip on that belief was loosening almost daily.

  Ultimately, I realized that the Darunta team, for all Abu Khabab’s prized autonomy from al-Qaeda’s high command, would not be the arbiters. The question that lurked at the back of my mind was how soon such a weapon might
spread deadly gas in a cinema in London or in the Paris Métro. Unless I could extricate myself I would have to answer to God.

  One long and lonely night at Abu Khabab’s camp, with a winter wind howling around our flimsy shack, I had what can only be described as a blinding realization.

  ‘Of course,’ I whispered to myself, metaphorically slapping myself on the forehead.

  The doctors in Qatar who had treated my malaria and typhoid had told me to return for tests twelve months later. Abu Khabab had always known this; he would support my travel, not least because he needed me to be in good health as one of his assistants.

  Here was a way out beyond suspicion. I rehearsed endlessly how I would broach the subject and one morning late in November the opportunity arose. Abu Khabab was busying himself rearranging shelves of chemicals.

  ‘You know I’m meant to go back to Qatar for medical tests,’ I said airily. ‘Do you think it would be safe?’

  ‘You should go,’ he said. ‘I don’t need another episode like last year.’ He was probably aware that the chemicals we were experimenting with were known to affect the liver.

  As he spoke he absent-mindedly left a jar of something white hanging off the shelf. I moved quickly to restore it.

  ‘Well, I’m in no hurry,’ I lied, ‘but perhaps you’d ask for permission for me to retrieve my passport.’

  I began to make plans and wondered what bolt-hole would be safest. I was undoubtedly on the Bahraini security services’ radar. According to intelligence gathered by Abu Zubaydah, my friend Khalid al-Hajj had been arrested in Saudi Arabia weeks after returning from the Philippines, during a panicky response to the embassy attacks. I wondered whether under interrogation he had given up my name; I doubted it. Kuwait looked like a better bet; it was more tolerant of hardcore Salafis. I could travel there easily from Qatar.

  On an early winter’s morning, I made the trip through the Khyber Pass to Peshawar once more. As I travelled from Jalalabad, the White Mountains away to the south were already powdered with snow. The brutal Himalayan winter was about to set in and I would not be sorry to miss it.

  Abu Zubaydah handed me my passport, no questions asked. I felt a euphoric surge of freedom, tempered only by anxiety that some officious Pakistani official would detain me for questioning at Islamabad airport. But there, too, no questions asked.

  On the flight to Qatar with my imaginary ‘doctor’s slip’ I began thinking of the comforts of obscurity and routine – the very opposite of what I had yearned for just three years before. I thought of catching up with my brothers, doing a university course, becoming a history teacher. Perhaps I would find a devout young woman to marry and settle down. Just twenty, I still had plenty of time for a fresh start. Or so I thought.

  Doha airport was the ordered, antiseptic opposite of my previous surroundings – all gleaming marble floors and bling-laden duty-free shops. It was an assault on the senses of a jihadi used to primitive mountain dwellings and isolation.

  I put on a brave front at immigration control. I was here for routine medical tests.

  ‘Where did you start your journey?’ the officer asked.

  Should I lie? What if they already knew?

  ‘Er, Peshawar in Pakistan,’ I said with a sigh, trying to sound like it was a weekly return trip.

  I was treated to a stern look, but the loud stamp on my passport sent a wave of relief through me.

  ‘Have a nice stay,’ the officer said, not meaning it.

  I was met in the arrivals hall by Ahmed, my friend from Bosnia who had looked after me during my medical emergency the previous year. I told him that the last year had been gruelling and I needed a rest. Over the next two days I sank into comfortable anonymity, grazing at shopping malls and catching a couple of films. It was a relief to pray at mosques untouched by the devious fanaticism of Sheikh al-Muhajir. Within a few days, I began to ask myself whether I had left al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda had left me. I was no longer wracked by doubt; I could follow my interpretation of what God intended and bin Laden could follow his. But normal didn’t last long. As we drove back from dinner one evening, Ahmed received a call on his cell phone. The colour drained from his face. He looked frightened.

  ‘That was state security,’ he stuttered. ‘They told me to drive you to their headquarters immediately and then come back with your belongings later.’

  I was surprised that they knew how to reach him but then remembered that I had provided his name at immigration as the person I’d be staying with. A part of me had been preparing for this moment. Even so, the prospect of a visit to state security filled me with apprehension. What did they know and how did they know it?

  ‘In my luggage,’ I whispered, ‘there’s a leather pouch. Inside, two floppy disks. Please hide them somewhere.’

  Those disks, copied on a whim, were now my insurance, something I could trade in case of trouble but not something I wanted others to find. Should the Qataris discover them, I feared I would never see the light of day again.

  ‘Just be sure no one can find them,’ I repeated.

  Ahmed agreed. I trusted him absolutely.

  Over the next nine days, I would get to know well the anonymous beige-brick building near a Sheraton Hotel on the outskirts of Doha. My host was Captain Ali Mohanidi, a courteous man who assured me I would be treated well. Even so, I realized the Qataris might be persuaded to transfer me to a less understanding regime.

  I was given a couch to sleep on in one of the offices, guarded by Pakistanis, who did much of state security’s grunt work.

  Sleep took a long time to come that first night. As I lay curled up, I focused on the small, high window that allowed in the glow of the city beyond. I felt a shudder of claustrophobia; there was no guarantee I would ever leave detention.

  I decided cooperation would be my best strategy. I was not going to be beaten to a pulp to protect a group that was veering towards some warped interpretation of a religion that meant everything to me. I wanted a normal life, and I would not let a misplaced sense of loyalty stand in the way.

  Early the next morning, I was taken to a wood-panelled office in an adjacent building. In front of me was an array of pastries and juices. Killing me with kindness, I mused.*

  I was questioned – ‘interrogated’ would sound too harsh – by five officers. It soon became clear they knew where I had been – and whom I’d met. It read like an al-Qaeda leadership chart: bin Laden, Abu Zubaydah, Ibn Sheikh al-Libi. I knew all the wrong people.

  ‘Do you deny this?’ one of the officers asked curtly.

  ‘No,’ I replied. They looked surprised. I had just spared them a lot of time.

  ‘There was a call from a phone linked to Abu Zubaydah to your friend here once upon a time which has been of great interest to Western intelligence,’ he continued. I suddenly realized why they knew about me; in the depths of delirium, when I was trying to get to Qatar for emergency medical treatment a year earlier, I had called Ahmed from Abu Zubaydah’s phone.14

  ‘Was it the French who were monitoring the phone?’ I asked.

  ‘We can’t tell you that,’ one of them replied.

  ‘Was it because of his role in the Paris Métro bombings a few years ago?’ I said.

  I told them I had heard in the camps that Abu Zubaydah had provided fake passports to the network behind the 1995 attacks and was worried the French were onto him.

  They were unable to hide their excitement.

  ‘Why are you telling us this?’ one of them asked with a hint of suspicion.

  ‘Look, I came to Qatar because I wanted to leave the group. I wasn’t exactly planning to talk to you. But here I am.’

  As I caught the questioning look in their eyes, I realized that I needed this speech to be very persuasive.

  ‘I went to Bosnia to defend Muslims, to prevent them from being massacred. I went to Afghanistan because I thought bin Laden wanted to defend Muslims. But it turns out he wants to attack the world. There is nothing in the Koran that justifi
es the embassy attacks. And I know there is more, and worse, to come.

  ‘I just wanted to get out, disappear.’

  I felt my voice trail away. It was an authentic and spontaneous epilogue to a speech I had rehearsed to order my own thoughts.

  While I needed the Qataris to be convinced of my change of heart, I also needed to be able to trade information for some assurance that they wouldn’t leave me languishing in jail after extracting all they could. The routine was polite, orderly – but I was very much not free to leave.

  On the third day of interviews they asked me for something ‘big’ they could take to their counterparts in French intelligence. I wasn’t about to tell them about Abu Khabab and Darunta; that was my ace. But I had plenty of other baubles I could dangle.

  Abu Zubaydah, I told them, had a fake Saudi passport – and he used it to open an account at Faysal Bank in Peshawar. I gave them the account number, which I had memorized after my brother had used it to send cash for my travel for medical treatment.

  ‘How on earth do you remember the account number?’ one of them asked.

  ‘I have a photographic memory,’ I replied.

  Two days later, my inquisitors looked exceptionally pleased. They had passed the bank account details to the French, who had recovered a trove of information and even a photograph of the elusive Abu Zubaydah. Thanks to me the Qataris were playing at the top table and basking in the attention.

  I knew I was an interesting case because every day a more senior official would come by to be briefed on the interrogation. They even asked me for a favour. Captain Mohanidi took me to small room stacked from floor to ceiling with books.

  ‘We’ve gathered these from underground booksellers specializing in Shia tracts. But we really haven’t had time to work out which are seditious and which are harmless.’ He flicked through a couple of titles, detonating a small cloud of dust. Sheepishly he asked, ‘Do you understand Shia theology? Would you mind taking a look at them? You’re a learned man; you’ll understand what might be risky.’

  I agreed and within a couple of hours had established a small stack of politically provocative volumes and a much larger pile of purely religious works.