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

by Aimen Dean

  After nine days of courteous but insistent questioning at the state security headquarters I was told I would be allowed to leave. But first I had to see the boss: Colonel al-Nuami.

  I expected a taciturn, humourless bureaucrat. You didn’t become head of the security service in an Arab state by cracking jokes. So I was pleasantly surprised to discover the colonel was a jovial man who sprang from his enormous leather armchair to grasp my hand.

  His office was the size of a tennis court – all mahogany furniture with the obligatory photographs of his meetings with various Royal Highnesses. He beckoned me to a sofa that I thought might swallow me and offered tea.

  ‘Thank you for what you’ve done,’ he began. ‘Everything you told us about Abu Zubaydah checks out. The French are excited.’ No wonder he was in such a good mood. He took a sip of tea and leaned towards me across the acreage of his green leather desktop.

  ‘We’d be happy to keep you here but we can’t protect you if any of your former comrades find out you’ve been talking. Regretfully, there are still a few here.’ Another sip. ‘Also, word may spread that you are in Qatar. There is a risk the Saudis or Bahrainis will demand your extradition for whatever offences you may have committed in their countries, and that would put us in an awkward position.’

  The Qataris liked to show their independence from the Saudis, but there were limits. ‘Your talents would be better served with a bigger organization. I can arrange a private jet tonight to take you to France. The DGSE [French overseas intelligence] would like to meet you.’

  He set his expensive gold pen on the desk and waited.

  ‘Do I have a choice?’ I asked. I thought for a moment about asking whether anonymity was an alternative, but the gaze fixed on me did not encourage bargaining.

  ‘The Americans, the British. I know what I’d do,’ he replied.

  I raised my eyebrows.

  ‘Let’s just say I wouldn’t choose the Americans. They’ll chew you up and spit you out. They don’t have a history of looking after their people. Think about it. Come back and tell me in thirty minutes.’

  So I had a whole half-hour in which to decide the rest of my life.

  I felt little cultural affinity for the French and didn’t speak the language. I didn’t trust the Americans either, and, given my lingering anger over the Dayton Accords, the idea of talking to them was a step too far. I imagined (was it the spy films?) that the British were more professional than other intelligence agencies. They understood the Arab world; they had been here long enough. I had enjoyed being in London when I had picked up the satellite phone.

  There was another reason. My grandfather had fought against the Ottomans for the British in the Mesopotamia campaign of the First World War. He had risen to the rank of major and become head of the Colonial Police in the Iraqi city of Basra. He had always spoken of British administration in glowing terms.

  After my appointed half-hour was up, I was ushered back into the colonel’s office.

  ‘I’m ready to go to London,’ I said. I was suddenly (and perhaps irrationally) excited about my new lease of life. My appetite for adventure and movement had briefly stifled any apprehension I might still have about such a sudden and drastic change of course.

  The Qataris booked me on a British Airways flight and called Ahmed.

  ‘You can come and collect your friend,’ said the captain. ‘Bring all his belongings. He’s going straight to the airport.’ My heart leapt. Would they discover the leather pouch? It might give them second thoughts about releasing me.

  When Ahmed arrived my suitcase was carefully unpacked in front of me, its linings prodded, pockets minutely examined. I did my best to look uninterested but every second of the search felt like a long winter’s night at Darunta.

  To my relief Ahmed had taken the precaution of burying the pouch in a flowerpot. As we left the building, he asked me with a smirk if I’d been worried.

  ‘I wasn’t exactly chilled,’ I said with a laugh.

  ‘You know me,’ he said, ‘I’m no amateur. You’ll be glad to know that they warned me of serious consequences if I breathed a word of this to any of our jihadi brothers. As if . . .’ he said, waving both his arms skyward.

  On the way to the airport we stopped at Ahmed’s villa. He lived in a quiet suburb of Doha; it had been easy to ensure we were not being tailed. He closed the front door and checked no one was within earshot.

  ‘I knew they’d arrest you,’ he said quietly, without looking me in the eye.

  ‘After your last visit they came to see me, the security people. They somehow knew about the phone you’d used to contact me. Whoever it belonged to was of interest to them. I didn’t want any trouble. I just told them that the only person to call me from Pakistan was an old friend from Bosnia known as Haydara al-Bahraini. I told them it was an emergency; you had come to Qatar for urgent medical treatment. Obviously they checked with the hospital and found out you’d be coming back for a check-up. So they came to me and said that if you returned I would have to tell them immediately. And that if I warned you, there would be consequences for me.’

  We retrieved the pouch from the pot on his balcony. He paused as we got into the car and then looked at me. I was taken aback to see tears welling up in his eyes. ‘I’m sorry; I didn’t know what to do. I want to stay here. I have a fiancée.’

  I clapped him on the shoulder.

  ‘Ahmed; you kept the pouch away from them. That’s all that mattered. Remember, I’ve been in the camps for two years; I’m quite hardened to adversity. They’re allowing me to go to London to get medical treatment for this liver condition. Life’s good.’ I laughed. ‘Well, it’s better than my liver.’

  When I arrived at Doha airport, I noticed that the flight had a stopover in Bahrain. Would the security services there know of my travel and march me off the plane? Colonel al-Nuami had indicated I was a wanted man there. I was apprehensive but had literally no one in the world to talk to; this was truly the meaning of limbo.

  When the flight arrived in Bahrain, it seemed to sit at the gate forever. Or was that me just experiencing every minute as an hour? There were hushed conversations going on between the purser and one of the pilots. A Bahraini official came on board. My stomach turned over. Was I being stitched up?

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, captain speaking, apologies for the delay, but unfortunately we won’t be leaving Bahrain tonight . . .’ There was a chorus of groans. ‘The air space over the Gulf has been closed due to military operations. We will have to wait till tomorrow, when I hope we’ll have a better idea of what’s going on.’

  Operation Desert Fox, a four-day bombing campaign to punish Saddam Hussein for defying UN resolutions and obstructing weapons inspections, was in motion.

  This was impossible. I couldn’t go through passport control in Bahrain; I would be arrested. I motioned to one of the cabin crew.

  ‘I would rather stay at the airport tonight,’ I said. ‘I need to do some duty-free shopping and really don’t want to travel miles to a hotel.’

  I was instantly aware that my excuse sounded beyond lame. Stay up all night to buy perfume?

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to leave the airport. We’ve made arrangements to fast-track everyone through immigration.’

  Everyone but me, I thought.

  ‘Look,’ I said, leaning towards her confidentially. ‘I am in the Bahraini opposition. I am based in Qatar. If they identify me I am in real trouble.’

  It was a desperate gamble. She could see I was very anxious and looked sympathetic. Other passengers shot me quizzical glances as they filed through the plane.

  She asked to see my boarding pass.

  ‘Just remain in the terminal. I’ll take care of it,’ she said.

  I spent an uncomfortable night wandering the brightly lit duty-free shops and trying to find a quiet corner at an unused boarding gate. The BA flight finally left Bahrain the following morning, and I was glad to see the sprawling metropolis shrinking beneath
me.

  In the gathering gloom of a December afternoon I finally arrived at Heathrow Airport.

  Standing at the gate were one of the most senior counter-terrorism officials at MI5, who introduced himself as Tom, and an MI6 agent who introduced himself as Harry.* (It might have been because of his fleshy ears.) They welcomed me with broad smiles and firm handshakes, as if they’d been expecting me for months. In fact, the Qataris had given them just a few hours’ notice that I was en route. Perhaps the welcome reflected their glee in putting one over on the French.

  Tom was tall with a shock of white hair, which sat slightly uneasily with his much younger features. He had a ready smile and an air of casual authority. He spoke excellent Arabic and seemed to enjoy practising it.

  They took me to an interview room.

  ‘You must be tired, so we will try to keep this short,’ Harry said, speaking slowly to accommodate my basic command of English. ‘First we’ll need your boarding pass. I’ve sent someone to collect your suitcase.’

  After plenty of practice in Qatar I delivered a concise account of my story. They were sympathetic listeners. At one point Tom told me: ‘We understand how difficult this is. These people, you fought alongside them, you shared a lot of experiences. But you’re doing the right thing.’

  ‘Your medical condition gives us some cover,’ he said. ‘We’ll work on a story with the Qataris,’ he said. ‘Like the Ministry of Health sent you to London for specialist treatment of your liver problem.’

  I felt I needed to give them a token of goodwill.

  ‘Can I speak in Arabic?’ I asked. ‘I want to be accurate.’

  I was almost too exhausted to think in my native tongue, let alone English.

  ‘You know I can’t accept civilian casualties. Well, I’m concerned about a plan in Yemen that involves British citizens.’ The change in their body posture assured me I had their full attention.

  ‘In Jalalabad, before I left, I met a teenager. He’s the son of a cleric here at a place called Finsbury Park, Abu Hamza al-Masri.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Tom said, ‘we are well aware of him.’

  ‘Well, we got into conversation. He was impressed that I’d been at Darunta. His father provides funds for the camp.’

  ‘We didn’t know that,’ Tom murmured.

  ‘Anyway, his name is Mohamed Mostafa. He said that his father had big plans for Yemen. He recited a well-known prophecy to me:

  ‘From the region of Aden and Abyan 12,000 warriors shall rise to fight for God and His messenger.’

  ‘He said his brother had already gone to Yemen. And he said his father had warned Westerners to stay out of Yemen.’15

  ‘Yes, he did, that’s true,’ Tom said in Arabic.

  ‘He claimed that they’re going to start an armed campaign to drive out the remaining infidels. They’re planning to strike a missionary church and to kidnap Westerners.’

  ‘Oh boy!’ Harry sighed, after Tom translated.

  ‘Keep talking: we need every detail on this you have.’

  After three hours I was escorted through immigration control to a waiting car that would take me to a hospital in London.

  ‘Rest up,’ said Tom. ‘I’m sure we have a lot more to talk about.’ He added an almost mischievous grin.

  ‘Oh! Before I go, you’d better have this,’ I said and handed him the leather pouch still dusty with Qatari sand. He gave me a curious look as he gingerly took it. ‘On the disks you’ll find a lot of stuff on al-Qaeda, their camps and the formulas for some of the bombs the group’s working on. Especially the work of Abu Khabab; he’s very clever.

  ‘Don’t lose it,’ I said, allowing my fatigue to release a whiff of impudence.

  The car pulled away. As I glanced out of the back window, Tom was holding the pouch as if it had just emerged from Tutankhamun’s tomb.

  * I later learned the bombs were designed by Abd al-Aziz al-Masri, al-Qaeda’s in-house explosives expert.

  * As noted above, Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad carried out a suicide bombing attack on the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad in November 1995. But at the time his group had not yet formally joined forces with al-Qaeda.

  ** Al-Maki’s birth name was Jihad Mohammed Ali al-Harazi and he also went by the name Azzam. His al-Qaeda alias was Abu Obeydah al-Maki. He was the cousin of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the future mastermind of the USS Cole attack, and a friend of two of the future 9/11 hijackers.1

  * That prerogative had been loosely interpreted by the Umayyad Caliphs to justify wars fought for the sake of territorial expansion – expansion that would take them across North Africa and into Andalus, what is now southern Spain. In the end the expansionist behaviour of the Muslim empire was not much different from that of any other empire.

  * In the view of the Jordanian scholar Marwan Shehadeh, al-Qaeda and other groups have abused al-Tatarus. ‘Killings started to target innocent civilians without observing those restrictions and conditions or considering the preventions that guard against the spilling of “protected” blood,’ he wrote.2

  * For example, the Syrian al-Qaeda aligned group Jabhat al-Nusra emphasized coalition building and building up support among the local population.

  * Al-Suri’s anger was triggered, in part, by the May 1998 press conference bin Laden and Zawahiri held for a select group of Pakistani journalists to talk up their ‘Worldwide Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and the Crusaders’.5

  * On 20 August 1998, bin Laden explicitly denied responsibility for the embassy attacks in a statement relayed to a Pakistani journalist.6

  ** Bin Laden’s father’s side of his family hailed from Hadramaut in Yemen.

  * Weeks before the African embassy bombings, the camp leadership had relocated us ‘for training purposes’ from our usual sleeping quarters to tents which were put up on the edge of the camp. With the benefit of hindsight it is clear the camp leadership anticipated the United States would likely retaliate with air strikes. The fact the tents were hit illustrated the Americans had undertaken careful satellite reconnaissance. President Bill Clinton described the strikes as part of ‘a long, ongoing struggle between freedom and fanaticism’. Few guessed how long that struggle would be, nor how quickly it would escalate.

  ** He was also known in jihadi circles as Tala’at. His real first name was Safwat but I never found out his last name.

  * Deek was known in jihadi circles as Abu Ayed. He was close to the British jihadi Abu Hudhaifa and stayed with him in Birmingham for a time.

  * Also there was Abu Abdullah al-Scotlandi from Dundee in Scotland. His real name was James McLintock. He told me he had settled in Pakistan after working for Aramco in Saudi Arabia. He married a Kashmiri woman and began moving in jihadi circles in Peshawar. He had a reputation as a ‘high society’ jihadi. For those attending the camps in Afghanistan, Peshawar was like the ‘Hamptons’ – a place where the cream of the crop went to rest and recharge.7

  * According to US court documents al-Qaeda first sent operatives to conduct reconnaissance of the US embassy in Nairobi in 1993. Ibn Sheikh al-Libi told me one reason the embassy was targeted was because Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad believed it was the biggest CIA station in Africa and had orchestrated the defection of the wives of two EIJ operatives in Sudan. Al-Libi would be detained in Pakistan after 9/11 and transferred to US custody. He was subsequently transferred to Egypt where, allegedly under torture, he stated (falsely) that Saddam Hussein had provided chemical and biological weapons training to al-Qaeda, information subsequently used by the George W. Bush administration to make the case for war in Iraq. He was later transferred to Libya where in 2009 he was found hanged in his prison cell in suspicious circumstances. Given his religious views it is almost inconceivable he committed suicide.8

  * Gadahn had made one previous trip to Pakistan the year before. After falling ill he had returned to California.10

  * Al-Qaeda footage of a dog being exposed to what one expert said was likely hydrogen cyanide p
oison gas was obtained after 9/11 by CNN in Afghanistan and broadcast in a report by correspondent Nic Robertson. A leading chemical weapons expert advising the US government said at the time: ‘The fact they were able to repeat tests or demonstrations on this tape indicates that they clearly have a way to produce a predictably lethal chemical.’11

  ** Phosgene was first used by the Germans against British troops in late 1915 and was responsible for up to eighty-five percent of the 90,000 deaths by gas in the First World War.12

  * According to the Robb–Silberman Presidential Commission on WMD, prior to the US offensive to remove the Taliban from Afghanistan, ‘analysts assessed that al-Qa’ida “almost certainly” . . . had produced small amounts of World War I-era agents such as hydrogen cyanide, chlorine, and phosgene.’ They knew this because I told British intelligence.13

  * It was a smart move on the part of the Qataris, surprising and putting me at ease. Sometimes coaxing is much more effective than cajoling or threatening. Al-Qaeda and ISIS recruits expect to be brutalized and are trained to resist ‘enhanced interrogation’. They believe the more they resist it, including by providing false information, the greater the reward in the afterlife. Good food, somewhere to sleep and shower, the prospect of rehabilitation, disorientates and destabilizes the detainee.

  * As is the practice of British intelligence, these were the invented names they used in handling me, rather than their real first names. While, after years of service, I learned the real identity of many of my handlers, this book uses their invented names or in a couple of cases pseudonyms to protect their privacy and security.

  My Fifth Life: Undercover

  1999

  I had travelled from the medieval surroundings of an al-Qaeda camp to a sofa in Qatar’s intelligence headquarters to the hushed corridors and expensive sheets of a private London hospital – and all within two weeks.

  It was enough to disorientate anyone, which as much as my inflamed liver kept me awake despite aching fatigue. I had left Jalalabad for medical treatment and a lifetime of anonymity, and ended up thousands of miles away in London as a guest of British intelligence. Christmas trees adorned every floor of the South Kensington hospital, their lights twinkling cheerily. As a Muslim who had until very recently been a fully pledged member of al-Qaeda and one of its up and coming bomb-makers, they were a source of surreal amusement.