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

by Aimen Dean

  My new friends had ushered me quietly into the hospital – no form-filling or check-in. As it turned out, I was there for good reason. I had failed to keep up a treatment regime for malaria and typhoid (no easy task at Darunta) and my liver had rebelled. The stress of the past two weeks had no doubt contributed.

  The day after I was admitted, I was absorbing all these changes while gazing at the grey street below and following the ubiquitous white vans as they broke most traffic regulations in the space of a couple of hundred yards.

  I realized this was a watershed in my life. I needed to cooperate fully with the British if I wanted to resume what might resemble a normal existence.

  There was a knock at the door. Tom from MI5 entered with a cheerful smile.

  ‘Rested?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, not exactly,’ I said. ‘It’s quite a lot to take in.’

  ‘So was the pouch you gave us for Christmas,’ he said.

  I smiled.

  ‘I hope it’s useful,’ I said with false modesty.

  ‘We are still going through it all. Our Arabic translators are at full throttle.’

  ‘Tell them to focus on what’s called the “Encyclopaedia of Jihad”. It has years of practical information on how to wage terrorist and insurgent campaigns. It’ll take them a while.’

  ‘We’re arranging a six-month medical visa for you,’ he continued. ‘That happens all the time for people from the Gulf who get private medical attention in the UK. Call it one of our invisible exports,’ he said. ‘And we’re following up on the Yemen story. Wanted to check whether you had any more on that.’

  I didn’t. But the value of what I’d provided was demonstrated even as I lay in hospital.

  On 24 December 1998, Yemeni security forces arrested five British citizens in the port city of Aden. In the process they also seized rockets, landmines and explosives. Those arrested were about to carry out devastating attacks on the five-star Mövenpick Hotel, the British consulate and a Westerners’ club. The cell included the son of Abu Hamza I’d met in Jalalabad and his stepson.*

  Another of their targets, as I had warned British intelligence, was Aden’s only Christian church. The cell planned to declare the attacks were in retaliation for the recent British and American air strikes in Iraq (the same ones that had led me to spend an uncomfortable night at Bahrain airport).2

  In a nod to the famous prophecy the group had called itself the ‘Abyan Faction of the Islamic Army of Aden’ and was a joint venture between the Finsbury Park cleric and a local militant called Abu Hassan al-Mihdar,* with funds funnelled from London by the former. Abu Hamza had provided his stepson with a satellite phone so that he could orchestrate their efforts from London.

  Four days after the plot was thwarted, the remaining members of the cell, armed with machine guns and rocket launchers and led by al-Midhar, kidnapped sixteen Western tourists in a convoy of SUVs in an attempt to win the release of their comrades. After they took the hostages into the desert, Abu Hamza himself provided them with guidance via the satellite phone. When the next morning Yemeni security services launched a rescue operation, the kidnappers used the hostages as human shields. Four British tourists and one Australian were killed.4

  I don’t know whether my intelligence was the only warning about the plot. The calls Abu Hamza made to Yemen were also intercepted (though whether by the UK or CIA I was never told).5 But Tom told me my information had helped them understand just how serious the threat was.

  It was a good start. But my new clients wanted more.

  ‘It would be very interesting to see who you might be able to flush out here,’ Tom said. ‘Make a few calls perhaps. We’re getting a bit tired of this Londonistan tag.**

  Trouble is,’ he continued with a grim smirk, ‘we’d need to prove they are raging psychopaths about to blow up Buckingham Palace to get an English court to take notice.’

  I nodded, but Tom wanted to reinforce the message, just in case it had been obscured by my sketchy understanding of English or medical condition.

  ‘It would be good to let some of your contacts in England know you are here in hospital, so the news gets round.’

  It made sense: questions were sure to be raised when I failed to return to Afghanistan. I’d also be able to establish myself in the jihadi community in London.

  Time to reach for the Bosnia rolodex.

  My first call on what would become a meandering journey through the UK’s militant scene was to Babar Ahmad, the British Pakistani jihadi I had helped down the mountain during that final battle in Bosnia.* I’d briefly encountered him in Baku when he visited our ‘charity’ offices in order to make contact with the mayonnaise-loving Ibn Khattab. We had sent a letter to the Saudi jihadi leader vouching for Ahmad and they had been in contact ever since.

  I was taken aback by how much he had aged. Perhaps the head wound he’d received in Bosnia was in part to blame. Nearly bald, he looked less the youthful jihadi fighter and more the earnest technician. Which in a way he was – using his considerable IT skills to propagate the wonders of jihad.

  He leaned down to embrace me.

  ‘Not how I expected we would meet,’ he said with a grin.

  ‘Not where I expected to be,’ I replied, laughing.

  I spun him a story about how my routine check-up in Qatar had uncovered some sort of medical emergency – and now, at great cost to my family, I was in London for treatment.

  ‘Can you let people know what’s happened to me?’ I asked. ‘I don’t want them to think that I’ve been arrested.’

  Babar Ahmad readily agreed and invited me to visit his home to catch up.

  Next on my list was ‘Mohammed al-Madani’, the Saudi who had teased me about my puny frame in Bosnia and had since moved to England. Al-Madani made an odd sight in central London in his black Afghan robes and carrying a shepherd’s staff. I thought he was both cunning and perceptive so was more than a little apprehensive about meeting him. He was also in close contact Abu Qatada, one of the most influential preachers in Londonistan. Gaining access to the cleric depended on my making a good impression. I was not yet convinced that I could hide my change of heart, nor even sure that I wanted to work against some individuals who had been my fellow travellers for the previous four years and might even share my vision of jihad rather than al-Qaeda’s.

  I imagined that as my old friends arrived to see me in hospital a man in a raincoat waiting for a bus or fixing a phone box across the street was taking clandestine photographs. Al-Madani promised to get word to Afghanistan that I was getting emergency treatment in London. (Tom had impressed upon me how important it was to keep what he called my ‘legend’ intact.) Al-Madani appeared genuinely happy to see me again and we spent a surprisingly relaxed hour talking about the Bosnia campaign.

  After a few days recovering my strength, I called my brother Moheddin in Saudi Arabia and explained recent events. He was shocked and wanted to come to London. I quickly dissuaded him; having my oldest brother in tow, asking awkward questions, was all I needed.

  ‘You know the Islamic Centre here,’ I said casually. ‘If you have any contacts there, can you arrange a room? I want to get out of this hospital as soon as possible,’ I lied, as an attractive nurse entered the room with lunch.

  In fact I’d already stayed at the Islamic Centre (the al-Muntada al-Islami mosque in Parsons Green) the previous year when I’d picked up a satellite phone for al-Qaeda. It was a suitable first step towards familiarizing myself with the area’s Muslim community. And my brother might just know some interesting characters.

  I left the cossetted comfort of the hospital early in the new year. A plan had evolved in my mind: do a few weeks of sleuthing and spotting for my new friends at MI5 and then revive my dream of obscurity, perhaps scrape the cash together to go to college.

  Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Services had rather different plans for me. The famous pouch had provided many intriguing answers but provoked myriad questions. And it was not
as though Tom could pop down to a café on the Brompton Road to catch up on al-Qaeda’s plans for global terror.

  On a grey and bitter January morning I was huddled inside a suite at a grand Victorian hotel a little way south of King’s Cross. Tom was master of ceremonies – irrepressibly cheerful but also sensitive to my cultural background. No doubt ignoring the service’s HR manual, he asked me if I preferred to work only with male agents. I reflexively replied yes. I still inhabited an all-male universe and wasn’t sure how I would interact with a female officer, beyond being cripplingly shy.

  Another MI5 officer introduced himself as Nick. He resembled the actor Sam Neill, who had played the palaeontologist in the Jurassic Park movies.

  MI6’s representative might have come from central casting, dressed immaculately in a double-breasted Savile Row suit, his tie dotted with the crest of some exclusive school or college. A gentleman’s hat hung on the coat stand. This eminent member of the British establishment introduced himself as Richard. He was probably in his early forties but looked older. He had the cut-glass accent of the well-educated, and his bulging waistline, receding hair, hooded green eyes and majestic salt and pepper beard made him the spitting image of King Edward VII. I soon took to teasing him as ‘Your Majesty’, which he took in good humour.

  Richard startled me by switching briefly to perfect Arabic with a Bedouin twang. In a previous incarnation, he had spent time visiting tribal encampments in the desert interior of Saudi Arabia. For the sake of his colleagues, he reverted to boarding school English to lay out the British government’s needs.

  ‘The information you brought – let’s describe it as alarming. Those designs for bombs and chemical devices won’t remain theoretical forever. You’ve seen this?’ he asked.

  He passed me a photocopy of a recent interview that Osama bin Laden had given Time magazine.7

  ‘Quote,’ he continued, ‘ ‘‘Acquiring [chemical and nuclear weapons] for the defence of Muslims is a religious duty. If I have indeed acquired these weapons, then I thank God for enabling me to do so.’’ ’8

  I thought of Abu Khabab and his prized independence. How long could that last?

  ‘It’s conceivable,’ Tom continued, ‘that you’ve spent much of the last two years in the most important fifty square yards in Afghanistan. So we’re going to need your help – maybe for a few months.’ He let the last three words sink in, perhaps inviting protest. His hawk’s eyes peered at me from beneath heavy lids. ‘If you help us, we can then help you transition to a normal life.’

  The alternative was left unsaid.

  And so began a series of meetings that stretched into the spring. I came to know a lot of hotel conference rooms in central London. The protocol was always the same, but I sometimes felt slightly foolish following it. Every time I met my handlers I would call a given number from a public phone, holding my nose in the stuffy, smelly booth and ignoring the various services on offer from silhouetted women. I would be told to proceed to another phone box via a particular route to place another call. Only on the second call would I be told where to go and when. The tortuous routine – not unlike a reality TV show – was to allow MI5 spotters to ensure I was not being followed.

  I explained how the Darunta research team had been working on a delivery mechanism for poison gas and provided my inquisitors with every last detail about Abu Khabab’s laboratory. They were not happy to hear that a middle-aged UK citizen of Egyptian origin (Safwat) was one of his most able apprentices.

  I related my bomb-making experiments and my time in the Philippines and Bosnia, including my narrow brush with the Serbs’ landmine booby trap and my leg wound in the jungle.

  ‘Perhaps we should call you the cat,’ Richard said. ‘You’re certainly using up some lives.’

  The nickname quickly stuck among my handlers.

  I also provided MI5 and MI6 with a detailed picture of how al-Qaeda was organized, the leading players and the relationships between them, the locations of camps and safe houses. I listed common jihadi travel routes and financing sources, support networks in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, Pakistan and Turkey. I supplied or confirmed the identities of dozens of operatives from their photographs, details of bank accounts, phone numbers al-Qaeda operatives used and even the models of vehicles they preferred.

  I was surprised that I seemed to be drawing on a blank sheet of paper. Literally everything I said was being scribbled down by my audience. British intelligence (and they were not alone) was awakening to a danger of which it knew little. For years, MI6 had been focused on the chaos that had followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and countering nuclear proliferation, while MI5 had focused on Northern Ireland. The Africa embassy bombings just four months previously had changed the calculus in London and Washington.

  Of greatest concern to my new handlers was the emergence of suicide bombings as an al-Qaeda tactic and the ‘suicide bomb squads’ that Abu Hafs al-Masri had been organizing in Afghanistan.*

  Senior jihadis in Afghanistan obligingly helped keep me up to date. Just weeks into my debriefings, I got a phone call from Afghanistan. Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, the head of the Khalden camp whom I’d met in Peshawar just months earlier, was on the line, along with Peshawar gatekeeper Abu Zubaydah.

  They told me I should meet an Algerian by the name of Said Arif, who was the head of al-Qaeda’s intelligence apparatus in London and right-hand man to the Jordanian Palestinian cleric Abu Qatada. Abu Qatada was raising serious sums of money for the cause of global jihad. While he was very much on the radar of British intelligence, he covered his tracks expertly. Everything he raised was helping ‘Muslim civilians’ in conflict zones. Like the Haramain Foundation, Abu Qatada and many others were using the guise of humanitarian causes to siphon money to militant groups.

  I called al-Madani to arrange a meeting with Said Arif and Abu Qatada.

  ‘You’ll find them at the Four Feathers Club. I’ll take you to see him after Friday prayers,’ he said.

  I found it amusing that the Four Feathers Club was not far from the fictional dwelling of Sherlock Holmes in Baker Street. There the similarities ended. Rather than the book-lined study of Victoriana’s most famous investigator, the Four Feathers social club occupied several dingy rooms in a dilapidated building. But appearances were deceptive; it had become a nerve centre in Europe for international jihad. MI5 was aware of some of what was going on but badly wanted someone on the inside.

  Al-Madani and I met Said Arif on one of those London afternoons where the lowering clouds send squalls of heavy rain into every corner. Arif was a lean man in his late thirties, whose searching brown eyes gazed through wire-framed spectacles. He had a long beard and a tidy, close-cropped haircut. Part of his job was to vet would-be jihadis from North Africa who wanted to go to Afghanistan. His intense expression suggested he was probably quite good at it. As he began to talk I quickly realized we had met in bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan, when I had known him by another name. It helped cement the relationship that we could reminisce about the ‘good old days’.*

  I noticed several long-bearded young men, some of whom appeared to have battlefield injuries, sitting on the other side of the room. And here they all are, safe and sound, sitting next to the radiator in a sanctuary in central London. The tolerance – or naivety – of democracies, I thought.

  ‘Al-Ghamdi says we should take advantage of your medical visa so you can help us recruit and fundraise in London,’ Arif told me. Al-Ghamdi, I thought – still watching over me after luring me into al-Qaeda, and with a direct line to London, too.

  ‘Rather than return to Afghanistan?’ I asked, feigning disappointment.

  ‘First you should recover your strength, then we’ll see.’

  ‘I just don’t want to be here too long. The filth and sin of London is too much,’ I said self-righteously. I hoped I was not overdoing it.

  ‘This way,’ he said, and knocked gently at a cheap wooden door.

  Inside was a grinning, generously p
roportioned man in his mid-forties. ‘Sheikh Abu Qatada’ had deep-set eyes that didn’t always look in the same direction, and a fleshy nose. His bulging waistline and magnificent beard, like a ruff, gave him an almost Shakespearian air.

  ‘Sheikh,’ said Arif, ‘this is Abu al-Abbas, who until last month was with the brothers in Afghanistan.’

  ‘Welcome, my brother. We’ve heard a lot about you,’ Abu Qatada said to me quietly.

  Probably not as much as you need to, I thought.

  Abu Qatada’s surroundings belied his place in the global jihadi establishment. If his surroundings were modest, his self-esteem was far from it. He was rare among radical preachers in the UK in having serious theological credentials. He claimed he had a master’s degree from the Jordanian university in Amman in the study of hadith. He had come to Britain illegally in 1993 after spending time in Afghanistan and Pakistan.10 None other than Abu Zubaydah had provided him with a forged UAE passport.

  Abu Qatada was known for being an extreme hardliner.* In a 1995 fatwah he had condoned the killing of the wives and children of ‘apostates’ by the militant Armed Islamic Group (GIA) in Algeria, which gave the group theological cover to massacre Muslim civilians.

  He was thirsty for news from the camps and was impressed that I had been commissioned by bin Laden to ‘educate’ recruits. I quickly realized that he didn’t suffer fools gladly.

  ‘I look forward to more conversations about Shariah and the future of jihad,’ he said as he bade me farewell. ‘Most of the Algerians around me are no more intelligent than their family donkeys.’

  Abu Qatada was the consummate performer. In private he was all calm authority, soft-spoken and smiling. In front of the faithful on a Friday morning his voice would rise to shrill anger as he pumped up the congregation, mixing a loathing of the perfidious West with glorification of jihad. A favourite target was the recently deceased King Hussein of Jordan, whom he pronounced ‘would be spat out even from hell’.