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

by Aimen Dean

  Trawling the mosques and lecture halls of Islamist London was both illuminating and surprising. I also discovered plenty of petty jealousies among ‘leaders’ such as Abu Qatada and Abu Hamza al-Masri.

  In presiding at Finsbury Park, Abu Hamza controlled one of the largest mosques in the city. He also garnered more publicity than Abu Qatada because of the loss of both his hands in that experiment gone wrong, and his piratical metal hook made him an irresistible draw for the British tabloids.**

  The story Abu Hamza told about how he had lost his hands and one eye was typical of the braggadocio among London clerics. He said he’d been disabled while clearing mines in Afghanistan, but I already knew from Abu Khabab about his bomb-making mishap.* He preached about the obligation of jihad to impressionable youngsters at Finsbury Park, and formed an organization called Supporters of Sharia (SOS) which peppered Muslim neighbourhoods with leaflets. On one visit, I went down to the mosque’s basement to find rows of bearded young men in sleeping bags on the concrete floor. Some of them would soon be on their way to Afghanistan. I outlined to MI5 how the cleric was facilitating the travel of young men from the UK to al-Qaeda’s camps.

  To Abu Qatada, it was insufferable that he had to make do with preaching to acolytes in the drab surroundings of the Four Feathers Club, while the Egyptian ‘pretender’ – whom he described as an ‘uncouth low-life’ – preached to a congregation of hundreds. Abu Hamza for his part resented the fact that Abu Qatada was held in greater esteem by Salafis back in the Middle East. His Yemen project had been a failed attempt to eclipse the Jordanian cleric.

  I was witness to their rivalry. At a wedding party to which both had been invited, Abu Hamza had proffered his elbow so that Abu Qatada could shake it in greeting, but such was the contempt the Jordanian felt towards the Egyptian that he had pretended not to see him and moved on.

  ‘Abu Qatada is an unforgiving brute,’ Abu Hamza said to me, rolling his one good eye.

  I raised the subject of their rivalry with Mohammed al-Madani.

  ‘It’s like putting roosters in a cage,’ he said with a shrug.

  Abu Hamza’s links to terrorism were more direct than those of the more guileful Abu Qatada. But he had not been arrested even after the hostage attack in Yemen. I was told the police needed more time to gather evidence. Under British law, the intercepts of Abu Hamza's satellite phone calls could not be used in court and any information I gathered could not be used without exposing me as a spy.

  MI5 nevertheless pressed me to find out as much as I could. After prayers one day at Finsbury Park, Abu Hamza revealed to me he had constantly been in touch with the cell in Yemen. There had been no intention to harm the hostages, he said, but the plan had unravelled when Yemeni security services discovered the cell’s desert hideout.

  My intelligence contributed to Abu Hamza’s arrest and questioning on 15 March 1999 on suspicion of ‘the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism’. However, he was released without charge because of a lack of admissible evidence.* British security forces had wanted to rattle his cage.**

  One of those held in the Yemeni desert was a slight, middle-aged Xerox executive, Mary Quin. Two years after the kidnapping, she travelled from New York to London to confront the cleric. Abu Hamza confirmed to her he had provided the group with a satellite phone. He declared the kidnapping was justified and would not have resulted in lives being lost had the hostage takers’ demands been met. He also (astonishingly) allowed her to tape their conversation. This evidence, which corroborated the information I provided MI5, was used to convict him in a courtroom in New York many years later. The prosecutor described it as ‘devastating evidence of the defendant’s guilt’.15

  Completing the north London triumvirate was another preacher given to bombast and double-talk, Omar Bakri Mohammed. Detractors called him the Tottenham ayatollah. Abu Qatada described him as the biggest fraud in London, and it was clear from my one meeting with him that he had the theological intellect of one of Abu Qatada’s ‘donkeys’. But in the girth stakes at least, he easily surpassed Abu Qatada.

  Despite their rivalries, this trio, surrounded by acolytes, were all capable of raising serious money for the Afghan camps and other ‘worthy causes’. They were also adept at whipping up a crowd and knew where the dividing line between free speech and incitement to terrorism lay. To impressionable young Muslims looking for a sense of identity they were charismatic and persuasive, and that made them dangerous. Their followers came to believe what I had been led towards in al-Qaeda’s camps just months earlier: that God had made the world for Muslims only.*

  It was a dark and divisive view of the world that I found increasingly repellent. And it wasn’t confined to a few mosques north of the Thames. After a number of weeks living at the Islamic Centre in Parson’s Green I was nearly drowning in jihadi acquaintances. My handlers decided I needed new premises, though obviously nothing too grand. I was, after all, meant to be a struggling militant in Londonistan.

  Those premises were a one-bedroom flat in a gloomy semi-detached house on Brighton Road in Purley, a suburb south of London. Thanks to contacts at the Four Feathers and among the Bosnian alumni, my shabby pad became a dormitory for itinerant jihadis. The smell of fish fingers and Cornish pasties never quite left the place. There were listening devices in the ceilings and even behind the cistern, thanks to an ‘electrician’ who had come to update some wiring.

  I paid the rent from the modest income* I earned from working part-time in an Islamic bookshop, topped up by a £1,500 monthly stipend from Her Majesty’s Exchequer. The £18,000 a year I received in the early years I worked for British intelligence was a modest sum, but I was never motivated by the money.**

  Among my guests at Brighton Road was Abu Zubayr al-Hayali, a Saudi al-Qaeda member known as ‘the Bear’ because of his large frame. He was from a prominent family and was married to a Saudi princess – a sign pre-9/11 of just how deeply embedded jihadis were in the Kingdom. We had first met in Bosnia.

  Al-Hayali told me he had recruited four Saudis to carry out an attack on US soldiers in the BurJuman shopping mall in Dubai. The attack would have coincided with the August 1998 embassy bombings but had been aborted because he was unable to procure weapons in the emirate.**

  Most of my visitors were earnest young men with romanticized visions of jihad. As we huddled around the three-bar electric heater, I spun stories of life in the Afghan camps. If only I had a working liver I might still be there, I complained. The yarns may not have been Rudyard Kipling but they bolstered my credibility.

  There were some unintended consequences. Two young men of Egyptian and Sudanese extraction were so inspired by my stories that they resolved to travel to join al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. However, to my MI5 handlers who were listening in, the value of the intelligence I was gathering far outweighed the risks of a few extra radicals walking the walk.

  So rich was south London in jihadi contacts that I could jump off at pretty much any stop of the number 77 bus and find a ‘like-minded’ militant. The Tooting Circle, co-founded by my friend Babar Ahmad, was one of the most active – sometimes meeting at the gloriously named Chicken Cottage, a halal fast-food joint on Tooting High Street. I was often enlisted to talk about jihad to the youngsters who gathered around Ahmad. They were in many ways the poster children for a second generation of British Muslims who felt alienated both from their immigrant parents’ traditional Islam and from mainstream British society. Their rootlessness made them vulnerable to radical interpretations of Islam and the call of jihad. Many of their parents had come to England from humble backgrounds in the valleys of Kashmir, the villages of the Punjab and the rice fields of Bangladesh.

  The older generation was renowned for their hard work and efforts to co-exist in their new societies, even if assimilation was often beyond them. Their children had higher expectations. While first-generation migrants had hardened themselves to discrimination, many in the second generation did not feel British and
resented the casual racism that was an almost daily experience. Some became involved in petty criminality and gangs, before confronting this identity crisis and seeking ‘redemption’ by turning to religion. It was a pattern that was beginning to repeat itself in dreary inner cities around Europe, in places like Molenbeek in Brussels, Aubervilliers in Paris, and Small Heath in Birmingham.

  Salafism’s rejection of modern Western values provided these kids with an alternative identity of rebellion (just as Sayyid Qutb had provided me with such a foundation) – a way to define themselves against not only mainstream society but the traditional Islam of their own parents. They reminded me of the nihilists in Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons, who mocked their parents’ traditional values as simple-minded.

  Groups like the Tooting Circle allowed these young men to evade the authority of strict parents (how could they object to their children becoming more devout?) and plot their own lives. One of the group was an earnest nineteen-year-old called Saajid Badat, whose bookish reading glasses made him seem much older. He was entranced by my stories of working with Abu Khabab and nagged me to provide a letter of introduction. Within weeks of receiving it, he was gone.

  The suffering of Muslims in Bosnia and then Chechnya had created not only a sense of burning indignation among these young Muslims but also a frustration that their own community was not doing enough to fight back. Into this mix stepped proselytizers like Abu Qatada and Omar Bakri Mohammed.

  The result was a mood of bleak anger fed by a cynical message from the pulpit.* It was shocking to me because even in Saudi Arabia I had grown up in an Islam that was rich and compassionate, that celebrated its history and morality. The Islam I had found in Europe was all about hellfire and guilt. It was totally joyless. In many respects it was more puritan than Wahhabism. Imams shipped over from rural Pakistan or conservative parts of the Arab world with a warped view of Western culture and with few words of English warned their congregations they should avoid succumbing to the depravity that surrounded them. Our preachers in Khobar (with the notable exception of the Smurf-hating Yusuf al-Ayeri) had preached about Islamic compassion, but there seemed to be a snarl on the lips of many imams in the UK. Damnation, they shouted during Friday sermons, lay around every corner.

  Young Muslims consumed by this message decided jihad was the surest way to avoid hell and be admitted to paradise.

  Around the turn of the century, this anger was turbo charged by the Internet, by the likes of Babar Ahmad’s website azzam.com, whose mission was to spur to jihad ‘the Muslims who are sitting down ignorant of this vital duty’.

  ‘Fight in the cause of Allah,’ it said, and ‘incite the believers to fight along with you.’19

  I would sit next to Babar Ahmad for hours as he administered azzam.com in his bedroom. He had set up the website at the request of Ibn Khattab and adroitly used editing software to create short clips of mujahideen exploits in the Caucasus. Azzam.com would clock up hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world. Babar Ahmad’s presentation of ‘martyrdom operations’ by Chechen jihadis was the prototype for many online efforts by Islamist terrorist groups. And he wasn’t just active virtually. Babar Ahmad would reveal to me he had ‘sent’ several of his circle in Tooting to fight in Chechnya.*

  A few stops on the bus from Babar Ahmad’s home was another group of extremists clustered around the black-robed Mohammed al-Madani, who lived in Balham, an area popular with Islamists. Al-Madani became an unwitting source of intelligence following a brief visit he made to Afghanistan in the spring of 1999.

  The setting was quite bizarre. We were sitting on a low stone wall outside a house near Wandsworth Common where his in-laws lived. As we chatted, women walked by with prams or shopping; an ice-cream van with its familiar music-box jingle drifted optimistically down the road.

  Al-Madani revealed with barely suppressed pride that he had met bin Laden and formally joined the group. With a hint of amour propre, he confided to me that bin Laden had had a private landline installed between his headquarters outside Kandahar and the Pakistani city of Quetta. And he had the number. The significance of the information jostled with the absurd setting.

  I informed MI6 and imagined GCHQ analysts in Cheltenham or the United States National Security Agency at Fort Meade in Maryland monitoring the number. I never found out if they heard anything useful.

  I was rapidly getting the sense that MI5 was ill-equipped to deal with the panorama of jihadi agitation across London (and also in places like Birmingham, Luton and Manchester). The resources and focus were elsewhere, and the counter-terrorism laws were much weaker than they would be after 9/11. The law before the turn of the century made it difficult to prosecute anyone not actively planning an attack on British soil. Asylum laws were generous; extradition both difficult and time-consuming. Jihadis flocked to London from all over Europe and North Africa, knowing that arrest was unlikely so long as they did not announce plans to bomb Piccadilly Circus.

  British intelligence were delighted with the information I provided and worked diligently to reinforce my change of heart and probe for any doubts. One afternoon in a grand hotel room Richard and I had one of our long chats. We shared a love of Arabian history and I enjoyed his dry sense of humour. I had been devouring some of the classics of Arabic literature in between playing host in Purley.

  ‘You know, Richard, our great writers had compassion for all of humanity. Think of Naguib Mahfouz. That’s what gave them such powers of observation and the ability to tell such wonderful stories. When I look back now, I think I was in danger of losing all empathy in Afghanistan. I started to see anyone who was not a jihadi as a brainless grazing animal, no better than a sheep.’

  Richard was sitting upright in a mahogany chair which was a little too small for his generous frame and puffing on one of his beloved Cuban cigars.

  ‘And we all know what happened to Mahfouz,’ he said drily. The Nobel Prize-winning author had been stabbed by an extremist in 1994. He survived but suffered permanent nerve damage.

  ‘Exactly. When you start to dehumanize non-Muslims, and even Muslims you don’t agree with,’ I went on, ‘attacks like the bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam become thinkable, desirable even. Al-Qaeda is unleashing the inner psychopaths in its recruits.’

  Richard nodded and rested his cigar on an ashtray.

  ‘I fear what a certain Saudi millionaire has set in motion is not going to end well for any of us,’ he said through threads of blue-grey smoke.

  ‘The irony, Richard, is that he’s going to provoke a backlash and Muslims around the world will end up suffering the most. This violence they are inflicting is senseless.’

  Richard eyed me closely.

  ‘I take your point,’ he said. ‘But we use violence, too. We went to war with Saddam Hussein to remove him from Kuwait. Those were Muslims we were fighting. How do you feel about that?’

  He was trying to goad me. And I was conflicted. I’d been appalled by Western inaction in the former Yugoslavia, but equally by Russian atrocities in Chechnya. At least NATO had ultimately moved to protect the Muslims of Kosovo from Serbia. And to me the British Prime Minister Tony Blair had shown real leadership in confronting the Serbs.

  I thought for a few seconds.

  ‘It’s about legitimacy – the just war,’ I said with deliberation. ‘I don’t have to tell you that to many Salafis violence is the monopoly of the state, that politics is beyond or beneath them. So what authority does Osama bin Laden have when he goes beyond defending Muslims? He has set out on a path of chaos and disorder.

  ‘I used to think the old scholars of Islam who preached moderation and obedience to the state were fools and cowards. I thought they knew nothing of the world. But they were the wise ones and I was the foolish one.’

  ‘But don’t you feel guilty sometimes working for us?’ Richard asked. ‘After all, your targets here are all Muslims.’

  ‘You know what? I really don’t,’ I replied truthfully. ‘I
hear them say that you should never betray your Muslim brother to the kuffar [disbelievers], that only Muslim lives matter, regardless of the circumstances. So this is what I’d ask them now: what are you meant to do if a Muslim is about to commit a murder which could result in the kuffar killing many more Muslims in retaliation? Stay silent or act to protect the community?’

  Dusk crept across the room. It was a question that would soon resonate throughout the Muslim world.

  As the weeks went by, my old acquaintances, even a few I had come to call friends, gradually metamorphosed into adversaries and even targets. I saw them as misguided, bent on gambling with the fate of the Muslim world. I may have been only subconsciously aware that MI6 was grooming me through a well-calibrated mixture of persuasion, empathy and encouragement. The subtext was: ‘We think you’re beginning to see the world as we do, and that would be good for you and us.’

  From the mountains of Afghanistan, the world had looked black and white. It was us – the Victorious Vanguard – against all comers, in a pressure-cooker atmosphere where the cause occupied your every waking moment. Now, as my English improved and I immersed myself in a thousand contrasting views, the world looked much more complex. I would spend hours in public libraries and watch the television news. And every night, the last thing I would do as my head hit the pillow was press play, and wait for the Sandman while listening to an audiobook: British history, the great artists of Renaissance Europe, the Shinto religion in Japan.

  The effect was both disorientating and liberating. I questioned the orthodoxies that had become ingrained in me: that there was a Jewish/Crusader conspiracy against Islam and that the struggle could only end in an end-of-days battle. Facts were beginning to eat away at ideology and the tendentious interpretations of hadith.