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

by Aimen Dean

  What had begun for me as an attempt simply to extricate myself from al-Qaeda had become a mission to destroy it. Certainly, in the view of MI6, I was the perfect double agent: once highly committed to both an ideology and an organization but then struck by a moment of moral crisis – a moment expertly disguised from my ‘brothers’. My handlers seemed impressed by my mental agility and analytical skills, as well as my ability to penetrate networks while keeping my cool. I was not a one-off treasure trove but a continuing asset, invaluable because my ‘legend’ was intact.

  It helped that I felt comfortable living in London. I found the British tolerant and open-minded and unlike some Muslims experienced no racism. Like many fresh arrivals in London, I got to know the city through its public transport. Londoners are always complaining about their commute, but for me the extraordinary network of Tube lines and bus routes was a thing of wonder. Public services were nonexistent or haphazard in the Middle East and it was strangely liberating to be able to travel with such ease around such a huge city. It was, I now tell my wife, a case of intellectual liberation by public transportation.

  I was struck by how multicultural London was. My fellow commuters were from every race, ethnicity and religion, all going about their daily lives in a country in which they were free to express themselves, worship and work. There was a broad tolerance in society – compared to much of the Middle East – that I found refreshing and impressive. It was a sign of confidence in a way of life that had absorbed migration better than most – if by no means perfectly. It made me smile that fish and chips had been replaced by curry as the national dish, that Caribbean music had been woven into the mainstream of British pop. And while others complained about hooliganism, I saw countless examples of common courtesy: the student giving up his seat on the bus for an elderly Indian woman, the station manager explaining patiently how I could best reach Marble Arch, and of course the national pastime of queuing patiently. On the very first page of his manifesto Milestones, Qutb had written, ‘Western civilization is unable to present any healthy values for the guidance of mankind.’ As a teenager I’d lapped up these words, but now I saw a different reality.

  He had also written, ‘In all systems [apart from Islam] human beings obey other human beings and follow man-made laws . . . it is the duty of Islam to annihilate all such systems.’21

  Civilization was more complicated than that. And I was now in a society where laws passed by an elected parliament were paramount – and gave everyone equal rights if not equal opportunities. It was, I soon came to accept, more just and free than any back home in the Arab world.

  I also developed the greatest respect for my handlers in the intelligence services. Consummate professionals, they understood the Arab world better than I imagined. They had studied the rise of Salafism and were not beyond criticizing the Western response.

  And then there was a very personal discovery. Ever the historian, I began to investigate my grandfather’s time as the head of the police in Basra during the colonial period. He’d been granted a British passport. So had my father, in the 1960s. But why?

  I raised this family history with Richard, who was as intrigued as I was. He did a little homework and told me at one of our meetings that my father had ‘done some work for the Foreign Office once upon a time’.

  ‘I’m sure there’s much more in the archives,’ he said, ‘but finding it would take an eternity, and so would the paperwork to get access.’ Could my father also have been a spy? Whatever the truth, it seemed the Durrani family had a long line of service to HMG.*

  At the beginning of April, when the strange notion of a Fool’s Day fell a couple of days before the Easter holiday, I was summoned to a meeting. My handlers were looking forward to a few days in the countryside or a short break in Europe. I knew which I would prefer; bands of heavy rain were sweeping in from the west.

  ‘Time for a status report,’ said Nick as we settled into another unassuming hotel suite. ‘Your medical visa lasts just three more months: if you stay here how do we explain that away to your new friends?’

  I’d been so busy I had given it no thought.

  ‘One idea: you tell people your father had a British passport, which is true. You are wanted in Bahrain, which we can make true,’ Nick said with a smirk. ‘For now your health precludes an early return to Afghanistan, which is sort of true. Hence, you are applying for British citizenship.’

  ‘But Said Arif and the rest of them think I hate Britain.’

  ‘So you’ll have to take one for the team,’ laughed Richard. ‘Offer yourself as a sacrificial lamb, wallowing among the kuffar in the service of jihad. But let them have the idea.’

  They really were looking forward to a few days off.

  I spent hours pacing about my apartment on Brighton Road rehearsing the gambit before meeting several of the Four Feathers crew for a kebab at a tiny café that was all chipped Formica and steamed-up windows. They included Said Arif and Abu Walid al-Filistini, a wiry Palestinian sidekick to Abu Qatada who fancied himself a theologian.* I said a silent prayer that I would not muff my lines. Arif was sharp; this had to be good.

  ‘I’m thinking of my next move,’ I told him. ‘My medical visa runs out soon.’

  Arif briefly removed and polished his spectacles. As he replaced them, he fixed me with that cold stare.

  ‘Can you get it extended?’

  ‘No. The only thing I could do is apply for a passport. My father had one because he worked for the colonial government.’

  Arif raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I know,’ I mumbled. ‘I’m not proud of my family history but it was apparently quite common.’

  ‘It makes sense to me. We need you here and I’m sure it will come in handy. There will come a time when certain other passports get greater scrutiny,’ he said.

  Abu Walid leaned forward.

  ‘Becoming a British citizen would involve swearing an oath to the Queen,’ he said with unveiled disgust. ‘This is completely haram [forbidden].’

  Arif appeared annoyed at being contradicted but merely said, ‘Let’s give it some further thought.’

  As I stood in the drizzle waiting for a bus, I worked through my dilemma. It was something of a catch-22. If I accepted Abu Walid’s stricture, people in my circle might grow suspicious if I was able to stay in the UK beyond the end date of my medical visa. But rejecting his command might also attract suspicion, and that, too, would damage my contacts within the jihadi community.

  Nick lit on a brilliant solution.

  ‘I think we can work around this. You are claiming British citizenship by descent, so would not need to swear any oath to Her Majesty.’

  Even Abu Walid could not object now. Phase one complete, I thought to myself as I waited at a rain-swept bus stop.

  Phase two was to make myself indispensable to Abu Qatada and Said Arif. This involved ostentatious deference to Abu Qatada’s wisdom and becoming Arif’s errand boy.

  Arif masterminded a network of Algerians in Europe using credit card fraud and other schemes to raise six-figure sums for various jihadi groups in Afghanistan and elsewhere, including Ibn Khattab’s jihadi outfit in Chechnya. They called the proceeds ghanima – the loot or spoils of war – and were not using them to buy blankets for suffering refugees.

  On one occasion Said Arif handed me a bag with £6,000 in cash and a slip of paper with one name on it: ‘Abu Sarah’.

  ‘Go to the Costcutter store next to King’s Cross and ask for “Malik”,’ he said.

  As I left the Four Feathers, I felt a shot of exhilaration. Arif must really trust me.

  ‘This is for Abu Sarah. Suleiman sends his regards,’ I told Malik.

  He took the money without a word and scribbled a receipt for Arif.

  This was how terrorists moved money, in cash and in envelopes. No deposit account at Barclays. It was the hawala system, introduced by Arab traders over a thousand years ago to transfer money along the Silk Road. The hawala allows funds t
o be transferred outside the banking system but without money physically moving. It is based on the honour system, so there is no paper trail lodged with third parties.

  Malik was a hawala broker. After I dropped off the cash, I imagined him placing a phone call to a counterpart in Peshawar instructing him to pay out the £6,000 to ‘Abu Sarah’. The Peshawar hawala broker’s confidence that Malik would eventually settle the balance between them meant they only needed to send actual money to each other if their account became lopsided.*

  British intelligence didn’t intercept the payment. It was much more valuable to them to tap into the financial arteries that provided terrorism with its lifeblood. Throughout the spring, I helped MI5 map out the impressive money-spinning operation run out of Baker Street. My shocked handlers used a word other than ‘impressive’ as we learned more of the operation.**

  My employers were beginning to get a sense that Europe had an expanding and multifaceted problem: radicalization, recruitment and fundraising in what was essentially a continent-wide sanctuary. I soon had first-hand evidence of the way jihadi networks saw themselves as pan-European even as the national security services arrayed against them worked in silos. A man called Abu al-Fidaa was coming to town from the German city of Stuttgart. He was a key associate of Abu Qatada and Said Arif, and like the latter an Algerian.

  Nick was intrigued, although his way of showing it was nothing more than a raised eyebrow. Al-Fidaa was on MI5’s radar, but a faint blip. They wanted me to meet him.

  Amid the bustle of people hurrying for trains and muffled announcements of cancellations to Haywards Heath, I sat down at a coffee shop on the upper floor at Victoria Station. I remember it as a crystal-clear May morning, when even the traffic fumes of central London seemed to have been banished.

  Al-Fidaa was a thickset man in his late thirties, whose face seemed squashed flat. I wondered if he’d been a boxer. He wore a sour expression as he shook my hand, looking quickly towards the surrounding tables.

  ‘Abu Qatada suggested we meet,’ I said, ‘in case I can help your operations, especially as I’ll soon have a British passport.’

  His Arabic was guttural and streetwise.

  ‘I’m sending people from Germany and Austria to Khalden,’ he said. ‘I need money.’ He wasn’t a man for courtesies. ‘They’re mainly Algerians and Moroccans; they don’t have much money. Flights, sometimes forged documents, it’s expensive. Look,’ he said, stirring his espresso vigorously, ‘there are hundreds and even thousands of young men in Germany ready to go. Thirty years of migration as guest workers – now a second generation that hate their parents and hate being called German.’

  There was a grim relish in his voice, but I recognized the scenario.

  ‘Düsseldorf, Cologne, Stuttgart, Munich, Hamburg – I could be on the road all the time. Let’s just say there’s no shortage of recruits. And the BfV are useless.* They have no idea what’s going on, they’re too busy hiding information from the BND. I’m building a support network but I have to be careful. I don’t work with fools.’

  We talked for half an hour – al-Fidaa was not a man to shoot the breeze – and then he left abruptly. But the impression he left was that the exodus of young Muslims from Germany amounted to an underground railway, including converts and men of North African and Chechen descent.

  As I stood on the escalator to the Tube, I wondered why he’d said nothing about plots inside Germany. Perhaps there were none, because it was more important to ship recruits to Afghanistan. More likely, he didn’t trust me enough to talk about them.

  Nick from MI5 had told me to catch the Underground to High Street Kensington after the meeting. If I thought I was being followed, I should stop by a fruit stall at the exit. If not, I’d be picked up by the pedestrian crossing. I was very careful on the way there, stopping to read an advert in one of the tunnels, pretending to confuse east with westbound platforms. Any tail would have been exasperated by my indecision.

  A black van picked me up at Kensington. Nick was inside.

  ‘We’ll feed everything back to the Germans,’ he told me as we swept into Park Lane. ‘They have to put a stop to this.’

  Unfortunately, the BfV and other agencies were as redundant as al-Fidaa had asserted. A short while later they lost track of him; and at some point he, too, left Germany for Afghanistan. The British established that he was raising hundreds of thousands of pounds through various fraudulent schemes and uncovered a network with major nodes in Stuttgart and Sheffield in northern England.

  In the course of five hectic months, I had provided British intelligence with a manual of jihad unrivalled in its detail. I was told some time later that the services regarded my information as gold dust as they grappled with a new threat on which they had little solid information and within which they had precisely zero sources. While the Americans were ratcheting up their surveillance of al-Qaeda by ‘national technical means’ (in other words electronic eavesdropping) the British were much stronger in human intelligence. What I provided added a great deal to the very basic picture of al-Qaeda they had. My information was ending up – regularly – at Number 10 Downing Street. And much of it was being passed on to the American cousins (suitably amended to try to keep the source protected) where on occasion it was included in the president’s daily intelligence briefing.

  It was time for a reward – the subtle British way of making me feel ‘family’.

  ‘How about escaping Brighton Road for a few days? Perhaps a trip to the mountains?’ Nick asked.

  A few days later, he picked me up at Glasgow railway station. We drove through the Scottish Highlands to Oban and took the ferry to the Isle of Iona, where Nick told me about the ancient convent and its nuns. They had followed the teachings of St Augustine of Hippo, an early Christian teacher who had lived in what is now Algeria.

  The haunting and windswept beauty of the place deeply affected me. I read of how Columba, an Irish missionary, had built a monastery here in the sixth century, and how the Vikings had plundered it in 795, not long after the Prophet had struggled to establish Islam in the deserts around Medina. The parallel was not lost on me.

  There’s something about the ocean, its vastness and timeless power, the monotonous crash of the waves, that always makes me brood. Standing on the shore of Iona, facing the soft westerly wind, I watched the gulls swoop and catch the breeze.

  Nick had slipped into the hotel for a warming beverage, and I fancied it was not coffee. I had told him that I wanted to take some photographs, but in reality I wanted a few minutes to walk among the heather and try to make sense of things.

  I felt a deep affinity for St Columba and the monks who had come to the Scottish islands in the sixth and seventh centuries to do God’s will. Monks had remained here despite endless pagan raids in which many died a brutal death. An Irish monk called Blathmac had stayed because he ‘wished to endure Christ’s wounds’. He was ready to embrace martyrdom for his faith. The Vikings would grant him his wish.

  Blathmac was to me the definition of faith. His medieval biographer, Walafrid Strabo, had written a poem about his death, imagining the monk’s last words: ‘Barbarian, draw thy sword, grasp the hilt and slay; gracious God, to thy aid commend me humbly.’

  How different was this form of self-sacrifice from the bombing of Nairobi.

  Incongruously, my mind leapt back to Khobar, and the years when I was finding my faith. The Omar bin Abdelaziz mosque – a sand-coloured, modern building – had none of the remote mysticism of Iona, but it had been my sanctuary as a child, especially after the death of my mother. There, I had been taught that Islam demanded much in the way of sacrifice but that it was also a religion of compassion and charity. It was not the language of Qutb, but he, too, had stressed obedience to God. I recalled his words: ‘There is either commitment to Islam as a religion, as a way of life and as a social order, or unbelief – jahiliyya – ignorant desires, darkness, falsehood and misguidance.’

  Was there more in comm
on between the fidelity of Blathmac and the principles of Qutb than I might have imagined?

  I wandered back to the hotel.

  ‘You look deep in thought,’ said Nick, his hands warming a glass of single malt.

  ‘It’s this place,’ I smiled. ‘It makes you think of the bigger things, what unites us as human beings, and what destroys us.’

  ‘Goodness,’ he laughed. ‘I might need another drink.’

  Not once during the few days we spent in Scotland did we talk ‘shop’. Nick was instead the personification of kindness, gently coaxing biographical details from me but more than that showing that British intelligence valued me. I found myself telling him what a misfit I had been at school, how I had never ceased to miss my mother. I wondered aloud whether my anger with the world at the age of thirteen, deprived of parents, had pushed me towards more militant beliefs.

  The trip was a bonding exercise, but it wasn’t purely altruistic. I was not altogether surprised when in June 1999, a mere six months after sitting down for what I had fondly imagined would be a couple of debriefing sessions, Richard put a proposition to me.

  We were in the George Washington suite at the hotel of the same name off Green Park, enjoying tuna and roast beef sandwiches.

  ‘Ali, you’ve served us tremendously well,’ Richard began, stressing the word tremendously like a district commissioner in the Colonial Service. ‘I know we promised you that after all the debriefings we would give you the opportunity to go back to university or settle down somehow.’

  It sounded like there was a ‘but’ coming.

  ‘I know we made you this promise,’ he repeated. ‘But would it be stretching your tolerance to remain with us for another six months and make a trip back to Afghanistan? There are many gaps we’d like to fill in.’

  It was an appeal to my restlessness as much as anything. By now the British were convinced of my bona fides.