by Aimen Dean
‘I was wondering when you were going to ask me that question. The answer is yes,’ I replied.
I was confident that my handlers would – to the best of their ability – keep my cover intact. Amid periods of inaction between briefings, I was getting restless. As much as I felt settled in London, I knew there was unfinished work. Al-Qaeda’s camps were evolving. New figures were being elevated; and who knew what advances Abu Khabab had made? I was in a unique position to fill in the gaps. There’s nothing like being ‘wanted’, in the positive definition of the word.
Richard’s normally laconic demeanour erupted into a broad smile, which for him bordered on euphoria. MI6 would have its own asset deep inside al-Qaeda.
‘But there is one problem,’ he said, exchanging a look with Nick. ‘You made a big song and dance about applying for a UK passport to help my dear friend here from Thames House, and al-Qaeda’s intelligence chief in London seems to have grown rather fond of having you around.* Now suddenly you tell them you want to go back to Afghanistan. Does it make you look – er – a little mercurial?’
I looked a little puzzled.
Nick picked up. ‘In other words,’ he added, ‘will they think you’ve lost the plot?’
‘I can tell them I need to recharge my spirituality. I have already told them I can’t stand it here and I’m longing to return,’ I said. Richard raised an eyebrow. ‘Or I could go into the luxury food business.’
They both looked at me as if to check on my sanity. I laughed.
‘Some of the best honey in the world comes from the lower slopes of the Himalayas. There’s great demand for it in the Gulf, as well as pink salt and saffron. Anyway, last year someone with al-Qaeda called Abdul Rasheed suggested we set up a business. He knew producers in Kashmir; I knew the wealthy markets in Saudi.’
‘And how would al-Qaeda view this enterprise?’ asked Richard sceptically.
‘They’d be very happy. They like members who are financially independent. They like them even more if they contribute to the cause. There’s another bonus: my brother Moheddin is perfectly placed to sell whatever we can get.’
Richard looked almost excited.
‘I like it,’ he said. ‘Covers a lot of bases – allows you in and out of Afghanistan to attend to business. At the same time, you get a British passport – it makes you useful in terms of the financial flows and allows you to be the go-between between head office and the London mullahs.’
It was like a game of three-dimensional chess: anticipating your opponent’s needs and decisions, preying on his weaknesses, thinking several moves ahead. My handlers were brilliant at exploiting such advantages, looking for vulnerabilities and temptations.
They also knew that even one clumsy remark to jihadis I encountered had the potential to trip me up. That made it essential to stick as close to the truth as possible. In London I had the grandmasters close at hand but once back in Afghanistan I would be on my own for months at a time.
‘We’ll provide a number for emergencies or if it’s vital you get in touch,’ Richard said, ‘but we understand that won’t be a lot of use where you are going. To be honest, we wouldn’t know if you came under suspicion and could do nothing to retrieve the situation even if we did. It’s not like we can just drop the SAS into Darunta to see if you’re okay.’
Not for the first time he asked me whether I really wanted to go ahead with the plan.
‘It’s very rare for us to send someone on their own into such a situation. Even when we dropped agents in to help the French Resistance, they had a network.’
I said that I appreciated the risks – and the intelligence services would have to be patient.
‘I certainly won’t be calling from a payphone in Afghanistan, and I can hardly ask to use one of their satellite phones to call home. I might as well kill myself. So I hope the handlers are patient, because they won’t hear from me until I’m at the airport in Doha or Dubai on my way home.’
I was reminded of an Arabic phrase about hopeless and damned places: ‘Those who enter disappear; those who come out are born again.’
I knew I would have to commit every detail to memory; nothing could be written down or sent, unless I wanted to risk execution.
‘Just as well you have that famous photographic memory,’ Richard told me. ‘Let’s hope that there’s plenty of space left in it,’ he laughed, clapping me on the shoulder.
Before leaving, I was taught counter-interrogation and counter-surveillance techniques. I was shown a variety of ruses for checking whether I was being followed – such as bumping into someone so that I could turn round, or dropping a handkerchief as I took out my wallet. I was told to avoid eye contact with anyone who might be following me but focus on the details of their clothes, to go into a shop to buy something and use reflections in windows to survey my surroundings.
‘Street food,’ said one of my instructors, ‘is one of your best defences. It’s impulsive and natural to stop. And in Peshawar,’ he added with a grin, ‘I imagine there’s quite a lot of it.’
Then I was sent onto the streets. During three exercises I only identified one of my pursuers, even though at one point he crossed the road and was almost ahead of me. I failed in the other two exercises – probably because my tails were women. It was a useful reminder: don’t make assumptions. I was told that my moderate pace was difficult for a tail to mimic; most people, apparently, walked more quickly or slowly than me. To this day I feel myself checking on my walking pace.
Most of the training was done on a sofa; it was like visiting a shrink. A variety of MI5 and MI6 instructors, some of them former military and police, drilled into me one thing: be yourself at all times. Don’t start asking too many questions but don’t become withdrawn. Let information come to you. Immerse yourself in your environment; try to recall what made you join in the first place, the injustices against Muslims, the perfidy of America.
In mock interrogations I was asked about my finances, which mosques I had attended, friends and relatives. Consistency was everything. I should always tell as much of the truth as possible rather than indulge in outright fiction. It was too easy to trip up when telling (and trying to keep track of) lies. And I was told always to get plenty of sleep; fatigue was the surest route to mistakes.
Another technique suggested was ingenious. If I felt that I was coming under suspicion, or someone was asking me too many probing questions, I should take it up with the local commander or emir, complain that such intrusive questioning was unnecessary and suspicious. Why would my inquisitor need such information? It would help restore my integrity and shift suspicion to whoever was being too inquisitive.
I was taught to read facial expressions and whether they suggested trust or suspicion. Those who insist on constant eye contact are trying to probe for uneasiness or guilt; those who keep bringing the conversation back to a certain topic after you have changed the subject are fishing.
‘What can you do if you really need to leave or if you hear about an imminent attack being planned against Britain?’ one instructor asked me.
I thought for a while.
‘Take off your glasses,’ he said. ‘How short-sighted are you?’
‘Very,’ I laughed. ‘Let’s put it this way – you are three feet from me but a blur.’
‘So,’ he said, ‘don’t take a spare pair of glasses. Arrange for these to be broken, properly broken. I imagine there are not too many opticians around Darunta.’
I remembered the cruise missile strikes.
‘That’s brilliant,’ I said. ‘I’d have to go all the way to Peshawar to get the right glasses.’
‘But this is your joker,’ he said. ‘You get to play it once.’
One thing I was not taught: handling weapons. As one of my handlers put it, ‘We don’t want to teach you any techniques that would be at odds with al-Qaeda’s house style.’
In June 1999, I told Said Arif that I wanted to escape London and start a food business on behalf of the
brothers. He wasn’t displeased. It showed – he thought – where my heart lay, and he had some comms equipment that he wanted carried to the camps. I accepted it, and British intelligence discreetly modified it before I left.
My first stop in Peshawar – as always – was Abu Zubaydah’s guest house. I trudged towards the villa with some trepidation, thinking of the torture techniques for suspected spies I’d learned in the camps the previous year. If anybody could sniff out a spy it was Abu Zubaydah.
When he greeted me he put his hands on my cheeks and tugged at the skin. I tried to appear relaxed. It wasn’t easy.
‘I can see you’ve put on some weight. This is good. The brothers in England informed me you got treatment for your liver.’
I called Abdul Rasheed.
‘The Kashmiri food business,’ I said, ‘let’s make it work.’
He was delighted.
‘Come over,’ he said. ‘I need to take you somewhere.’
The following morning I gazed from a Fokker Friendship aircraft as it threaded a path above thickly forested hills and indigo rivers. In the distance were the towering peaks of the world’s highest mountain range; they looked almost frightening. Abdul Rasheed was taking me to Muzaffarabad, capital of exotic honeys. The flowers of the region had great medicinal benefits.
The business model was simple. We’d agree contracts among the Kashmiri suppliers; Moheddin would sell our produce at a rough mark-up of 1,000 percent. The more worldly-wise among wealthy individuals in the Gulf would be happy to pay a premium for the best delicacies and help the cause of jihad in doing so.*
We met a group of beekeepers the next day on a hillside covered in cedar trees in the Neelum valley – and bought our first tonne of honey. Over the next several years the little company we founded in Peshawar sent Moheddin a good deal of the best Himalayan produce. My role was to manage the book-keeping and the paperwork for shipments, which conveniently required occasional trips to Islamabad and other places where I could be debriefed.
Muzaffarabad was a pleasant diversion but the real business of becoming a jihadi again awaited. By the time I made my way through the twisting Khyber Pass, I had clothed my mind in the persona of a Holy Warrior engaged in a war against the West. My method acting was a matter of survival. ‘After the Torkham Gate, you’ll be on your own,’ Richard had said. If I was to come under suspicion, there was no way to escape and no possibility of rescue. I would be found within 500 yards of the camp if I tried to sneak away. Al-Qaeda’s guards knew the terrain.
Despite the risks, I felt at peace as the bus rumbled its way towards Jalalabad. The training and the drills in London had boosted my confidence. To reduce the risk that counter-intelligence operatives like Abu Zubaydah would figure out I was a mole, Richard had assured me the British would only act on information from me if they could corroborate it with other sources. I trusted him. By volunteering to come back to Afghanistan I was showing my commitment to British intelligence. When the day came to move on with the rest of my life, that commitment would put me beyond reproach. I also believed strongly it was the right thing to do. Bin Laden was – pure and simple – a threat to my religion and to humanity.
I had been propelled into swearing bayat partly because I had wanted to be part of history, for my life to make a difference in the grand scheme of things as the ‘age of prophecies’ dawned. I felt a similar sense of purpose now. For a short while, a combination of emotional and physical fatigue had led me to want to retreat into quiet obscurity, eschewing risk. But that wasn’t the real me. Deep down nothing frightened me more than the absence of a challenge or the sense of being surplus to requirements. Staying in the UK would have seen my value as an intelligence asset gradually atrophy. I was propelled by a need to be relevant, needed.
I was pleasantly surprised by the warmth of the welcome I received when I arrived at the safe house al-Qaeda used in Jalalabad. No one asked me much about my time away. The good thing about belonging to a group like al-Qaeda is that on the whole members don’t ask too many questions. The camps seemed to have filled out; the cruise missile strikes against al-Qaeda the previous summer had served only to rally more followers to the cause.
It was not difficult to return to the familiar routine of camp life in Afghanistan. When I prayed with my fellow al-Qaeda members, I felt a sense of strength rather than shame. The message I took from those prayers was very different from that understood by the Holy Warriors kneeling to my left and right. I often muttered a saying of Imam Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed and fourth rightly-guided Caliph. ‘Loyalty to the treacherous is treachery in the eyes of God. The betrayal of the treacherous is loyalty in the eyes of God.’ It became my mantra, the bedrock of my conversion.
Soon after returning, I was summoned to bin Laden’s compound in Kandahar to see Abu Hafs al-Masri, the COO. I tried, not altogether successfully, to quell my nerves. Could they, against all odds, have found out that I had betrayed them?
I was struck again by Abu Hafs’ piercing intelligent eyes. There seemed to be more flecks of grey in his immense beard. He was still in charge of the day-to-day decisions in al-Qaeda, including training and the planning of attacks. He began with a note of congratulations, which put me at ease.
‘The Egyptian and Sudanese boys who met you in London; they were so enthused they came here full of praise for you.’*
I told him about my time in London and the food business.
‘Why did you choose Abdul Rasheed as a partner?’ Abu Hafs asked.
‘Because of his connections in Kashmir,’ I replied.
‘Ah, yes, yes,’ Abu Hafs replied, seemingly satisfied. He picked at his teeth. ‘Just remember, if you make a good return on your investment you should not forget our brothers here – especially those with families.
‘I was glad to hear you applied for a British passport,’ he said, changing the subject. ‘Very useful.’
News travelled fast, I thought. Headquarters must have had a note from Said Arif about my ‘progress’. But rather than suspect me, it seemed that Abu Hafs – and others in the higher tiers – had come to consider me an asset, a savvy investor and one of the few mujahideen likely to have regular access to Western capitals and technology, apparently unsuspected.
In my interactions with al-Qaeda leaders it was as if I was now listening to them with a different part of the brain. No longer was I seeking counsel on jihad. Instead I was filing away every last detail to take back to my handlers. I was careful not to appear too inquisitive, but thankfully had one skill that generated plenty of information.
I was the ‘dream-whisperer’. I had begun to develop a reputation as an interpreter of dreams in Bosnia and had further refined the skill in my first Afghan ‘tour’. Fighters would provide me with all sorts of supplementary information to try to help me make sense of their dreams.
I was genuinely surprised to hear that my old friend Khalid al-Hajj – whom I had last seen in the Philippines – had just arrived in Afghanistan and was staying at the Kandahar compound. The last I had heard he had been detained in a Saudi sweep of militants after the embassy bombings. I had mixed feelings about seeing him. It was one thing to spy on al-Qaeda’s high command and quite another on a man who for years had been my best friend. But he was a target now. His photograph was in the dossiers I had gone through with my intelligence handlers in London. I had watched him behead a man in Bosnia and was under no illusion he would follow orders, including torturing and executing me if I was suspected as a spy.
I found him at the shooting range, blasting away at a target on which had been scrawled the features of President Bill Clinton. When we embraced I could not but feel happy to see him. He told me he had left Saudi Arabia almost immediately after being released from prison. He was now one of bin Laden’s personal bodyguards, travelling with him around the country. Khalid was reluctant to speak about his treatment in jail, except to say that he had ‘scars that will never heal’. I had no doubt about what he meant.
/> ‘I’ll tell you one thing. If I ever go back to Saudi Arabia it will be to wage jihad against the House of Saud. They are a cancer that needs to be cut out,’ he said. The bitterness in his voice was unsettling. Here was a young man whose optimism had been snuffed out; his mistreatment in jail had hardened him. The light I had previously seen in his eyes now had the glint of cold steel. He had never previously spoken about overthrowing the Saudi royal family. The change in him mitigated the unease I felt in spying on him.
My next stop was the fifty square yards of Afghanistan that most worried British intelligence.
At Darunta Abu Khabab greeted me like a lost son, and strangely – despite all that had happened in the previous eight months – I still felt some affection for him. I remembered London’s advice: be yourself, let him talk.
Over the inevitable green tea and basking in the summer sun, Abu Khabab filled me in on experiments and personnel and asked me about the ‘brothers’ in London. I was just about to tell him about my chat with his former and handless student, Abu Hamza, when he grasped my forearm.
‘Saajid Badat,’ he said. I hesitated – and then remembered the serious teenager in the Tooting Circle. ‘A good student – thank you for sending him. And his recitation of the Koran: beautiful.’ He swept his arm into the thin air as he made the compliment.*
In the months I had been away, Abu Khabab and his apprentices had been experimenting with delivery mechanisms for poison gas, based on Hassan Ghul’s concept. I was relieved to find Hassan was still alive, and his good humour still irrepressible.*
The camp had become quite the finishing school for aspiring bomb-makers. Its guests included two members of the radical Palestinian group Hamas.** Jihadi groups were already mixing, learning from each other and collaborating.
Abu Khabab’s priority that summer was the potent but very sensitive explosive TATP. For years, terrorist bomb-makers had been making the explosive by mixing particular quantities of acetone, hydrogen peroxide, and acid.25 Despite the dangers, Abu Khabab produced the stuff as if he were brewing a pot of tea. So much for his stricture that our first mistake would be our last.