by Aimen Dean
* Abu Bakr al-Masri was firmly established as Abu Khabab’s deputy. There were some new faces in Abu Khabab’s camp, though unfortunately Abu Nassim – the sadistic Tunisian – was still there.
** Over the years Abu Khabab’s trainees became more diverse. In the early days at Darunta he had mainly trained Arabs, but as his reputation grew Pakistani, Uzbek, Chechen and Palestinian militants started training with him.
* This description leaves out critical information on making TATP and does not go beyond information already in the public domain in academic studies, media articles, court documents, government reports and the like. While the recipe to make TATP is well known and all too easily found on the Internet, it is exceptionally tricky and hazardous to make. It involves a complicated and intricate set of steps with very little margin for error. Jihadi terrorists in the West who have successfully made TATP tend to have received hands-on training in how to make it.26
* The new formula also produced TATP that was even more sensitive than before. Even a small impact or friction could set off the explosive. This made it even easier to set off but also likely contributed to dozens of Hamas bomb-makers accidentally blowing themselves up. The British explosives expert is my only source that the new formula was used to make the bombs in these attacks. Investigators have not released sufficient information to make this determination independently. TATP has more recently become an explosive of choice for ISIS and was used as the main charge in the terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015, Brussels in March 2016 and Manchester in May 2017. Investigators have not yet revealed the preparation ratios in those devices.28
** The Taliban wanted to break through this front line because it would open the road to the Panjshir valley where Northern Alliance forces were headquartered. Al-Qaeda fighters were drafted in part because bin Laden wanted to curry favour with Mullah Omar. Participation on the front line was also seen as good for morale because it provided an outlet for recruits desperate for ‘action’ and ‘martyrdom’. Perhaps most importantly, it allowed al-Qaeda to build up its capability as a military organization.29
* The front-lines were fluid and not neatly defined. I was told that at various points that year the nearest Northern Alliance fighters were further to the north.
* After the fall of the Taliban, Abdul Hadi organized the al-Qaeda resistance in Afghanistan. He also had contact with a group of British jihadis in Pakistan, who were encouraged via his deputy to launch an attack in the UK. Their plot to attack UK targets including possibly the Ministry of Sound nightclub with fertilizer bombs was thwarted by Operation Crevice in early 2004. Abdul Hadi later became a key liaison between al-Qaeda central and its Iraqi affiliate. He was captured en route to Iraq in November 2006 and transferred to Guantánamo Bay, where he faces a trial by military commission.30
My Sixth Life: Jihad for a New Millennium
1999–2000
Shortly after midnight on 9 September 1999, a massive bomb exploded in the basement of an apartment building on Guryanov Street in Moscow. Much of the structure collapsed; over ninety people were killed. At dawn, the full horror of the scene was apparent: children’s clothes scattered across the street, a sofa perched on a ledge that had been a sitting room.
Terrorism had come to Moscow, in the most shocking form its citizens could remember. There was a climate of fear; whose building would be next?1
The city’s mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, told Russian television: ‘I am sure Chechnya is to blame. It was a promised expansion of hostilities and terrorist acts by Chechen warlords.’2
In the three years since a truce had been declared between Russian forces and Chechen separatists, the situation in the Caucasus had slipped towards anarchy. Kidnapping was the main industry amid a broader social disintegration, and foreign jihadis were beginning to scent opportunity in the mist-covered mountains. Separatism was now clothed in Islamist radicalism.
In August 1999, some 2,000 jihadis had crossed from Chechnya into Dagestan and captured several mountain villages. The Russians had responded with air strikes and ground operations. But the rebels, led by Shamil Basayev and Ibn Khattab (no doubt galvanized by mayonnaise), carried out more incursions.3
Yet the Chechen warlords, normally quick to claim any success against Russia, professed ignorance of the apartment bombing.
‘The latest blast in Moscow is not our work, but the work of the Dagestanis,’ declared Basayev hours after the bombing. ‘Russia has been openly terrorizing Dagestan, it encircled three villages in the centre of Dagestan, did not allow women and children to leave.’4
Four days later another huge bomb – also planted in the basement – demolished an eight-storey apartment building on the southern outskirts of the Russian capital. One hundred and twenty-four people were killed; debris was hurled 300 metres from the scene.
Before anyone claimed responsibility for the second attack, the story took the strangest twist. On 22 September in the city of Ryazan, some 100 miles south-east of Moscow, individuals were seen loitering by the basement of an apartment block. The police arrived to find what appeared to be a detonating device and wires among sacks of powder in the basement.
A witness who had called the police swore that the men were undoubtedly Russian, not from the Caucasus. Tests on the powder showed it was hexogen, the same Second World War-era explosive that had been used in the Moscow bombings.5
Police detained two suspects, who turned out to work for the FSB. They were quickly ordered released and Nikolai Patrushev, chief of the Russian FSB internal security service, appeared on television to announce that the sacks had contained only sugar. The whole thing had been part of a public safety drill, he claimed. The FSB quickly cleared the basement in Ryazan of all evidence. The headlines were by now dominated by news of Russian military action in Chechnya. The previous evening Acting Prime Minister Vladimir Putin had announced that Russian aircraft had bombed Grozny airport.6
Questions began to swirl, not least among my handlers in London. Had Chechen jihadis really decided to provoke war with the Kremlin? And had Russian intelligence cynically co-opted a budding terror campaign to whip up hysteria and justify a Russian crackdown against Chechnya?
Astonishingly, it began to look as though the Russian security services – and perhaps others in the Moscow hierarchy – had foreknowledge of the plot. Conspiracy theories multiplied. Why would they do such a thing, and where did responsibility truly lie?
The bombings occurred against a fevered political background in Russia in the waning days of Boris Yeltsin’s presidency. Sick and suffering from alcoholism, Yeltsin presided over a failing state where corruption was endemic, reaching deep into his own family. Inflation was destroying the living standards of ordinary Russians; democracy had become a byword for chaos. Many subsisting on pensions were literally going hungry.
There was a growing feeling Russia’s humiliation needed to be avenged, just as a succession struggle was shaping up in Moscow. The recently appointed acting Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was determined to exploit one to win the other.
Putin had been the head of the FSB and a long-time KGB operative in the Soviet era; he knew the dark arts of sabotage and blackmail. But as a relatively unknown figure, with presidential elections a year away, he needed recognition as the man who would drag Russia out of its mess. He grasped the opportunity presented by the bombings, laying to rest his image as the colourless bureaucrat.7
‘Those that have done this don’t deserve to be called animals. They are worse . . . they are mad beasts and they should be treated as such,’ Putin said. Lapsing into street jargon, he promised: ‘We will waste them . . . we will bury them in their own crap.’8
It was an enormously popular message for a frightened people. His approval ratings rocketed, as did support for a scorched-earth assault on Chechnya. But questions about the bombings lingered.
In the weeks after the bombings, I was in London on what might be euphemistically called ‘home leave’ after my close brush with de
ath on the front line north of Kabul. Richard told me the clumsy cover-up in Ryazan and the rapid clearance of the bomb sites in Moscow had prompted UK intelligence to wonder whether the Russian authorities had themselves carried out the bombings to create a pretext for invading Chechnya.*
‘It looks as if they did it. That’s their nature, that’s the way they approach things,’ Richard said, ‘in complete secrecy as if they are covering up something. Any news on the grapevine?’ he asked, more in hope than expectation.
Babar Ahmad, who was usually in contact with Ibn Khattab even from Tooting, told me he had not been able to find out whether the jihadis had carried out the attack. Abu Qatada, a major fundraiser for Chechen jihad, told me he was convinced Putin had ordered the bombings to justify an all-out offensive on Chechnya, one that was indeed announced on 1 October.9
There were plenty of theories but no conclusive evidence, just a maelstrom of dark rumours fed by dubious sources. Even on my next trip into Afghanistan, influential figures like Abu Zubaydah shrugged their shoulders in what seemed genuine bemusement.
Illumination would finally come when I had an invitation from Abu Qatada to his home. My ceaseless flattery of his religious wisdom had paid dividends.
‘Please,’ he said, ‘Come tomorrow, after Iftar. We’ll have a call with your old friend Abu Said al-Kurdi.’
I was keen to find out what al-Kurdi, the former deputy of Abu Zubaydah, had been up to. I knew he had relocated to the former Soviet republic of Georgia and carved out a role as the logistics chief for the Chechen jihadis. Astonishingly, he seemed to operate unhindered by the Georgian authorities. Perhaps he was a tool for them in their rift with Moscow.
When I arrived at his home on a dank winter’s evening, several associates of Abu Qatada, including Abu Walid al-Filistini (the stickler over my passport application earlier in the year), were already sitting in a semi-circle on the floor. Abu Qatada had laid out dates, biscuits and coffee. Somewhat incongruously, Ricky Martin’s ‘Livin’ La Vida Loca’ was wafting through the wall from a neighbouring house.
‘We’re going to get a first-hand account of events in Chechnya,’ Abu Qatada said. By now the Russian offensive was in full force.
Using a scratch card for international calls, he dialled the Georgian number and placed the call on loudspeaker.
Al-Kurdi greeted us all in turn.
‘It’s a long time since we swam in the lake in Jalalabad,’ I told him.
‘Yes, my friend. Too long,’ he replied.
He then gave us an update on the state of combat in the Caucasus. There had been heavy casualties among fighters and civilians. Putin had delivered on his threat.
Abu Qatada chipped in.
‘So Putin killed his own people in Moscow so he could kill hundreds and thousands more of ours.’
There was a pause.
‘No,’ al-Kurdi replied. ‘There’s been a lot of talk about the bombings in Moscow. All of it is wrong. The Islamic Emirate was responsible.’
There was a stunned silence.
His brow furrowed, Abu Qatada asked: ‘But why? Didn’t it invite Putin to attack?’
‘It was revenge,’ came the curt reply.
Al-Kurdi said that members of the brutal Moscow Region OMON militia unit had been involved in previous atrocities in the Caucasus. The jihadis had tracked a few of them to the Moscow apartment buildings that had been bombed.*
‘We have our informants; there are plenty of Chechens in Moscow,’ al-Kurdi added. ‘It took us nineteen months of surveillance, preparations and bribes, because we smuggled all the bombs and materials and trucks. This is Russia. People will sell you their mothers for $100.’
Perhaps he could sense the doubt in the silence at the other end. ‘I want you to remember that we as mujahideen on the ground assess the situation better than you because we are here, so trust us that we made the right choice. The war was coming whether now or in a year or two. So when we took vengeance we knew what we were doing.*
‘Believe me, it was ridiculously easy.’
I wondered who might be listening to the call besides the small party in Abu Qatada’s living room. The British? The Russians? The Georgians?
‘All were in agreement,’ al-Kurdi continued, ‘except Maskhadov, who didn’t know. But Shamil Basayev and Ibn Khattab were in on the plan.’**
Al-Kurdi’s line from Tbilisi was muffled at times, but clear enough for me to hear a very precise figure: $180,000. That was the amount al-Kurdi said had been received in foreign donations for the Chechen cause, for which he was immensely grateful. And much of that sum had been raised and distributed by the mild-mannered cleric sitting opposite me. I nearly asked al-Kurdi to repeat the figure, such was my disbelief: the sums being raised were way beyond those handled in Peshawar by Abu Zubaydah. How had their movement never been detected?
After the call, Abu Qatada seemed preoccupied.
‘I think they miscalculated,’ he said.
He was probably right. Putin may not have ordered or even been aware of the plan to bomb Moscow. But it was a gift – whoever wrapped it – to the new hard man of Russian politics. In the smoke-and-mirrors secrecy of Moscow Rules, he didn’t need to be complicit.*
One of the leading Russian authorities on the story wrote later that ‘the world of terrorism and the world of the secret services are not divided by a wall so impassable that they are prevented from merging into one landscape. And a police provocation can take different forms: for instance, the police may fail to act when they receive threatening information – if, that is, someone thinks that inaction more closely corresponds to the unspoken desires of the higher-ups.’12
That night, against normal protocol, I scribbled down everything I had heard on the call. I had to get this right because al-Kurdi’s information flew in the face of a widespread perception that the Moscow bombings were a false-flag operation staged by Putin.
Richard was taken aback by al-Kurdi’s account and shocked by the money flows.
‘There are plenty of people at Vauxhall Cross** who think this was an inside job,’ he said when we met in an almost deserted café in Victoria. London was in limbo in that period between Christmas and New Year when offices are empty and commuter trains silent. More so this year, as the countdown to the new millennium reached fever pitch.
Within a couple of days Yeltsin quit and handed the keys of the castle to Vladimir Putin. It was New Year’s Eve, hours before the advent of the third millennium, but I soon had a call from Richard. He demanded ‘every detail about the call at Abu Qatada’s house down to the brand of slippers he was wearing’. British intelligence wanted every last scrap of information about the Kremlin’s new occupant, and that included anything on whether he was the cynical killer of his own people. The ‘PM’ wanted to develop a personal relationship with Putin.
Months later, when Tony Blair travelled to Moscow, he and Putin were photographed at the Pivnushka restaurant, dressed casually and talking animatedly.13
‘You’re responsible for that picture,’ Richard said, poking at a newspaper. It was hyperbole, but he probably wanted me to feel that my contributions were significant. The information gleaned from the al-Kurdi call had at least raised questions about the bleakest appraisals of Russia’s new leader.
The war in Chechnya became ever more brutal, with Russian forces razing the capital, Grozny, to the ground. The United Nations called it ‘the most destroyed city on earth’.14 As for the bombings, two men were convicted in 2004 of carrying them out. But their trial was held in secret, and several people who dug deeper into the case died in questionable circumstances.15
Al-Qaeda’s gatekeeper eyed my freshly minted British passport, its gold-emblazoned coat-of-arms not yet dulled by wear.
‘Most useful. It’s a shame you did not tell us about your eligibility sooner,’ said Abu Zubaydah as I checked in at his Peshawar way station a few weeks after the Moscow bombings.
He did not even try to hide the fact that his agents
had done some vetting. My brother Moheddin had received a visit from a Saudi I knew to be a member of al-Qaeda. Was it true that our father had been a British citizen?
‘It seemed a strange thing to ask,’ Moheddin had told me in a phone call. ‘I told him that while we don’t exactly advertise the fact, Dad did have a UK passport.’
Abu Zubaydah caressed my passport and looked at me.
‘I was very surprised when I heard your father was British.’
The subtext was obvious. We do check. Don’t think you are too smart and don’t try to hide anything. The same applied to the food business, for which I said I needed to keep the British passport.
‘I hope it will soon be profitable,’ he said, handing me back the passport, ‘for all our benefit.’
I had promised to return to Afghanistan with ‘supplies’. It was the downside of my freedom to travel. A few bits of communication equipment, suitably adapted by technicians at MI6, were buried deep in my suitcase. But in the depths of winter, amid sudden scrutiny of my story, I was apprehensive and agitated. Even though I thought my tradecraft was impeccable, I could not afford a ‘bad day at the office’.
One piece of equipment was a phone for a training camp which al-Qaeda had set up in Logar province to replace the one destroyed by cruise missiles in Khost.* Fighters there were complaining that they could only contact their families if they went to Kabul, some fifty miles away. I was assured that detecting the tracking mechanism was beyond all but highly trained engineers. There was ‘no way in hell’ the device would be discovered, as one of them put it.
On the trek into Afghanistan, snow and ice covered every mountain crag; a bitter wind swept across the barren scarps. Clouds and mist obscured the peaks either side of the winding Khyber Pass.