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

by Aimen Dean

  The camp commanders were delighted with the ‘satphone’ – but not as much as British intelligence would be. For the next two years, MI6 was able to track calls into and out of al-Qaeda’s main terrorist training camp. Calls were made to the UK, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Canada, the US and elsewhere. The British built a matrix of al-Qaeda’s networks, its recruitment process and security – as well as the recruiting grounds that were proving most fertile. They were also able to get a sense of morale in the camps and movements in and out of Afghanistan. In effect, they built an organic structure of the group. The intelligence mined was more valuable than the arrest of any would-be jihadis.

  The camp, hastily set up in an abandoned copper mine far from the site of the previous year’s missile strikes, had over fifty fighters. Among them was the American Adam Gadahn. He had filled out and was a head taller than me. He had also grown in self-assurance and spoke excellent Arabic.*

  I made mental notes of the camp’s size, buildings and location, a few mountain ridges from the forbidding outlines of the Pole Charkhi prison, before setting off for Darunta. British intelligence badly wanted to know about any technical progress and personnel changes there.

  The journey took me within sight of the ridge of hills – now coated in snow – where Safwat had lost his life a few months earlier. I wished I had had the time to visit his burial site, and suddenly thought that his grieving widow would never know where he was laid to rest, in a cemetery outside Kabul where the flags of the dead fluttered among plastic bags that swept across the open land and snagged on bushes.

  Safwat had been killed by other Muslims in a war that was going nowhere. Now I was about to re-enter global jihad’s ‘research establishment’ as it looked for ever more inventive ways to kill people. Yet again I would need to be on my guard against any slip of the tongue, even while absorbing every minute detail about Abu Khabab’s research and apprentices. Not one normally given to stress, I felt a suffocating apprehension.

  Trucks coming north barrelled past the little minibus into which I was crammed, sending clouds of dust through cracks in the ill-fitting windows. More than once I thought about jumping into another minibus in Jalalabad and escaping into Pakistan and away from everything. But even had I succeeded, the guilt of moral surrender would have followed me. I treated myself to a banana milkshake in Jalalabad and walked for an hour to clear my head before haggling with a taxi driver over the fare to Darunta.

  Abu Khabab welcomed me back warmly. He told me his team had made significant progress in solving the challenge of designing a simple device to spread poison gas, but he had paused in his work because a number of jihadis were visiting the camp to get training.

  One of them was a short, heavy-set Jordanian. There was an intensity to him that was both compelling and somewhat disturbing. In a past life he had been the feared thug in a street gang. His name was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and he had just completed a five-year prison term in Jordan. He intrigued me because British intelligence had suggested I keep an eye open for Jordanians in the camps, especially any that might have done time in jail.

  Zarqawi’s background could not have been more different from that of the wealthy, highly educated bin Laden. He had grown up in a grim industrial town in Jordan and had a criminal record before he was out of his teens.17 Barely literate, his rough-hewn street Arabic made him sound less than articulate.

  On his first trip to Afghanistan in 1989 he had sought to escape a troubled life, in which multiple criminal cases against him piled up as he drifted from one calamity to the next.18 To coin a phrase, he had needed jihad more than jihad needed him.

  In 1994, after returning to Jordan from Afghanistan, Zarqawi had gone to jail yet again. He was arrested along with a militant (and highly influential) preacher, Abu Mohammed al-Maqdisi,* in connection with a plot to attack an Israeli border post.20

  Zarqawi made up for his lack of schooling and intellect with a ruthless determination and unwavering commitment to jihad. He had memorized the Koran while in prison and set about recruiting other prisoners. He had developed leadership skills that used fear and loyalty in a charismatic combination. Even in jail, Zarqawi and al-Maqdisi built a group that gained in numbers and notoriety.

  The world might have been saved a lot of trouble had the Jordanian authorities not declared a general amnesty for prisoners in March 1999. Months later Zarqawi booked his passage to Pakistan, telling security officials at Amman airport he was starting, of all things, an international honey business.21 It was astonishing to me that a man with his record was allowed to leave. Perhaps the Jordanians hoped for his untimely martyrdom in a foreign field; they would be disappointed.

  Zarqawi arrived at Darunta with a companion and for long hours they were huddled with Abu Khabab in his makeshift laboratory or at the lakeside testing ground. Their focus was on basic but powerful bombs made from fertilizer. Once they had mastered the art, they assembled one tonne of ammonium nitrate. Abu Khabab called everyone to a viewing point above the lake as Zarqawi, a look of manic intensity in his eyes, detonated the device by remote control.

  Such was the shock wave that reverberated around the hills, some locals thought there had been an earthquake and ran from their homes.

  Zarqawi was also fascinated by experiments with gases and toxins. He spent part of his sixteen-day visit poisoning rabbits in the aquarium – using hydrogen cyanide and chlorine and taking detailed notes in the process. It would be an abiding interest for the Jordanian.

  I wanted to know more about this driven individual, but he had not exactly integrated into camp life. Then one morning he emerged though the mist carrying two glasses of tea. I had just given the lesson at dawn prayers.

  ‘The brothers here told me that you’re our young preacher,’ he said, sitting down next to me on a rock. It was quite the compliment.

  ‘Thanks,’ I replied, ‘that’s very kind of you.’

  ‘Can I ask you a question? I was told by Abu Khabab that now and then you interpret dreams.’

  ‘Yes, but I’m not an expert. I use a lot of the dream interpretation methods in old Islamic books.’

  I didn’t want to be labelled as selling a false bill of goods and was conscious of my youth in the presence of an experienced and by all accounts courageous fighter.

  ‘Last night,’ he continued, ‘I dreamed that the Prophet Mohammed came into the camp. He shook hands with all of us. Then he extended both his hands and gestured to two of the group to follow him. They left with him. What does it mean?’

  ‘Did you recognize them?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘All I can tell you, Abu Musab, is that generally in dreams when you see someone who is dead but who was dear to you – and they invite you to come with them – it means that your death is near.

  ‘As for your dream, if it was a genuine vision, then two of our number here in the camp will meet their deaths soon,’ I said.

  Even as I spoke, I thought the interpretation outlandish. We were far away from any front lines here.

  He started narrating to me his many vivid dreams while in jail in Jordan.

  ‘I can only classify you as a prolific dreamer,’ I said with a smile.

  His expression barely changed.

  He went on to describe his time in jail and his determination to build a force of Jordanian-Palestinian jihadis that would overthrow the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan, which was in his view an apostate regime. Zarqawi – like many jihadis – saw Afghanistan as the platform from which great armies would set out to topple the Arab regimes, recapture Jerusalem and establish the Caliphate.

  ‘This land is blessed with the blood of thousands upon thousands of martyrs and it’s the land mentioned in the prophecies, where the black banners shall rise,’ he told me. How many times had I heard that before?

  ‘Remember the words of the Prophet,’ he said, momentarily forgetting that I was the preacher:

  ‘The era of Tyrannical Rulers shall last among you for as long as God
wills to last, then it will end when God wills to end. Then comes the era of the righteous Caliphs.’22

  Our discussion was punctuated by the sound of muffled explosions at the lakeside. A few Pakistanis were testing devices they had built under Abu Khabab’s supervision.

  A short while later, a much louder explosion interrupted our conversation, accompanied by the unmistakeable whiff of sulphur.

  I looked at Zarqawi.

  ‘That’s not right,’ I said.

  We ran down the hill and saw the bodies of two young Pakistanis, horribly mutilated by an explosion. Their comrades were crying and beseeching Allah to receive the two men in martyrdom. If anything, al-Zarqawi was more shocked than I was – less at the gruesome sight than in recalling our conversation.

  ‘What you said was true. This is the dream I had. You must speak of this at their funeral, so others will know that the Prophet himself was waiting for them to arrive in Paradise.’

  The incident made a deep impact on Zarqawi. But not long afterwards he left on the next phase of his quest. And I had to get back to ‘business’. Before I’d left London my handlers had set aside a window when they would be in Islamabad, waiting to debrief me should a suitable excuse to leave Afghanistan materialize.

  Abu Khabab looked at me with a hint of annoyance.

  ‘We have things to do here that are more important than buying saffron,’ he said.

  ‘I understand,’ I said, ‘but Abu Hafs [al-Masri] and the others really like the business. I have to keep it going.’

  Secretly I was delighted to escape Darunta, for my own mental health but also because I knew my handlers would be intrigued by Zarqawi’s visit. As soon as I was in Pakistan, I alerted MI6 that I was on my way to Islamabad, using a Pakistani phone number that I had memorized when leaving London.

  Al-Qaeda had its spies in the Pakistani capital and agents of the powerful ISI intelligence service were on almost every street corner. There was an elaborate protocol for me to be ‘landed’. Under cover of darkness I should visit a specific phone booth to dial a number I had memorized. I was then given another number and received directions.

  The male voice said simply: ‘Walk south along the road. Five hundred metres. A vehicle will be there.’

  A few minutes later a van pulled up alongside me. Two Pakistanis took me by the arms and shoved me – rather unceremoniously, I thought – into the back. I could see nothing as the van stuttered its way through the traffic, but I could hear the screams of the two-stroke mopeds and the growl of trucks. Then the roads grew quieter; there was some shouting and the sound of the metal rollers of a gate.

  Someone opened the cargo door and I was blinded by bright fluorescent lighting. I seemed to be in a suburban garage. At the doorway to the adjoining villa was a familiar figure.

  ‘Ah! If it’s not the cat come to meet the kittens,’ he laughed, holding up two mewing balls of fur. My eyes were still getting used to the light, but there was no mistaking Richard’s voice.

  ‘Welcome, welcome!’ he said, and for the first time he put an arm round my shoulder.

  ‘Sorry about the undignified arrival. The house belongs to one of ours. We’ve got a long night ahead of us. Come and meet the rest of the troops,’ he said.

  I was introduced to two British ‘diplomats’ stationed in Islamabad. They were both Scottish and one was the current occupant of the villa.

  ‘And this is Alan, he’s from the opposition,’ Richard said.

  A bald man with a pronounced beer gut, who might easily have been cast as Friar Tuck in a Robin Hood film, offered me a Coke – clearly he’d been briefed on my addiction.

  ‘Alan’s your new handler from MI5. He’s taking over from Nick.’

  ‘Heard a lot about you,’ Alan said with a smile. He had a disarming manner that immediately put me at ease.

  We sat around a large kitchen table.

  ‘Plenty of Coke for you tonight, and there’ll be food soon,’ said Richard, heaving his frame onto a chair that looked as if it might not sustain the burden.

  ‘But first, notepads at the ready, gentlemen.’

  MI6 enjoyed its reputation of having better intelligence inside Pakistan than any other Western agency. The colonial legacy helped, as did the fact that both the political and military elite gravitated to Britain for education and training. But the emergence of Islamist militancy – and its infiltration of the armed services – had made the picture altogether more difficult to read.

  My questioners wanted to know about the Pakistani factions represented at Darunta.

  ‘Abu Khabab told me that he’d been asked to train members of Harakat [al-Jihad al-Islami] by old contacts inside the ISI,’ I said. Harakat al-Jihad was a Pakistani militant group whose leaders’ close relationship with the Taliban was allowing it to flourish in Afghanistan. It had also been involved in a plot to overthrow Benazir Bhutto in the mid-nineties.23

  There was feverish note-taking as I sipped at my can. I suddenly felt very tired.

  ‘At least two of them have died training on explosives,’ I added, and then related my long conversation with Zarqawi.

  ‘We had a feeling you might run into him,’ said Richard, now very interested. ‘Tell us more.’

  It seemed that Jordanian intelligence, which worked very closely with MI6, had kept tabs on him in Pakistan. They may have asked for help from the British once he crossed into Afghanistan.* I told them about our long conversation and about the colossal bomb that he built and detonated.

  More note-taking and another swig of Coke. Zarqawi’s stay in Darunta appears to have been a crash course in learning to build powerful bombs and chemical weapons for what became known as the Millennium plot. It was an ambitious plan to attack tourist sites in Jordan and the Radisson Hotel in Amman in a blitz to greet the New Year.

  The man who was CIA director at the time, George Tenet, later wrote that Jordanian intelligence discovered that the plot included using hydrogen cyanide in a cinema.25 The conspirators hoped the bombings would destabilize the economy and undermine the monarchy.

  The Jordanians would arrest sixteen people after learning about the plot in late November 1999. Zarqawi was not among them. Some intelligence suggested Zarqawi had returned to Jordan; the bomb-making ingredients seized by the Jordanian security services were similar to those he used at Darunta.** Certainly, the massive bomb he assembled on the hillside at Darunta would have brought down the Radisson.

  To this day, I can’t be sure whether my intelligence about Zarqawi played any role in thwarting the Millennium plot, but circumstantial evidence suggests it may have done. The Jordanians had discovered the plot after intercepting a phone call in which none other than Abu Zubaydah told the plotters ‘the time for training is over.’ It later emerged that some of the plotters had also trained in bomb-making in Afghanistan.**

  Richard’s interest in Zarqawi was prescient. This was a young man in a hurry. At some point that autumn he tried to get an audience with Osama bin Laden in Kandahar. According to one account, Bin Laden was ‘unavailable’ but dispatched a key aide, Saif al-Adel, to meet him.28 Al-Adel sensed an opportunity in Zarqawi’s determination to cause mayhem in Jordan; it would mark another front in al-Qaeda’s expanding war.

  Bin Laden might have found the Jordanian uncouth and obstinate, but once more the power of prophecy intervened. According to the hadith:

  ‘There will come a time when you shall fight the Jews. You will be east of the river Jordan, while they are to the west of it.’

  Expanding jihad to Jordan would create a showdown with Israel and thus fulfil the divine preconditions for the establishment of the Caliphate, the return of the Mahdi and a last glorious Islamic era in history. Or so they thought.

  Saif al-Adel provided Zarqawi with start-up money for a camp in Herat in western Afghanistan.29 A few dozen jihadis – mostly Jordanian, Syrian and Palestinian – joined him. So did Sheikh al-Muhajir, head of al-Qaeda’s Shariah college and chief apologist for suicide attacks,
to preside over the religious training of new recruits. When Zarqawi had been in Darunta, Abu Khabab had suggested he meet with al-Muhajir. Zarqawi and the cleric had clearly seen eye-to-eye in what would become a cruel alliance of brawn and extremist theology.*

  Zarqawi also continued to leverage his relationship with Abu Khabab. I learned that once established in Herat he sent a number of his men to train with the Egyptian so he could start his own research and training courses on unconventional weapons. Herat would not be Zarqawi’s final destination. When he left Darunta he was a bit player with grand ambitions. Neither I nor anyone in al-Qaeda (nor British intelligence) had the faintest idea that he would become so influential and ruthless, nor that he would ultimately challenge bin Laden and Zawahiri and lay the foundations for the even greater horrors of ISIS.

  The day after our kitchen meeting in Islamabad, I had another long and very personal chat with Richard. He’d noticed that only an almost intravenous supply of Coke had kept me awake the previous evening.

  ‘You’re a young man, but you have to pace yourself,’ he said as we wandered through a garden tinged with frost. ‘What’s the word? Knackered, isn’t it? That’s how you look. You have to do better at protecting yourself from your own impulses. The last few months have been non-stop.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’m tired.’

  ‘And it’s in our mutual interest,’ he continued, ‘that you are fit for purpose. I don’t want it on my conscience if fatigue leads you to make a basic mistake.’

  He set off back towards the villa, and then turned back.

  ‘A week’s bed rest. Doctor’s orders.’

  It was only halfway through that week that I realized how right he was. I was reminded of my original tradecraft training: good sleep was my best weapon. I slept long hours, mooched around the villa, made endless cups of tea and got to know Alan better.

  ‘No!’ I heard him exclaim one evening as the furry short-wave sound of the BBC World Service drifted through the villa. I thought for an irrational moment a jihadi had penetrated the villa and rushed downstairs.