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

by Aimen Dean

  ‘Can’t believe they lost.’ he said to no one in particular, pouring out the words in exasperation.

  I looked puzzled.

  ‘Everton, my team in England,’ he said, ‘though sometimes I wish they weren’t.’

  It turned out he rarely missed one of the team’s games, home or away, when he was in England.

  I realized in watching the low clouds swallow the hills above Islamabad that the rain here would mean snowstorms at Darunta. Another few days in a warm room snug amid crisp sheets would not go amiss.

  I still needed a legend for my stay in Islamabad. It came in the shape of £4,000 in rupees, dropped onto the kitchen table by Richard in a brown envelope.

  ‘This’ll cover your second shipment, though God knows how I’m going to report it to Accounts. Not sure that “Exports, al-Qaeda Inc.” will cut it.’

  I had other concerns.

  ‘In a few days I’ll be back at Darunta yet again,’ I told Alan and Richard as I prepared to leave. ‘You know we are getting close to a device that really will work in spreading poison gas. How can I put this? How enthusiastic should I be?’

  Alan and Richard understood the dilemma.

  ‘From what you’ve told us,’ Alan said, ‘you’re a significant player in this. You can’t suddenly become insignificant and withdrawn. But we can’t offer you a play-by-play. When you’re there, your instinct for self-survival has to be paramount. We’d want you to be as passive as possible – responding to suggestions rather than coming up with solutions. But we know it’s not as simple as that. The most important thing is to remain part of the team, and to have Abu Khabab’s confidence.’

  ‘I imagine business must be a little slow at this time of year; nothing grows in this weather,’ Abu Khabab exclaimed when I arrived amid sleet and freezing rain. Whatever his surroundings, his sense of humour rarely deserted him. Thick mist obscured the lakeside. I had a sudden image of my tawdry flat on Brighton Road; it seemed like luxury now.

  I found a corner of concrete floor for my sleeping bag and pretended I was glad to be back.

  ‘We need your help,’ Abu Khabab said as he brewed a kettle for tea. ‘It’s difficult to focus on developing the device and training new recruits in explosives at the same time, especially now the days are so short.’

  I only wished they were shorter.

  For weeks Abu Khabab’s team tinkered with different designs before settling on one that was crude but seemed to answer the remaining technical problems. The device itself was not particularly impressive to look at – taped together from parts you might find in a tool shed, with holes that would allow – according to a later detailed description of the device publicly posted by American authorities – the ‘violent spewing’ out of cyanogen chloride.*

  The detonator could be triggered by a timer or cell phone so that the attacker could deploy the weapon without sharing a choking, excruciating death.

  It was time to put the invention to the test. On a gloomy afternoon down by the lake we rigged up a prototype and inserted a timed fuse to set off the detonator. We then put five rabbits inside wooden cages positioned at regular intervals, with the furthest fifteen metres away from the device. The fuse set off the detonator as planned, and from a safe distance we heard a crack and a rush of air. A translucent yellowish fog drifted towards the cages.

  Through binoculars I saw the most exposed rabbit almost immediately flip onto its back and shake violently. Within a minute it was still. The rabbit furthest from the device endured thirty minutes of agony before it expired. We waited an hour before approaching the cages to confirm all five animals had died. Through our makeshift masks we could still smell the remnants of the acrid gas.

  I joined in the inevitable chants of ‘Allahu Akbar’, hugging my fellow apprentices Hassan Ghul, Abu Nassim, and the camp’s deputy, Abu Bakr al-Masri.

  Predictably, Abu Nassim was ecstatic. ‘Imagine seeing the enemy suffer like this. It brings joy to our heart. Several at once could kill many people in a confined space – like a subway or cinema.’

  I felt sick to my stomach. Whether I liked it or not, the ‘unique invention’ – the al-mubtakkar-al farid, as it quickly became known – was born. Abu Khabab asked us to keep the successful test to ourselves. Perhaps he was perturbed by Abu Nassim’s glee. But the genie was out of the bottle. A new class of terrorist weapon had been created.

  After several weeks in the frigid camp, I was desperate to escape the psychotic Abu Nassim and further contributions to the perfecting of the mubtakkar*. I wanted to visit Kabul to see Abu Musab al-Suri again, not out of any devotion to his intellect but to see whether he had grown any closer to al-Qaeda’s leaders, some of whom were gravitating to the Afghan capital.

  The future of international jihad and al-Qaeda’s relationship with the Taliban was entering a crucial phase. The Taliban’s only backers in the international community at the time – Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Pakistan – wanted jihadi camps closed or at least scaled back. The Taliban had made a show of closing some camps around Jalalabad but allowed their occupants to relocate discreetly closer to Kabul where they could be better ‘supervised’.

  Al-Suri had made good on his plans for a training centre. The Taliban had given him a barracks in an old Soviet base at the Qargha reservoir on the outskirts of Kabul.32 He was recruiting those he regarded as the most promising Arab jihadis, including from al-Qaeda, much to bin Laden’s consternation.33 Abu Khabab had told me in Darunta he would himself soon relocate to the same base.*

  Al-Suri allowed me to attend a lecture in his draughty classroom. About forty young jihadis were in attendance, mostly Saudis, Algerians and Syrians. His performance was equally brilliant and disturbing. Standing in front of a whiteboard, al-Suri outlined his vision for the future of the jihadi movement, his thick black marker pen soon filling the board. The lectures formed the basis for his 1,600-page Call for Global Islamic Resistance, which would be published online in 2004 and make a deep impact on jihadis around the world.

  His arguments advanced what we had discussed the previous year. ‘Open fronts’ like Afghanistan and Chechnya were crucial bases upon which international jihad could build. But he was controversially dismissive of the structure of groups like al-Qaeda and Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Time and again their operations had been depleted and dismantled by security services in the Arab world and the West.

  Modern communications technology provided a different opportunity to incite and provide strategic guidance to waves of ‘individual jihad’ by small cells connected only by ideology.34 The lecture was a tour de force that in many ways predicted the evolution of jihad after 9/11.*

  Al-Suri believed Islamists already living in the West should be the shock troops of terrorism in the future. Having himself lived for years in Europe, he believed there was already significant sympathy for the jihadi cause there.35 More than any other jihadi leader I met, he had an unbridled hatred for European secularism and lassitude. While bin Laden obsessed about the United States, al-Suri had called on Algerian jihadis to ‘strike deeply in France’, and he hated Britain just as venomously.36

  Al-Suri’s other critique of bin Laden and Zawahiri was that their campaign of terrorism was making little difference. If terrorist outfits were going to attack the West, they should go big or go home. (On this point, of course, he would be spectacularly wrong.)

  ‘Warfare in their countries should be based upon the infliction of large human losses. We have to start thinking about using weapons of mass destruction,’ he told his students. He paused. ‘You understand? In their countries we have to use these weapons. You have to kill civilians indiscriminately.’*

  And Abu Khabab would soon be relocating here, I reflected. No wonder my handlers wanted to know more about how well he and al-Suri got on.**

  Nobody did more than al-Suri to lay the intellectual foundations for the terrorism that erupted in Europe over the following decade. This one-time resident of Neasden in north London, living in Kabul
with a Spanish wife, was a clear and present danger.

  After the lecture, al-Suri offered to drive me back into town. Sleet danced around his mud-caked 4x4. It was so cold he gave me a battu, a garment for men made of thick wool, which helped to restore my circulation. He gazed out of the window at the mud-brick neighbourhoods, made even more desolate by the winter chill.

  ‘Abu al-Abbas, all of our plans will fail unless we rouse the believers,’ he said, citing a famous injunction of the Koran.39 ‘We can only be the detonators. We need the masses to be the main charge. How are we going to do this? Complex theology won’t move them. You need to give them a sense of destiny through the prophecies.’

  He changed gear.

  ‘The era of the Prophet shall last among you for as long as God wills it to last, then it will end when God wills it to end.’ The same hadith Zarqawi had recited so earnestly when we had sat on the hillside at Darunta. He continued:

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

  Then the era of benign Kings shall last among you for as long as God wills it to last, then it will end when God wills it to end. Then the era of Tyrannical Rulers shall last among you for as long as God wills it to last, then it will end when God wills to end.’40

  Al-Suri was in full flow.

  ‘Hafez al-Assad, Hosni Mubarak, Saddam Hussein. What Muslim could deny we have lived through all these stages and are now in the era of tyrannical rulers? What Muslim does not want to enter the era of righteous Caliphs? We must appeal to the souls of the Ummah with the mystical forms of our religion. That’s what Khomeini did in Iran.41 His simple message was that the revolution was the first step towards the return of their Mahdi.’

  Al-Suri was obsessed with the prophecies, not least because they foretold that both the Antichrist and Jesus would emerge in Syria. The descent of the Mahdi to Mecca and a new glorious age of Islam had been written, so it would come to pass.

  I had once believed the same. I still believed in the prophecies but now the likes of al-Muhajir were abusing and twisting them. The notion that jihadis could hurry God’s divine plan was, to me, a blasphemous conceit. But I was in a minority, and al-Suri’s soliloquy was itself prophetic of the evolution of terrorism. The jihad of the early twenty-first century would be drenched in an apocalyptic contortion of the prophecies.

  Before I left Kabul I had the opportunity to meet the ‘great and the good’ of al-Qaeda at a reception thrown by one of its wealthier members to celebrate the birth of his daughter. Many nationalities were present: it was like a United Nations cocktail party minus the alcohol, the women and the discussion of Manhattan property prices. Abu Hamza al-Ghamdi, who had used the prophecies to such good effect in recruiting me into al-Qaeda, was there. A lamb was slaughtered and the guests retreated upstairs. Platter after platter was brought in. It was a rare feast in a country where many went hungry every day.

  It was odd to see Abu Hafs al-Masri and Abu Musab al-Suri in the same room together – another case of roosters in the same cage. Al-Masri (with some justification) believed al-Suri was trying to poach al-Qaeda recruits and was bad-mouthing bin Laden to the Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Al-Suri, for his part, believed the Egyptians in al-Qaeda had hijacked bin Laden for their own ends, shown a complete lack of respect to the Taliban and persuaded bin Laden that a few bombings in far-off places could reorder the Middle East.

  ‘It’s interesting bin Laden is not here today,’ al-Suri said to me.

  ‘He’s like the absent Mahdi of the Shia. The Egyptians only reveal him when it suits their interests.’

  Al-Masri and al-Suri did have one thing in common – hatred of the West.

  ‘Our generation started the war, the next generation will fight the war, and the generation after that will win the war,’ al-Masri declared. ‘You know there’s a group in America that wants to overthrow Saddam Hussein?* But they say the American people won’t support a war in Iraq unless there’s an event on the scale of Pearl Harbor.’42 Then, with a rare flash of amusement in his eyes, he added, ‘We should – with God’s help and grace – give them a Pearl Harbor! Let them come into Iraq, let them come into Afghanistan, let them come into Somalia.’

  ‘Unlike the Japanese we don’t have aircraft carriers,’ retorted al-Suri.

  ‘Maybe we don’t need aircraft carriers,’ Abu Hafs replied with a smirk.*

  It seemed like idle jousting at the time, but years later Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would tell US interrogators that in March 1999, some eight months before this Kabul gathering, bin Laden and Abu Hafs had approved the outlines of the 9/11 plot.43

  That night, in the dormitory of al-Qaeda’s guest house, I fell into conversation with a pleasant young Saudi who had the mattress next to mine. His name was Abdul Aziz al-Omari. He had refined features and looked altogether too gentle to be a jihadi.

  Al-Omari had recently arrived in Afghanistan from Asir, a Saudi province bordering Yemen, leaving his wife and daughter at home.44 He was soft-spoken and thoughtful but clearly burned with desire to expel the Americans from the Arabian Peninsula and topple the House of Saud. He was twenty years old – just a few months younger than me – and had been moving towards life as an imam before deciding he was one of Sayyid Qutb’s unlit candles.45

  My journey had seen many twists since that fateful decision; there would be more to come. His would be a short one.** On the morning of 11 September 2001, al-Omari would be the lead hijacker on American Airlines Flight 11. He and the three other ‘muscle’ hijackers used box cutters to slash those who stood in their path, breached the cockpit door and overpowered the pilots, allowing Mohamed Atta to pilot the plane into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.46

  I left Kabul, as keen to escape the long Afghan winter as I was to debrief my handlers in London. As I travelled the rutted highway towards the border, Atta and several others were arriving in Kandahar after a long trip from Hamburg in Germany. Bin Laden and Abu Hafs al-Masri would personally recruit them into the plot that would change the world.47

  Torkham Gate beckoned. Al Qaeda had a rule that operatives only cross into Pakistan in discreet pairs. My companion was carrying a bunch of letters that I was due to hand-deliver to ‘brothers’ in London. As we approached Torkham Gate, he fell back a little way to watch whether I would make it through. I had passed through into Pakistan many times before and never had anybody requested to look at my travel documents. I credited my father’s Afghan heritage as helping me to pass for one of the hundreds of Pashtun who streamed through the crossing each hour.

  This time, a Pakistani soldier who took his duties with uncommon gravity demanded to search my bags. I realized I had made a small but stupid mistake: I had forgotten to take my glasses off. Local tribesmen did not wear spectacles. I might as well have had a sign over my head shouting ‘foreigner’.

  The soldier addressed me in Pashto, asking where I was heading.

  I replied in my best Pashto that I was on my way to Peshawar.

  He broke into Arabic.

  ‘You think I’m stupid? I worked in Saudi Arabia for ten years. I know an Arab when I see one.’

  Things did not improve when he searched my luggage and found my British passport.

  ‘An Arab with a British passport. That’s interesting. They’re giving out bonuses if we catch foreigners. I think I just earned myself one.* What were you doing in Afghanistan?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m a food exporter,’ I said.

  He cut me off. ‘You must have got lost then,’ he said. His moustache twitched. ‘You’re definitely one of bin Laden’s people. I know them when I see them.’

  ‘How on earth can you say that?’ I protested.

  ‘They’re all just like you. Well-educated. Well-spoken. Clean. Tidy.’

  He hadn’t met some of the Yemeni boys, obviously.

  Soon afterwards, two well-dressed officers from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency ar
rived. The ISI had a reputation for brutality and duplicity in equal measure and inside Pakistan was a law unto itself. People in its custody would disappear for years, maybe forever. Depending on how the winds were blowing, an al-Qaeda member might be given a VIP escort or summarily executed along a dusty highway. British intelligence, despite regularly cooperating with the ISI, profoundly mistrusted it.

  It had been drilled into me that nowhere and to no one should I ever admit to being a British spy. It was a statement of the obvious but, faced with an uncertain fate at the hands of the ISI, it was a tempting card to play. Then again, what would they do to me if they thought I had useful intelligence? I felt very much on my own.

  My custodians escorted me to the back of a van and we set off from the border. But after a few miles the van pulled into a compound in a straggling settlement of low brick-and-mud houses. This was Landi Kotal, where the ISI brought visitors from Afghanistan who had aroused suspicion. I was let into a squalid cell to join several others chained to the wall.

  With a start, I realized I recognized one of them, a Saudi al-Qaeda member I had known in Bosnia, who had set off for Pakistan a few days before me. He flashed a warning look at me. Acknowledging we knew each other would only dig us into deeper trouble.

  I began to imagine all sorts of scenarios. I would perish of pneumonia just as my handlers concluded that I had gone back to the ‘dark side’; I would be shot after blurting out something stupid.

  For several days we all sat there, a miserable collection of drug traffickers, alleged terrorists and people whose faces didn’t fit. We were fed rice and gruel twice a day and drew the tattered blankets around ourselves at night. My morale began to sag; I began to see myself as expendable to British intelligence, forgotten by al-Qaeda. And I felt desperately sick.

  Days after being detained, one of the ISI officers who had been my original escort arrived at the door and told me to get up. I was bundled into another van. I could smell the body odour and damp that I exuded. I felt filthy and tired beyond measure. I began to shiver uncontrollably and begged the officers to turn on the van’s heater. Perhaps anxious that I might die on them, they obliged.