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

by Aimen Dean

  He had used the English word ‘subway’. He hadn’t said metro or underground.

  For a moment I forgot my training.

  ‘Subway, as in New York?’

  He smiled but said nothing.

  ‘Well,’ I went on, trying to sound as if I was mixing a spray for the lawn, ‘the two gases behave differently.’

  ‘But which is more deadly?’

  I had to cooperate, to sound as if I, too, wanted to maximize casualties. The best approach, I quickly decided, was to provide him a mix of information and disinformation. I would have to provide straight answers on anything easy for him to check but that left opportunities to throw some metaphorical sand in his eyes.**

  It was perturbing to be discussing the relative merits of gassing New Yorkers with what was in effect Zyklon B or the equally nasty cyanogen chloride. Both are asphyxiants and can kill quickly. They are known as blood agents because they affect cells’ use of oxygen19 – and at high doses lead to rapid organ failure.

  ‘What can happen with both gases,’ I continued, ‘is that the lungs are flooded with fluid. Your last moments can include cardiac arrest, choking and violent seizures. It’s a ghastly way to die.’20

  The rapt attention on Akhil’s face is an image I still remember.

  It was time to request an urgent meeting with British intelligence. When I had set off from London the previous October we had agreed that our rendezvous point would be Dubai, but to have left Bahrain immediately after my first meeting with Akhil could have invited suspicion.

  The phone was answered by a woman whose calm, polite voice had inevitably led me to nickname her Miss Moneypenny.

  ‘It’s Lawrence here,’ I told her. ‘I need a meeting.’

  A couple of days later, two representatives of Her Majesty’s Intelligence Services were staring wide-eyed at me in a room at the Dubai Meridien hotel.

  MI6 was now represented by Freddie. In his thirties, he sounded and looked like Prince William. He was a sympathetic listener and a good conversationalist with whom it was easy to relax. An economics graduate from Loughborough University, he didn’t have the snobbery of some of the Oxbridge crowd. It helped that we were both big fans of The Simpsons.

  The new MI5 man, Kevin, had spent most of his career in Northern Ireland and had been reassigned to Islamist terrorism like so many other officers after 9/11. He had sandy hair and deep-set green eyes. Kevin was from northern England and was less patrician than the average British intelligence officer. They made a good team and I would get to know both of them well. But on this first encounter overseas after our introductory meeting in London, the urgency of the agenda left little time for small talk.

  I related my meetings with Akhil and his links with al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. After I was done, Freddie finished scribbling notes and tucked his pen inside his jacket.

  ‘We’re going to have to take this back to London.’

  Kevin picked up. I noticed how he would narrow his eyes when things got serious.

  ‘But the controller will want to know why you confirmed to Akhil the designs worked. Shouldn’t you have played for time?’

  I made no attempt to hide my annoyance.

  ‘Come on, guys. I was dealing with a chemistry teacher, for goodness sake. They had the recipe right. They had the engineering right. I was on the spot and had to improvise. Don’t you think he would have become rather suspicious if I’d asked for time to figure it out. They know I was one of the creators of the device.’

  There was an awkward pause.

  ‘We need you to stay here. We’ll be back within forty-eight hours,’ Freddie said.

  As I sat nursing a ice cold Coke by the hotel’s neon-blue swimming pool that night, I imagined the lights burning in the MI6 building at Vauxhall Cross. Within hours, though I did not know it then, the Americans had been informed.

  When Freddie and Kevin returned they looked worn out. They had clearly not slept much in their brief trip home.

  ‘This has become an urgent priority,’ Freddie said.

  We went over my dinners with Akhil again, checking every detail.

  ‘We need you to stay on the inside. More dinners, I’m afraid,’ Freddie said. ‘But the higher-ups are a bit anxious that you might end up providing Akhil with information to improve the design. We know you’re in an impossible situation, but try to keep that in mind.’

  Kevin handed me a comms device.

  ‘We’ll need you to use this to keep us informed. There’s a software program buried inside to encrypt and decrypt messages. It’s no substitute for meeting in person, but you can use it to request meetings and send critical information.’*

  After a quick tutorial they departed again for the airport.

  There followed more dinner meetings with Akhil.

  ‘I have a question for you,’ he said one evening. He was annoyingly cheerful. ‘Your notes don’t say anything about means of delivery. In the camps in Afghanistan did you discuss a martyrdom mission or to leave the device behind?’

  ‘It depends on the situation. If you use it in a cinema, you can have two brothers come in and set off one device near the entrance and one near the emergency exit. In between you’ll have a kill zone.’

  My callous words made me feel nauseous, but they were a necessary evil. I needed to find out more about their plans.

  He cut me off.

  ‘It’s not a cinema. We’re talking about inside the trains or next to the ventilation shaft in the subway system.’

  ‘If you use it in trains you’re going to get some casualties,’ I said. I was only stating the obvious. In fact Abu Khabab’s team had estimated that half the occupants of a subway carriage could perish if a device was timed to go off between stations.

  Akhil nodded non-committally and then repeated his original question.

  ‘Did you discuss a martyrdom mission or put-and-go’?

  ‘Put-and-go,’ I replied. ‘It’s not like a bomb blast in which the brother will instantly be in paradise. It’s an extremely unpleasant way to die.’

  ‘Well, we have four Saudi brothers already in Morocco and someone there who will teach them how to build the mubtakkar. They all have ten-year visas for the United States and can go anytime,’ he said.

  The operation had clearly moved beyond the planning stage. The enormity of what I was hearing was slowly sinking in.

  ‘What is your passport?’ he continued.

  ‘I have a UK passport.’

  ‘So you can fly to Morocco without a visa?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Would it be dangerous for you to go? Do you think you are on the radar screen?’ he asked me.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied. If he was testing me I could not afford to sound too keen, nor too reluctant.

  I risked raising an obstacle.

  ‘You need a fatwah for this.’

  ‘Sheikh Yusuf has commissioned a fatwah,’ he said. He meant my former community group instructor Yusuf al-Ayeri. ‘And we are waiting for the final clearance from Sheikh Osama. It will be a matter of weeks before we have a go-ahead,’ he added with a note of triumph.

  I feigned confusion in case it should unearth another lead.

  ‘Why would Yusuf commission a fatwah? Shouldn’t it be the leader of the group Saif al-Battar [Swift Sword]?’

  That knowing smile again.

  ‘Yusuf al-Ayeri is Saif al-Battar.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ I felt like shouting as the penny dropped. Western intelligence agencies had been trying to fathom out the identity of Swift Sword for months. Now it had been casually tossed to me over chicken and rice, and it was someone I had spent many hours with in Saudi Arabia, Bosnia and Afghanistan. I could scarcely believe the ammunition Akhil had given me. Not only did we have a chance to thwart the plot against New York, but an opportunity to dismantle al-Qaeda’s network in Saudi Arabia.*

  A week later, in the incongruous setting of the Holiday Inn near Victoria Station in London, I was debriefing
Freddie, Kevin and a young officer called Nish over sandwiches.

  ‘You have to be absolutely sure about this,’ Freddie said. ‘Even the Saudis don’t know who Saif al-Battar is.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ I said as I prodded a rather tired looking sandwich. ‘Akhil is very much part of this plot; he would know.’

  My colleagues were excited; this was serious information to trade. Freddie allowed for a moment of levity.

  ‘Excellent,’ he said, steepling his fingers in his best impression of Montgomery Burns. ‘So now we’re going to have to call you Chemical Ali.’

  We all laughed.

  ‘So it was al-Ayeri that wrote The Truth about the Crusader War?’ asked Nish.

  ‘Correct,’ I said. The tract had appeared weeks after 9/11 to justify the attacks. It and other publications had made the mystery writer a subject of great interest to Western intelligence.22

  I was warming to Nish, who had clearly been doing his homework since joining MI6. It seemed he had immersed himself in the subject, reading jihadi output and studying biographies.

  ‘We have two problems,’ I said, stifling the brief interlude of good humour. ‘Akhil told me they’re training recruits in the desert and stockpiling weapons for attacks against the security services and foreigners in Saudi Arabia.

  ‘As for the mubtakkar plot, it could go operational within weeks. If Akhil is to be believed, Swift Sword has four Saudi operatives sitting in Morocco about to be taught how to make the mubtakkar. They have ten-year US visas. I don’t know how they’ll get hold of the materials but once they build the devices they’ll cross into Manhattan with their backpacks and set them off in the subway.’*

  My handlers looked not a little anxious at the thought of four operatives setting off multiple mubtakkar under the streets of New York.

  MI6 shared my intelligence with the Americans. It was inevitable and necessary but also like buying a lottery ticket. You had no idea who would gain access to the information and what they’d do with it. Given the stakes, I imagined the CIA had demanded more detail about the source. How much they were told I could not know. It was one of those moments when an informant’s life is in the hands of others more than one step removed from his welfare. In the febrile and competitive world of US intelligence gathering, that was not necessarily a good thing.

  Even in the aftermath of 9/11 it is unlikely the British would have revealed my identity to the ‘cousins’. It is conceivable that the CIA gradually built up a picture of my identity (if not my name) through the drip-feed of answers from British intelligence. I imagined at the time that the sort of specifics I was providing – imminent and actionable – had inspired a torrent of further enquiries.

  My information was fed quickly up the chain to the White House. President George W. Bush was briefed in the Oval Office; according to one account there was stunned silence when the implications of the mubtakkar were absorbed.23 Bush in particular was very concerned.24

  Despite the fact that the invasion of Iraq was weeks away, the plot was discussed at length, with CIA Director George Tenet stressing the need to ‘chase down’ the threat.25 The mood among some officials was later described as ‘just shy of panic’.26 Might the cell already have been dispatched to the United States? Was there a plan to attack the New York subway the moment the invasion began?* When the NYPD police chief Ray Kelly was eventually briefed he worried ‘the damage could be catastrophic.’28

  But al-Qaeda had another surprise in store.

  ‘It’s not going to happen,’ a crestfallen Akhil told me when we next met. ‘Zawahiri has cancelled the operation.’

  I tried to appear desperately disappointed despite the relief coursing through my veins.

  ‘But why?’ I asked. ‘We were so close.’

  I might as well squeeze the last details out of him; it wasn’t likely to be difficult.

  Al-Qaeda’s deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri had consulted al-Qaeda’s Shura Council. He was concerned that an attack in New York would be used to claim that Saddam Hussein had given al-Qaeda WMD so that the Americans could legitimize the invasion of Iraq, however ridiculous the link.*

  ‘Zawahiri thinks this would be a gift to Bush, Cheney and Blair and that the Ummah will not forgive al-Qaeda. He thinks it will feed conspiracy theories that al-Qaeda is an invention of the Americans,’ Akhil said gloomily.**

  The way he spat out the words suggested he thought Zawahiri’s logic was at best convoluted. He said al-Qaeda’s leadership also feared the use of the mubtakkar might prompt the United States to use tactical nuclear weapons against al-Qaeda. I found that hard to believe.

  ‘So what are Zawahiri’s instructions?’ I asked.

  ‘To keep knowledge about the mubtakkar under tight control,’ Akhil replied.

  He leaned towards me and lowered his voice.

  ‘Perhaps if we can’t use it against the Americans we should use it against the Israelis. Now we have all the notes, we can share it with Hamas.’

  His arrogance finally touched a nerve in me.

  ‘You have no right to do that,’ I replied sharply. ‘They said don’t disseminate it. You don’t own this technology.’

  For the first time I saw Akhil moved to anger. No doubt he was still smarting from cancellation of the project that would have made him a household name.

  ‘The fucking Jews are killing our people in the West Bank. It’s no less than what they deserve.’

  When I returned home I encrypted a note to MI6. A message that looked like a jumble of letters and symbols was soon on its way to London. Given the apparent imminence of the threat, my handlers had wanted regular updates. Once decrypted at the other end, the response came quickly. Come to London.

  ‘But why?’ were Freddie’s first words when we met. ‘You sure it’s not a ploy, that they’ve decided to spread word that the operation is off, even among their own?’

  I believed Zawahiri’s message was genuine. He had a reputation for being extraordinarily sensitive to other Muslims’ views of al-Qaeda.

  When my intelligence reached the White House, Vice President Dick Cheney was perplexed and worried that something bigger was in the works.30 For British intelligence, the priority was to prevent the mubtakkar blueprint from finding a wider audience.

  On 13 February 2003, as a result of intelligence I provided to the British, Bahraini police stopped a group of men as they drove across the King Fahd Causeway to Bahrain. It was made to look like a random security control. If they believed the security services had stumbled upon them by accident, they would be less likely to suspect the existence of a mole inside their ranks. One of those detained was Bassam Bokhowa, an IT technician in his mid-thirties. On his laptop they found blueprints for the mubtakkar*. I knew from spending time with both of them that Akhil had tasked him with converting my handwritten notes into an electronic document complete with diagrams.

  Bokhowa was a friend of Akhil and a painful narcissist, constantly boasting about his computer skills and embellishing his role in the jihadi cause. He had tried but failed to reach Afghanistan to join bin Laden’s jihad. Now he worked for a telecoms company.

  Unfortunately, my brother Moheddin was caught in the net. Like Akhil, Bokhowa had been less than discreet about the enterprise and told Moheddin about the mubtakkar. My brother was not a little surprised to discover that I was one of its architects. Once again Moheddin was on the fringes of the wrong crowd; his degree in chemical engineering only added to the suspicion.**

  The official Bahraini news agency trumpeted that the security forces had ‘broken up a cell that had been plotting terrorist acts . . . targeting the kingdom’s national interests and endangering the lives of innocent citizens’.33

  The cell did try to upload the mubtakkar blueprint for Hamas. My handlers later told me the Israelis had intercepted the messages before they could reach their intended recipients: operatives within the al-Qassam brigades, Hamas’s military wing.

  Within hours of Bokhowa’s arrest, MI6 an
d the CIA were poring over the blueprints.34 Any remaining scepticism that a real plot had been in the works was banished. The CIA arranged for a prototype of the device to be built and estimated that a coordinated attack involving multiple mubtakkars would undoubtedly be lethal. The agency was so disturbed by the outcome that they took the device to the Oval Office.

  President Bush is said to have picked it up, saying quietly: ‘Thing’s a nightmare.’35

  The device obviously generated huge interest among the experts. Some time later, two of them said it was ‘perhaps the most nefarious and dangerous’ of all the chemical and biological weapons designs produced by jihadi terror groups. ‘Equally troubling’, they concluded, ‘it is relatively easy to assemble and deploy if terrorists are able to acquire precursor chemicals of suitable potency’, even if ‘it is doubtful that deploying such a crude device would truly produce mass casualties.’* Of greater concern was the panic that would follow a poison gas attack under the streets of Manhattan. If successful, it could shut down the New York transport system for weeks and dent the US economy.37

  Akhil was not immediately detained as the risk to my cover would have been too great.

  His eventual arrest in Saudi Arabia weeks later was wrapped up in a general sweep of al-Qaeda sympathizers.** Moheddin, who had been released, called me with the news and said we should go immediately to Akhil’s apartment in Bahrain to remove any incriminating evidence. The risk to him was considerable but I could hardly refuse. I was not surprised to find the place ransacked and Akhil’s computer gone. Bahrain’s intelligence service had already paid a visit.

  Saudi security services later recovered a large quantity of cyanide salts and potassium permanganate in a desert retreat near Riyadh, apparently acquired to test the mubtakkar*. As for the four Saudis waiting in Morocco for their orders, they just vanished. None was identified, let alone apprehended.

  Although the immediate danger had passed, Western intelligence continued to worry that another plot using the technology was in the works.** After US and British troops entered Iraq, Zawahiri’s key reason for holding back no longer applied.39 My handlers told me later that for years US border agencies were under instructions to look out for Saudis coming into the United States with multi-year travel visas and Morocco entry stamps.