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

by Aimen Dean

  ‘If we want to test the poison before we use it what will be the best way?’ Abu Muslim asked me on the way to Dudley one frigid February afternoon.

  ‘The same we used in Afghanistan: rabbits,’ I replied.

  ‘Then we’ll get pet rabbits,’ he replied. There was something Pythonesque about the conversation.

  ‘Soon the rich are going to be swapping their Mercedes for Minis. It’s gonna cause panic, bruva.’ **

  In early March the group purchased a large quantity of cigarettes, Pyrex glass containers, protective gloves and other items necessary to prepare the nicotine poison. Alstair from MI5 told me to cut off all contact.

  ‘To protect you the police are going to arrest them for financial crimes,’ he told me.

  It was rather like prosecuting Al Capone for tax evasion, but the British did not want to expose me. A few days later, Alastair confirmed to me the trio had been arrested and charged with defrauding banks and the post office.

  The nicotine plot was thwarted, but just a few weeks later – on 7 July 2005 – terror came to London. Like millions of others I flicked between the live news networks as the horror beneath and on the streets of the city emerged. When MI5 established the identities of the plotters they realized that several had been on the edge of their radar screen, but they’d not been seen as dangerous.

  When I was shown their photographs, I recognized Mohammad Sidique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer and Germaine Lindsay as the three young men I’d met at the talk given by Anwar al-Awlaki. Both Khan and Tanweer had cropped up during the surveillance of another British terrorist cell that had been broken up but had not been judged priority targets. Khan and Tanweer had left the UK in 2004 to be trained to make explosives by al-Qaeda in the tribal areas of Pakistan. The explosives instructor who taught them how to make the devices used in the London bombings – Marwan Suri – had been another student of Abu Khabab.*

  ‘What you have witnessed now is only the beginning of a string of attacks that will continue and become stronger until you pull your forces out of Afghanistan and Iraq,’ Tanweer said in a martyrdom video.12

  It was the clearest indication yet that al-Qaeda central was regenerating in the Afghanistan–Pakistan border region. Not long afterwards, al-Qaeda would task another group of British extremists they trained with blowing up over half a dozen transatlantic airliners leaving from Heathrow with liquid bombs. The plot, which rivalled 9/11 in ambition, was thwarted the following summer – but a string of other conspiracies using Western recruits trained in the Afghanistan–Pakistan border region would follow.**

  Zarqawi had been right. The diversion of US resources away from Afghanistan and his largesse had allowed al-Qaeda to recover. The Taliban had begun what would prove to be a sustained comeback and were now using suicide bombings, having seen how devastatingly successful such attacks had proved in Iraq.13 I summed it up to my handlers: ‘Instead of fixing Afghanistan we went into Iraq. Then we broke Iraq. And then Iraq broke Afghanistan.’

  Were there missed signals? Western intelligence soon suspected that the brains behind the London bombings was Hamza al-Rabia, who’d been guiding the plot to attack the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain in the summer of 2004. We had, of course, missed the opportunity to capture al-Rabia’s envoy; it was an old battle scar that still irritated me. It might have led Western intelligence to al-Rabia and other senior al-Qaeda operatives, perhaps even have disrupted plans for the London attack.*

  The British government responded to the attacks by placing Islamist terrorism at the top of its agenda. Prime Minister Tony Blair announced a twelve-point plan to protect the country from further terrorist atrocities. Several of those points, my handlers told me, were developed from brainstorming sessions I had with the services in the immediate aftermath of 7/7. Whether real or imagined, the praise did little to ease my fears that we were now fully immersed in a new era of home-grown jihadi terror – and that Europe was especially vulnerable given its large migrant populations from North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.

  There was also growing evidence – to me – that the security services were overstretched and the court system too lenient in grappling with the problem. I learned within weeks of the July attacks that my Dudley sidekick Abu Muslim had skipped the country and was now believed to be in Pakistan.

  After his arrest in March he had been released on bail without any control order.** MI5 had delegated surveillance to the West Midlands police. The sullen sidekicks, Javed and Ahmed, were both given two-year sentences for fraud. But Abu Muslim failed to turn up for his trial at Wolverhampton Crown Court.16 He still had his passport and had simply absconded. MI5 blamed the police for not keeping tabs on him. I had not heard the last of him.

  On a beautiful autumnal afternoon a few months after the London bombings, I was out walking amongst the fallen leaves on Oxford’s Port Meadow when I received an unexpected call from my brother Moheddin in Bahrain. Thankfully he’d stayed out of trouble for more than a year, but he still kept some interesting company. I still struggled to separate loyalty to Moheddin from my role in passing on much of what he told me to MI6. Sometimes I was less than transparent about my sourcing with British intelligence. I was not going to tell them anything that would implicate him.

  ‘Ali,’ he said, ‘there’s someone who’d like to meet you. He says it’s important.’

  ‘If it’s Yasser Kamal,’ I replied, ‘that’s not smart. It would put all of us on the radar again.’

  As far as Moheddin knew, I was still devoted to the cause, living among the kuffar under sufferance.

  ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Abu Hafs al-Baluchi.’

  Zarqawi’s courier and sometime Bob Marley fan. Of all the people I wanted to meet, al-Baluchi was up there.

  ‘Really?’ I didn’t have to feign surprise. ‘I don’t think I can get to Baluchistan without getting into trouble.’

  ‘No, no,’ Moheddin laughed. ‘He’s coming to Bahrain – the week after next.’

  I told MI6 I had the opportunity to meet one of al-Qaeda’s Iranian couriers, and they were all too happy to prise me away from domestic duties. The insurgency led by Zarqawi had turned the Sunni ‘triangle’ north and west of Baghdad into a state of war. The US occupation, supported by an increasingly anxious British government, was unravelling.

  ‘But,’ I asked Freddie from MI6, ‘how about my going back to Bahrain after a less than dignified departure last year?’

  ‘The slate’s clean,’ he replied. ‘You won’t be harassed. Words have been exchanged.’

  Even so, passing through immigration in Manama, my palms felt rather moist.

  Moheddin arranged for me to meet al-Baluchi discreetly in a suburban mosque. Al-Baluchi was an elegant if stocky man, with a dark beard that was just beginning to show traces of grey. I guessed he was in his mid-thirties. I was impressed by how calm and relaxed he was. He had an impish sense of humour, frequently cracking jokes about his itinerant existence (an occupational necessity) and slapping his thigh in the process.

  ‘What about Bob Marley?’ I asked, joining in the levity.

  A wistful look crossed his face.

  ‘Haram,’ he said with a note of regret. In the astringent world of Sunni jihadism, ‘No Woman No Cry’ was beyond the pale.

  He told me about his job quite openly. He clearly had no doubts that I was still a committed jihadi. The traffic he supervised spent days or even weeks crossing Iran. At one end were remote border posts into Pakistan or Afghanistan, places with mysteriously exotic names like Taftan or Zaranj. At the other were mountain passes between Kurdish parts of northern Iran and Kurdish parts of northern Iraq. The city of Isfahan, a historic crossroads in central Iran, was the hub – where messengers would meet and transfers of money, letters and people would take place in smoke-filled coffee shops and safe houses. The security services of the Islamic Republic were unable or perhaps unwilling to interrupt the traffic.

  ‘You would not believe the money passing through,’ he told me misch
ievously. ‘Large bags of cash, almost always dollars – is coming from Zarqawi’s people on their way to Zawahiri and al-Qaeda’s treasury.* Millions of dollars are flowing in from private donors in the Gulf to the Iraqi brothers, but I don’t know how they have so much money left over while fighting the Americans.’**

  This was a cue for another burst of laughter. But the consequences were deadly serious. From what I could gather, well over a million dollars had been transferred from Iraq to al-Qaeda ‘Central’ in the previous eighteen months; it had helped revive jihad in Afghanistan and was laying the foundations for al-Qaeda’s operations in Yemen.

  After a while I felt it prudent not to seek any more details.

  ‘But tell me, what did you want to see me about?’

  Al-Baluchi knew plenty about me.

  ‘You worked with al-Khabab, right? There may be some interest in your experiments in poisons.’

  I looked puzzled; I was. But al-Baluchi had ambitions for the Baluchi cause. Two years previously, a young Baluchi nationalist called Abdul Maliq al-Rigi had formed a militant Sunni group called Jundullah to fight the Iranian state. Now he was looking for unconventional ways to take on the enemy.**

  ‘It’s very difficult to be successful with poisons unless you are qualified and experienced,’ I told al-Baluchi. ‘But I’ll give you some formulae.’

  I did, and al-Baluchi scribbled down the details. But each one of my recipes omitted a crucial step. I wanted to be sure Jundullah never devised its own WMD programme.

  ‘There’s another matter,’ said al-Baluchi before we parted. ‘Zarqawi is looking for you.’

  For a searing split second I imagined he had somehow suspected that I was a spy.

  ‘What?’ I asked, stepping back with an incredulous look.

  ‘He remembers a young Bahraini who wore glasses and was good at interpreting dreams. We worked out it must be you. He wants you to join him in Iraq, as a spiritual adviser.’

  I was flattered and appalled in equal measure. The invitation made me seriously important in the eyes of al-Baluchi and burnished my jihadi credentials. But it also posed a delicate problem. The answer: play for time.

  ‘You’ll excuse my surprise,’ I said. ‘I’d have to sort out a few things here and then work out how to get to Iraq. It may take a few weeks.’

  While joining Zarqawi would have given me the sort of access that Western intelligence craved and possibly brought his murderous sectarian campaign to an end sooner, it would have also used up my remaining lives as ‘the cat’ – and more besides. I thought immediately of the informant who had lost his life – no doubt after being tortured – in the failed attempt to rescue Ken Bigley.

  I had no intention of spending my last days holed up in a safe house in Iraq’s Sunni Triangle, with people who made my old acquaintances in al-Qaeda look like reasonable moderates. I just hoped that al-Baluchi would forget about the invitation and move on to more pressing business.

  When I returned to London, my British handlers were obviously fascinated and not a little tempted by the Zarqawi offer but agreed that the risks were hideous. As one of them put it, ‘There’s no way we could extricate you; and you could be killed by any one of a dozen parties. We’d never know.’ Events would soon prove that in this instance discretion was indeed the better part of valour.

  Over the next few months, Zarqawi’s campaign of sectarian murder reached new heights. The number of Iraqi civilians killed rose eighty percent in the first six months of 2006,20 and the attack on one of Shia Islam’s most revered shrines, the Askari Mosque in Samarra, threatened to tear Iraq apart in an orgy of bloodletting.

  On the morning of 7 June 2006, a US Predator drone picked up a ‘person of interest’ being driven through Baghdad. His name was Sheikh Abd al-Rahman and he was Zarqawi’s spiritual adviser. He was heading north out of Baghdad into Diyala province. The car stopped and he climbed into a truck. Al-Rahman, an interrogation of a detainee had revealed, visited Zarqawi every ten days or so – and the available intelligence put the AQI leader in Diyala, a province towards which the truck was now travelling.

  In the town of Baquba, al-Rahman changed vehicles again – getting into a white pickup truck that drove to a nondescript square house near the town of Hibhib. By now dusk was approaching – but not before a US drone observed a man of heavy build in front of the house. It was Zarqawi.21

  Minutes later, an F-16 dropped laser-guided bombs on the house. Zarqawi was mortally wounded. His young second wife was also killed in the strike. (His first wife, a Jordanian, did not even know of her existence and was reportedly very displeased.) Zarqawi’s death did not mean the end of the insurgency that had taken so many American and Iraqi lives. But it was a major breakthrough: Zarqawi was beyond doubt the most dangerous and powerful terror leader on earth in 2006.

  There were other signs of progress. Many of al-Qaeda’s senior figures were scattered to the four winds or dead; others languished in US detention at Guantánamo Bay. Few of what I called the ‘Bosnia generation’ posed any further threat. In the UK, Abu Qatada and the hook-handed Abu Hamza al-Masri were in detention. Abu Musab al-Suri, whose strategic acumen and fascination with WMD had so concerned Western intelligence, was under lock and key after being arrested in Pakistan.* I had disrupted one potentially dangerous plot – the nicotine conspiracy – and provided plenty of intelligence on other militants in Britain.

  My handlers suggested I take a few days off to celebrate Zarqawi’s demise. I planned my first real vacation since becoming a spy.

  It would not go according to plan.

  Eleven days after Zarqawi’s death, I was on a pleasure boat easing through the rippling waters of the River Seine. Ahead was the majesty of Notre-Dame Cathedral, on each bank the bustling café society of Paris on a summer Sunday. I leaned against the railings of the upper deck. Children chattered or gazed at the churning wake of the boat; the usual cast of tourists from around the world brandished cameras or lazed in the warm sunshine. It all felt vaguely surreal. Just weeks earlier, I had been tracking large sums headed to al-Qaeda’s coffers from Iraq and eavesdropping on Britain’s jihadi fraternities. But nearly eight years working for British intelligence had left me drained.

  Soon we would be docking near the Hôtel de Ville. I anticipated watching the world go by sitting on the terrace of a café, a leisurely stroll through the flower market. I was still getting used to having nothing on my schedule.

  I felt my phone vibrate and pulled it out. The text, black on green, was difficult to read in the bright sunlight. I cupped my hand over the device.

  Brother go into hiding there is a spy among us.

  I scrolled down.

  Go read Time website now.

  I immediately recognized the source from the number: someone closely associated with al-Qaeda in Bahrain. He was someone I had fought alongside in Bosnia, someone I trusted and who (I thought) trusted me. I was puzzled but also alarmed; there was an urgency about the text that worried me. I read it again – perhaps it was a sick joke. Not likely: this was not someone given to pranks. And here I was, stranded on a boat making its unhurried way to moorings some fifteen minutes away.

  I turned over the possibilities in my brain – too quickly to give any one of them real scrutiny. I read the text again, grasped at the reassurance that at least I wasn’t being accused of being the spy. Then again, perhaps it was a ruse to flush me out. Every possibility spewed more.

  The passengers descended the stairs to the cobblestone dock in slow motion. They would go on with their vacations, laugh over dinner and a glass of wine, sleep soundly. I had to get out.

  I almost ran in search of a café with Internet access: this one closed, the next occupied. Finally, after what seemed an odyssey, I found a quiet place in a side street off the Voie Georges-Pompidou. Such was the rush of my fingers that it took three attempts to access the Time website. The bold type of the headline leapt from the screen.

  Exclusive Book Excerpt: How an Al-Qaeda Cell<
br />
  Planned a Poison-Gas Attack on the N.Y. Subway

  A wave of nausea swept through my body. I had to slow down, read carefully, and above all think clearly.

  ‘Al-Qaeda terrorists came within 45 days of attacking the New York subway system with a lethal gas similar to that used in Nazi death camps,’ proclaimed the opening sentence.

  The 2003 mubtakkar plot.

  ‘Over the previous six months,’ the report went on, ‘US agents had been receiving accurate tips from a man the writer identifies simply as Ali, a management-level al-Qaeda operative.’

  Ali was my birth name. Sure, there were a few Alis among the dozens of al-Qaeda sympathizers in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. But I was probably the only one with intimate knowledge of the mubtakkar.

  The Time report was an extract from a book, The One Percent Doctrine, by Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist Ron Suskind, to be published just two days later.23

  ‘US intelligence got its first inkling of the plot from the contents of a laptop computer belonging to a Bahraini jihadist captured in Saudi Arabia early in 2003,’ the article continued. That was the laptop found on Bokhowa when he was stopped on the causeway. I grasped for comfort. Plenty of others also knew him, I calculated, and a few had been less than discreet in discussing the details of the plot.

  I was astonished that such sensitive intelligence could have been leaked. But my surprise was soon overtaken by shock and disbelief, and a deep sense of foreboding.

  The excerpt continued that Ali was ‘aware of the plot [and] identified the key man as bin Laden’s top operative on the Arabian Peninsula, Yusuf al-Ayeri, a.k.a. “Swift Sword”’.

  I had indeed identified al-Ayeri.

  Suskind had described ‘Ali’ as an informant in four different respects. It was like one of those police sketches of a suspect, I thought. Every paragraph provided another detail about Ali, until the full picture emerged – looking distinctly like me. Even though Suskind’s account contained several errors,* in all these strands I was the common denominator. As for whoever had leaked this intelligence, I was stunned that of hundreds of names they could have chosen, they had opted for mine.