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

by Aimen Dean

  I wasn’t afraid. Twelve years as a jihadi or spy had bred a certain sangfroid. But I was angry. I looked up from the computer screen and traced the delicate ironwork of the balconies across the street. In three short days I had been captivated by the City of Love, by the bistros and boutiques of its side streets, the wide, leafy boulevards. Now I had to leave, and quickly. I reached for my phone, took one more look at those few words that had changed my life in an instant, and deleted the message without replying to it. Stay out of sight and out of contact.

  I dialled a number in the United Kingdom.

  ‘Hello, how can I help?’ The female voice was anonymous, bland.

  ‘This is Lawrence, I need to speak with Freddie. It’s important.’

  ‘I’ll see if I can reach him and have him call you.’ And without any pleasantries she hung up.

  The minutes dragged by. I ordered another Diet Coke and made sure I was out of earshot of the few customers whiling away their Sunday. My impatience got the better of me and I texted Freddie directly, contravening the normal protocols.

  Pls get back to me. Urgent, I tapped.

  When my phone buzzed on the table three minutes later, I nearly jumped out of my seat.

  ‘This is Freddie. What’s happening?’ It was reassuring to hear a familiar voice, to have a counsellor.

  ‘Freddie, can you go read the Time magazine website, the story on al-Qaeda planning to bomb the New York subway?’ I paused, not wishing to sound alarmist but also wanting to convey the urgency of the moment. ‘I think we have a problem,’ I added.

  ‘Hold on, I’m not at home, give me ten minutes.’

  I could hear that he was driving. Probably a relaxed Sunday afternoon with his girlfriend, or returning home after a pub lunch. I felt a flash of envy; Paris had turned solitude into loneliness.

  My initial shock was giving way to a sense of clarity. I hailed a taxi and went to my hotel near the Champs-Élysées. I would pack and be ready to leave if told to.

  I didn’t have to consider my next move for very long.

  ‘Holy shit’ were Freddie’s first words when I picked up. ‘Where the hell did this come from?’

  ‘I have no idea but I’m furious.’

  ‘We need to get you back here quickly. Get the first train from Gare du Nord. We’ll meet you at Waterloo.’

  I always find that train journeys help contemplation. Perhaps it’s the smooth, even motion or the passing tableau of silent countryside that lulls you into reflective mood. On the journey from Paris I had plenty to contemplate. The questions came thick and fast. Would I have to quit espionage? Would the Brits protect me? How long before someone in al-Qaeda put two and two together? What else in the Suskind book could damage me? All I had was the tease of a magazine article.

  And what on earth would I do with my life now? There’s nothing sadder than a washed-up spy.

  I also thought about my family in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. I might now never be able to see them again.

  One question kept resurfacing. Who leaked and why – and just how much?

  The train passed into the dark tunnel that would take me under the sea and into England.

  Freddie was buried in the sports section of the Sunday Times when I stepped down onto Platform 21 at the Waterloo International Terminus. The World Cup was underway in Germany; all of England was transfixed.

  ‘Well, this is all very unfortunate,’ he began, indulging his preference for dry understatement.

  He could tell I wasn’t amused.

  Alastair arrived.

  ‘Rest assured, we’re going to take care of you,’ he said.

  ‘We have no idea how all this emerged,’ Freddie continued as we walked to the concourse. ‘But it’s seriously bad news. People like you don’t exactly walk through our door every day.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked. ‘What’s the plan?’

  ‘We’re taking you home, but you’re not staying there.’

  My minders wanted me to cool my heels somewhere anonymous for a few days. It would not look good if they escorted an agent home only to find out he had been murdered a day or two later. And at that point, there was no knowing whether al-Qaeda had identified me as the mole and had sent someone to kill me. It was very unlikely but not impossible and hardly worth the risk. After all, Abu Muslim knew where I lived; he could have shared that information with anyone.

  The journey passed largely in silence. There was little more Freddie or Alastair could tell me and it wasn’t the right time to ask about my future. I didn’t even know what I wanted.

  As internal exiles go, the Randolph Hotel on St Giles’ was not entirely disagreeable. A Victorian pile in the heart of Oxford, it was full of fifty-something Americans who were unnecessarily loud at breakfast. The university’s students had gone down for their long summer break and the colleges were gearing up for their lucrative summer schools, so the place had a transitory air that suited my mood.

  I registered under an assumed name, and there were no questions asked. My account had been ‘taken care of’. For the next few days I was one of thousands of commuters trekking into London through England’s green and pleasant land. How had a studious boy from Saudi Arabia, deeply immersed in religious history and philosophy, ended up surrounded by bankers and civil servants on the 8:23 a.m. train to London Paddington?

  My meetings in the conference rooms of London hotels were sober and ultimately dispiriting. My career in espionage hung in the balance. We read and reread the section on Ali in Suskind’s book.24 We did at least enjoy the passage claiming that the existence of Ali disproved the conventional wisdom that the ‘United States does not have any significant human sources – or humint – assets inside al-Qaeda’.

  Alastair enjoyed reading aloud that my supposed CIA handlers had contacted me ‘through an elaborate set of signals’ and that President Bush had been fascinated that I was cooperating with the CIA. He would tease me about cheating on MI6. The account provided to Suskind seemed like a PR campaign for the brilliance of US intelligence, despite the fact it was the British who had recruited, cultivated and run me.

  There was an extra detail in the Suskind book that on first reading offered a glimmer of hope. It described Ali as a source from within Pakistan (authors’ emphasis) ‘who was tied tightly into al-Qaeda management’. I had, of course, been in Bahrain at the time of the mubtakkar plot, but given the multiple clues to my identity in the Suskind account, my handlers believed the detail did little to mitigate my exposure. I had, after all, spent a great deal of time in Pakistan before 9/11.

  For now, my handlers said, there was no question of my going back into the field. They were groping around for alternatives.

  ‘I can’t exactly walk into normal life,’ I said. ‘I have no academic or professional qualifications, unless you count being a jihadi since the age of sixteen.’

  ‘You’ve always liked books,’ Freddie said one day, in a tone of desperation. ‘How about getting a job in a bookstore, and we’ll make up the difference financially?’

  ‘I don’t see myself stacking Harry Potter or recommending Jihad for Dummies,’ I replied with undisguised impatience. ‘And I really want to know how this happened. This was information that I provided to you, seriously valuable intelligence. Three years later an American journalist blurts it all out, even says I was working for the CIA. So he’s wrong and yet he still ruins my career.’

  ‘Well, we don’t have the answers yet,’ Alastair said. ‘But we suspect the leak came from the White House, from the office of the vice president.’

  ‘Cheney?’ I asked incredulously.

  ‘Well, not him necessarily, but someone in his office. That’s what we suspect after reading the Suskind book. Most of his information appears to have come from former CIA people and the White House.’

  ‘So let me get this right,’ I said. ‘I am one of less than a handful of people working inside al-Qaeda for Western governments. I have identified senior leaders, was on th
e inside of plots in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and provided the only intel you have on al-Qaeda’s WMD programme. And in my spare time I tracked networks here in England, a job that’s even more urgent now.

  ‘And MI6 thought my work so important that you shared it with the CIA, which then took it to the White House, which then gave it to a journalist. Which means you now have one fewer than a handful of agents inside the world’s most dangerous terrorist group.’

  I was actually quite pleased with my peroration, which was followed by an awkward silence.

  ‘That’s not quite the way I’d put it,’ Freddie said meekly, not even looking at me.

  ‘Not only that,’ I resumed. ‘The CIA thought the mubtakkar so frightening that they tested it and took a mock-up to the president’s desk in the Oval Office. And yet no one seemed to think the guy who supplied the intelligence on where it might be used was worth protecting.’

  It was useless. I knew MI6 was not responsible for the leak; there was a bigger play going on. The British liked to show the US they punched above their weight, still brought gold to the table, still knew how to deploy and gather human intelligence better than anyone. In the process, they shared information that was thrown into the roulette wheel of leaks and spin for which the US government was notorious.

  It is not clear when exactly the Americans learned my identity. Despite the ‘special relationship’, British and US intelligence do not, as a general rule, share the identity of key human sources. It is possible the Americans zeroed in on my identity soon after I alerted the British to the mubtakkar plot against New York in 2003. But it is more likely that they put the pieces together after the plot against the US Fifth Fleet was thwarted in the summer of 2004. If the Americans had known the British had a double agent inside the cell tasked with making the devices, surely they would not have pressed so hard for quick arrests? After the names of those arrested were published and my repatriation to the UK was reported in the media, the Americans must have twigged (if they had not already) that I was a British spy. I imagine the British likely complained to the Americans that they had compromised an intelligence operation. Perhaps, in doing so, they brought the Americans into the full picture.

  Perhaps I should not have been surprised when MI6 officials told me they suspected the leak emanated from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office. At the time it was embroiled in a scandal over the leaking of the identity of the covert CIA employee Valerie Plame to an American columnist. Eight months previously, Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, had been indicted by a federal jury in connection with the leak investigation.*

  The price of this leak was surely exponentially higher than the Plame case. Besides my life being put in danger, I was still involved in vital work for British intelligence. Not only had I been identifying movers and shakers among the jihadi community in Britain; I also had an inside track on how al-Qaeda was moving money and personnel between Iraq and Afghanistan. Beyond the missions I was already working on, we would lose unknown opportunities to track down terrorists. And there would be plenty of them, in Britain and across Europe, planning and carrying out attacks over the next decade.

  In the weeks after my Paris ‘moment’, my handlers came up with some routine tasks to keep me engaged – going through all the maps, photographs and documents that we had shared over the years, looking for new clues. But I knew my work undercover, in the Gulf and in Britain, had been fatally compromised.

  MI5 instructed me to spread the word that I was moving overseas and then cut contacts with all the extremist circles in the UK. The services relocated me to a high-rise apartment near the financial hub of Canary Wharf in London. I woke up every morning expecting to find that al-Qaeda had denounced me publicly and called on jihadis everywhere to put me out of circulation. But for the time being at least there was silence.

  In typically British fashion, I was given a good send-off by current and former MI6 colleagues at Fort Monckton. It was quite the gathering: I had never seen so many controllers in one place. The visit ended with a flourish as the laptops and other devices I had used while serving HM Government were used for target practice on the range.

  To complete the erasure of my existence as a spy, I was asked to dream up a new name, something neutral rather than Arabic. I suggested Aimen as it could be anything from Pakistani to Irish, and borrowed half of my grandfather’s name, which was Muhideen. Henceforth, I would be Aimen Dean.

  Soon after my ceremonial farewell from British intelligence, I received an unlikely email. It was from George, the MI5 psychologist. He had not been at Fort Monckton for my farewell bash, which was a strictly MI6 affair. He asked if we could meet.

  I arrived at an Italian bistro off the Strand on a blustery evening, the orange-tinted clouds skidding through the sky.

  ‘Goodness, you look just the same,’ he said. ‘Will you never age?’

  After months of feeling neglected if not rejected, it was comforting to get a warm welcome.

  ‘You have no idea how hard I had to fight to even see you,’ he said. The protocol for British intelligence agencies is to cut contact to a minimum when agents are being transitioned away from service.

  ‘I might get into trouble for saying this, but I can’t believe the way you are being treated.’

  He looked at me with genuine concern, even anger.

  ‘Their suggestion you work stacking books or in an Oxfam store is an absolute disgrace after all you’ve done for them. They have to take their share of responsibility for what happened. This is just total bullshit. Just say no to everything they throw at you and leave the rest to me.’

  In the weeks and months after my recall to London, I had struggled to come to terms with the transition to ‘ordinary life’. I was affronted and deeply wounded by the way I had been ‘dropped’ – like a striker for whom the goals had dried up – through no fault of my own but, rather, thanks to excessive trust in the American cousins.

  I told George that I’d been lonely and disorientated. I could hardly return to the Gulf. I’d probably be jailed in Saudi or murdered in Bahrain, and I was already a known quantity to the Qataris. And in all three places I knew al-Qaeda sympathizers still at large who might have some awkward questions for me.

  ‘I really want to stay here,’ I told George. ‘It’s become my home, but to any prospective employer I’m a blank sheet of paper. My adult life has been rubbed out by al-Qaeda and British intelligence.’ For some reason I began to laugh at the absurdity of it all, which appeared to relieve George.

  ‘Anyway, I’m not retreating to some remote hillside like some dissident IRA guy on the run. Obviously, after the publication of the Suskind book, I’m going to keep a low profile. But I’m not going to try to start a new life under a false name I’d never remember and with plastic surgery making me look like Mr Bean.’

  I was beginning to enjoy my own gallows humour. The evening revivified me. George was sympathetic, reassuring – and reminded me that, despite everything, I still had plenty to offer. And it was true that to al-Qaeda associates I still seemed to be the ‘brother’ in deep cover in Europe. Nothing suggested my contacts were yet compromised by revelations in the Suskind book.

  As we parted on the Embankment, a brisk breeze blew papery brown leaves in a jig. I shook George’s hand.

  ‘If someone in al-Qaeda is able to work out that I am “Ali” and then find me, they have my respect and I’ll take my chances,’ I said. We shook hands and I walked away towards Temple Underground station.

  * It’s difficult to overestimate the influence of Awlaki. He returned to live permanently in Yemen in 2004 and would go on to play a key role in al-Qaeda’s affiliate there, masterminding terrorist plots against American passenger jets. Over the next ten years, his online sermons and lectures would inspire literally dozens of terrorist attacks and plots in the West.

  * I later obtained a recording of the lecture in Dudley.

  * MI5 conducted surveillance outside of Awlaki’s remaining le
ctures in Dudley as a result of what I told them.2

  * This was subsequently acknowledged by then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.3

  * Javed is not his real first name.

  * The destruction of many of Fallujah’s mosques caused a global outcry. The Coalition blamed the insurgents for using them as firing positions during the fighting. This would become known as the second battle of Fallujah, fought in November and December 2004.8

  ** The Istikhara is a prayer seeking God’s guidance and for Him to show you the way.

  * The full extent of the mistreatment of Iraqi detainees at the US detention facility in Abu Ghraib had become clear earlier that year.

  * Not his real first name.

  * The plan was similar to an aspirational poison plot broken up by British security services in 2003. At a flat in London police found traces of an attempt to make nicotine poison and the raw material for ricin, along with equipment needed to produce it. They also found recipes for these two poisons as well as for cyanide and botulinum. Police said the jihadi convicted in connection with the plot discussed smearing nicotine poison on the door handles of cars in London.10

  ** It was not clear whether the senior leadership of al-Qaeda was aware of what was in the works. During the preparations for the attack, Abu Muslim was sometimes in touch with Yasser Kamal, but I don’t know how much he told him.

  * Mohammad Sidique Khan had already made several trips to the Afghanistan–Pakistan region when I encountered him at the Awlaki event, including attending a jihadi training camp in the summer of 2003.11

  ** These plots included the plan by Najibullah Zazi and two other al-Qaeda recruits to bomb the New York subway in 2009.

  * Hamza al-Rabia's training of foreign recruits ‘resulted in the blessed attacks on the British capital’, according to a subsequent academic review of al-Qaeda martyr biographies.14