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

by Aimen Dean

  Only later did the distinction between the Coke in a red can and coke as a white powder become apparent.

  My appointment was fortuitous: ‘political risk’ was about to take on a whole new meaning in the Middle East. In the spring of 2010, it seemed that the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI) was on the ropes. Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, its leader, was killed in a joint Iraqi–US operation, along with another leading member of the group, Abu Ayyub al-Masri.5

  Most intelligence assessments were that ISI was finished and that al-Qaeda was also on life support, whittled down by the aggressive drone campaign ordered by President Obama and the US Treasury’s laser-focused targeting of its finances. Yes, it was still causing trouble in North Africa and Yemen, where its expert bomb-makers were devising imaginative schemes to smuggle bombs aboard Western airliners, but bin Laden was nowhere to be seen. Al-Qaeda was more of a brand than an organization.

  Even so, I felt there was a risk of complacency in the corridors of power, especially with the imminent departure of US combat forces from Iraq. My contacts in the region and my understanding of the way the Islamic State in Iraq had evolved suggested it was built to survive against the odds.

  My alarm grew late in 2010 when I met Moheddin in Bahrain.

  ‘Abu Hafs al-Baluchi is still the courier,’ Moheddin said. We were whispering on the balcony of his apartment while Lebanese pop songs blared from the stereo indoors. Just in case. ‘He’s carrying messages between Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and al-Zawahiri.’ (Baghdadi had replaced his namesake as the leader of the Islamic State in Iraq.)

  At the same time, al-Baluchi was taking a healthy commission from the money flowing between Iraq and Afghanistan to help fund the nascent Baluchi insurgency in Iran.*

  ‘Baghdadi is trying to persuade Zawahiri that he has a plan to revive the group, but he wants his blessing. It’s called “aggressive hibernation”.’*

  Al-Baluchi told me that, while suffering, ISI was not exactly on the verge of extinction.

  For a start the group was hardly out of money, thanks to bank robberies and extortion rackets that would have made the Cosa Nostra blush. By Baluchi’s account, Baghdadi had decided to devote no less than $120 million to buying and building businesses in Sunni parts of Iraq: Baghdad, Mosul, Ramadi, Fallujah, Samarra, Baquba and Tikrit. These businesses had to interact with people – they were cafés, barber shops and grocery stores – and they had to be located near government offices and security facilities such as army bases, prisons and police stations. In this way, they would be able to spy on officials.

  The money was spread among dozens of cells. Part of the profits would establish car dealerships and garages to give the group mobility. And part would be spent on buying farms, remote from the surveillance of government agencies.

  None of this ambitious plan was committed to paper. Instead, according to al-Baluchi, it resided in Baghdadi’s head. This was a man who had learned by heart the Koran and other religious texts; he had a phenomenal memory for detail. It was the first step in a clever plan to gather intelligence for the day that ISI would relaunch the insurgency.

  The intelligence came as a shock to my new employers at the bank. The directors shared the consensus view that Iraq had turned a corner and the insurgency was limping towards its demise. The bank was planning substantial investment in what it regarded as a promising market buoyed by recovering oil production. My contrarian view did not go down well with some managers, but the bank scaled back its commitments to the ‘new’ Iraq. I later received a personal note from the chairman thanking me for having warned of the perils ahead.

  Over the next two years, sources spoke of underground ISI networks in Sunni strongholds frightened by the new Shia hegemony. Sectarian poisons were sinking deeper into Iraq’s political fabric. Bombings and assassinations were on the rise, and the government of Nouri al-Maliki was only making matters worse by pursuing a narrowly sectarian agenda.

  The foundations that Baghdadi had laid were used to dramatic effect. ISI declared its ambition, renaming itself in April 2013 the ‘Islamic State in Iraq and Syria’ (ISIS) to take advantage of the latter’s collapse into civil war.7 But it needed to replenish its ranks with hardened fighters and experienced soldiers and bureaucrats; thousands of them were held in maximum security prisons.

  The placing of ISI businesses, plus the necessary cash to bribe mid-level (and not so mid-level) officials, was the ace in the hole. On the evening of 21 July 2013, ISIS fighters simultaneously launched raids on the infamous Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad and another jail in the capital. Both held senior al-Qaeda members. In one night, ISIS added about a thousand experienced insurgents to its ranks. The raids were precise and devastating. At Abu Ghraib, dozens of mortar shells were fired at prison buildings and then car bombs were detonated to break open entrances, before attackers wearing suicide vests swarmed in.8

  Transporting, hiding and feeding a growing shadow army of thousands of militants demanded all the preparations that Baghdadi had made. But much of that planning had been done without Western intelligence – or, apparently, the upper echelons of the Iraqi government – hearing a whisper.

  Developments in Iraq played out against the background of the Arab Spring, which had fleetingly promised so much. It had been stifled, strangled at birth, by the twin toxins of chaos and then resurgent authoritarianism. Into this vortex stepped the Islamic State and other jihadi groups, in Syria, Iraq and across much of the Muslim world.

  Once again the Arab world seemed incapable of progress. Millions of Muslims sought solace – and answers – in their faith. Political upheaval and conflict, heightened religious awareness and the spread of social media as a propagator all stoked a resurgent passion for Islam. There was also more interest than ever in the Islamic prophecies, among ordinary people and not just jihadis, with one survey suggesting that more than half of Muslims expected to see the arrival of the Mahdi in their lifetime.9

  Against this background, the emotional and psychological issues of an individual could quickly take a dark turn. I encountered one dramatic example of this while working with a large Belgian construction company involved in building the extension to the Suez Canal. They had contacted me because of my work on ‘insider threats’ – employees and contractors who might harbour militant Islamist sympathies.

  A manager of the company called me to express concern about one of their workers.

  ‘We have an Egyptian engineer,’ he said, ‘and he seems troubled. He used his computer at work to print out ten pages about prophecies and fighting for the Black Flag.’

  I looked at what he’d been researching and called back.

  ‘You need to look a bit deeper into his online activities and what else might be going on in his life,’ I told them.

  The engineer had recently been divorced. His personal life in turmoil, he had begun communicating with a jihadi group in Sinai, the vast tract of desert adjoining the Canal. They were telling him that they were the instruments of God’s will, and he could not resist what had been prophesied in the Koran. The engineer was clearly being turned, with dangerous implications for the company’s personnel and its project in Egypt.

  The company dispatched him to Cairo but was apprehensive about informing the authorities, fearing he would disappear forever into the bowels of a high-security prison. It offered him counselling and it worked. The mercy shown – and the opportunity for him to reconsider – put an end to his contacts with the terror group then growing in strength and ambition in northern Sinai.*

  By 2013, resurgent jihadism was sending tremors worldwide – from northern Nigeria to the remote deserts of Algeria, the teeming cities of Iraq and Bangladesh. The Syrian civil war was an incubator for militancy – already, jihadi groups were beginning to eclipse more moderate opposition. Governments the world over were scrambling to understand and counter newly minted jihadi networks.

  During the Iraq insurgency many militant Salafis believed that it was only a matter of time before jihadi armie
s would emerge in Yemen and Syria. By early 2013, they were thrilled by the course of history. The black flags literally flew in Iraq, Yemen and Syria. Fighting was still raging in parts of Abyan in Yemen’s tribal areas, where al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula – the most potent of all the affiliates – had seized territory in the chaotic aftermath of the Arab Spring. In the eyes of many Muslims, this fulfilled the prophecy that ‘from the region of Aden and Abyan 12,000 warriors shall rise to fight for God and His messenger.’10

  Given the draconian rule of the Assad dynasty in Syria, it had seemed unlikely that the country would become a front for jihad anytime soon. Then in March 2011, in the town of Daraa, the regime had brutally lashed out against teenagers who had spray-painted anti-Assad slogans, and soon the streets of Syria’s cities echoed to the chant of ‘ash-sha’b yourid isqat al-nithaam’, or ‘The people demand the fall of the regime’. Protest invited repression which prompted resistance – and soon that resistance had a jihadi colouring. To groups like al-Qaeda and their supporters, this was galvanizing. The Prophet had foretold that Syria would be the epicentre of the end-of-days battles. Not only would the Mahdi’s armies congregate in Damascus11 but Jesus Christ would also descend to the city.12 Moreover, the Prophet had said the most righteous of all the armies would emerge in Syria (the Levant).

  ‘If you are alive at that time then join the army of the Levant, for it is the good land of good people.’13

  Many Muslims around the world saw the descent of Syria into civil war and the descent of the Arab world into chaos as evidence that these epic battles were already underway. The fall of Ben Ali, Mubarak, and perhaps soon Bashar al-Assad made it seem like the era of ‘tyrannical rulers’ foretold by the Prophet was coming to a close, making possible the establishment of a new Caliphate and the arrival of the Mahdi. This electrified jihadis around the world.

  The Syrian conflict was a rallying call for young Arab (and European) Sunni militants who wanted to join the fight against the Assad regime and its Iranian backers. Two of my own family were among the thousands who made the journey to Syria.

  The first was my cousin Abdur Rahman. In May 2013, the family received news that he had been killed while fighting for the al-Qaeda-aligned group Jabhat al-Nusra near Damascus.* Abdur Rahman’s death was a watershed for my favourite nephew, Ibrahim, one of Moheddin’s sons, with whom just years earlier I had been playing hide-and-seek. Very soon after Abdur Rahman’s death he too had gone to Syria. He left a last will and testament, writing that ‘the Prophet said go to Syria.’

  I was furious with my brothers for not dissuading him and had several heated phone conversations with Moheddin and Omar.

  Exasperated, at one point Moheddin said: ‘It’s his choice. Remember – you went.’

  I had no answer to that.

  Like Abdur Rahman, Ibrahim had at first joined Jabhat al-Nusra. He’d had a narrow escape when its fighters lost out to the Islamic State in the city of Raqqa.14 ISIS – or Daesh as it would become known in the Arab world – was rapidly becoming a force to be reckoned with in Syria as well as Iraq. A lot of Nusra fighters joined the newly named ISIS after its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had announced in April 2013 he was taking control of al-Nusra, setting the stage for a bitter split between ISIS and al-Qaeda. Ibrahim told me ISIS was seeking to dominate everything.

  I tried to stay in touch with Ibrahim through occasional Skype calls. It was not easy. I encouraged him to join a different Islamist group – concerned that his association with al-Nusra would tar him as a terrorist in the eyes of Western (and not a few Arab) governments. He journeyed through Syria’s chaos from Raqqa to Idlib and joined a famous commander, Abu Issa al-Sheikh. And he sent me a photograph of himself brandishing an AK-47, a broad and all-too-innocent smile on his face.

  Idlib was the magnet for many jihadis, much of it beyond the Syrian regime’s control and accessible via the adjoining border with Turkey. They were of dozens of nationalities, including a growing number of Uighurs – Muslims from the Chinese region of Xinjiang, a vast stretch of mineral-rich desert abutting the Himalayas. It was the Uighurs that brought me an unusual and unexpected assignment.

  On a torpid Dubai morning in May 2013, I received a call from a well-placed intermediary for major Chinese companies. We had known each other for several years because of my consultancy work. Her job was to make introductions that would later yield lucrative contracts. Once in a while, she would seek out my thoughts on who was up and who was down in the various royal courts of the Gulf.

  On this occasion, she had a rather different client: China’s Ministry of Public Security. The Ministry was grappling with militancy among the Uighurs. Officially, Xinjiang was an ‘Autonomous Region’, but that did not preclude heavy-handed action by the security forces. Riots in 2009 involving clashes between Uighurs and ethnic Han Chinese had left dozens dead.

  The Chinese authorities were going to great lengths to dilute the ethnic and religious identity of Uighurs. A towering statue of Mao Zedong overlooked the main square of the oasis city of Kashgar, which was closer to Aleppo than it was to Beijing. The authorities discouraged mainstream Islamic practices such as fasting during Ramadan, and frowned upon men growing beards and women wearing headscarves, to dilute Muslim identity.

  The response of hundreds of young Uighurs was to leave – crossing mountain frontiers into Pakistan and Afghanistan. They had a ready sponsor, the Turkistan Islamic Party, which actively supported the Taliban, and soon became a regular fixture in Afghan provinces like Kunar.* Despite never being more than a few hundred, their fighting abilities had an outsize impact. They believed passionately in a global Ummah.

  ‘My clients,’ said the intermediary in a cool efficient tone, ‘want to get a sense of Uighur migration to the Syrian conflict, how it’s resourced, the travel flows, you know. I thought you might be able to help.’

  I had not given much thought to the ‘Uighur factor’ in international jihad but was intrigued. It beat writing reports on political risk that appeared to get parked on some virtual shelf by the clients that commissioned them. Even so, I was surprised that after several years out of the espionage business it should be the Chinese rather than the British or another Western power that came calling. It demonstrated how Chinese security and commercial interests were fast expanding throughout South Asia and the Middle East.

  ‘I will be in Dubai next week; perhaps we could meet,’ she said.

  And a week later, passing drivers might have asked why this odd couple – the Arab man in flowing white robes and the immaculately dressed Chinese woman – were walking among the desert scrub of the United Arab Emirates.

  She rattled off a synopsis of the mission as seen by her client.

  ‘You’re in Turkey a lot,’ she said, ‘and that is where we would like to focus. We believe that some Uighur militants are getting support from the Uighur and Turkmen communities in Istanbul. We need to know how much, who’s involved, who are the leaders. We’ve heard that one influential figure was once a student of Abdullah Azzam.* Is it a trickle or a stream and does it threaten to become a flood which will one day return to Beijing?’

  The Uighur are a Turkic people; tens of thousands fled China in the 1930s and after the Communist revolution. There was another spate of refugees after the violence flared in Xinjiang in 2009. For a long time, the Turkish authorities had an open-door policy, providing Uighurs with residency almost automatically. Recently, the welcome had become more tentative as China made its objections known. Nevertheless, there were already about 400,000 Uighurs in Turkey, and the numbers were growing.

  ‘We have our spies among the Uighur,’ my Chinese guest said, ‘but they are not the smartest. We need a sense of how close the ideological links are between them and jihadi groups in Syria. What are the Turks doing? Are they just letting this happen? Are they even encouraging it?’

  She got high marks for candour; there were no coded hints in the message.

  ‘I’ll need a cover story, someth
ing watertight,’ I said. ‘I can’t just roam around the suburbs of Istanbul. And I’ll need a guide, someone who knows this scene and speaks Turkish.’

  ‘Figure it out and let us know, within a week,’ she responded. ‘Money won’t be an issue.’

  Over the next week, I studied hard – researching where the Uighur community was strongest, reaching out to the few Turkish contacts I could trust. I knew this mission would carry risks of a different sort. The government of Turkey would not want anyone investigating whether it supported Uighurs joining certain groups in Syria. Nor would the tightly knit Turkic community want a Gulf Arab sniffing around.

  For a short while I entertained the thought of reviving the Kashmiri food business but realized it would look odd trying to sell such refined products in a lower-middle-class suburb of Istanbul. Even so, the idea prompted another. I could be a Saudi importer looking for ethnic foods. Uighur cuisine was popular in Saudi Arabia, especially its rice and kebabs. Polu was one speciality – carrots and chicken fried in oil with onion and then added to rice. It sounds simple, but a truly Uighur polu is special.

  In my guise as a food entrepreneur I would be seeking out the best Uighur ingredients and chefs for export to the Gulf. Uighur chefs were already working in their dozens in Mecca and Medina. I chose to go in Ramadan, which fell in July. It might seem perverse that I picked the month of fasting for a food tour, but the evening meal of Iftar would bring everyone together.

  Through a friend of a friend I found an intelligent and discreet Turkish speaker based in Europe who might be helpful. The fact that she was not a Turkish citizen was a bonus; it made her less prone to any retribution by the Turkish authorities. It was quite immaterial that she had also been a finalist in an international beauty contest, wearing the sash and tiara down the runway before turning her mind to getting a university degree.

  I will call her Dilay.* I can relate that she was taller than me, with luxuriant raven-coloured hair that cascaded well below her shoulders. When we spoke via Skype, I discovered someone who was self-assured, perceptive and fascinated by my field of work. We chatted amiably for half an hour but I knew that our more serious conversation had to be face-to-face. This was not going to be a straightforward assignment.