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

by Aimen Dean

  Abu Khabab al-Masri, the doyen of Darunta, fled his laboratory the day before US air strikes obliterated much of the site in October 2001.* US intelligence collected fragmentary information suggesting he had resumed research on chemical weapons and poisons in the tribal territories of Pakistan.3 Despite a $5 million price on his head, he survived for another seven years before the ‘Rewards for Justice’ programme and a missile caught up with him. Lamenting his martyrdom, al-Qaeda promised Abu Khabab had ‘left behind him a generation who will seek revenge and punishment with God’s help’.4

  One of that generation was Dudley’s own psychopath, Abu Muslim. After skipping bail in the UK, he’d fled to Pakistan. There is intelligence suggesting he then traveled to the badlands and met up with none other than Abu Khabab.5 I had often spoken to him about Abu Khabab and, if he indeed trained with him, perhaps he’d sought to follow in my footsteps. Abu Muslim was arrested in Pakistan in 2007 and deported to the UK, where he served three and a half years in jail. Then in 2012 he joined militants in the tribal areas of Pakistan and then travelled to Syria to join ISIS.

  By 2015, using the name Muslim al-Britani, he had become one of the most prolific ISIS fighters on Twitter, sharing images of his bomb-making workshop and posting guidance on electronic components for bombs and the chemicals needed to make poisons. He threatened to blow up MI6’s headquarters and interviewed online by a British newspaper said: ‘All I see for the UK in the horizon are dark black clouds.’*

  He also boasted about his prowess in ‘producing sophisticated IED’s’. An intelligence source told me in 2017 that Abu Muslim was thought to have been involved in ISIS efforts to develop bombs that could be smuggled onto aircraft disguised as laptop batteries. I was told these efforts had been inspired by news coverage of exploding Samsung Galaxy Note 7 mobile phones.** It seemed he’d become quite the inventor. I was told he was also involved in adapting commercial drones to carry bombs or explode on impact, which became an important part of the ISIS arsenal as it came under attack in 2017.

  I had clearly underestimated the ‘bruva’ from the West Midlands. So, apparently, had the British security services. I frequently wondered why, after being released from prison, he’d been allowed in 2012 to leave the country. At time of writing, I have no idea whether he is still alive. I hope not.

  So many of the men I once counted as friends and comrades are dead: Khalid al-Hajj, Farouq al-Kuwaiti, the mild-mannered Safwat. My one-time lab partner Hassan Ghul and Adam Gadahn, the American I had escorted to join the group, were among those killed in US drone strikes.**

  Many who could not be counted as friends are in jail. Abu Nassim, the Tunisian psychopath I had encountered in Darunta, travelled to fight in Syria before slipping into Libya, from where he helped plan the March 2015 attack on the Bardo museum in Tunis and the June 2015 attack on a beach in Sousse, killing over fifty holidaymakers from Europe and around the world. After pressure mounted on ISIS in Libya, he was apprehended and extradited to Tunisia where he was convicted in connection with the two attacks.*

  Others are still at large, like Dundee native Abu Abdullah al-Scotlandi. He was designated by the United States as running a ‘front organization’ for al-Qaeda based in Pakistan that financed al-Qaeda and other jihadi groups in Afghanistan.10 Also at liberty at the time of writing is Yasser Kamal, the great persuader behind the Bahrain plot in 2004 and the man who connected me with Dudley’s own Abu Muslim. His life’s mission appears to be to liquidate me. While I feel it unlikely that he has the guile to track me down in Europe, I would think twice about a visit to Bahrain, especially since the warning I received in 2016.

  The world, and especially the Islamic world, has become a darker place since I set out for Vienna as a naive and bright-eyed sixteen-year-old. The range of opposing and mutually intolerant perspectives has grown exponentially. Common ground and tolerance among Shia and Sunni has evaporated, even in places where sectarian strife used to be rare.

  ‘The spectrum of those who practise the faith is widening to convulsive effect,’ the historian Tom Holland wrote in 2015.11 The Islamic State widened that spectrum still further. As Graeme Wood observed the same year, ISIS drew its fair share of psychopaths and adventure-seekers. But from its perspective its behaviour was ‘a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse’.**

  As I write this in the spring of 2018, I have had much time to reflect on how the global jihadi threat is evolving and the steps I believe are necessary for the civilized world to prevail. In my lifetime I have witnessed two intersecting struggles evolve. One is the asymmetrical war between international jihadi groups and the world at large (the West and at times Russia and Arab governments, too). This has manifested itself in attempts to bring down airliners, and attacks in European cities or on hotels frequented by Westerners in remote places like Mali.

  Both al-Qaeda and ISIS have exported their ideology to a small, alienated fraction of the Muslim communities of Europe and North America. Young men – impressionable, angry – grasp a distortion of religion to justify acts of violence against the societies where they live but which they have come to loathe.

  Some – a few, but enough – have moved from idle boast to terrible deed, driving trucks into vacationing crowds or shooting dead scores of people at a concert. Bomb-makers have hidden in nondescript apartments in Manchester, Brussels and Paris – even Sydney. The age of encrypted communication has aided conspiracies and the transfer of deadly technical skills. This sporadic, attritional conflict consumes acres of media coverage and outsize police resources in Europe. But to me it’s an offshoot of a much larger battle – a civil war – among Muslims, locked in an epochal struggle over the meaning of Islam and its place in a rapidly modernizing world.

  Two decades ago I listened to muezzin on opposing sides of the front lines in Afghanistan compete in singing out the call for evening prayers. It was a metaphor for my religion: the ascetic medieval fundamentalism of the Taliban against the pro-Western Islamic nationalism of the Northern Alliance.

  How has this happened? Some scholars go back centuries, to the Reconquista that ejected Muslim rulers from much of southern Europe, and the failure of the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683. Europe’s agricultural and industrial revolutions followed, while much of the Islamic world made slower strides towards modernity. The age of colonialism, and superior Western economic power, subdued Muslims in their homelands, from French Morocco to the Dutch East Indies.

  ‘The Muslim,’ as Bernard Lewis put it, ‘has suffered successive stages of defeat.’13

  In the age of the modern nation-state, Arab societies have scrabbled for a stable way of governing, from absolute monarchy to military dictatorship and one-party rule, even Marxism. Add the dislocating effects of urbanization, the rapid homogenization of global popular culture, the impact of pan-Arab television networks, the lack of social mobility and opportunity, endemic corruption: the diagnosis of the sickness has many causes.

  This frustration is not exclusive to Muslim countries but has aggravated a sense of disequilibrium and humiliation among the millions of Muslims who are not among a tiny and (often) Westernized elite. Some of these Muslims heard those in the pulpits and the madrassas who said that pagan innovations were to blame, and the only recourse was to return to the Holy Book, in other words to fundamentalism.

  There were, of course, intellectual underpinnings for this – such as the works of Qutb that I devoured as a teenager. But there were also moments in history that fed the polarization of Muslim opinion and the development of Salafi jihadism, and several of the most significant occurred in a single year: 1979.

  The War Within Islam

  The convulsions of 1979 changed our religion and our politics forever. I was just months old when the year dawned but have lived with its consequences all my life. Just days before I was born, the Shah of Iran declared martial law in an effort to quell Isla
mist-led protests. A cleric scorned by the Shah’s government as a ‘mad Indian poet’ moved from his exile in Iraq to a village near Paris to begin agitating for the Shah’s overthrow. That cleric was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

  Within weeks of the new year, the Shah was gone, swept away by the protests of millions that seemed briefly to bring all of Iran – Communists, democrats and Islamists – together. In much of the West, Khomeini was portrayed as a spiritual leader who would usher in some form of Islamic democracy. My oldest brother, Moheddin, and his contemporaries had a very different feeling. Where we lived – in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province – there was a restive Shia minority that might take heart from events across the Gulf. The mutual mistrust between Sunni and Shia, which had ebbed and flowed across the centuries, acquired a new piquancy.

  Just as the Shia ayatollahs in Iran were taking power, so Sunni militancy – in Pakistan, Egypt, even Saudi Arabia – was also beginning to gather strength. My family, like millions in Saudi Arabia and across the Muslim world, was stunned when Sunni militants attacked the Grand Mosque in Mecca in November 1979. As many as 400 armed jihadis infiltrated the Mosque, taking thousands of worshippers hostage. It took Saudi special forces, with the help of tanks, artillery and even French expertise with toxic gas, nearly two weeks to flush out the militants.14

  The leader of the group, Juheiman al-Oteibi, rejected Saudi Arabia’s modernization. He saw the al-Saud dynasty as guilty of corroding the moral values of Saudi society. He and his followers also believed the Mahdi was about to descend to earth to lead Muslims in an apocalyptic battle against the infidel. In the months before they seized the mosque, al-Oteibi and dozens of his followers had night visions that his soon-to-be brother-in-law Mohammed Abdullah was the Mahdi.15 This not only strengthened their resolve to act but propelled them towards seizing the Great Mosque. According to a well-known hadith, near the end-of-days this messianic figure would be given allegiance at the site of the Kaaba* in order to rid the earth of wrongdoing and injustice. It was an early example of the power of prophecy.16

  Many young Saudis were appalled by the attack and by the merciless reaction of the Saudi army, which in their view had desecrated the holiest place in Islam with its blunt use of force. One of those horrified was a young Osama bin Laden, scion of one of the Kingdom’s wealthiest families.

  The siege at Mecca reverberated throughout the Muslim world. Ayatollah Khomeini proclaimed that Israel and the United States were behind the plot. That was enough to drive enraged protestors in Pakistan to attack and burn down the US embassy in Islamabad. Pakistan, too, was changing. Its military dictator, General Zia ul Haq, was intent on making it a more Islamist society. Zia had overthrown the democratically elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in 1977 and had him hanged in April 1979. Zia ul Haq would direct the infamous ISI – with whom I had some awkward interaction – to support the Afghan mujahideen.*

  Not all was confrontation in the Middle East that fateful year. The day I was born, President Jimmy Carter, whose administration would be crippled by events in Iran, finally persuaded Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to put pen to paper after twelve days of secret negotiations at Camp David. It was an historic agreement that would lead to the celebration on the White House lawn of a peace treaty between Arab and Jew. The 1979 Peace Treaty was optimistically cast as the foundation of a broader reconciliation between Israel and its Arab enemies. But it hardened the hearts of the ‘rejectionists’, most of them radical Islamists, to whom Egypt had surrendered its role as the bastion of Arab resistance. These Islamists were revolted by the secularization of Egyptian society under first Nasser and then Sadat. One of them – a young surgeon recently married – was Ayman al-Zawahiri.

  Peace with Israel would set in train a conspiracy among Islamist radicals including within the Egyptian army that would lead to Sadat’s assassination two years after that moment of sunlit optimism in Washington. Zawahiri had only a marginal role in the conspiracy but Sadat’s assassination, on 6 October 1981, would thrust him into the limelight as one of the leading intellectuals of Egyptian jihad.

  By then Zawahiri had become immersed in the aftermath of a seismic event that closed 1979 as dramatically as the Shah’s fall had opened it. On 24 December, Soviet tanks rolled across the border into Afghanistan, the vanguard of an invasion that would set off the horrendous war between the Red Army and the Afghan mujahideen. The invasion would draw thousands of Arabs to the region, including Zawahiri. They provided humanitarian aid; they provided weapons; and they joined that resistance. Jihad was going international.

  Other events that year had indirect but just as profound consequences for the Arab world and for the growing polarization that would disable it for decades to come. One was almost overlooked altogether in the West, even among Arabs. It was the purge of the Baath Party in Iraq which made Saddam Hussein an unchallenged dictator, his megalomania given free rein to launch wars against Iran and Kuwait. He also built a ruthless security apparatus, some of whose number would later help build the Islamic State in Iraq into the most potent jihadi group yet seen.

  I justify this historical diversion for two reasons. These events demonstrated in many ways the effects of Western (and Soviet) intervention in the Middle East. This chunk of land, and especially the region between Cairo and the Gulf, is at the centre of the world, a crossroads of both maritime and land routes. It is resource-rich, home to two thirds of the world’s oil and gas reserves and a sizable fraction of its mineral wealth. It was inevitably going to be a sandbox of competition and conflict. As many of its states have been so lavishly armed, it will remain so and at a higher level of lethality.

  The second and more important reason is that much of what is playing out today has its foundations in or was unleashed by those events in 1979: Sunni versus Shia, Persians against Arabs, the battle pitting the conservative monarchies (and in Egypt’s case the military) against political Islam, represented by the Muslim Brotherhood and more radical shades.

  In a very short period of time, a series of unrelated events can coalesce to change the course of history. Such was the case in 1979 across the Arab and Muslim world. This upheaval has affected millions of Muslim families, including my own. My brother Moheddin was among so many from Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Egypt and elsewhere who felt driven by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to join jihad against the godless Russians. My cousin and nephew died in Syria opposing the regime of Bashar al-Assad. And I, of course, pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden.

  After a lifetime as a participant in and observer of Islam’s civil war, I reject the reductionism of some Western observers. In his famous 1990 essay, Bernard Lewis said that in the ‘classical Islamic view, to which many Muslims are beginning to return, the world and all mankind are divided into two: the House of Islam, where the Muslim law and faith prevail, and the rest, known as the House of Unbelief or the House of War, which is the duty of Muslims ultimately to bring to Islam’. This would lead to what Lewis called ‘a clash of civilizations – the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present and the worldwide expansion of both’.17

  Sadly, many Muslims would subscribe to this perspective rather than acknowledge the crisis within Islam. They think the conflicts ravaging their lands stem from a Western conspiracy to steal their natural resources. So perfidious is that conspiracy that many Muslims even blame terror attacks in the West, from 9/11 to the November 2015 gun rampage in Paris, on the CIA and Mossad. They interpret these attacks as wicked plots to put Western boots on the ground and drones in the air across the Middle East.

  This persecution complex is the outgrowth of a sense of hopelessness among millions who see their lives as bereft of opportunity and their social environments as stacked against them. They think politics is useless and, unable to change the system, they set out to smash it. Many Muslim states are home to a proliferation of non-state ac
tors because the state is held in contempt. It provides few services, is corrupt and frequently oppressive. Jihadism has become the Muslim version of anarchy – on steroids.

  Many of the men who became my friends or brothers-in-arms were convinced of the righteousness of their cause, of their duty to wage jihad. Wherever they looked, they saw a civilizational war, or, rather, overlapping wars. The West was the enemy, but so were the corrupt Gulf monarchies, which were merely American puppets. And as the years passed, especially when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s sectarian loathing was inherited by the Islamic State, a third war began: doctrinaire Sunni militants against messianic Shia fundamentalists.

  The Power of Prophecy

  The Islamic State and al-Qaeda have had plenty of ‘personality disorders’ among their numbers: sociopaths and psychopaths. But the conviction I saw in the gleaming eyes of Khalid al-Hajj, the young Canadian Muslims who had come to Bosnia, the attendees at Awlaki’s Dudley lecture, the wounded fighters in Syria and dozens more derived from intense religious faith and an unshakeable belief that Islamic prophecy would guide the Ummah to a purer state.

  So many attempts by outsiders to capture the essence of these groups have underplayed their spiritual underpinnings. Western analysts tend to study jihadi movements through the prism of their own assumptions, believing that such groups will weigh risks and benefits and act rationally. Al-Qaeda was quite capable of that as the meticulous planning of the 9/11 attacks showed. But, ultimately, global jihad is guided by very specific interpretations of the Koran and the hadith.

  In al-Qaeda, the pitch has been simple. One of the group’s preachers cites a verse from the Koran or a hadith foretelling great battles to come, and poses a straightforward question to his audience: ‘Do you think you know better than God? Do you think He would have left us without a blueprint for the future? Do you not see that the long-foretold epic battles have begun in Yemen, Syria and Iraq?’