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

by Aimen Dean

  In the exercise area trainees dressed in flowing dark robes were conducting drills on monkey bars as an instructor barked commands at them in an Egyptian accent.* On the other side of the complex, shaded by the wall that surrounded the camp, a large group was sitting crossed-legged listening to a religious lesson. The sound of Kalashnikov fire reverberated off the walls.

  As I was ushered into one of the larger buildings, I was nervous but not overwhelmed; bin Laden, after all, was just flesh and blood and I had met him once before. Perhaps my youthfulness helped. I had seen older men consumed with nerves before they met the Sheikh.

  I entered the main prayer hall and was greeted by al-Ghamdi. He ushered me into a bare reception room no larger than the average living room, simply furnished with straw mats. Large, hard cushions were propped up against bare walls whose eggshell paint was peeling.

  One of bin Laden’s Saudi bodyguards, Abdulaziz al-Juhani, entered the room to announce that the Sheikh was ready. I was escorted into the inner sanctum. A small window and a naked electric ceiling bulb illuminated the room. The walls were book-lined – the quiet reading room of a serious academic. And the desk was piled high with papers; al-Qaeda had its own bureaucracy and bin Laden was renowned for micro-managing.

  The Sheikh was sitting cross-legged on a large Afghan rug, leaning against scarlet-coloured cushions. He was barefoot, wearing a simple white salwar kameez, the Afghan pakol on his head and an Afghan scarf around his waist. He was buried in a book.

  When he looked up I thought he seemed older than when I had seen him a year previously. Perhaps the Afghan diet and his more austere surroundings in Kandahar were taking a toll. I was expecting at least an assistant or guard to be present; I had not even been searched.

  Al-Ghamdi made the introductions.

  ‘Sheikh, this is our Bahraini brother. He has come to pledge bayat [the oath of allegiance].’

  Bin Laden closed his book and stood up with a smile. I was again struck by how tall he was. He had the beady gaze of a hawk; I could almost feel him examining my every gesture and movement. He shook my hand and in a voice scarcely more than whisper bade me sit on the floor.

  He lowered his long limbs, not without some stiffness, to join me. Al-Ghamdi sat opposite.

  ‘Where are you staying?’ he asked.

  ‘At the guest house in the city,’ I said, feigning a casual air as if I was talking to an uncle. ‘But I hope to go back to train with Abu Khabab in Darunta.’

  He nodded approvingly. He was clearly aware of the work of Abu Khabab’s precocious team. Al-Ghamdi had told me about the dreams of al-Qaeda leaders in which the Prophet had urged training in explosives.* Perhaps we were the vanguard of the Vanguard.

  Bin Laden seemed unhurried. He asked me about my family and was impressed that my oldest brother, Moheddin, had already been to Afghanistan to fight.

  To show I was not overawed and to move the conversation along, I told him we had met once before, soon after he had arrived in Jalalabad the previous year.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘I remember you now.’

  I had no idea whether he did – but preferred to think so.

  ‘And tell me about your time with our brothers in the Philippines.’

  I provided an optimistic portrayal of the struggle there. It would take time, I said, for jihad to take root in the rainforest, thinking of the welcome diversion the improvised volleyball court had provided. But I was anxious to move on to the real business of the meeting. Al-Ghamdi had persuaded me that al-Qaeda had been anointed to shape history. I had to be part of it.

  Perhaps bin Laden sensed my agitation.

  ‘You are about to enter into a sacred oath. You have been chosen as a mujahid,’ he said. By whom went unsaid but was obvious: it was by God. I was one of a few hundred out of a billion Muslims chosen to fight for our religion.

  The enemy was now America, he told me. Afghanistan was the crucible of jihad, the beginning of a global campaign. This was to me undoubtedly a call to offensive action, however much al-Qaeda might dress it up as a defence of Islam – light years from defending Muslims in the Balkans or Caucasus. Indeed, eighteen months later, in the very room where we were meeting, bin Laden would approve Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s idea of flying hijacked aircraft into targets in the United States.*

  Bin Laden was never excitable; he seemed to relish the idea of struggle against the odds.

  ‘This path you have chosen will not be easy. There will be times when it will become difficult, so you must always pray to God to make you steadfast,’ he said. There would be many years of suffering ahead for the true believers, he added; the cause of jihad would not start nor end with him. But with God’s help al-Qaeda would ultimately prevail.

  The moment for my pledge of allegiance had arrived. He extended his right hand with his palm opened upwards and took mine. I noticed how long his fingers were and how soft his skin. Clearly this was someone who had rarely endured physical labour.

  The recital of the bayat can be compared to a wedding vow. Al-Ghamdi played the role of the priest, asking me to repeat every clause after him. I recall my exact words as I looked solemnly into the al-Qaeda founder’s eyes.

  ‘I give you my allegiance to obey, to follow orders during the good times and the bad without disobeying God on the path of jihad. I fight alongside you when you declare war and I make peace when you make peace. And God is the witness to what I have declared.’

  There was a pause and he smiled.

  ‘May God welcome you into the caravan of jihad and the mujahideen,’ he said.

  ‘What name have you chosen?’ bin Laden asked. New al-Qaeda operatives frequently changed their fighting names for security reasons.

  ‘Abu Abbas al-Sharqi,’ I replied. Al-Sharqi referred to the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia where I was brought up. Now I was joining al-Qaeda it would have been imprudent to carry on identifying myself as a Bahraini national.

  Bin Laden had his first instruction for me.

  ‘I understand you have had a good religious upbringing and are well versed in holy texts and religious history,’ he said. ‘I need you to bring some of this wisdom to our brothers from Yemen who have much less education.

  ‘You should go among the camps and help them understand what God intends for us. They have not had the luxury you enjoyed of growing up with scholars and books.’

  There were hundreds of Yemenis descending on the camps at that time: illiterate boys recruited by militant imams in that splintered, chaotic country that hugged the Arabian Sea.

  As I took my leave and stepped out in the harsh sunlight, I felt euphoric. I had just been given serious time with the Sheikh; I had been praised and encouraged, welcomed as one of the safwah (chosen ones).

  The bond of brotherhood was unbreakable, something to be celebrated. I was now inextricably tied to a group where absolute and indefinite loyalty to the cause and to the Sheikh was unarguable. Whatever other associations I might be allowed to keep up, I was ultimately al-Qaeda’s property. When the call came, there could be but one answer.

  I lingered in Kandahar for a few days while al-Ghamdi made arrangements for my training with Abu Khabab. It was a useful introduction to the al-Qaeda hierarchy. I had my first interaction with bin Laden’s right-hand man Abu Hafs al-Masri.

  I would have mistaken him for an Egyptian labourer; he was simply dressed, with a straggly beard that might have been borrowed from a bison. He had a working-class accent and had been a low-ranking policeman before coming to Afghanistan. Despite his modest background, he had a sharp mind with an unsparing attention to detail. There was an intelligence and alertness in his eyes. He was effectively al-Qaeda’s Chief Operations Officer. If bin Laden was the inspirational driving force behind al-Qaeda, Abu Hafs was the one who made the trains run on time. When I met him he was preoccupied with spare parts for al-Qaeda’s vehicles.

  He was a man of few words but had a calm presence that inspired deference. He asked who I had known in Bosnia,
especially among the Bahrainis. I was astonished by how many names he could recall.

  ‘I actually grew up in Saudi Arabia,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, I thought the accent was not quite Bahraini,’ he said in his deliberate, ponderous voice.*

  I returned to Darunta on a cool, late autumn day. The Himalayan winter was foreshadowed by the speed with which the temperature dropped as soon as the sun slipped behind the mountains.

  While I had been in the Philippines, Abu Khabab’s reputation had only grown in al-Qaeda circles as an explosives alchemist. His camp was situated on two levels on a steep, barren hill above the artificial lake at Darunta. The upper level consisted of two small mud and straw buildings. One served as a kitchen and dormitory with room for just five occupants. The other was used as a laboratory and classroom and resembled an Ottoman apothecary. Its safety precautions, or, rather, their absence, would have induced a cardiac arrest in any Western chemist. The shelves were bent by the weight of Pyrex jars – some of them cracked – containing an assortment of highly toxic chemicals. Down the hill there was a shipping container which had been modified into storage space for chemicals, and by the waterfront a scorched area with several craters where Abu Khabab tested his concoctions. The buildings occupied perhaps fifty square yards, but the experiments there would change the face of the global terrorist threat.

  Abu Khabab was an avuncular figure out of class but a demanding teacher. He only allowed four or five apprentices at his camp at any one time. One of them was Hassan Ghul, a baby-faced Pakistani in his early twenties. Ghul had grown up in the Saudi city of Medina and spoke Arabic with its unique twang. He had wanted to travel to Bosnia but had been denied a Croatian visa because of his Pakistani nationality. He told me he had applied to train with Abu Khabab after having a dream that he would become a master bomb-maker. He would indeed become skilled in handling explosives. His links to Medina and fluent Arabic, Urdu and Pashto would also make him a trusted courier.*

  Within a few minutes of meeting him I knew we were destined to get along. He had an infectious sense of humour and we would joke about some of our more austere comrades, of whom there were plenty. Occasionally, we would jump in any truck heading for Jalalabad for provisions so that we could spend our precious pocket money on mango and banana shakes. When Abu Khabab needed more supplies from Peshawar, Hassan Ghul was often the shopper.

  Another apprentice called Abu Nassim al-Tunisi was from Milan. He was lanky and awkward, with a prominent hook nose and receding hairline. He was also a sociopath. He had a gentle voice and shy eyes when in conversation, which was rare, but took great pleasure in torturing the animals on which we experimented and held extreme takfiri views. His only redeeming quality was an extraordinary ability to conjure mouth-watering pasta dishes out of whatever basics were available in Jalalabad. Al-Tunisi’s real name was Moez Fezzani. After a misspent youth selling hashish on the streets of Milan he had found religion and decided to join the jihadi cause after attending sermons by Anwar Shaaban.19 He’d fought in Bosnia (though I didn’t meet him there) before coming to Afghanistan.20 None of us knew much chemistry when we arrived, and in the first few weeks Abu Khabab taught us the basics.

  ‘Brothers,’ he announced at our first session, ‘always remember: you are not dealing with potatoes here. These are dangerous chemicals. Your first mistake is your last. I only allow the best in this camp because making explosives requires exceptional care.’

  Abu Khabab was speaking from bitter experience. Over the years, a who’s who of jihadis had sustained injuries. Ibn al-Khattab, the Saudi commander in Chechnya, had lost two fingers. An Egyptian named Abu Hamza had made the mistake of inserting a detonator into nitroglycerine while it was still warm, when training at a previous facility run by Abu Khabab in Pakistan.*

  Abu Khabab had told him to wait until the mixture cooled and went upstairs. Seconds later, Abu Khabab was blown off his feet by an explosion. He rushed downstairs to find Abu Hamza bleeding from his left eye and minus both hands, which were lodged in the rafters. The Egyptian’s disability would become a trademark when he became a notorious preacher at the Finsbury Park Mosque in London. The ever-delicate British tabloids were quick to nickname him ‘Captain Hook’.

  Abu Khabab saw himself as an artist whose vocation was to create innovative weapons for the Jihadi cause.*

  I have often asked myself why I so enjoyed learning with Abu Khabab. It is an uncomfortable question. I think it was the science, the experimentation and sense of discovery that attracted me. Perhaps I subliminally set aside the obvious consequences of our work, pushed them out of mind in my fascination with chemistry and engineering challenges. My motivation was certainly not to learn how to murder and maim as many people as possible. I had an innate aversion to civilian casualties, even as a headstrong teenager. I was constantly haunted by that scene on the bridge in Sarajevo; it would achieve nothing to mimic the Serbs’ savagery.

  Only much later did I appreciate how naive I had been to embrace and advance Abu Khabab’s experiments without sufficient thought for why al-Qaeda regarded them as so important. These were not weapons for use on the front lines.

  I found Abu Khabab an appealing, almost bewitching character. He looked after us, insisting we eat properly.

  ‘You were taught how to be tough in the other camps,’ he told us. ‘But here I need you to be healthy and alert and your immune system at full throttle, otherwise you’re not going to last long.’

  And he was never short of surprises. He had a house at the university in Jalalabad, from which I went to collect some chemicals one day. In the corner of one room there was a mattress resting on about a thousand neatly stacked grenades.

  Abu Khabab laughed when he saw my look of astonishment.

  ‘The Communists used this place as a store room. We found the grenades when we took over the house. They still have their explosives, but they won’t go off unless their pins are removed.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I said, laughing. ‘Just don’t have any violent nightmares.’

  Abu Khabab was more than a master bomb-maker. Like me, he was fascinated by Islamic history. In a place where entertainment and recreation were in seriously short supply, we could while away an evening talking about some obscure historical figure or battle. Like many jihadis he was also deeply interested in the meaning of dreams and insisted I help him decode them, regarding them as messages from God.*

  He was also a superb storyteller, and I liked to think that I was one of the lucky few to be told the inside story of this plot or another.

  Abu Khabab’s hatred of the Egyptian regime was visceral, and he had helped plan a truck-bomb attack on the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad in 1995, the one in which the preacher al-Muhajir had also been involved.

  ‘I told two guys how to build the bomb. It weighed 750 kilograms and was made up of fertilizer, which was easy to get. The bomb was built in a garage in Rawalpindi, just down the road from Islamabad.

  ‘Fate intervened to guarantee our success. A few weeks before the attack, there was a falling-out between the Egyptian and Pakistani security services. An Egyptian agent hit one of his Pakistani counterparts in an argument over what to do about a detainee. They couldn’t do anything; the guy had diplomatic immunity. Out of spite, someone in the ISI (Pakistani military intelligence) decided that security at the embassy should be lowered.’

  He shrugged. ‘Did they have an inkling there was an attack planned? We’ll never know.’

  It’s impossible to know if Abu Khabab’s story was true, but he was not known for embellishment. The attack was the first suicide bombing by Islamist radicals on Pakistani soil, and killed fifteen people. He told me several of the dead were officials working undercover as diplomats to help the Pakistani authorities track down militants. I wondered if they included the man who had lost his temper.

  After being instructed in the basics of bomb-making in a forty-five-day course, I was taught how to set off explosive devices using a watch as a time
r or a mobile phone as a remote detonator. I soon learned why the testing ground was situated at the water’s edge. If the explosives blew up in our faces, we would be able to douse the flames with water from the lake (or so the theory went).

  More than once, I felt that trial and error was not quite the right prescription for bomb-making. I will never forget the cold sweat and nausea as I tried to concentrate on perfecting a chemical formula or wiring up an experimental device. I was not afraid of death, or so I told myself, but if martyrdom came I wanted it to be on the battlefield surrounded by my comrades, rather than on an empty hillside after I had made a dumb mistake.

  Abu Khabab’s interests went well beyond conventional explosives. He began discussing experiments with chemicals and poison gases. He developed a procedure for extracting nicotine poison from cigarettes using a large supply of Marlboro Reds, a blender, a Pyrex jar and other easily obtainable substances. Over several days we drained and squeezed a dark brown liquid until it thickened to the consistency of treacle.

  I was fascinated by the procedure but had deep misgivings about the discussions that accompanied the experiments. Marlboros were a lot cheaper than missiles, but this was clearly a weapon designed to spread terror among a civilian population. Our resident psychopath, Abu Nassim, talked about lacing banknotes with the poison inside letters.

  Abu Khabab viewed the crude chemical weapons and toxins he was developing at Darunta as adding powerful capabilities to the arsenal of jihad. Several Arab regimes had such weapons, so why shouldn’t groups like al-Qaeda? Khabab was always adamant, however, that their use would require approval by the Shariah Committees of jihadi groups, and worried that hot-headed jihadis might use them without getting the necessary approval. For my part, I viewed these weapons as deterrents or at most weapons of last resort. Only later would I agonize over the research being done at Darunta and who would decide on how and when such weapons might be deployed.