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

by Aimen Dean

  One afternoon he had accidentally changed the ratios and been surprised by the results. A solid mass of TATP formed in the solution after twenty-one hours rather than the normal twenty-four – and there was more of it.

  He gathered us around and suggested we take advantage of his error and try to create even more TATP. The new ratio was both daring and foolhardy.

  ‘My bet is that the standard formula has a significant safety margin,’ he said.

  I would have preferred greater precision than a bet. But to demur might invite a lack of confidence from my mentor – or worse, stir suspicion.

  So for my new Queen and country, and with my heart pounding, I helped Abu Khabab and the other apprentices make a new batch of TATP. We decided to produce it in the dormitory rather than the laboratory, which held all sorts of other explosives. A chain reaction would blow much of Darunta skyward. I was in a cold sweat as we mixed the ingredients, my mouth dry with apprehension.

  The TATP solidified in just six hours and there was significantly more of it.

  ‘Okay, so tomorrow lets see how far we can take this,’ Abu Khabab said with a glint in his eye, every inch the mad chemistry professor. For a moment I thought he was teasing us; it was soon apparent he was not.

  I prayed fervently that night that his scientific curiosity wasn’t about to kill the cat.

  The next morning, we wrapped damp scarves around our faces and put on spectacles and any other eyewear we could get our hands on. We must have made a comical sight, like short-sighted clowns moving clumsily at a lakeside. Extraordinarily, just a few minutes after we mixed the further enhanced formula, almost the entire solution became TATP.*

  I was more an observer than leader in the process, focused on my survival and the challenge to chemical conventions. But the two Hamas members were ecstatic. Abu Khabab’s experiments had yielded a recipe to make TATP on an industrial scale. Previously, TATP had generally been used to make detonators and was considered very expensive and labour-intensive to produce in large quantities. Now, bigger batches could be produced more quickly, making TATP the terrorists’ explosive of choice for the ‘main charge’ in bombs.

  During the Second Palestinian Intifada, between 2000 and 2005, almost five hundred Israelis would be killed by suicide bombs,27 some of which, I was later told, used the new formula. No wonder the Israelis referred to the explosive as ‘mother of Satan’.*

  I’d only been at Darunta a couple of weeks when a courier arrived ordering several fighters in the camp to report to Kabul.

  ‘That can only mean one thing,’ said Safwat. ‘Front-line duty.’

  Bin Laden regarded providing military support to the Taliban as an important part of al-Qaeda’s mission and required members to help in the defence of Kabul. The Taliban had held the capital since 1996, but Ahmed Shah Masoud and other enemies had reorganized under the banner of the Northern Alliance and held on to positions not far from the capital. Arab fighters were made responsible for guarding a stretch of front line on the northern approach to Kabul.**

  I was not happy. How ignominious would it be to become cannon fodder on the gridlocked front north of Kabul? After dismissing the idea of a medical excuse (malaria?), or a critical moment in Abu Khabab’s experiments (I’d only just got back), I realized I had no option but to go.

  I had discussed the possibility with Richard in London before I left. ‘If you can’t find a way to avoid it, please be careful and Allah Ma’ak [God be with you],’ he had said helpfully. I would later be commended by senior officials in MI6 for going to the front lines. In reality I had no alternative.

  Kabul was at least no longer a city in anarchy. The hawkers had returned to the streets; battered taxis threw out noxious fumes. The heavy hand of the Taliban’s Religious Police was everywhere. The Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice was at the zenith of its power. In the shimmering summer heat – laced with the odour of rotting garbage – one occasionally witnessed shapeless blue forms escorted by bearded men. They were rare evidence that women still existed under Taliban rule. For those guilty of one form of vice or another, there were regular stonings in the football stadium.

  Al-Qaeda’s Kabul guest house was a large villa in the Wazir Akbar Khan district, which by Kabuli standards was an upscale part of the town. It was just a few hundred yards from the presidential palace.

  Abu Hafs al-Masri greeted the few dozen of us summoned from the provinces.

  ‘I have news which will fill you with joy. Masha’Allah [by the grace of God] you have been selected for deployment on the front lines.’

  The room was filled with a chorus of ‘Alhamdulillah!’ (Praise be to God.)

  We were provided with basic weapons – mine was an AK-47 that had seen plenty of action – and given a rota of duty. Just before dawn on a dusty July morning, we set off towards the front line at Murad Beg in a convoy of Toyota pickup trucks.

  As our flags thrashed above the vehicles and dark shapes could be seen trudging along the roadside towards morning prayers, I felt something unfamiliar: fear.

  I thought back to Bosnia and the Philippines and my readiness to embrace martyrdom. The world then had seemed so dualistic; the righteous path so obvious and undeniable. Doubt is a cruel thing, but it had seeped and then flooded into my heart in the past two years. I could not expect martyrdom in the service of a cause I had abandoned because it perverted Islam. In short, I had no desire to die; to the contrary, I felt that I had much work to do before being called to the next world. My faith was not in question but my perception of serving God was very different from that of the fighters sitting opposite me, as the truck bounced and jolted up the hill. I was somewhat comforted by the fatalism that is ingrained in Islam. In the words of Imam Ali: ‘Cowardice never prolongs life and bravery never shortens life.’

  But if a bullet or mortar round extinguished my life I hoped God would look on me kindly. While I could no longer be assured of the heavenly rewards of the martyr, surely He would not consign me to hell for trying to save lives?

  Al-Qaeda’s forward operating base at Murad Beg was situated on a high, flat, fertile plain bordered by mountains twenty miles north of Kabul. A bunker served as both command post and sleeping quarters. Taking shifts, fighters manned positions in a trench lined with sandbags. Northern Alliance fighters were dug in around some abandoned farm buildings 500 metres away.*

  At sunset on the day we arrived I could hear the call to prayer being sung by a fighter on the enemy side. A young al-Qaeda fighter on our side began the adhan at almost exactly the same time. Al-Qaeda had taught its fighters that the Northern Alliance were godless mercenaries doing the bidding of Western powers, but hearing the soulful voices of the duelling front-line muezzin echo around the valley – as if in a duet – reminded me that this front was a civil war between Muslims. The enemy now was not the Serbs or the Russians, or even Christians in the Philippines army, but others who turned to the same god that I did. It was not so long ago that Ahmed Shah Masoud had been proclaimed ‘Lion of Panjshir’ by the mujahideen for his exploits against the Soviets.

  I knew that the following morning I might be called upon to kill those praying in the opposing trenches and felt deeply uneasy.

  Our commander at Murad Beg was Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi.* He was dressed in camouflage and had strong symmetrical features, intelligent eyes and a beard that was just beginning to turn grey. He had been a major in the Iraqi army before coming to fight jihad in Afghanistan in the early 1990s and had won a reputation as a brave and capable military leader. He asked me what fighting experience I had and I was quick to stress my expertise on mortars.

  ‘Very good, you will travel to the Bagram front tomorrow to join the mortar team there,’ he said.

  I was relieved. Being part of the mortar team meant I would be stationed a little way behind the front lines. My chances of survival during my two-week rotation to the front had improved.

  The following evening, as the setting sun ringed the
mountains in a crimson glow, those assigned to the Bagram front piled into the back of a Toyota pickup truck. The vehicle lurched and jerked along the track out of our rudimentary base.

  Suddenly, there was a pinging of impacts and the vague sighs of bullets that had missed their target. Then came the much more definable clatter of machine-gun fire from a distance.

  ‘Ambush!’ one of the Saudi fighters screamed. ‘Turn around. Back to the base!’ he shouted, hammering on the cab. Our driver slammed on the brakes and began an arduous turn that seemed to go on forever. We were now at our most vulnerable, a stationary target, broadside.

  I clutched my AK-47 and trained it on what I thought was the origin of the fire, desperately searching for muzzle flashes in the fields below. A shell hit the road nearby, sending rocks and dust flying.

  At last our driver completed his turn, the gears crunching. Next to me now was Safwat, the Egyptian from London. He nodded towards a small group of fighters creeping up the hill towards us. I turned to look and in that instant heard the crack of an impact that seemed inches away. I looked towards Safwat and was stunned to see blood pouring from his head. A round had gone straight through his skull, exiting at the temple. He slumped forward onto the muzzle of his AK-47 as the truck accelerated away.

  At that moment I knew he was dead – even in the darkness – but I prayed otherwise. As I tried to prop him up I felt desperate. A lifeless body has a gravity all of its own. I had felt the difference in Bosnia; now I felt it here. In the few hundred metres back to the camp, I felt sure the truck’s suspension or its rear axle would collapse. More than once I was sure one or more of us would be ejected by the pinball effect of our frantic retreat. But all the time, I had a mental picture of Safwat’s ex-wife, the genteel Englishwoman, receiving news of his death in her London kitchen. It was an image that I found hard to shake in the following weeks.

  The camp was a whirr of activity. Mortars were being mobilized and within minutes I was manning one of them, unleashing volley after volley in the direction of the Northern Alliance. There was no time to think; only time to act. But when Abdul Hadi ordered a ceasefire, and an eerie quietness descended, the adrenalin drained from my body.

  I did not need to be told that, had one of our enemy trained his gun just a fraction differently, the body slumped in the back of the truck would have been mine.

  In Bosnia I had felt despair at not being welcomed among garlands into paradise. In Azerbaijan, I had felt exasperation about not reaching Chechnya; in the Philippines infuriation at the lack of desire among local fighters. Now I felt just the ache of relief, an enervating emptiness.

  I thought of Richard’s wry remark that I was gambling away the lives of a cat. I had just used my fifth.

  * Both Abu Hamza’s son Mohamed Mostafa Kamel and stepson Mohsin Ghalain were convicted in a trial in Yemen for the Aden terrorist plot. After completing their sentences and returning to the UK, they were convicted in a fraud case in 2009.1

  * His real name was Zain al-Mihdar. He was known by the nom de guerre ‘Abu Hassan’. He was executed ten months after the hostage attack.3

  ** British media and some commentators had begun dubbing the city ‘Londonistan’ because of the number of radical Islamists who had arrived to seek political asylum or raise funds and support for militant groups.

  * Babar Ahmad had completed an engineering degree at Imperial College after coming back from Bosnia.6

  * MI6 also wanted my thoughts on where al-Qaeda might strike next. I told them of the flood of Yemenis being trained and sent home. Yemen would be the location for al-Qaeda’s next big attack in October 2000, when al-Qaeda operatives approached the USS Cole in a skiff off the port of Aden and detonated a huge bomb, killing seventeen US sailors and crippling the destroyer.

  * Arif’s kunya was Abu Sulaiman al-Jazari. He had contacts with extremist networks throughout Europe including in Bruges, Antwerp and Stuttgart. He was also connected to a cell in Strasbourg which in late 2000 plotted an attack on a Christmas market in the French city. In 2003 he was arrested and tried in France in connection with a plot to blow up the Eiffel Tower. After getting out of prison he travelled to Syria in 2013. He was killed in a Coalition air strike there in 2015.9

  * In Pakistan Abu Qatada had come under the influence of Sayyid Imam, an Egyptian cleric who was the intellectual architect of takfirism. In a treatise written in the early 1990s, Sayyid Imam argued that Muslims who did not follow his interpretation, even those in some jihadi groups, were lapsed Muslims whose lives were potentially forfeit. From London, Abu Qatada helped spread Sayyid Imam’s hardline ideology, though he later distanced himself from the leadership of the GIA after they started killing fellow jihadis.

  ** By his own account, Abu Hamza was not a ‘good Muslim’ when he came to the UK and worked for a while as a nightclub bouncer in Soho. He became ‘born again’ after marrying a Muslim woman and travelled to Afghanistan in the early 1990s. He took over the Finsbury Park Mosque in 1997.11

  * Abu Hamza admitted at his trial in New York that his injuries came from an experiment with explosives in Lahore.12

  * In 2004, the British home secretary (interior minister) David Blunkett conceded that the prohibition of using phone tap evidence in UK courts had made it more difficult to try Abu Hamza in Britain.13

  ** During later court proceedings in the United States, Abu Hamza claimed that in 1997 MI5 and Scotland Yard’s Special Branch opened a line of communication with him in order to ‘keep the streets of London safe’. His defence team submitted documentation to the court which they argued backed up the claim. But nothing has come to light suggesting he ever wavered in his commitment to the broader jihadi cause.14

  * Omar Bakri was allowed to spread his toxic message for far too long. He was banned from returning to Britain in 2005, but by then his organization – al-Muhajiroun – had hundreds of committed followers. At least a half of all terror plots involving British nationals since the late 1990s have had links to al-Muhajiroun.16

  * Being seen to do some form of paid work was necessary as otherwise questions might have been asked in jihadi circles about how I was sustaining myself. From 2002 the British gave me a raise, bringing my annual income up to £30,000.

  ** Still it grated when, much later, former British prisoners at Guantánamo reportedly received millions of pounds of compensation from the British government.17

  ** Al-Hayali (real name Badr al-Sudairi) would be arrested in Morocco in 2002 for a plot targeting British and US warships off the coast of Gibraltar. I was told by MI6 his aim was to attack British nuclear submarines. Despite his royal connections he was short of funds. In 2000 he stole my Bahraini passport from the drawer in my bedroom so that he could leave the UK. In an ominous sign for Saudi authorities, al-Hayali was greeted by thousands when he returned home in 2013 after being released.18

  * Because I was seen as well versed in theological matters, I was asked by one of my Londonistan contacts to fill in for an imam in a mosque in Brighton down on the south coast. For a while I travelled there to give the Friday sermon. I tried to keep it orthodox and non-political. ‘We can talk about jihad during the barbecue afterwards,’ a Libyan jihadi who was on the mosque committee advised me. One day I stood up in front of the nearly 300 congregants and discovered that I had brought the sermon I had given weeks before. I improvised. ‘I spoke to you about gossip, backstabbing and the need for brotherly love, but I’ve not seen any improvement so I’m going to repeat the sermon I gave a few weeks ago,’ I complained to the faithful. Afterwards one of the elderly congregants came up to me and whispered, ‘So the imam forgets his sermon and the congregation pays the price.’

  * Babar Ahmad was arrested in December 2003. After an eight-year extradition battle he pleaded guilty in the United States to providing material support to the Taliban at the time they were harbouring Osama bin Laden. He was released in 2015 and returned to the UK.20

  * I also found out that my father and uncle, who worked for the
Saudi–American oil company Aramco, had known the British spy and adventurer Harry St John Philby. Philby had worked as a British colonial administrator before converting to Islam in Saudi Arabia in the 1930s. His son Kim would become a notorious double agent inside MI6, fleeing to the Soviet Union in 1963.

  * He was a leading ideologue supportive of al-Qaeda who also had been a staunch defender of the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) in Algeria, despite its many atrocities against civilians. Al-Filistini was also known as Abu al-Walid al-Ansari.22

  * The US Treasury would devote a great deal of time and effort to persuading Gulf authorities to rein in the hawala system.

  ** One of the main recipients of Abu Qatada’s largesse was the Khalden camp in Afghanistan run by Ibn Sheikh al-Libi. As always, funds first needed to be transferred to Abu Zubaydah, the camp’s gatekeeper in Peshawar.

  * The Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, or BfV, is Germany’s domestic intelligence agency. It is overseen by the Interior Ministry, while the foreign intelligence service, the BND, or Bundesnachrichtendienst, is tasked with overseas intelligence gathering.

  * MI5 has offices at Thames House.

  * Honey had long been a key source of funds for jihadi groups, including al-Qaeda and Kashmiri militants. Al-Qaeda welcomed self-funding recruits as it reduced their payroll costs. I did not funnel any proceeds to the group. Instead I used my earnings to pay for my own travel and for the rent on my UK apartment. Abdul Rasheed’s brother-in-law, the Jordanian-American Khalil al-Deek, also became involved in the business that Abdul Rasheed and I founded.23

  * Both men eventually left the al-Qaeda fold and neither became involved in terrorist attacks.

  * I was later reunited with Badat in the camps. A few weeks after 9/11 he and Richard Reid were given shoe bombs and instructed by Abu Hafs al-Masri and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to blow up aircraft over the United States simultaneously. He pulled out of the plot at the last moment but was later convicted by a British court after components of the device were found at his parents’ home in Gloucester. He subsequently gave evidence against other al-Qaeda plotters.24