by Aimen Dean
I gazed through droplets of rain running down the grimy window at the grey-brown of Pakistani rural life, occasionally interrupted by the high walls of a feudal pile. In their piteous state you might expect these people to be Maoists or Marxists. But they were devout Muslims to a man, woman and child. Perhaps religion was the only comfort and explanation for a life of monotonous hardship.
I knew we were on the road to Peshawar and not surprised when we turned into a large, well-guarded barracks. A sign in Urdu and English announced that I was at the ISI’s regional headquarters in Peshawar.
I was taken to a bare interrogation room, where I tried to edge my chair as close as possible to a paraffin heater, even though it was emitting more fumes than heat. A middle-aged man who appeared to be a major walked in with a file that contained just one piece of paper. At least they didn’t have a dossier on me, I thought.
‘So,’ he began, sitting ramrod straight opposite me. ‘You are a member of al-Qaeda, and you have a British passport. Interesting combination.’
He pushed his chair back, waiting for me to protest. I did not disappoint.
‘Wrong,’ I said, sticking to my story. ‘I am a luxury food trader. You can check with my office in Peshawar.’
The major smiled.
‘We shall see,’ he said.
Perhaps more brutal methods would be used to elicit information.
My new accommodation was less draughty than that at Landi Kotal, but the chef was no better and the company no more inspiring – apart from a Pashtun opium smuggler with an irrepressible sense of humour. His offence was that he owed several million dollars to another smuggler with rather better connections. He had travelled the world and spoke good English and was optimistic that he would soon be freed if the appropriate commission were paid to the right party. Spending time in the company of the ISI was the cost of doing business across the border.
Our conversation was interrupted by the arrival of a visitor to see him. Even in my debilitated state I saw an opportunity.
‘How do you get visitors?’ I asked.
‘Special relationship,’ he laughed.
‘Can you ask the next one to do me a big favour – to go to the British embassy and tell them Mr Durrani is being held in Peshawar. I am a British citizen and I’m exporting honey from Afghanistan.’
‘Ah, so am I!’ he laughed again, slapping me on the shoulder. ‘Don’t worry! I’ll take care of it,’ he said.
Four days later the major stormed into my cell.
‘Why are the British asking about you? You’re not British; you’re Pakistani,’ he said angrily.
‘You know perfectly well I’m British,’ I replied, adding an expletive for good measure. He was clearly not used to being addressed in such a way. ‘In any case, if I was Pakistani, you would have hit me by now.’
He would have to let me go, but not without a final humiliation. I was shoved onto the open trailer of a pickup truck and nearly froze to death as I was transported through the mountain passes back to Landi Kotal.
A Land Rover sent by the British embassy in Islamabad was waiting. Inside was the First Secretary and a Pakistani Christian called Aziz.
‘You look rough,’ the First Secretary said.
‘I feel a lot worse than that,’ I said. ‘Let’s go, please.’
If my current streak of luck held, the al-Qaeda guy detained with me would tap on the window at any moment and ask for a lift.
‘Islamabad,’ said the First Secretary to the driver.
‘But first Peshawar,’ I said. I had to collect the letters that my travelling companion at the border still had. I had no idea of their contents, but one was from al-Suri to Abu Qatada. I doubted it was family news.
The First Secretary acquiesced reluctantly; the last thing he wanted to do was to spin his wheels in Peshawar while I trotted off to find a jihadi. I was exceptionally careful to leave the vehicle unobserved and recovered the letters.
When I was escorted through the staff entrance into the High Commission (embassy) in my filthy salwar kameez I felt a little like Lawrence of Arabia entering the officers’ mess in Cairo after crossing the desert dressed as an Arab. The looks I encountered ranged from bewilderment to faint horror, but that may have been the odour.
One of the Scottish spooks I had met months previously was less than charitable about my vanishing act.
‘You disappeared from the face of this earth,’ he said. ‘We thought you’d bailed on us – gone back to the dark side.’
For a few weeks after being extracted, I was left alone to graze and recover, first in Islamabad and then back in London. Richard was as good as the promise he’d made about letting me rest – an agent comatose with fatigue was a liability.
When I went to meet Richard and Alan, I was still smarting from the doubts expressed by the unsmiling Scottish agent in Pakistan.
‘Did you really think I’d defected?’ I asked both men at our first meeting.
‘Of course not,’ Alan said. ‘But in our job you see everything. We had to ask ourselves whether we could have done something to upset you.’
‘Even if I was upset with you personally, there’s no way I would change my convictions,’ I replied.
They believed my cover was still intact. They weren’t happy the Pakistanis had fingerprinted me but surmised the ISI hadn’t a clue that I was a spy. Perhaps British diplomats had told the Pakistanis I was wanted back home for ‘questioning’.
It was my favourite season in London – carpets of daffodils and crocuses illuminated St James’s Park and the plane trees were in bud. To escape the long Afghan winter, the privations of camp life and ISI detention was a tonic in itself.
At a meeting with my handlers at a hotel near the park, talk turned to the Olympic Games, due to begin several months later in Sydney.
‘I don’t have much time for sport. Besides, we Bahrainis rarely cover ourselves in glory.’
Richard was staring out of the window.
‘Well, our friends in Australia are worried,’ he went on, gazing at the London traffic edging along Piccadilly. ‘They’re asking if there’s any chatter about an attack on Sydney.’
I’d heard no whisper of al-Qaeda taking aim at the Olympics. I promised to keep my ear to the ground when I returned to Afghanistan.
It was weeks before I felt physically and psychologically fit enough to return to the fray. Eighteen months behind enemy lines, in Afghanistan and Londonistan, had taken a toll that I was only beginning to understand.
I arrived in Jalalabad, rejuvenated, in early summer, less than three months before the XXVII Olympiad was due to begin. When I reached the al-Qaeda guest house, I came across Abu Hamza al-Ghamdi. He saw me as one of his protégés and invited me to visit the Taliban’s regional governor. It just so happened that the governor had another visitor – the Taliban’s Sports Minister (if such an oxymoron is allowed), Abdul Shukoor Mutmaen. I decided to ask Mutmaen whether Afghanistan would be represented at the Olympics. After three years of rule, the Taliban wanted international recognition.
‘All we want is to be invited to the opening ceremony. We are being treated like a pariah,’ he said. ‘The foreign minister wanted to use the Games to show we are the legitimate government here. But the International Olympic Committee in their wisdom invited the Shura-e-Nazar instead.’ *
‘That’s ridiculous,’ I replied sympathetically.
‘This racist prime minister in Australia said: “No Taliban here – over my dead body,”’ Mutmaen continued. ‘They’re always talking about the women, women’s rights all the time.’
I decided to go for broke – a freelance initiative.
‘I have an idea, but you may think it’s crazy.’ He looked at me quizzically.
‘My mother’s family is Lebanese. I have relatives in Australia, and a cousin is on Australia’s Olympic Committee.’ It wasn’t true, but I took the risk that he would neither ask for his name nor check with the Committee. The Taliban could be surpr
isingly naive at times.
‘He knows I’m in Afghanistan and thinks I’m involved in humanitarian work. I’d be happy to convey some sort of goodwill message, any assurance you could offer that groups here will not be allowed to target the Games. Break the ice, as it were.’
Keep it vague, I told myself. Let him have the idea.
‘We can’t declare that groups which take shelter with us can be turned on and off like a tap,’ he replied.
‘Some private message? From the foreign minister?’ I had to stop leading the witness, but the seed was sown. Short of dictating a note for him, there was no more I could do.
As we parted, I played my final card. ‘I may have to go to Australia to settle some inheritance issues. I’d see my cousin if I go. Let me know if I can help. But please keep this private; some of the brothers would not understand that sometimes there is a place for diplomacy,’ I added with a sheepish grin.
A few days later Mutmaen returned to Jalalabad, in a convoy of 4x4s. The Algerian who ran the guest house looked at me wide-eyed and asked what I had done to deserve such attention.
‘The minister knows I interpret dreams,’ I said with a straight face.
Mutmaen escorted me to a part of the compound away from prying eyes and ears.
‘On Mullah Omar’s authority,’ he said with gravity, ‘Foreign Minister Muttawakil is entrusting you with a message that all groups with safe harbour in Afghanistan are under strict instructions not to launch any operation that would interfere with the Olympics.’
‘I understand,’ I replied, ‘and I will do my very best.’
Two weeks later I travelled again through the Khyber Pass at the start of the long journey to Sydney. On a stopover in Dubai, I contacted Alan at MI5.
‘I can’t say much more,’ I said, ‘but I’m on my way to Sydney to discuss the Games.’
He arranged for me to be ‘taken aside’ at immigration in Sydney for further questioning.
In a conference room not unlike the one at Heathrow Airport eighteen months earlier, a senior MI5 official was waiting for me, along with a tall officer with chiselled features from the Australian intelligence agency.
I told them the full story.
‘I’m sorry if you think I went rogue. It just seemed an opportunity too good to let pass.’
They were agape.
‘That’s brilliant, mate,’ the Australian said quietly. The MI5 man wore a smile of quiet satisfaction, as if to say, ‘It’s the quality we have.’
‘Does that mean we have the pledge of bin Laden and everyone?’ he asked incredulously.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and Mullah Omar is guaranteeing that.’
On 19 August 2000, news broke that the International Olympic Committee would be inviting observers from the Taliban to the Games, with the approval of the Australian government. The Australian agent I’d met told me that my initiative had led to visas being issued for two Taliban observers.48
Abdul Shukoor Mutmaen told the media in Kabul that after talks with Taliban delegates, ‘The IOC have offered invitations to two of our Olympic Committee members for the Sydney Games, and this means that they recognize us. I am thrilled by this.’
So was I, but the Taliban could not help overplaying their hand. Mutmaen’s boast that the IOC recognized the Taliban as Afghanistan’s legitimate government was too rich for the Committee. Additionally, there was an outcry, especially from women’s groups, that even observers had been invited. Within a week, IOC spokesman Franklin Servan-Schreiber announced that the Committee had reversed its decision after Taliban leaders had misrepresented the offer.
‘They have turned this into a political issue by making a statement that this is recognition, there is no longer a problem with the IOC,’ Servan-Schreiber said. ‘Those arguments are completely wrong and totally outside what was agreed orally in the meeting. They are no longer invited.’49
It was an opportunity so nearly grasped and then squandered – one that could have brought the Taliban a step closer to being readmitted to the family of nations and even strengthened moderate elements in Afghanistan.*
At least, I consoled myself, the Taliban had apparently obtained guarantees from al-Qaeda and other groups in Afghanistan that they would not attack the Games. Perhaps that might be a precedent for other international events to which Afghanistan was invited.
But I was deceiving myself. Al-Qaeda’s planning for the 9/11 attacks was well underway. I would play an unknowing part in their preparations.
* The high number of Russian soldiers killed during the previous Chechen war (1994–6) had led to popular backlash in Russia which had forced Yeltsin to end hostilities.
* A Moscow-based OMON unit had been involved in a massacre of Chechen women and children in April 1995.10
* The jihadis were eventually driven deep into the mountains and Chechnya ‘pacified’. Putin would install a pro-Kremlin regime.
** Aslan Maskhadov was president of the Chechen Republic between 1997 and 1 October 1999, when Putin declared his authority illegitimate. He fought in both Chechen wars against the Russians.
* Just how the bombings occurred and who was responsible will probably never be known for sure.11
** The MI6 Headquarters building at Vauxhall on the south bank of the Thames.
* The camp in Logar was called Faruq, as it had been in Khost. The camp was later moved to near Kandahar and again called Faruq.16
* I saw Gadahn in the camps again the following year. He was learning Shariah law with one of al-Qaeda’s leading clerics, Abu Hafs al-Mauretani. By the time Gadahn was eventually killed in a US drone strike in the tribal areas of Pakistan in 2015, he had emerged as al-Qaeda’s chief spokesman and the driving force of al-Qaeda’s media outlet as-Sahab. Another American al-Qaeda operative I met briefly in the camps before 9/11 was Adnan Shukrijmah, who was killed by the Pakistani military in 2014.
* Al-Maqdisi embraced the most extreme school of Salafism. In the mid- 1980s he published The Creed of Abraham, which depicted Muslims who obeyed secular laws as apostates and worse than infidels. It had a huge impact on Salafi-jihadis in later decades. Al-Maqdisi would become al-Zarqawi’s ideological mentor. His tracts were smuggled out of the Jordanian prison where he was he held with Zarqawi, and published online by Abu Qatada in London. It was an early example of the Internet’s potential in disseminating ideas banned by oppressive Arab regimes.19
* According to one account, Zarqawi had been trailed by an informant after he left Jordan and arrived in Peshawar in September 1999.24
** Seized documents and surveillance indicated that Zarqawi was a participant in the plot, though possibly only in an advisory role. He was later convicted in absentia in connection with the plot.26
** As investigations continued, it was revealed that the attack plans in Jordan were part of a broader ‘Millenium plot’ linked to Abu Zubaydah to hit Western targets, including Los Angeles airport. Khalil al-Deek, the former resident of California who had dispatched me to Peshawar to meet Adam Gadahn, had helped arrange training for the Amman conspirators. He had even provided the plotters with a CD-ROM of the ‘Encyclopaedia of Jihad’ with instructions on bomb-making that I had passed to him via disk. That may have compromised his security. He was arrested in late 1999 in Peshawar and extradited to face charges in connection with the Millennium plot. He was released in the spring of 2001. He returned to Afghanistan and was killed in 2005, according to his wife.27
* Al-Muhajir’s views were becoming increasingly radical. At Herat he began drafting a lengthy book called The Jurisprudence of Blood in which he provided a sweeping justification for suicide bombings and argued it was justifiable to kill all infidels, including women, children and the elderly, and preferably by beheading them, unless Muslim authorities had granted them protection. He had an equally murderous disposition against the Shia. Zarqawi lapped up his teachings and ISIS later made the book a key part of its curriculum. As one close associate of the Jordanian put it, ‘Our Shaykh al-Zarqa
wi, may Allah bless his soul, adored his Shaykh Abu Abdullah al-Muhajir . . . [Zarqawi] told me that he had studied [The Jurisprudence of Blood] under [his] supervision.’30
* A variation on this mixture produced instead hydrogen cyanide. Abu Khabab’s team experimented for weeks to figure out how to disperse the gas in the most lethal way. We have omitted some details that appear in academic studies, media articles, court documents, government reports and the like. The device was described in detail in a 18 November 2004 joint FBI and DHS Bulletin which was obtained by a major US media organization and published in its entirety. To help first responders, at least one government body in the United States posted significant detail about the device.
* I was later told that after I left the camp, Zarqawi returned for a brief spell to Darunta. As related above, in late 1999, Jordanian security services thwarted a plot linked to Zarqawi to release hydrogen cyanide in an Amman cinema. Few details have been released about the device they planned to use but one possibility is Zarqawi planned to build and deploy a mubtakkar. Perhaps the decision to target a cinema was inspired by Abu Nassim.
As already noted, once Zaraqawi established himself in Herat there was a significant transfer of knowledge on unconventional weapons from Abu Khabab’s facility to Zarqawi’s facility there. Zarqawi’s group would later morph into ISIS. A direct line can be drawn between Abu Khabab’s Darunta experiments and the Islamic State’s current capacity to unleash chemical terror.31
* The location of the camp was a reflection of al-Suri’s strong relationship with the Taliban. Al-Suri told me about a heated exchange he had with bin Laden in front of Mullah Omar in the aftermath of the Africa embassy bombings. Al-Suri by his account had reminded bin Laden he had sworn an oath of allegiance to Mullah Omar as commander of the faithful and needed to keep him in the loop. Al-Suri also told me that in the summer of 1999 Mullah Omar had personally complained to him about bin Laden’s activities in Afghanistan. Al-Suri told me the Taliban leader announced to him: ‘We will never give Osama bin Laden up but we need to know what he’s up to.’
