by Aimen Dean
* Inspire magazine, a publication founded in 2010 by the late American terrorist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, played a key role in circulating al-Suri’s ideas on ‘individual’ terrorism. Finding it difficult to organize complex plots, groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS increasingly called on their followers in the West to launch terrorist attacks in their name. The 2013 Boston bombers, the 2015 San Bernardino shooters and the 2017 London Bridge attackers were a few of the many who responded.
* An audio recording of this lecture, part of al-Suri’s ‘Jihad is the Solution’ lecture series in the autumn of 1999, was subsequently posted online. In his 2004 book, al-Suri said that ‘Strategic Operations Brigades’ should be established and given ‘very high-level financial capabilities’ to acquire an ‘operational knowledge and potential to use WMD’. Then Americans, he argued, could be subjected to a ‘back-breaking policy of collective massacres’.37
** Despite calling for massive attacks against the West, al-Suri was initially critical of the 9/11 attacks because they led to the removal of the Taliban and intensified counter-terrorism operations. But he eventually changed his mind, writing, ‘I feel sorry because there were no weapons of mass destruction in the planes that attacked New York and Washington on 9/11.’ After the US invasion of Iraq energized the jihadi movement he came to believe the 9/11 attacks had helped mobilize the jihadi movement by creating a confrontation between the West and Islam.38
* It was known as the Project for the New American Century, a neo-conservative group whose members would be prominent in the administration of George W. Bush.
* I reported the conversation, and much besides, the next time I was debriefed by my British handlers.
** I again met al-Omari in 2000 at bin Laden’s Tarnak Farm headquarters near Kandahar.
* The new scrutiny at the border had no doubt been mandated by Pakistan’s new military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf. His coup had been widely condemned in Western capitals, and he had every incentive to present himself as a constructive counter-terrorism partner. Although he intensified such cooperation in the face of withering American pressure after 9/11, he would prove to be a fickle partner.
* Shura-e-Nazar was the term used by the Taliban to describe the ‘rival’ government led by Ahmed Shah Masoud. I do not know if they were actually invited.
* MI5 and ASIO (Australian intelligence) asked me to spend time in Sydney and Melbourne introducing myself to radical circles. Abu Qatada had provided me with contacts for several of his ‘students’ in Australia. But most radicals I met were keeping a low profile because of aggressive surveillance in the run-up to the Olympics. What I did encounter was bitter alienation among the younger generation of Lebanese Australians. It was my introduction to what would soon become known as ‘gangster jihadism’ – young gang members justifying petty crime with jihadi ideology and infusing that ideology with street violence.
My Seventh Life: Something Big
2001–2004
In June 2001, I received an unusual summons. At the time I was at al-Qaeda’s Tarnak Farms complex near the airport in Kandahar and was due to leave for the UK within days. The summons came from Abu Hafs al-Masri, bin Laden’s right-hand man, which made me distinctly uneasy. Did the leadership somehow suspect I was working for the British? I couldn’t imagine how, but ahead of the meeting I spent hours trying to work out whether and where I might have slipped up.
Al-Masri had a way of pursing his lips that only underscored his severity. One of the Egyptian group around bin Laden, he was not given to levity.
He was sitting behind a desk in a library that doubled as an office.
‘When exactly are you travelling to England?’ he asked.
‘In four days,’ I replied.
He did not invite me to sit down but stared at me for a few seconds in a way that turned my stomach.
‘I want you to take a message to some of our brothers,’ he said. He spelled out the four names slowly and clearly, as if I was an imbecile.
‘They must leave the country and come here before the end of August. Something big is going to happen and we expect the Americans to come to Afghanistan.’
I failed to find words to respond as I tried to take in the enormity of what he was suggesting.
‘Do not be tempted to come back to fight alongside us here. Stay in England; do not leave your post. We will contact you.’
It was clear the meeting was over. It had lasted two minutes, but set my nerves jangling and sent my brain into overdrive. Why these four men? Why now? What was ‘something big’?
I was not stupid enough to ask. Al-Masri was obsessive about operational secrecy. He had literally drafted a ‘need-to-know’ policy and posted it prominently in the camps.
At least I was beyond suspicion; he would not hint at ‘something big’ unless he had complete confidence in me. It seemed that to al-Qaeda’s leadership my ability to travel, apparently unsuspected, continued to make me a precious commodity. On several occasions I had been given letters for al-Qaeda supporters then in the UK – letters expertly unsealed and resealed by MI6 before reaching their recipients. But this time the message was simple, verbal and direct: get out.*
I knew three of the four individuals well. One was Mohammed al-Madani, who had introduced me to Abu Qatada’s circle in London. The second was ‘Abu Hudhaifa al-Britani’,** who had been in Afghanistan and knew Abu Khabab and many others within al-Qaeda. The British intelligence services had Abu Hudhaifa under surveillance but were frustrated by his expert navigation of the line between militant free speech and explicit involvement in a terrorist organization. I knew just how closely he had been involved with al-Qaeda because I had seen him in the camps, but that was hardly admissible in court.
The third was Abu Walid al-Filistini, the Palestinian cleric close to Abu Qatada who had almost blocked me from applying for a British passport.*
The weather was muggy in London when I arrived five days later. At Heathrow I noticed the news stands were full of headlines about Tony Blair, who less than two weeks previously had been re-elected for a second term as prime minister. Within hours of arriving I was ensconced in another conference room with bad coffee and a car park view.
I told Alan and Richard of the cryptic message from Abu Hafs, and about his ominous phrase: ‘something big’.
‘I don’t like the sound of that,’ said Richard. ‘Were there any other clues at all?’
‘It was a two-minute conversation,’ I replied.
‘Was anyone else in the camps talking about a big operation?’ Alan asked.
‘No; like I said, the words came as a shock to me.’
‘Go through it one more time,’ Richard said. ‘Every tiny detail, even if they don’t seem relevant right now.’
I repeated Abu Hafs’ instructions.
There were a few moments silence.
‘We’ll see what else, if anything, is being picked up and of course raise this with our colleagues across the pond,’ Richard said, referring to the Americans. ‘In the meantime, go ahead and deliver the messages,’ Alan said as he closed his briefcase. ‘Obviously, it’s absolutely vital for us to know exactly how they react.’
I never found out. When I met Mohammed al-Madani, he curtly thanked me for the message and said he would tell the others.
There were other straws in the wind. I told them munitions and other equipment were being transported from the camps to secret locations in Afghanistan and possibly into Pakistan, but I had no idea why.*
I reminded MI6 that influential figures like al-Suri were arguing that a confrontation with the Western powers was inevitable – and that large-scale attacks, ideally with weapons of mass destruction, were necessary. The one man who might be able to deliver such weapons – Abu Khabab al-Masri – had relocated to a facility next door to al-Suri alongside the Qargha reservoir. I had seen them both at a sprawling Taliban base on a recent trip to the Afghan capital. Abu Khabab revealed that he had developed a final blueprint for the poison ga
s mubtakkar, one that could be built by someone with no more than basic training. Al-Suri had told me there was an urgent need of a fatwah permitting the use of such weapons.**
‘Abu Khabab told me that Zawahiri and others in the al-Qaeda leadership were interested in the technology,’ I told Alan and Richard.**
‘That’s not good,’ Alan said drily.
‘No, it’s not good,’ I replied. ‘The only glimmer of hope is that he won’t hand it over to al-Qaeda for free. He’s always complaining to me about how al-Qaeda never paid him enough to train recruits.’
‘It’s not much of a glimmer,’ Richard said. He doodled on a notepad for a few moments. ‘Is anyone missing from the camps?’ he asked.
I didn’t know – people were moving in and out all the time. The camps were like a luggage carousel. Bags are added and taken away, but there are always bags. Their body language suggested my handlers had also heard people were on the move. But I could hardly go back. Abu Hafs al-Masri had told me to stay put; to reappear without permission would be insubordination and might, my handlers believed, provoke suspicion.
It was already abundantly clear that al-Qaeda was ready to intensify its war against the West. The previous autumn it had carried out a suicide bomb attack on the USS Cole, a naval destroyer, as it was moored in Aden, killing seventeen American sailors. Then, in late June, the Arabic television channel MBC reported bin Laden’s ‘pleasure with al-Qaeda leaders who were saying that the next weeks “will witness important surprises” and that US and Israeli interests will be targeted’.6
We all wondered about the magnitude of an event that would ‘bring the Americans to Afghanistan’. It suggested to us a plot of greater ambition than the bombing of the USS Cole*.
At lunchtime on 11 September 2001, I was walking along Oxford Street in London. It was a bright and breezy day, and central London was breathing again after the hordes of summer tourists.
A small crowd had gathered at a store window. It was a branch of Dixons, the electronics retailer. Curiosity slowed my pace, and, as I reached the store, a large television screen was playing on repeat an image of a plane hitting a skyscraper. Black smoke was billowing into the blue sky above.
‘New York,’ said a man, glancing in my direction. It’s a strange thing about the British that they rarely talk to strangers unless provoked by a crisis – a snowstorm or road accident. ‘Seems like an airliner hit the World Trade Center,’ he continued.
This was no catastrophic accident – rather, the most spectacular act of terror in the modern era. I knew it instinctively, and I knew it was al-Qaeda.
Immediately, my thoughts returned to Kandahar and my brief encounter with Abu Hafs al-Masri. ‘Something big’. The vague, teasing phrase reverberated in my head.
In the preceding weeks, some of the best minds in British intelligence had tried to discern what ‘something big’ might be. I myself had repeatedly gone over the meeting with Abu Hafs with my handlers, until they had extracted every last drop of information. In our brainstorming sessions we had guessed that it might be another embassy attack or the bombing of a US military facility in Europe. The idea that al-Qaeda was planning to hijack and crash multiple aircraft into the towers of the World Trade Center, the US Capitol and the Pentagon was beyond our wildest imagination and our worst fears.*
I stood transfixed by the live images from New York, wracking my brain for clues I might have missed. And then I saw the second plane streaking towards the South Tower. It was exactly 2:03 p.m. in London; I thought of all the people arriving for work in the 110 storeys of the World Trade Center.
Mesmerized for what must have been half an hour, I eventually broke away from the crowd of whispering viewers and stepped into a quiet side street.
I dialled a number on my cell phone. The usual bland answer.
‘It’s Lawrence. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.’
Lawrence was then my code name – a play on the name of the famous Englishman of Arabia.
As I thought of all my interactions in Afghanistan, only one small, opaque clue came to me. It was when Abu Hafs had talked about presenting America with another Pearl Harbor at the reception in Kabul in late 1999.
In the days after 9/11, we raked over old ground: the personalities, the camps, the connections. Targets were identified inside Afghanistan. I assumed that as we worked British Special Forces were being prepared for action. What had we missed that now – with the searing clarity of hindsight – looked obvious?
In fact, the plot had been brilliantly concealed within a very tight circle. Short of being selected as one of the hijackers myself, I could not have picked up the scent. The 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, later told US interrogators that the plotting was kept so compartmentalized that even senior figures in the group were in the dark. The ‘muscle’ hijackers – like the young Saudi I’d met in the Kabul guest house – were only told of their targets after they had arrived in the United States and just weeks before the attacks.*
I had come across the so-called twentieth hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, in London before he left in February 2001 (it later emerged) to get flight training in the United States. Surly and secretive, he used to attend prayers at Abu Qatada’s Four Feathers Club. Moussaoui was confident that I was also a committed member of al-Qaeda but he never told me of any plans to travel to America.
Immediately after meeting him I told my handlers that I’d encountered a French jihadi called Zacarias and that he’d been in the al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, but I only knew his first name and nothing suggested he was a significant player. Only after 9/11 was I shown his photograph and learned his full name and connection to the conspiracy.**
British intelligence asked me to game al-Qaeda’s next move. Were more attacks in the pipeline? Where would the leadership go? Would this have been sanctioned by bin Laden himself? On that last question, I had no doubts.
I found it bitterly amusing that suddenly our meeting rooms were larger and invariably packed with attendees from both agencies scrambling to get up to speed on a subject that had been something of an intelligence backwater. Richard and Alan were having their moment in the limelight. For years, they’d been ‘down the agenda’ – behind nuclear proliferation, Russia and Northern Ireland. Now they were on the front page, their knowledge of the abstruse suddenly mainstream. They would soon earn promotions.
There were further questions about al-Qaeda’s WMD ambitions. On 7 November 2001, weeks after the US-led offensive to topple the Taliban had begun, bin Laden told the Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir: ‘I wish to declare that if America used chemical or nuclear weapons against us, then we may retort with chemical and nuclear weapons. We have the weapons as a deterrent.’11
I was as sceptical as ever. Al-Qaeda would have loved nothing more than some sort of nuclear capability. But nothing I had seen – or heard from Abu Khabab – suggested they were anywhere close to acquiring it.*
My work in London intensified as arrests were made in Pakistan and the first batch of detainees were shipped to the hastily prepared prison camp at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. I went through hundreds of photographs trying to identify anyone I might have known, anyone who mattered. But few were of any interest; they were mostly young Yemeni, Afghan and Pakistani foot soldiers who had tried to escape from Tora Bora through the mountain passes into Pakistan.
I was sure al-Qaeda had launched the attacks with the goal of provoking the Americans into invading Muslim lands. Abu Hafs had said as much at the Kabul gathering in late 1999. The aim was to spur US reprisals that would resurrect the spirit of jihad among the masses. The turmoil could then be leveraged to overthrow Arab governments seen as puppets of the West.*
The 9/11 attacks had also demonstrated to me the power of the ideology that was being spouted at mosques in London, camps in Kandahar and classrooms in Kabul. I had seen and heard it at first hand, from Abu Qatada and Abu Musab al-Suri among others. Exhibit A was eighteen tapes of Abu Qatada’s lectures found
in a Hamburg apartment used by 9/11 attack cell leader Mohamed Atta and two more of the hijackers.14
In the months after 9/11, al-Qaeda was scattered to the winds by a US-led coalition that bombed and occupied Afghanistan. By the end of 2001, its last redoubt at Tora Bora was once more an empty warren of ravines and caves. Many of al-Qaeda’s leaders escaped, including bin Laden and Zawahiri. The organization they led fractured as if thrown into some centrifuge. But if it was reeling and diminished, it was far from extinct.
By the autumn of 2002, Osama bin Laden’s gaze had turned to his homeland. US intelligence had intercepted a message sent to the mysterious leader of al-Qaeda’s Saudi ‘branch’ – known only as Saif al-Battar (Swift Sword) – instructing him to prepare for a campaign of attacks in the Kingdom.15 Hundreds of Saudi al-Qaeda fighters had returned home from Afghanistan and the worry was they might be stockpiling weapons.* Nor were the Saudi security services organized for the task of confronting them.
Bin Laden might have been on the run, but he still had a grasp of the wider world. It seemed increasingly likely that the United States would invade Iraq. Bin Laden expected that would ignite Muslim anger across the region, providing al-Qaeda with the chance to lead an insurgency in his home country.**
There were, in short, a lot more intelligence opportunities in the Gulf than there were in London, where my work involved surveying jihadi websites and trawling round improvised mosques in warehouses, listening to execrable Arabic and half-baked slogans.
Abu Qatada had gone on the run, only to be found in a council house (public housing) in south London. One of my handlers told me he’d been found clean-shaven and awaiting fake travel documents. An earlier police raid had found the equivalent of £170,000 in cash underneath his bed, but no charges were brought, partly because MI5 didn’t want me testifying in court but also because existing counter-terror laws made it difficult to win convictions.** For several years he would remain in a legal limbo, but his freedom of movement (and fundraising) was radically curtailed.
