by Aimen Dean
I lay there, slipping in and out of consciousness, imagining – hoping – that Kevin and Freddie were working the phones and raising hell. But for someone so used to controlling his destiny, not knowing what would come next was worse than the diagnosis of diabetes.
The purgatory lasted thirty-six hours until a police officer entered my hospital room and told me I could go while investigations continued. I wasn’t about to tell him that I didn’t feel well enough. Dizzy and beyond exhausted, it took me ten minutes to put on my clothes.
I was puzzled about the whole operation. If we were as dangerous as the Americans asserted, surely we would be held longer than a couple of days. Perhaps the Bahrainis thought they’d rounded up the wrong people. Perhaps MI6 had brought them into the picture and asked for a softly-softly approach, though that seemed unlikely. There were too many mysteries, but one certainty. Unable to reach Kamal, al-Rabia’s envoy would abandon his visit. Hopes of detaining or tracking one of al-Qaeda’s most important envoys were in tatters.
But at that moment I was too tired to care.
Oblivious to the extensive damage to my apartment, I collapsed onto my mattress; it sagged sadly as some of the stuffing came out. When I woke up, I realized I had no way to send encrypted emails to my handlers; I had smashed all my equipment.
I’d have to be old-school.
I went to a payphone and called an emergency number in London, after wandering the streets to ensure I wasn’t being tailed.
‘Can you get me out of here? I’m sure you’ve heard I had a slight health issue.’
Freddie was at the other end, trying to slow me down.
‘We need to handle this carefully. You’ve been put on their no-fly list. We don’t want the whole of Bahraini intelligence suspecting you’re working for us. Hang in there. We’re working on it.’ Before ringing off, Freddie said they would contact me on a particular website British intelligence believed was unlikely to be monitored by the Bahraini security services. While the messages would not be encrypted, we could get essential information across by choosing our words carefully.
It was a frustrating limbo. It took me two days to restore my apartment to a liveable state and I was forbidden by the conditions of my bail to leave the country. Nor did I have any sense whether my fellow conspirators suspected me.
On the evening of June 25 our defence lawyers organized a press conference at the headquarters of the Bahrain Society for Human Rights to claim we had been wrongly arrested. I had little choice but to attend. Each of us addressed the reporters in turn. I kept my remarks as brief as possible, imagining how nervous my handlers in London would be when they saw all the coverage. I was now a double agent pretending to be a terrorist and denying being one at the same time. It was enough to make your head spin.
My moods over the next days veered between anxious, angry and sad, punctuated by a sense of relief that at least I was no longer locked in a cell with Yasser Kamal. I was unnerved by the diabetes diagnosis and it took days to find a doctor who could give me decent advice. At times I felt perilously close to losing my self-control, overwhelmed and suffocated by the sheer speed and gravity of events.
There was at least some welcome news. My lawyer was able to recover my British passport from the authorities. I badly wanted to use it.
After two weeks of purgatory, a post on the website said simply Need to leave. It was followed by a jumble of six letters: a flight reservation. I fumbled my way to the British Airways website and plugged in my name and the code. It was for that night.
I am normally quite fastidious when it comes to packing. Not on this occasion. I raced to Manama International Airport, checked in and headed to security.
The immigration officer frowned as he scrutinized my passport.
‘You are a Bahraini citizen and you are banned from travelling,’ he said.
‘Under what authority?’ I asked.
He repeated himself and asked me to step away. I returned to the BA desk and explained what had happened before finding a payphone. I was desperate and blew the normal protocols to the wind.
‘We’ll sort it out. Watch the website,’ was the curt reply.
A few hours later, the message came through. ‘It’s handled.’
For the second time in as many days I presented myself at passport control. The sound of a stamp in my passport could have been symphony. Almost light-headed, I walked through the concourse and with a rush of relief onto the waiting plane.
I would later learn that, under huge pressure from the Americans,65 the Bahrainis were about to rearrest the cell and my handlers needed to get me out of Dodge. Having me out of circulation for a few weeks was tolerable; losing me for months to the vagaries of the Bahraini legal system was out of the question.
Freddie and Kevin met me at Heathrow. They looked anxious and even a little sheepish. They were clearly expecting a tirade from Lawrence. By the time we were in a hotel suite in west London, I was ready to deliver it.
‘I thought I was working for a professional organization. Why was my brother arrested but not Yasser’s brother Hamad, who was going to be one of the suicide bombers? Why did this happen when I was just days away from meeting Hamza al-Rabia’s envoy?’*
I rarely swear – at anyone – but this time the gloves were off. ‘Could you not have waited five more fucking days? It was six months from being carried out and I was the one tasked with building the bombs. We had total control over the plot.’
Freddie attempted to explain.
‘Our liaison people in Bahrain were doing everything we could to get the Bahrainis to hold off. We knew there could be a treasure trove of information and wanted to let this play out. But Dick Cheney picked up the phone and called the King of Bahrain and demanded the arrests.’
‘Why did you tell the Americans about the plot if you knew they were going to overreact?’
‘There are rules and conventions about intelligence sharing,’ Freddie replied. ‘You can only pick and choose so much.’
Kevin was studiously examining his notepad and remained silent. MI6, he clearly thought, owned this one.
Freddie pressed on: ‘We can’t sit on information like this. And we can’t control the intelligence once it reaches them.* Yes, they overreacted and compromised our operation. Representations will be made, but if the White House decides to take action it’s way beyond the pay grade of even our director.’**
‘Well, thanks at least for the warning,’ I shot back. ‘I hope no one minds that fifty-five kilograms of cyanide is sitting by the sea in Bahrain.’
To the best of my knowledge, the cyanide was never found. I still brood about the missed opportunities to this day.
Kamal and the others were rearrested on 14 July. The conspirators had computer files on how to ‘make weapons, explosives, poison and chemical substances’, the Interior Ministry said. The files, I was later told, had been recovered from Kamal’s computer.
Anonymous sources briefed the media that a British citizen had been sent to the UK for ‘medical treatment’ and Bahrain would ‘ask Britain to either extradite Ali or try him there’.
Yet within a few months, a judge ordered the release of the suspects, dropping terrorism charges against two and releasing four, including my brother, on bail,68 prompting the US embassy to complain that the decision ‘sends the wrong signal on [Bahrain’s] commitment to fighting the war on terrorism’.
US diplomatic cables also said that senior Bahraini officials ‘have complained of the lack of hard evidence against the suspects’.69 This was scarcely credible given the Bahrainis’ earlier declaration about the computers.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed the irony. The White House itself had demanded arrests before sufficient evidence could be gathered. Only Yasser Kamal went back to jail, and that was because he had fled the court house during a September hearing (amazing in itself), rather than on terrorism charges.*
The Americans were apoplectic about the judge’s decision. A secret diplomatic cab
le sent on 6 November complained that ‘Bahraini officials from Prime Minister Khalifa and Crown Prince Salman down have told us that the GOB [Government of Bahrain] would conduct a thorough investigation and aggressive prosecution of the case.’ The releases had ‘shaken our confidence that Bahrain is with us in the global war on terror’, the cable stated.
US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was dispatched to Bahrain to warn the Bahrainis that ‘by not aggressively pursuing this case, they will put into jeopardy further progress’ on everything from a free trade agreement to cooperation on counter-terrorism.71 The Americans were playing hardball with the Bahrainis, as they did with other Gulf States seen as insufficiently determined to stamp out terrorism.
I took time to recalibrate. The intelligence services had found me an apartment in Oxford, in a quiet side street near the railway station. Part of me still yearned to become an academic, and I felt a real affinity for the city and its air of learning. I walked its cobbled streets, through the Covered Market and the meadows along the river Isis, peered with envy into the cloistered quadrangles.
It took time to recover from the intense stress of the Bahrain operation, and I worried about Moheddin. I was still learning to cope with diabetes. Waves of anxiety troubled my nights as I slowly released myself from immersion in conspiracies and chemical weapons. The intelligence services were happy to let me graze for a while. They occasionally checked on my wellbeing but realized they were close to burning out an asset.
My respite would not last long.
* When I met Abu Hafs, the date for the terror attacks in the US had not been set according to information uncovered by the 9/11 Commission.1
** An alias. Both Abu Hudhaifa and Mohammed al-Madani left the UK for Afghanistan before the deadline. The only one of the four I did not know went by the name Abu Aisha and lived in Birmingham.
* When he moved to Afghanistan Abdul Walid al-Filistini would become of of the leading ideologues within al-Qaeda. He had previously made at least one trip to Afghanistan because I saw him in the camps in 2000. He is still at large.2
* We came to the conclusion that much – but not all – of the equipment was probably destined for the front lines north of Kabul. In the spring of 2001, the Taliban was preparing a major offensive against the Northern Alliance.3
** There was a great deal of debate within al-Qaeda about the deployment of WMD. Abu Hafs al-Masri purportedly wanted not only to possess WMD but also store it in the United States to be used in retaliation if the United States struck al-Qaeda camps. Bin Laden, who had declared in a 1999 interview that obtaining WMD was a religious duty, was more cautious about using such weapons, but let Abu Hafs take charge of the WMD file, according to one account.4
** After 9/11, evidence emerged of some cooperation between Abu Khabab and Zawahiri.5
* According to the 9/11 Commission report, US intelligence saw a surge of reports in June and July 2001 suggesting al-Qaeda was planning attacks against US and Israeli interests. There were ‘few specifics regarding time, place, method or target. Most suggested that attacks were planned against targets overseas; others indicated threats against unspecified US interests.’ I am not sure how my intelligence affected the overall picture being formed by the Americans. In his memoir the then CIA director George Tenet referenced ‘Late June information that cited a “big event” that was forthcoming.’ Tenet wrote that by June 28, 2001 the CIA had ten specific pieces of intelligence about impending attacks.7
* The 9/11 Commission famously called the failure to anticipate such a spectacular attack ‘a failure of imagination’. On 6 August 2001, the Presidential Daily Brief for President George W. Bush contained an item entitled ‘Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in the US’, but contained no specific information about any active plot.8
* KSM also stated that bin Laden had only notified al-Qaeda’s Shura Council in late August that a major attack against unspecified US interests would take place over the coming weeks, without disclosing additional details.9
** Moussaoui was arrested in Minnesota on 16 August 2001. According to CIA director George Tenet, US intelligence was notified by French intelligence eight days later that Moussaoui had jihadi terrorist connections. He was subsequently sentenced to life in prison.10
* I reminded my handlers that the leadership had already decided to exaggerate (or fabricate) such potential to sow uncertainty. While much effort was devoted to testing al-Qaeda’s boasts, US agencies in 2002 concluded there was no credible information that the terror group had obtained fissile material or a nuclear weapon.12
* To some in al-Qaeda the strategy worked. In 2005 Saif al-Adel, a senior Egyptian al-Qaeda operative I had known in Afghanistan, wrote: ‘Our ultimate objective of these painful strikes against the head of the snake was to prompt it to come out of its burrow . . . Such strikes will force the person to carry out random acts and provoke him to make serious and sometimes fatal mistakes. This was what actually happened. The first reaction was the invasion of Afghanistan and the second was the invasion of Iraq . . . Our objective, therefore, was to prompt the Americans to come out of their hole and deal powerful strikes to the body of the nation (Muslims) which is in slumber. Without these strikes there would be no hope for this nation to wake up.’13
* Since 1998 I had heard reports of al-Qaeda smuggling weapons into Saudi Arabia from Yemen and Kuwait, where Saddam Hussein had left an arsenal of weapons after being forced out in 1991.16
** Bin Laden had not been in Saudi Arabia in ten years, and the adoration of al-Qaeda’s Saudi recruits had made him overestimate al-Qaeda’s appeal in the Kingdom. He was right in believing a US attack on Iraq would spur an insurgency, but it would be in Iraq rather than Saudi Arabia.
** Abu Qatada had finally been arrested in south London in October 2002 after new anti-terror laws were adopted in late 2001. Successive governments would place him under various forms of detention and house arrest before he was eventually deported to Jordan.17
* I am not revealing his last name.
* I was referring to myself, Abu Khabab, his deputy Abu Bakr al-Masri, Hassan Ghul and Abu Nassim al-Tunisi.
* The March 1995 sarin gas attack in Tokyo metro trains by the Japanese death cult Aum Shinrikyo killed twelve people and made thousands sick.
** I was indeed able to make a number of suggestions which I hoped would slow down or sabotage their plans.
* The system encrypted messages into garbled text which could then be sent to an anonymous email address. My handlers could then decrypt this using the same software. Ironically, al-Qaeda itself would later use similar technology to swap encrypted messages through a system called Mujahideen Secrets. This was well before the days of smartphones and encrypted messaging apps.
* In the lead-up to 9/11 al-Ayeri and his associates recruited a significant number of young Saudis to train with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, including the 9/11 ‘muscle’ hijacker Abdul Aziz al-Omari I met in Kabul. After 9/11 al-Ayeri focused on building up the group’s operations in Saudi Arabia. He had originally disagreed with bin Laden’s orders to start an all-out war in Saudi Arabia, fearing the organization was not yet ready, but as a loyal soldier had accepted his orders. I was subsequently told this by an al-Qaeda operative in Bahrain.21
* I subsequently learned that MI6 later corroborated from other sources that the target was New York.
* Tenet wrote in his 2007 memoir that the operatives ‘were already staged in New York’. I do not know why he wrote that. Nothing I heard suggested they were.27
* Akhil said that all communications destined for bin Laden had first to pass through Zawahiri. In the years after 9/11, al-Qaeda used a mixture of electronic communications and couriers to transfer messages. Messages were sent by courier within Saudi Arabia and then electronically to Pakistani cities such as Peshawar before again being transferred by courier to al-Qaeda’s leaders.
** Of the cancellation, Tenet wrote that the cell had requested ‘permission from al-Qa’ida central
leadership to conduct the attack. Chillingly, word came back from Ayman al-Zawahiri himself in early 2003 to cancel the operation and recall the operatives, who were already staged in New York – because “we have something better in mind.” Tenet added: ‘There was endless speculation at the highest levels as to the proper interpretation of al-Zawahiri’s cryptic comment. We still do not know what he meant.’ One aspect of Tenet’s recollection makes no sense to me. While I informed the British that Zawahiri had called off the plot, I never heard the rationale was that al-Qaeda had ‘something better in mind.’29
* I was told this afterwards by my British handlers. In his 2015 memoir, Ray Kelly, the NYPD police chief at the time, wrote that ‘the plot talk’ was ‘confirmed in early 2003 when Bassam Bokhowa, a jihadist from Bahrain, was captured in Saudi Arabia. On his laptop, Saudi security forces discovered detailed plans for building what the terrorists were calling a mubtakkar, the Arabic word for “new invention”.’31
** Besides my brother and Bassam Bokhowa, the security services named those arrested as Bassam Ali, recently arrived from Iran; Issa al-Baluchi and Jamal al-Baluchi. Both of the al-Baluchis would serve time as they were caught in possession of weapons. Issa was a lieutenant in the Bahraini National Guard. Neither had anything to do with this plot though they were not innocent in other instances.32
* They noted the poison gas attack in Tokyo, when ‘Aum Shinrikyo members disseminated the deadlier sarin nerve agent’ that ‘resulted in only 12 deaths’ despite being carried out on five subway cars during the morning rush hour.36
** He would spend about five years in prison before being released.
* I was told this by my British intelligence handlers. In his memoir CIA director George Tenet stated cyanide was found in a terrorist safe house in Saudi Arabia during raids by Saudi security forces in the spring/summer of 2003 making clear ‘their interest in using cyanide weapons in future attacks’.38
