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

by Aimen Dean

I didn’t know whether to curse or bless Yasser Kamal for bringing this oaf into my life. He was unbearable but at the same time potentially of great interest to MI5.

  Some of the rice had caught in his beard and I was nearly overcome with the urge to laugh. But his next words quickly doused the temptation.

  ‘I’m not interested in bombs. It’s poisons I want to do. We heard you were a student of Abu Khabab, and are good at poisons.’

  Javed looked on blankly. I wondered if he would react even if I stuck a pin in his cheek.

  I took my time to respond, the old tradecraft instinctively coming back to me. Never seem too enthusiastic; don’t ask too many questions. After a few seconds shuffling some rice about my plate, I looked at Abu Muslim with as much gravity as I could muster given the state of his beard.

  ‘I need to consider this; let me pray the Istikhara,’ I said.** ‘If my heart is clear I will do it.’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ Abu Muslim replied. ‘Bruva, we have huge respect for you; we have heard of everything you’ve done.’

  I seriously doubted that.?

  ‘We have a place all ready to begin, in a flat in Dudley.’

  Dudley again; could life get any better?

  As they took their leave, wandering out into the drizzle amid the matted brown leaves, I sighed and rested my forehead against the front door. I knew that events in Iraq were energizing the global jihadi movement. Dismantling a conspiracy in the West Midlands was like using a cork to plug a leak in a dam about to collapse. Was I ready for this?

  Three days later, I took the train to London to meet my handlers. As usual I walked a pre-arranged route so that the services’ spotters (or probably spotter singular in this time of budget cuts) could be sure that I wasn’t being tailed.

  After circling Victoria Station twice, I received a text on my phone to tell me it was safe to proceed to the nearby Holiday Inn.

  In a bland room copied a million times worldwide, Freddie from MI6 and Kevin from MI5 stood to welcome me. I accepted a Diet Coke and told them of my recent visitors.

  Kevin looked as though he wanted to be sick.

  ‘So this happened three days ago? Don’t you think you should have told us immediately?’

  ‘I don’t think there’s much to worry about now. It’s not like there’s any immediate danger – they want me to make the poisons.’

  My tone bordered on flippant, and he didn’t look persuaded.

  ‘First, we need Abu Muslim’s phone number and the exact time he came to visit you. We’ll be making some calls,’ Freddie said as he reached for his overcoat. ‘You’re staying the night in London.’

  I snapped.

  ‘Actually, I’m not staying the night. I’ll give you what you need then I’m getting out of here.’

  In truth I was feeling jaundiced; I needed a break.

  Suddenly, I found myself berating colleagues I had come to see as friends. I could scarcely understand the tone and force of my own voice; it seemed beyond my control.

  ‘Are you watching what’s going on in Fallujah – the civilian casualties? What’s the point of me working to prevent these guys from launching an attack when there will be dozens more like them in the weeks and months ahead? Everything America and the UK are doing is simply recruiting more trouble. Do none of you see that?’ It was an unfair accusation to level at Kevin and Freddie, but it didn’t matter. ‘Honestly, I think I’m done.’

  To their credit they let me finish. But before I took my leave, Freddie had some parting words.

  ‘Honestly, I understand where you are coming from. There are many people inside government who think it was stupid to invade Iraq. And it’s got worse ever since. Take all the time you need. But if there’s one thing I’d advise, just for your own health and sanity: stop watching those videos.’

  When I returned home that night, I didn’t bother turning on the lights. I fell into an uneasy sleep. A mood of deep brooding and utter loneliness set in; for several days I scarcely left home.

  A week later I received a house call from George, the shrink from MI5.

  ‘So it seems like the Iraq clusterfuck has produced a bit of a situation,’ he said. He’d obviously received a call from Kevin: someone was going off the rails.

  ‘You could say that,’ I replied, smiling weakly. Seeing him lifted my spirits, but I also felt embarrassed. I didn’t want to be seen as a prima donna. ‘I just don’t know if I can continue doing this.’

  He looked sympathetic.

  ‘I’ve put my life on hold these last few years to work for the British government. The work has literally made me sick. I have no social life, no friends or colleagues – apart from you and Kevin and Freddie and a few others. The rest of the world thinks I’m a jihadi, which hasn’t exactly enhanced my marriage prospects.’

  He nodded sympathetically. He must have heard the lament before: The Service has sucked all the life out of me. While stewing in my apartment I had even gone so far as to contact my brother Omar in Khobar to ask him if the family knew of a good marriage match.

  ‘And when I say single I mean very single. I just turned twenty-six and I’ve never been with a girl. Sure, some of the jihadi lot have offered their sisters in marriage, but there’s no way in hell I could bring myself to do that. Lying about who I really am would be cruel and I’m not sure I want to marry into al-Qaeda.’

  I was hitting my stride, and like the best of his profession George knew when to listen.

  ‘Being a spy has been a lonely life. It was a price I was willing to pay, but I’ve really started to question that. Has anybody been listening to anything I’ve been saying? There are ten thousand British troops in Iraq and all the focus is there. That means Afghanistan’s a disaster in waiting, and it plays right into bin Laden’s narrative of a war on Islam. I’m monitoring the extremist forums and they’re red hot. George, I’ve never seen jihadis around the world energized like this.’

  ‘A lot of us agree with you,’ he replied.

  I reprised the theme I’d taken up with Kevin and Freddie.

  ‘It’s all so futile. What’s the point of me risking my neck to identify terrorists, when Fallujah and Abu Ghraib are creating so many more?’*

  George felt he needed to intercede before I disappeared down a rabbit hole.

  ‘Hold on. Futile is the last adjective I would choose to describe your work. You’re one of the most important assets in British intelligence. But if you don’t feel like you should go on, then don’t. I shouldn’t really be saying this but you don’t owe anybody anything. They owe you.’

  There was a long silence. I walked to the window and watched leaves drift from the trees opposite.

  ‘And then,’ I said, turning to George, ‘there’s the Bigley fiasco.’

  ‘Believe me, I’m upset, too,’ he said. ‘I had no idea about the rescue mission. They kept that on a need-to-know. I forced myself to watch the video. It’s awful but there’s nothing we can do about it now. We were faced with impossible choices. If we hadn’t kept them talking, Ken might have been killed before even having a chance to escape.’

  We talked for hours. A few days later, when he came to visit again, I asked him if he had any news about my new friend from Dudley, Abu Muslim.

  ‘That’s interesting!’ he said with a knowing grin. ‘You’re not ready to quit just yet, are you?’

  He studied my reaction for a few moments.

  ‘No,’ I replied sheepishly, ‘I guess I’m not.’

  I realized that without my help Abu Muslim might end up taking innocent lives. Something about him unnerved me.

  I might not be able to change the world, but as the Koran says:

  ‘Whoever saved one life it is as if he saved mankind entirely.’9

  The following day, there was an encrypted message from Freddie.

  ‘Heard you had a good talk with our friend. Come down to London on Tuesday evening. Important meeting – 66 Trafalgar Square.’

  66 Trafalgar Square tu
rned out to be the address of Albannach, an expensive restaurant with the finest Scottish menu in London. Freddie and Kevin were sitting with a third man out of earshot from other diners.

  I’d never met my handlers outside of hotel rooms in London. After a few years working for the British, I’d told my handlers that I felt such precautions were over-elaborate.

  Freddie must have noticed the surprise on my face.

  ‘Don’t worry. Vauxhall Cross signed off. Extensive reconnaissance by one particular representative of Her Majesty’s Secret Service has established the Albannach is not a known watering hole for al-Qaeda,’ he said, before taking a sip of wine.

  ‘We know you love Scottish food and a dinner out was long overdue,’ Kevin said.

  Their colleague was called Alastair and was taking over the task of handling me for MI5 from Kevin. He was short, had a ginger goatee and a friendly face, and came across as nerdish.

  ‘As-Salaam-Alaikum,’ he greeted me.

  In near-perfect Arabic Alastair told me how he had taken Arabic studies and fallen in love with the language and culture of the Arab world. He had a particular fascination with medieval Muslim philosophers, but also a deep understanding of the history of the region. That history, he confessed at one point in the conversation, suggested the current British expedition to Iraq might not have been very well thought out.

  In the coming years we would spend many hours discussing the more esoteric and obscure aspects of Islamic philosophy. British intelligence had chosen well if it had sought someone who would restore my confidence in the mission.

  The pampering did me good. Meeting my handlers in public eased my claustrophobia by expanding the space in which I didn’t have to pretend to be a jihadi.

  Examining the wine list, Freddie quipped that choosing one particularly fine burgundy would fulfil a life’s ambition.

  ‘And what’s that?’ I enquired.

  ‘Drinking my income tax.’

  ‘That sounds like the ultimate tax refund,’ Alastair retorted, laughing. ‘But I fear the ladies in accounting would make this your last supper.’

  I enjoyed seeing Freddie’s enthusiasm and knowledge of vintages, but I was on Diet Coke.

  At the end of the evening, Freddie said: ‘The top brass would very much like you to come down to Fort Monckton to address the troops.’

  Fort Monckton had near-mythical status in the field of espionage: the training base for Britain’s spies for nearly a century. By inviting me they were sending a message: you are one of us. And I had begun to realize that the British government was not a monolith; at least some of the professionals were aghast at the conduct of the Iraq campaign and the missteps of the coalition authority and were prepared to say so. It was the politicians who were screwing it all up.

  Fort Monckton had been built to protect the naval harbour of Portsmouth towards the end of the eighteenth century and retains its bastions, moat and drawbridge. It also boasts high razor-wire fences, floodlighting and CCTV cameras. Richard, my first MI6 handler, was there to greet me. He now had a senior role in the agency and had organized for a select group of officials to hear me speak about my missions. We swapped stories and the old camaraderie flooded back.

  I stayed in the private quarters of Sir Mansfield Cumming, the legendary early twentieth-century British intelligence chief. I noticed some of his jottings were indented on the green leather top to his mahogany desk. Richard told me I had been given a rare honour, accorded only to Britain’s most valuable agents over the decades.

  The next day, I went up to London to see Freddie and Alastair with a fresh sense of resolve. It turned out that my living near Oxford railway station was more than just convenient. There were plenty of surveillance cameras in the immediate area – aimed at car thieves and loiterers rather than would-be terrorists. My handlers had obtained CCTV images of the Midlands duo. Abu Muslim’s real name was Hamayun Tariq. He was a car mechanic born and raised in Dudley after his family had emigrated from Pakistan. Alarmingly for MI5, he was not on their radar screen as a likely extremist, but West Midlands police were investigating him and his circle for financial fraud.

  ‘It looks like we’ll need you to spend some quality time in Dudley,’ Freddie told me. How come none of my assignments took me to the French Riviera or the Algarve?

  On a bleak winter’s morning I took the train north and met Abu Muslim near his home. He was in conspiratorial mood, glancing around him exactly like a secret agent doesn’t.

  ‘We have a safe house,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll take you there now, bruva. You’ll meet the others.’

  He relished uttering the words ‘safe house’ – as if it made him the real deal. It turned out to be the same cavernous space in the centre of Dudley in which Awlaki had given his lecture the year before. Abu Muslim told me he’d obtained recordings of the ‘great Sheikh’. Large bookcases with Islamic texts lined the walls. Dominating the far end of the room was the largest television I had ever seen, on which Abu Muslim’s co-conspirators Javed (whom I now called ‘Silent but Deadly’ for my own amusement) and an equally taciturn ‘bruva’ I will refer to as Ahmed* were killing each other in some video game.

  They reluctantly put down their control pads to greet me. Ahmed, a lanky specimen in his late teens, seemed even surlier than Javed. With the television turned off, I now heard a nasheed – a jihadi hymn – on the CD player. The contrast with Soldier of Fortune was poignant.

  We sat down on some expensive leather couches. I noticed they had what looked like the latest Apple computer sitting on a desk. All purchased from their fraudulent activities, I reflected, which would no doubt also finance our terror plot.

  ‘What’s the plan?’ I asked.

  Abu Muslim held court.

  ‘Sheikh Osama has instructed the Muslims to launch attacks that hurt the West’s economy. We want to make an attack with poisons. But we want to do something that will terrify the dirty Kuffar bruva. Are you able to make poisons from nicotine?’

  ‘Yes, brother,’ I replied.

  I cast my mind back to Darunta and our experiments with Marlboro Reds. It was a time-consuming process that required several rounds of purification, until the liquid became a paste.

  Just a tiny quantity of pure nicotine could kill a person.

  I outlined to my trio of collaborators how we had experimented with nicotine poison in Abu Khabab’s facility, and gone through more than eighty rabbits in the process.

  ‘I still dream of being chased by rabbits to this day,’ I told them. No one laughed.

  ‘So how do we do it?’ Abu Muslim asked quickly. He was like a boy about to enter a chemistry lab.

  ‘Well, first,’ I said, ‘we’ll need to buy a lot of cigarettes – the really strong ones. We’ll need to mash them in a blender, the biggest we can find,’ I told him, before outlining a series of bogus steps that would stand zero chance of producing any poison. ‘We’ll also need gloves and protective clothing for the next stage, which is to extract the solidified nicotine and refine it.’ Just how went deliberately unsaid. I didn’t want any freelance efforts in my absence. ‘Then the process is repeated. I will recognize the final product when I see it.’ (And you won’t, I thought.)

  There was a moment of silence. Even Javed was paying attention.

  ‘How deadly is it?’ Abu Muslim asked, barely able to contain himself. The word ‘psychopath’ popped into my mind.

  ‘Within two minutes a victim would have breathing problems. Within ten to fifteen minutes they’ll likely start to experience organ failure – we’re talking lung failure, seizures, cardiac arrest, really painful stuff. Within half an hour to an hour, unless they get the right medical treatment, they’ll be dead.’

  Abu Muslim’s eyes gleamed with excitement.

  ‘Bruva!’ he said predictably. ‘This is brilliant. The kuffar will suffer before they die. It will serve them right for supporting Blair’s war.’

  In the first weeks of 2005, the nicotine poison plot took shap
e. Abu Muslim would drive from Dudley to Oxford to pick me up. In his eyes, my stature within al-Qaeda made me a VIP and there was no way he was going to let me take the train. He might be a budding psychopath, but he was sweetness personified with me, enquiring about my diabetes, whether I’d taken my medication and generally fussing over me. Every time he picked me up there was a can of Coke in the cup-holder in case my blood sugar levels dropped.

  He was married to a Moroccan and his broken Arabic and claims to religious knowledge clearly impressed Javed and Ahmed. After enduring each two-hour car journey listening to him butcher the language of al-Mutanabbi, I considered demanding MI5 double my pay.

  The three of them constantly asked me to talk about my days in Afghanistan. I provided snippets about my time in bin Laden’s camps, careful to make it seem like I was reluctant to talk about it. Javed and Ahmed were spellbound, their computer games briefly forgotten.

  Their plan was to apply nicotine poison on the door handles of expensive cars. Abu Muslim thought it was the perfect way to undermine the British economy as bin Laden had called for.

  ‘Let’s go after the fucking rich pricks: Ferraris, Bentleys, Jaguars and Mercedes. If ten or twenty dirty kuffar drop dead, it’ll drive the price of the cars down and insurance up,’ Abu Muslim suggested. It took all my self-control to keep a straight face. The maniacal mechanic seemed to have a rather strong case of car envy as well as pretensions as an economist.

  Abu Muslim dispatched Javed and Ahmed to London to select targets and they came back with video footage of expensive cars parked on streets in Chelsea, Knightsbridge and Mayfair. The plan was to recruit additional foot soldiers for the plot. In the first wave, a small group would use the cover of darkness to apply the nicotine poison with a brush to the door handles of expensive cars. A few victims might die the next morning, and more if the medical professionals failed to recognize the very unlikely symptoms. Panic would set in. And then the cell would strike again, creating a crescendo of fear.

  Abu Muslim wanted to make enough poison for ten waves of attacks, and to provide other British Islamist extremists with the nicotine poison.*