Agent Storm: My Life Inside al-Qaeda (13 page)

I became adept at distinguishing between my commitment to the cause – and to al-Muhajiroun – and the rapport I developed with ordinary people I encountered.

I was proving less adept at keeping my marriage alive. I had given up my job as a forklift driver and was working as an occasional nightclub bouncer. I certainly had the build to qualify, and made more money than when I had a regular job. Being paid in cash at the clubs and pubs of Luton and nearby towns had one additional benefit: tax on my income would not directly go into the British government’s coffers for its war against Muslims overseas.

But Karima was unhappy, prone to mood swings, intolerant of my lifestyle as the ‘Muslim bouncer’. She felt alone and struggled to cope with the children. Osama had become a boisterous toddler. At one point – during a row about my lengthy absences from Connaught Road – she spat in my face.

On a grim evening of drizzle in the autumn of 2004 she came to me with a simple request.

‘Can you leave?’ she asked. ‘I don’t want you here any more.’

Karima asked me for a ‘divorce in Islam’ and even wanted me to help find her a new husband. Rather than allow a man I did not know to move into the house where my young children lived, I went as far as introducing her to a Turkish friend of mine. He became her new husband – at least in Islam if not according to the law of the land – and moved in with Karima. But three days later he moved out again.

‘I couldn’t take her,’ he sighed. We laughed.

With nowhere to live and a sense of failure, I hit a low that recalled my trip to jail in Denmark. Then my response had been very different: no more crime, find discipline and self-respect through becoming a good Muslim. As 2005 began, turmoil produced the opposite effect: it was like a relapse to my Bandido days. There was nothing in the Koran to guide the conduct of a nightclub bouncer. When I found club-goers with cocaine, I gave them the option of handing it to me or handing it to the police. Soon I had a lot of cocaine and began using it again after
seven years of self-denial. I also had a wild partner, a blonde called Cindy
²
who worked for a car dealership and filled the rest of her waking hours with hardcore partying.

Within about three minutes of meeting her and a friend outside one of the clubs where I was working, Cindy had leered at me.

‘I love spanking,’ she said.

‘What do you want me to spank you with?’ I shot back.

She named a certain whip apparently well known in S&M circles and gave me her phone number.

Whether I was still technically married to Karima or not, the Koran promised severe punishment for sex outside marriage.

‘The woman and the man who fornicate scourge each of them a hundred whips; and in the matter of God’s religion, let no tenderness for them seize you if you believe in God and the Last Day.’

It was the sort of punishment that Cindy might appreciate. But I spent the next few months living a life of contradictions, giving in to every sort of temptation but then trying to repent through prayer. I was hopelessly adrift, in a maelstrom of sex, drugs and brawls, interrupted by occasional reconnections to the faith.

One of the clubs where I worked was in the town of Leighton Buzzard. Shades was a pitiful place: a scar on what had once been a pretty street in a country town. It saw plenty of fights and I earned my keep. Tony, the head doorman, was an affable guy in his early forties and smarter than your average bouncer. He could be thoughtful and inquisitive, unlike the louts that we threw out of Shades most nights. I was the first Muslim convert he had worked with and he was curious about why I had chosen Islam.

On a bitterly cold evening in February 2005 Tony picked me up at Leighton Buzzard station in his ageing Honda Accord. Normally we would talk about boxing, work or the weather. But on that evening, as we sat at traffic lights, he turned to me and asked simply:

‘Why does Allah want people to kill other people? Don’t you think, Murad, Allah would prefer you to teach people to read?’

I stumbled, before offering up stock answers about the need for
jihad to protect my religion in the face of Western oppression. But the nakedness of Tony’s question troubled me. Since becoming a Muslim seven years before, I had learned to cultivate or imagine enemies – Shi’ites, the Muslim Brotherhood, racists in Luton, more recently the US government. Somehow I had become identified by whom or what I loathed; enemies provided an outlet for my anger. But they also camouflaged the real reasons for embracing hatred. Anger and frustration had been part of me since childhood; how much easier it was to hate than to reconcile.

My reflex reaction when confronted with painful questions was to blame the Devil for trying to undermine my faith. Since becoming a Muslim I had been constantly reminded by imams and scholars that Satan was always looking to sow doubt. As it was written in the Koran:
‘Satan said: “O my Lord! Because You misled me, I shall indeed adorn the path of error for mankind on earth, and I shall mislead them all. Except Your chosen slaves among them.”’

Amid the hedonism of life with Cindy, I felt weak – as if slipping back towards my clubbing days in Korsør. I had to escape before the quicksand enveloped me. And it was my estranged wife who would – at least for a while – rescue me.

‘Would you come back?’ was Karima’s simple question when I picked up the phone. It was the early spring of 2005. She sounded exhausted rather than desperate for my company. Even so I was elated at the chance to be reunited with my children. I would miss the sex with Cindy but not the unhinged lifestyle – nor the lack of any purpose.

Repentance is a formidable force, and helped me to put the wild interlude behind me. Walking through the backstreets of Luton, I would recite to myself the words of Allah.

‘Those are the true believers who, when they commit an evil deed, or wrong their souls, remember Allah, and seek forgiveness for their sins – and who but Allah forgives sins?’

CHAPTER EIGHT

MI5 Comes to Luton

Spring–Autumn 2005

On 30 April 2005,
Newsweek
went to print with an incendiary story. US military personnel at Guantanamo Bay had defiled the Koran and humiliated prisoners.

The magazine reported that ‘Interrogators, in an attempt to rattle suspects, flushed a Qur’an down a toilet and led a detainee around with a collar and dog leash. An army spokesman confirms that 10 Gitmo interrogators have already been disciplined for mistreating prisoners, including one woman who took off her top, rubbed her finger through a detainee’s hair and sat on the detainee’s lap.’

Newsweek
retracted part of the story, but by then Muslims around the world were outraged. There were deadly riots in Afghanistan, and in Pakistan the opposition politician Imran Khan
used the story
to undermine the country’s military leader, General Pervez Musharraf. Jihadist communities everywhere thirsted for revenge, among them our band of brothers in Luton.

Omar Bakri helped organize a protest outside the US embassy in London on Grosvenor Square in mid-May, and I drove down from Luton in a convoy of his followers.
¹

A video of the event is
still available online
, and among the Pakistani and Arab men yelling abuse there is a tall, broad-shouldered Dane, stamping on the Stars and Stripes as it smouldered on the London pavement, smiling and chanting.

‘Bomb, bomb USA.’ ‘Remember, remember, eleventh September.’ The chants were as provocative as possible. Then we knelt to pray, before, to my astonishment, the 200 or so protesters drifted away, as if a few slogans had restored Islam’s self-respect and caused the diplomats of the Big Satan to quiver behind the bullet-proof glass of their embassy.

I was furious. Just as my adrenalin was beginning to run, the protest was over. These so-called militants were pussies. Surely we had a duty to take on the police cordon and try to enter the embassy. So we would most likely be hurt and arrested, but that would be a pin-prick compared to the injury done to our faith. I was frustrated, disappointed by Omar Bakri. He had delivered a fiery speech and then retired to his comfortable car. It was all talk. I also began to doubt whether he really had contacts in Iraq and other jihadist battlegrounds.

I returned to Luton that evening determined to expose the blowhards who proclaimed jihad but did not want to miss lunch. With the passion of a man recently redeemed from straying into the wilderness, I threw myself into research on Salafism and jihad. As an ordinary Muslim I could not pretend that I could compose a fatwa, but I planned to publish a booklet, ‘Exposing the Fake Salafis’.

Over the next few weeks, working day and night, I wrote a pamphlet that became a paper and then a treatise – more than 140 pages of closely argued rhetoric, crammed with quotations from the Koran and the ancient scholars. The fake Salafis liked to talk but were secretly in league with the
kuffar
who had invaded Muslim lands.

‘The Fake Salafis in our time use thousand and one excuses to deny the obligation of Jihad Fard Ayn in Iraq and other Muslim lands, also denying that those who assist the Kuffar (disbelievers) in this crusade against Islam are apostates,’ I wrote.

My conclusion was a call to arms:

‘Your duty as a true Muslim, is to support your Muslim brothers and sisters, who right now are being killed by the neo-crusaders and Jews, I ask you kindly to at least make Dua [prayers] for them, collect finance for them, and try your best to reach the frontline where your brothers are striving or at least help someone to go there.’

Intellectually at least I was already on the battlefield.

My studying was interrupted one morning in June 2005 when there was a knock on the door at our semi-detached house. (By then, we had moved to Pomfret Avenue, another nondescript street in Luton.) I looked through the bedroom window and saw a policeman. There was another knock. I whispered to Karima to tell them I was not home.

From the landing I listened.

‘What do you want?’ Karima asked.

‘It’s the police. We’d like to speak to Mr Storm.’

‘He’s not here.’

‘Yes, he’s here – we know he’s here.’

I put on my clothes and went down to the door.

The officer was soft-spoken but did not give me his name.

‘Can you come with me, Mr Storm? We have some questions we’d like to ask you.’

It seemed like this was a routine he had performed a hundred times before.

‘No,’ I replied. ‘I can’t come with you but if you want you can come into my house.’

He declined, and I asked what the problem was.

‘Your car has been seen filling up at a petrol station. Thirty pounds of fuel and then whoever was driving left without paying.’

I knew it was a fabrication. Surely they could do better than this.

‘Here, take the key. Go look at the gauge. No one put thirty pounds of fuel in.’

I accompanied him outside and unlocked the car. As soon as I turned on the ignition, the police officer melted away. In his place, opening the passenger door, was a dapper young man in a suit.

‘Mr Storm – my name is Robert. I’m with British intelligence.’

His words went straight to the pit of my stomach.

‘All right,’ I said weakly, getting out of the car. ‘What do you want to speak to me about?’

‘This is dangerous,’ Robert said, ‘very, very dangerous. It’s very important that we speak.’

It was far from clear to me what was dangerous. I invited him to come inside, but insisted I had nothing to tell him.

He declined and we stood beside the car. As I began to recover my composure I was struck by how young he was. He must have just graduated. This was probably one of his first jobs in the field.

Perhaps, I thought, the security services were aware of my relapse into drugs and believed it might make me vulnerable.

‘Can I ask you a few questions?’ he resumed. Across the street I noticed glances from neighbours leaving for work.

‘Morten,’ he said, trying to be familiar and informal, ‘there’s a very dangerous situation in the UK with terrorism.’

‘First, my name is Murad,’ I replied. ‘Second, you don’t have anything to fear from Muslims. There have been IRA attacks, by Catholics, so why don’t you go to search for Catholics, or the Spanish ETA? Why are you harassing Muslims? There’s never been a terrorist attack by Muslims in the UK.’

Warming to my theme, I raised Iraq. ‘How many hundreds of thousands of children have you killed? You don’t expect Muslims to be angry? You expect to be able to hit people but for them not to retaliate? I am not scared of you. If you want I will pack a bag of clothes and you can take me to prison.’

Robert smiled and shook his head.

‘We don’t want to arrest you. We just want to ask you some things.’

Here we were – the Danish Muslim and the man from MI5 – engaged in debate on Pomfret Avenue, just around the corner from Treetop Close, in Luton.

Then the generalities ended.

‘What do you think of Abu Hamza?’ he asked.