Agent Storm: My Life Inside al-Qaeda (19 page)

The rebel in me had rekindled my free will, but I knew how dangerous that would be. Suddenly I was walking in the shadow of Kurt Westergaard, the cartoonist who had drawn the Prophet Mohammed and had his life threatened for doing so. Not so long ago, I had wanted him dead.

Now, I am my friends’ enemy, I thought one night as I lay in bed, restless. My wife lay peacefully at my side. What danger might she be in if I abandoned my ‘brothers’? For now, the less she knew the better.

The next morning I tried to busy myself with chores, washing-up and laundry. As I threw a shirt into the washing machine, a card fell out. I picked it up. Frayed and crumpled, it was still legible. It was the business card of the so-called Martin Jensen at PET.

The card had a phone number. I tucked it in my pocket and left the house, wandering the streets of suburban Aarhus. If I called him there would be no turning back, no middle ground. I would have to lead a double life, one in which a single mistake could cost me my life. But the alternative seemed worse. Would I stand by as people I knew, people I could stop, brought carnage to my homeland and the rest of Europe?

That same evening I called the number.

Not for a moment did I think his real name was Martin Jensen, and I was doubtful he would even answer. But he did.

‘This is Murad Storm. I need to meet you, soon,’ I said. ‘I have something I want to tell you.’

I could sense him struggling to stay calm.

‘Okay, how about the Radisson Hotel in Aarhus?’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Switching Sides

Spring 2007

The Radisson looks like a slab of ice, eight storeys high, with glass that reflects the clouds drifting above. The view from the Presidential Suite took in the canals and old cobbled streets of Aarhus, a spacious room of leather sofas, cool Scandinavian fixtures in birch and ash.

The same PET officers who had been at the police station late the previous year were there.

‘Martin Jensen’, the Clooney lookalike, clearly had a penchant for designer clothes: that day he was sporting a Hugo Boss shirt, expensive loafers and an even more expensive watch.

‘Murad, it’s good to see you again,’ he said, shaking my hand. He had a crisp Copenhagen accent and exuded confidence. This was his show.

‘You remember my colleague?’ he said, introducing the bald over-weight smoker. ‘We call him Buddha,’ he said with a smile. ‘And you can call me Klang.’ He gave no explanation for the code name.

I sat down opposite the two agents on the leather sofas. They perched on the edge of their seats, attentively. This could be a career-defining moment for them – they knew I would be a treasure trove of information about jihadis. Buddha thrust a menu into my hand. ‘Should it be halal? Chicken? Fish? Something vegetarian?’ he asked, sensitive to my Muslim diet. ‘Some bottled water? Coffee?’

His politeness amused me. It was time to make a statement.

‘No, I will have a bacon sandwich, and a beer, a Carlsberg Classic,’ I replied.

There was a stunned silence.

‘That’s what I want, guys.’ It was my way of saying: ‘I’m on your side.’

I felt like a weight had been lifted from me.

‘I’ve decided I’m no longer a Muslim,’ I said. ‘I am ready to help you in the fight against terrorism. For me, the religion that became my life has lost its meaning.’

‘This is going to be the biggest,’ Klang said, barely able to contain himself. They had a high estimation of my jihadist Rolodex.

The food arrived.

‘Skol,’ I said – raising my glass and savouring my first taste of alcohol in years. And then I set about a substantial bacon roll. I was a Dane again.

‘Let’s get started,’ I said, and I began to tell my story.

I was the convert unconverted; the scales fell from my eyes. Having been so rigid, I had swung to the other end of the pendulum. While I could do nothing to change the past, my embrace of 9/11, my delusions about jihad and my admiration for Awlaki, I could atone for it. I knew the murderous world-view of al-Qaeda and I wanted to play a part in stopping them.

The agents could hardly take notes fast enough. They kept stopping me – staring in disbelief that I could know so many militants in so many places. The meeting went on for three hours, but it was no more than a prologue.

To share my story was liberating, and the more I told the more I felt myself distanced from my former life. When I walked out of the lobby into the late-afternoon sunshine, I felt at peace. This was the right thing to do.

Klang and Buddha asked me to meet them again in a few days.

‘This work is going to take up a lot of your time so we can pay you 10,000 kroner a month,’ Klang said after we exchanged greetings in the follow-up meeting.

It was $1,800 – hardly a sum to make me blush but I had not expected to be paid anything at all. Given how cash-strapped I was it would be
welcome. ‘That sounds good.’ Klang handed me a Nokia mobile phone.

‘You’ll need this to contact us. We’ll pay the bill,’ he said.

‘And it’ll make it easier for you to keep tabs on me,’ I replied. It was meant as a joke.

‘No, no – we wouldn’t do that. We trust you,’ Buddha replied, protesting too much.

They had my first homework assignment. From a manila folder, Buddha produced two photographs and sheets with short biographies of two of my Islamist contacts in Aarhus.

‘We want to know if we need to worry about them,’ Klang explained.

The first was Abu Hamza, an overweight Moroccan cleric who liked to preach the merits of jihad, but whom I had always thought to be a blowhard. As I sipped tea in the sitting room of his mosque, listening to him sound off on the oppression of Muslims overseas while he devoured biscuit after biscuit, a suspicion that I had felt for some time hardened. Maybe Hamza was an informant on the payroll of PET. Was I testing him or was he testing me?

While I wasn’t sure where he stood, I felt increasingly confident about the decision I had made. It felt surreal but empowering. As I listened to the cleric rant on I nodded my head occasionally. But it was as if I was listening with a different part of the brain. No longer was I seeking religious truth, guidance on what Allah demanded. Instead I was filing away every last detail to take back to my handlers.

The second target was Ibrahim, an Algerian I knew from the mosque in Aarhus. I knew I would meet him at Friday prayers. Afterwards Ibrahim offered me some tea and I walked with him to his shabby apartment nearby.

‘Murad, I’ve found where Kurt Westergaard lives and I know where we can get weapons,’ he blurted out once we were inside.

I looked into his excited eyes. Why was he telling me this now? Was he working for PET too? Was this another test? Or did he mean every word?

‘Will you join me?’ he asked.

‘Let me think about it,’ I replied.

As soon as I left I punched Klang’s number into the mobile phone he had given me.

‘We need to meet as soon as possible,’ I said.

That evening I met him and Buddha in a hotel room in the city centre and relayed everything I had been told. They didn’t seem that alarmed, which made me think my instincts had been right all along: these first targets had been a test. PET had needed to know if they could trust me.

Just to be sure, I went to see Ibrahim again. We met outside the mosque.

‘So is it on?’ I asked. He looked startled.

‘I’m not interested any more,’ he replied, cutting off the conversation and walking away quickly.

In the weeks that followed I had frequent meetings with Klang and Buddha. Soon I seemed to know every hotel in Aarhus. We also spoke often on the phone, sometimes several times a day. I was being developed into a regular informant.

I warmed to Klang, who had become my main point of contact. Despite acting as the dandy, he came from a modest background like me. He had worked in the drugs squad before being redeployed to counter-terrorism after 9/11. He knew how life on the streets worked – even if he had little interest in the religious side of jihadism or the places that were breeding militancy. I gradually laid out my web of connections in Denmark. I came up with a colour-coding system: green for harmless, orange for those with potential for violence, and red for dangerous. There were some 150 names.

My task was to keep my eyes and ears open, and report back to my handlers on any potential threat.

‘Follow where your nose takes you but keep us informed each step of the way,’ Klang said.

The agents told me that occasionally they would ask me to visit radicals on their radar screen. They also gave me a USB stick specially configured to quickly suck out the contents of a hard drive when inserted into a target’s computer.

My cash flow steadily improved. The PET agents gave me a further 15,000 DKK so that I could pay the deposit on a new apartment. The
payments were masked – either arriving as Western Union cash transfers or deposits to my bank account via a PET front company called ‘Mola Consult’. PET would use the company to pay expenses relating to my work, including hotel bookings. To process invoices the company had a registered address in Lyngby, a Copenhagen suburb just a couple of miles from PET headquarters.

Fadia had no idea of my new source of income, nor of my contacts with PET. I told her I had received a bonus from the building firm. As a young Muslim woman in a foreign country she asked few questions about her husband’s activities. I also did my best to put on a show of recovering my religious faith. It was a necessary deceit – to protect us both. If she knew about my real work and let it slip, her life could be in danger, as could her family back in Yemen. Instead I tried to make her believe my sudden collapse in December had been an aberration brought on by depression.

Every Friday I left the house as usual to go to
Jumma
(Friday prayers). More often than not I did go to the mosque, but not to pray. The gatherings of ‘like-minded’ young men in fast-food joints or tea shops afterwards were always rich sources of information.

While my wife was safer knowing nothing, I needed to share the sea-change in my life with someone. And there was only one person in the world who could begin to fathom what had happened and would tell no one.

‘Mum, you can’t tell anybody this. And you’re the only person in the world who knows. I’m not a Muslim any more and I’ve started to work for Danish intelligence.’

There was silence for a few moments.

‘There’s never a dull moment with you,’ she finally replied.

I wasn’t even sure that she believed me but telling her was a relief. For the first time my work as a PET agent felt real. On the few occasions we met in the following years she never brought it up.

The first few months of 2007 had been traumatic for Fadia. I had not been a predictable companion and she seemed to expect that at any moment I would announce my departure for some foreign battlefield. She missed her family and had overstayed her visitor’s visa. PET told me that if she returned to Yemen they could enrol her in a Danish
university and then arrange a student visa, so she could quickly return to Europe.

But leaving Denmark would prove another trial for her. The immigration officer at Copenhagen airport noticed her lapsed status and began berating her. Fearful that she might be arrested, she called me – and I called my new friends at PET. Within a few minutes, the officer’s demeanour changed. He saluted my wife smartly and wished her
bon voyage
. She had no idea why.

I remembered my hostile encounter with officers at Luton airport a couple of years before. Being on the side of the ‘disbelievers’ had its advantages.

Now on my own, I found myself in great demand with Klang and Buddha. One of the Islamists I had coded red was Ali, the Danish convert who had called me up from Somalia to boast that he had beheaded a Somali spy. He had fled advancing Ethiopian troops but was captured shortly afterwards in Kismayo and held for two months before being deported to Denmark.

PET wanted to build a criminal case against Ali so enlisted my help in a sting operation.

‘Invite him to your home and get him talking,’ Klang instructed me.

He handed me a small black battery-operated electronic recording device, disguised to look like a pager, and showed me how to activate it. A couple of days later, I called Ali. I had carefully rehearsed what I wanted to say.

‘Ali, it’s Murad. I’m still in Denmark. I heard you came back. What happened? Can you come and see me in Aarhus? I want to hear everything about Somalia. I still want to go,
Insha’Allah
[God willing].’

Ali came to my apartment with several friends from Copenhagen. As they knocked at the door, I turned on the recording device and slipped it into my pocket.

I greeted them with Islamic salutations. It was like being in a film or a play. I had simply reverted to being Murad Storm. I could assume the role as easily as flicking on a light switch.

Ali looked thinner than when I had last seen him in Sana’a, but had that same fierce intensity in his eyes. After we prayed I made them glasses of tea and we sat down cross-legged on the carpet to talk.