Agent Storm: My Life Inside al-Qaeda (20 page)

‘Tell me about the fighting,’ I said. ‘I can’t believe what happened to you.’

This was gathering intelligence, in its purest form.

As he began describing his time in Somalia I looked around the room. His friends were listening with rapt attention. So was I, for rather different reasons. Ali clearly loved the attention. He needed little encouragement to describe the beheading of the Somali spy.

‘He had been pretending to be one of the mujahideen. But there was something about him that made us suspicious, and when he was interrogated he admitted he had been sent by the Ethiopians to find out our plans.

‘He begged for mercy and said he would join us as a fighter but he was sentenced to death by the Islamic Courts. I volunteered to carry out the sentence. Praise be to Allah for letting me serve Him,’ he said.

‘
Alhamdulillah
[praise be to God],’ I replied. He had just told me everything I needed. I decided not to wash the tea glasses. If the courts needed proof he had been in my apartment they could match his fingerprints.

Klang had disappointing news for me the next time I saw him.

‘The recording didn’t work.’

‘I did everything exactly as you told me.’

‘Don’t worry about it. It was a glitch. We’ll find another way.’

The Danish authorities never charged Ali. I began to suspect that the recording had worked but that PET did not want to compromise me as a source by handing it over to prosecutors. When I later asked Klang whether a case was being prepared against Ali he claimed that as the Somali spy had not been identified there was as a matter of law no victim. Ali remains free to this day and still lives in Denmark.

There were plenty of equally dangerous targets to pursue, and I was given great latitude to follow my instincts. On a breezy spring day in 2007, I was wandering through an immigrant neighbourhood in Copenhagen, hoping I might come across an old associate. I did. His name was Abdelghani Tokhi, a Danish resident of Afghan descent. His appearance made me suspicious. Gone was the long beard – he was now clean-shaven. It was a telltale sign. Jihadis in Western societies
frequently shave off their beards to blend in better as they prepare to go operational.

I told PET it might be a good idea to take a closer look at him. It transpired Tokhi was an associate of a Danish-born Pakistani called Hammad Khurshid who had just returned from Pakistan’s tribal areas. At that time, before the drone campaign ravaged jihadist ranks in Pakistan, the mountainous tribal areas were still the wellspring of international jihad. Khurshid had received bomb-making training from a senior
Egyptian al-Qaeda operative
who had supervised the explosives training of the bombers involved in the 2005 London attacks.

Unbeknown to him, Khurshid’s notes on how to make explosives were
discovered in his luggage
by security at Copenhagen airport. PET had subsequently
used a front company
to offer a cheap apartment for rent close to where Khurshid lived. The apartment was equipped with secret cameras and bugs. The agency turned away several prospective renters, before Khurshid and Abdelghani came calling.
A short while later they would film Khurshid making ten grams of the powerful detonating explosive TATP in the apartment, and in September 2007 Danish police would arrest Khurshid and Abdelghani. They were convicted of terrorism offences and remain in prison.

My bona fides – and value as an informant – were growing with every tip. And PET wanted to show me off to their allies in the intelligence world.

CHAPTER TWELVE

London Calling

Spring 2007

My Luton mentor, Omar Bakri Mohammed, had left Britain in 2005, weeks after the London attacks, amid hostility from the media and growing scrutiny from the security services. ‘
Send him Bak
!’ screamed the front page of the tabloid
Sun
.

Omar Bakri insisted he was going to see his mother in Lebanon for a holiday and planned to return to the UK. Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister had commented:
‘Enjoy your holiday – make it a long one.’

The preacher had taken refuge in the city of Tripoli on the coast of northern Lebanon and soon developed ties to Salafist militants. PET were interested that my former comrade and fellow Danish citizen Kenneth Sorensen was also there.

‘How about a visit to Lebanon?’ Klang had asked me. ‘See what Omar Bakri might be planning, who he’s hanging out with.’

I couldn’t wait.

Staring out at the twinkling lights on the hills as the plane began its final descent into Beirut on 25 April 2007, I felt a rush. The city had not so long ago been torn apart by religious conflict. How appropriate that this place of sectarian rivalry should be the first destination in my new mission.

The Danes planned to share my findings with the British intelligence agencies MI5 and MI6, part of the back-and-forth trade that is the lifeblood of intelligence services the world over. The Danes had
nothing like the resources of the CIA or the British, but they were keen to show they could punch above their weight. They also calculated that reconnecting with the preacher would further enhance my reputation in radical circles in the UK, something that one day might be useful to their British friends.

Omar Bakri and a couple of men with long beards and the look of enforcers were waiting for me in the Beirut airport arrivals hall. The preacher locked me in a bear hug.

‘How are you, Murad, my brother – it is good to see you,’ he exclaimed. I could not help but notice that his girth had expanded further.

We stepped out into the balmy April night and climbed into his gleaming black four-wheel-drive GMC. As he collapsed into the seat, the vehicle shook. He was clearly getting money from somewhere, probably from those young extremists that I’d sat with in Luton, listening to his bluster. We drove through the Christian suburbs of north Beirut and two hours later were in Tripoli.

On my first day in Tripoli, Omar Bakri took me to the mosque packed with worshippers by the old market. After prayers he bellowed out, ‘This is brother Abu Osama al-Denmarki – he studied in Yemen and knows all the brothers there and he would like to say a few words.’

That caught me by surprise. It seemed the cleric wanted to bathe in the reflected light of my jihadist connections. I managed to wing it – recycling all the old lines on the religious obligation of jihad – and it seemed to do the trick because many of the eager-eyed young men came up to embrace me afterwards. It was a moment I would have relished if I had still been on their side.

After a week in the cleric’s company, I tired of Omar Bakri’s outlandish claims. The preacher may have radicalized a generation of young British Muslims, but he was clearly out of his depth among the hardened militants of Tripoli. They had had to survive real war in the streets. Omar Bakri by comparison was a vacuous windbag.

Keen to impress my handlers, I decided to go after bigger prey. I would not have long to wait. One day when I was in Omar Bakri’s company, I met a young man with an impressive beard at a tailor’s in the old market in Tripoli. My Nordic complexion clearly took him aback.

‘
Masha’Allah!
Where are you from, brother?’ he asked me in Arabic.

‘Denmark,’ I replied.

‘Me too,’ he said, in Danish, laughing, introducing himself as Abu Arab. He was a Palestinian who had moved to Denmark as a young refugee; his real name was Ali al-Hajdib.

Abu Arab invited me to his house a few days later. Soon after I arrived he received a telephone call. ‘Come with me!’ Abu Arab said.

He led me down an alley. A black BMW with its engine running was waiting for us.

‘Get in!’ Abu Arab said, his eyes flashing.

We clambered into the back of the car. In the front were two fighters wearing military fatigues and headscarves. A Kalashnikov assault rifle was thrust into my hands and I was offered a pistol. After I declined, the man riding shotgun held up a hand grenade.

‘Perhaps you would like this?’ he asked. He seemed to be a commander.

‘Or maybe one of these?’ he said, opening his camouflage jacket to reveal an explosive belt around his waist. As the car accelerated down the narrow streets, the commander confided that if they were stopped by the security forces or a rival militia it was better to die than suffer the horrors of interrogation.

I tried not to wince whenever the car hit a pothole; explosive belts have an awkward tendency to detonate when jolted.

I did not immediately realize it but I had just been given a backstage pass to Fatah al-Islam, a hardline Sunni group with ties to al-Qaeda which was then sprouting in the Palestinian refugee camps of northern Lebanon.

The commander in the car was Abu Arab’s younger brother, Saddam al-Hajdib, a senior member of the group and one of several al-Hajdib brothers in a budding
terror dynasty
. Saddam was in his late twenties, had fought with al-Qaeda in Iraq and knew its top leadership.
¹
Another brother,
Youssef, had been arrested
in Germany the previous year – at
the age of just twenty-one – after leaving two suitcases full of explosives on trains near Cologne in a failed attack.
²

Over the next several weeks I was given a tour of the Tripoli refugee camps, where preparations seemed to be afoot for the ‘next war’ in Lebanon. Abu Arab told me they would stop at nothing in their quest to bring Sharia law to the camps, then to the north of Lebanon, and one day to the whole country. Given the resources of the rival Shi’ite militia Hezbollah, and Lebanon’s raw sectarian divides, that seemed a pipedream. But their ambition was irrepressible, they had powerful allies that saw Fatah as a useful counterweight to Hezbollah – and their willingness to make common cause with international terrorism was unquestionable.

I left Lebanon early in May and flew to London, to be debriefed by Klang and Buddha. This time, their immediate boss, whose given name was Soren, was also present. He was in his late thirties and in good shape – his athletic appearance let down by his regular fumbling for cigarettes. Like Klang, he had switched to counter-terrorism after working in the drugs squad, a unit I once had particular reason to hate during my days with the Bandidos. Now he and Klang were partners in the fight against terrorism. The Danes ordered beers for the debriefing. They seemed to want to make me as relaxed as possible.

Soren told me with a smile that half a decade previously he had once been part of the team that had me under surveillance, following my communications with fellow radicals as far apart as Odense and Indonesia. It was Soren and Klang who had witnessed my pavement meeting with Robert from MI5 in the UK.

‘He looked like a schoolboy trying to scare you,’ Soren laughed. As we swapped stories Klang revealed to me that he and Buddha had worked on the Vollsmose terrorism case – the investigation that led to the arrest and conviction of Mohammad Zaher and Abdallah Andersen – once my friends – for a bomb plot the previous year.

‘The informant we used testified in the trial. And we then had to arrange for him to change his identity and leave Denmark – it’s been pretty tough for him because he rarely sees his kids.’

His words weighed on me for a while. Would that be my fate?

The Danes seemed impressed with the information I had gathered about the convoluted alliances and shadowy leaders behind the Tripoli violence. Would I care to meet their British colleagues?

The Churchill Hotel – close to Hyde Park – is one of London’s finest. Behind the elegant facade, the lobby boasted marble floors and columns and mellow walnut furniture. If this was the typical venue for intelligence debriefings, then I was in the right business. The further I travelled from the spartan demands of Salafism the more I was seduced by the trappings of the espionage business.

As I crossed the threshold of the Churchill with my Danish handlers on a glorious spring evening, I had to restrain myself; it was just too easy to replay the Bond theme in my head. It became even more tempting when I set eyes on the MI6 officer who was waiting for us in the hotel suite.

He introduced himself as Matt. He knew how to wear a suit, had a cut-glass accent and impeccable manners, and was ruggedly handsome. He was the epitome of the British intelligence officer, with his oversize, fleshy ears the only part that seemed incongruous.

I imagined his background: one of England’s finest boarding schools, where he no doubt excelled at both rugby and Latin, followed by Oxford or Cambridge. And then perhaps someone at the careers department had casually inquired whether intelligence work for Her Majesty’s Government would be of any interest.

While I had developed a laddish repartee with my Danish handlers, Matt was all business and polish. In contrast to the sometimes crude Danes and the demanding Americans, the British spies I dealt with were polite and formal, almost to the point of being apologetic.

Even so, Matt laughed out loud when I called room service for some pork scratchings. It was not what he expected from a former jihadi.