Agent Storm: My Life Inside al-Qaeda (21 page)

I told him that Fatah al-Islam would try to ignite a war inside Lebanon, but he seemed more interested in what I had to say about Omar
Bakri, who had developed a network of supporters in the UK and was probably using them as a source of revenue.

Since the July 2005 bombings, MI5 was intensely focused on uncovering jihadist networks in places like Luton and Birmingham, networks and places I knew well. Since Karima had moved to Birmingham I had spent plenty of time there, renting temporary accommodation so that I could see my children whenever possible.

Not long after my meeting with MI6 my warning about events in Lebanon was borne out. Saddam al-Hajdib, the Fatah al-Islam commander I had met, robbed a bank near Tripoli and made off with $125,000. Lebanese security forces tracked him to an apartment block in the city. Al-Hajdib was true to his pledge: he blew himself up as the security services stormed the building. But the raid triggered days of clashes between Fatah and the security forces around the Nahr al-Barid refugee camp. More than twenty Lebanese soldiers and a similar number of Fatah fighters were killed.

Soon afterwards the Danes told me the British wanted to meet again. ‘You impressed them on Lebanon: they didn’t really see that coming,’ Klang said.

At my second meeting with the British, Matt was accompanied by an MI5 officer called Andy. He was from the English Midlands, in his late forties and not wearing a suit. He seemed harder – more operational than a handler, someone used to being on the streets. I later found out he had previously been a police officer targeting drug traffickers. He and the patrician Matt made an odd couple, but Andy had a very specific mandate – the extremist scene in Birmingham.

‘Can you keep your eyes open for us?’ he asked.

The initial arrangement was for me to report to the Danes, who would pass on my information to the British, and for me to travel back to Denmark whenever needed. PET were happy with the arrangement because it improved their standing with the British. Soon, however, it was agreed I should also report directly to MI5.

At the behest of MI5 I moved into a modest terraced house in the Alum Rock area of Birmingham. They paid me £400 each month to cover the rent. Like Luton, Birmingham epitomized Britain’s industrial decline, its poorer neighbourhoods of rundown terraces and drab
tower blocks home to a large South Asian immigrant community, and a hotspot for Islamist radicals. Weather aside, Alum Rock could be mistaken for the rough-and-tumble streets of Karachi.

In the early summer of 2007, as a new season of cricket games began in Birmingham’s parks, I immersed myself in the extremist scene. Most mornings I got up before dawn for the first prayer of the day at local mosques. As much as I was used to it, it was harder now that I was only a Muslim on the outside. Afterwards I’d often go to breakfast with ‘like-minded’ brothers at a halal restaurant. Then we might visit someone else’s home to read the Koran together or discuss the latest news from Pakistan or Iraq. And so the sequence would continue: cheap meals on polystyrene plates in cafés with Formica tables, invariably followed by a talk from a radical preacher. One of the most popular was Anjem Choudary, a British-Pakistani lawyer who had been Omar Bakri’s deputy in al-Muhajiroun and had taken over his mantle as the most controversial militant in the UK. I was not impressed by him, but noticed how many young men lapped up his every word.

Not all my time was spent in Birmingham. With Fadia away in Yemen and only occasional custody of my children, I had time on my hands. I returned periodically to Luton to keep tabs on the radical circle I had frequented two years before.

Getting ‘fellow’ extremists to open up was not difficult. Most loved nothing better than to talk. Sometimes I mentioned a new video sermon by Awlaki to get the conversation started. As in Denmark, I colour-coded UK-based radicals for MI5, according to the potential danger they posed. At the Small Heath mosque in Birmingham I rekindled my friendship with the young Somali, Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame. He was still desperate to return home to fight the Ethiopians but had yet to raise the funds to travel.

If I could help him to Somalia, we could gain valuable intelligence from a region where there was precious little. Andy liked the idea and with his approval I began fundraising in mosques for Warsame’s travel. A bureaucratic idiosyncrasy meant that MI5 rather than its sister service would run the operation because the intelligence would be collected through my email account.

The stories of rivalry between the domestic and overseas branches
of the UK intelligence services are legendary. But I found that the MI5 and MI6 officers I dealt with cooperated and respected each other’s needs. They were fighting different fronts of the same battle – MI6 in Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan, MI5 in Luton and Alum Rock. The suicide bomb attacks in London had given that collaboration new urgency.

It did not take me long to raise the money for Warsame’s travel in the mosques and from my militant contacts in Birmingham. He was overcome with emotion when I handed him £600 in cash. ‘May Allah reward you,’ he said as he embraced me.

We agreed to keep in touch by leaving messages in the draft inbox of a shared email account. Warsame left the UK to join the fight in Somalia, and before very long had a shopping list for me and a request for funds.

One man impressed by my fundraising – and by my friendship with Anwar al-Awlaki – was a Syrian in his mid-thirties called Hassan Tabbakh. He also knew me by reputation from my days with al-Muhajiroun. And we found we had several mutual acquaintances, including
Hamid Elasmar
, a British-Moroccan, convicted in connection with a plot to behead a British Muslim soldier in Birmingham. It seemed I was not short of links to extremists across the UK.

Tabbakh was a balding chemistry graduate in his late thirties with a beard just beginning to show flecks of grey. I was struck by the sneer that seemed never to leave his lips and by his rather dispirited eyes. He was not a man that radiated enthusiasm. But we were among the few non-Somalis at the Small Heath mosque so it was inevitable that our paths would cross.

I had my son with me the first time we met. ‘This is Osama,’ I told him.

‘
Masha’Allah
, this is a good name,’ he replied unsmilingly. He told me he had been granted political asylum in the UK after fleeing for his life from Syria. He said he had been detained for possessing anti-government literature. His constant anxiety suggested that his interrogation by the secret police of the Assad regime had been vicious.

Tabbakh invited me to his home, a small dark ground-floor apartment in a decaying terraced house around the corner from the mosque.
It suited his morose temperament. But he was not short of ideas, and he was desperate to share them.

‘I’ve been busy,’ he said.

He had been learning how to build bombs and showed me sketches of targets in London. They included Oxford Street, packed every day with shoppers and tourists, and the area around Parliament.

On the sketches he showed me where exactly he planned to set off his bombs. I noticed his hands were trembling.

‘Brother, what do you think? Will it work?’ he asked. He wanted me to join the plot. I was stunned that he should share so many details with someone he hardly knew.

With his background as a physics and maths graduate, I had little doubt he would be able to build the bombs, but what was his timetable?

I looked him in the eye. ‘
Insha’Allah
.’

‘You need to be careful, brother,’ I added, trying to coax him into slowing down. Anything to buy time.

I alerted MI5. Tabbakh had until then not been on their radar. He was the archetypal ‘lone-wolf terrorist’, the sort that are most difficult to detect for their lack of contact – by any means – with others. And I had stumbled into his plans.

‘We need you to stick very close to him in the coming weeks,’ Andy told me.

At another meeting soon afterwards, Andy asked me about the keys Tabbakh used to open his door.

‘Big keys, small keys, double keys?’ he asked. They were clearly planning to break in. I was told later that in the course of a break-in agents had found the sketches, photographed and carefully replaced them. They would be prima facie evidence of Tabbakh’s plans.

As part of the operation MI5 even staged detaining me at Gatwick airport to bolster Tabbakh’s trust in me. To set this up I asked Idriss, a well-connected British-Pakistani extremist from Walsall, to drive me to the airport to catch a flight to Yemen. When I tried to pass through security, a police officer made a big show of detaining me, knowing that my driver would tell all and sundry.

I was frogmarched to a small room near the security screening area
where an MI5 officer was awaiting me. The police officer was – to say the least – surprised when the agent jumped up and gave me a bear hug. We chatted for a while and then I was escorted back to the departure lounge, where I made a plaintive call to Idriss, complaining about the brutal British security service and asking him to come back to Gatwick to collect me. The incident burnished my credentials among the militants in Birmingham.

Tabbakh hadn’t settled on a date to launch his attack but sketched out a diagram of the electronics of the bomb design and told me which chemical ingredients he planned to mix. He said he would use large soda bottles to hold the charge. I wished I had paid more attention during science classes at school, but I told MI5 he seemed to know what he was doing.

The police did not move in immediately because MI5 was wary of blowing my cover. After all, I was the only one in whom Tabbakh had confided. In the following weeks, MI5 took elaborate steps to mask my role by shifting suspicion on to one of his radical associates.

Tabbakh was arrested
in December 2007 and later convicted of making bombs to launch a terrorist attack. Police found bottles containing acetone and nitrocellulose in his dingy flat and instructions for converting the ingredients into bombs. They would have been crude and basic, but the judge at his trial said they had ‘great potential for destruction, injury and death’.

My street-by-street knowledge of the militant scene in the UK and my Rolodex of jihadis abroad were generating results. Islamist terrorism posed a multitude of problems for agencies which not so long ago had concentrated the lion’s share of their resources on the Soviet bloc. It was young, difficult to penetrate and spreading quickly. Inside information was hard to come by; a Dane with good Arabic and nearly a decade of militancy behind him was the ideal informant.

No wonder the Americans came calling.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

From Langley with Love

Summer 2007–Early 2008

My handlers at PET always talked of the British as ‘the cousins’. The CIA were ‘Big Brother’. Klang and Buddha found it difficult to contain their excitement when word reached them that the Americans would like to meet Mr Storm.

The Danes set up a meeting at the Scandic Hotel on the waterfront in Copenhagen. Eighteen storeys of steel and glass, it looked like a functional American office building from the outside. But inside it was all pale woods, minimalist Scandinavian furniture and peculiar white perspex trees climbing through the lobby.

Klang and Buddha fussed over me when I arrived. Even Klang’s familiar mask was slipping with the Americans sitting upstairs.

‘Joshua’ and ‘Amanda’ must have been in their early thirties, both neatly attired in business suits. Joshua was tall with dark hair, good-looking in that preppy, north-eastern way. He had clearly never done a day’s manual labour in his life. Amanda made an altogether different impression. I was drawn to her eyes. They were cornflower blue and had a searching, almost beseeching aspect. She had full lips and high cheekbones; honey-coloured hair fell from her shoulders.

For the CIA, the Scandic meeting was a fishing expedition. How much had I learned about Fatah al-Islam, al-Qaeda, and the militants I had met in Yemen? They were especially interested in two topics: Anwar al-Awlaki – still held in solitary confinement in a Sana’a prison
but not charged – and the Yemeni connection to Somalia. At that time, the militant Islamist group al-Shabaab, a spinoff of the Islamic Courts Union, was emerging to challenge the Ethiopian troops that had intervened to save the Somali government, and it was beginning to attract fighters from the Somali diaspora in Europe and North America.

Amanda had a way of asking questions which was disarming. Perhaps it was her enthusiasm, her ability to find the same wavelength, or those eyes. For several hours I held court, laying out a spider diagram of my jihadist militant contacts on three continents.

Amanda said the CIA might be interested in having me travel to Somalia, whose anarchy had haunted US policymakers since the disastrous intervention of 1992–4 and ‘Blackhawk Down’. Should militants seize large tracts of the coastline or bog down the Ethiopians in urban warfare, it could become much more dangerous than Yemen.

Throughout the meeting Joshua and Amanda took notes. I watched Amanda’s manicured hand moving gracefully across the pages of her notebook, her neat script soon filling twenty pages. At the end they had a simple question: ‘How would you feel about working for us?’