Read Agent Storm: My Life Inside al-Qaeda Online
Authors: Morten Storm,Paul Cruickshank,Tim Lister
‘I would feel very good about that.’
‘We’ll be in touch,’ Amanda said, that smile finally escaping the corners of her mouth. I could only hope so.
I wanted to keep my options open. I could probably keep both the British and the Americans happy with some agile footwork, but their methods and priorities were different. The British seemed methodical to the point of pedestrian, cautious but well-informed. They had an almost academic approach to developing expertise overseas, relishing discussion of tribal rivalries and geographic oddities. But they were preoccupied by an enemy at home whose strength and determination they could not gauge.
The Americans by contrast wanted to use their formidable technical resources to take the battle overseas – to Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. The homeland had been hit once; never again. They would prove impatient for results – ready to throw money at problems. They had been seared by 9/11 and were prepared to pursue targets with little consideration for legal niceties. The British could not countenance assassination. Their resources, I fast discovered, were very different
too. PET and now MI6 flew economy, even on long-haul flights. So much for the James Bond lifestyle. CIA agents still turned left when they boarded. The Danes used to joke with their CIA counterparts that if they ever flew together, the Americans ought to send their leftovers back to them.
I was also fast discovering that PET wanted everyone to share the adventures I might provide, just so long as they were taken along on the magic carpet. And the next stop would be exotic enough. Klang at PET had a strange request.
‘Send me a draft email requesting a meeting in Bangkok.’ We had a practice of leaving draft emails in an account to which we both had access, the same trick that al-Qaeda used. The fewer emails that actually travelled the better.
For my PET handlers I was the passport to places they would otherwise never see on their government salaries. They appeared to be able to justify top-class hotels for meetings with Morten (aka Murad) Storm.
A three-day visit to Bangkok at the beginning of December to plan a mission to Kenya seemed ludicrous, but I soon found out why Klang was so enthusiastic about the Orient. Within hours of touching down he was in the red-light district with the rest of the Danish team, including team leader Soren, drinking beer after beer and negotiating terms for the services of a shy teenage girl.
And so it was that the taxpayers of Denmark subsidized the varied appetites of a government servant. Once he had found a girl, I left. The next few days would be arduous and I did not need to start with a monstrous hangover.
‘I guess I’ll see you later,’ he said with a leer.
At least one of Klang’s escapades ended in his humiliation. After he had spent some hours canoodling with another woman at a lap-dancing club, he brought her along to a restaurant. The waitress whispered that the woman was not all she seemed; in fact she was a very well-made-up ‘lady-boy’. As Klang’s face turned pale, the rest of us were bent double with laughter.
The Danes were taking a risk going out drinking with me. American and British agents never socialized with me in this way. But the Danes were more cavalier. There was always the possibility that I might be
recognized by someone, blowing my cover and endangering my life. But I was happy to let my hair down. I needed the release and assumed it was unlikely that any of my extremist acquaintances would be frequenting Bangkok nightclubs.
The weakness of several of my Danish handlers for escorts, exotic locales and expensive booze may have begun when they were working in the drugs squad, which had a reputation for hard partying and sampling the powder they confiscated. Now equipped with diplomatic passports, my squad were reaching horizons they had only dreamt about. As we logged more and more ‘debriefings’ in foreign fleshpots it would become all too easy to forget the PET agents were meant to be my professional partners.
Matt was as usual much more restrained, his only concession to this unusual field trip being an unbuttoned business shirt and neatly pressed jeans.
‘Hello, Morten. Beats damp, grey old London, doesn’t it?’ he said with a glint in his eye when we met in my luxurious hotel suite high above the thronging city.
‘We want you to go to Kenya; we have some presents for your Somali friends,’ he said to me.
By now, in the dying days of 2007, al-Shabaab was winning territory in large swathes of Somalia. The Transitional Government was confined to a few blocks of Mogadishu, propped up by the Ethiopian troops that had brought down the Islamic Courts Union and an African Union peacekeeping force.
Among al-Shabaab’s youthful ranks there were a growing number of foreign fighters. Within weeks, the US State Department would designate the group as a foreign terrorist organization. Somalia – once just written off as a failed state – was a source of increasing alarm in Western capitals.
One young man climbing the ranks of al-Shabaab was Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, whom I had helped to travel to Somalia earlier that year. Since then, he had left several messages in our shared draft email folder asking me to find and deliver equipment such as a laptop, camcorder and portable water filtration equipment.
For MI6 such a mission would open the door to the group’s inner
workings and senior personnel. A laptop – suitably fitted out – could convey valuable information when connected to the internet or when seeking a WiFi connection, and Matt had made arrangements to provide one. He introduced me to an earnest young man in thick-rimmed glasses who looked like he had not seen sunshine for weeks.
‘You look a bit young to be Q,’ I said, referencing the boffin made famous in the Bond films.
He carefully placed the laptop into a sports bag containing the other supplies: a camcorder, portable filtration equipment, a PowerMonkey solar mobile-phone charger, a Suunto GPS watch (useful for tracking a terrorist if suitably adulterated), run-of-the-mill night-vision goggles and a few hundred dollars in cash.
I wrote a draft email in the account I shared with Warsame to let him know I had what he needed.
As I left Bangkok for Nairobi, I was sharply focused. I rehearsed scenarios exhaustively, devised answers for any questions. I needed to rest but could not sleep, instead gazing out of the window at huge formations of clouds below. This was my first mission for MI6 and I felt I was at the centre of a global battle. Both they and Danish intelligence were assembling teams in Nairobi to support the mission.
I landed in Nairobi on 7 December 2007. I couldn’t stay at a luxury hotel. I was in jihadist mode, and that meant the modest Pan Afrique Hotel. At a nearby internet café, I logged on to the shared email account and found Warsame had left me a Nairobi phone number to arrange the drop.
In my room, I inserted a local SIM card into my mobile phone and called.
The voice that answered had a thick Kenyan accent. He was expecting to hear from me.
‘I have the equipment,’ I told him. ‘I’ll meet you tomorrow in the car park at the Intercontinental Hotel – three o’clock.’
The Danes had set the location and time of the pick-up; they and the British wanted to monitor it. To my surprise the contact did not argue.
My first field operation was going too smoothly. I kicked back in my room and watched Floyd Mayweather slug it out with Ricky Hatton for the world light welterweight title. It took me back a decade to the
Tyson–Holyfield bout, when I was bundled into that police car in Korsør. A lot had happened in the intervening years, but the Pan Afrique Hotel was surely better than a Danish prison cell.
I was early for the handover. A lanky Somali with large ears loped into the car park and spotted me. There were times when being a large Dane with flame-red hair could be useful. I felt my heartbeat accelerate as he walked towards me. Without a word, he took the bag and was gone. We had an audience – MI6 and a Danish agent had been watching.
There was another quick dividend to getting inside al-Shabaab. Kenyan intelligence trailed the man who collected the equipment to a Shabaab safe house in the Eastleigh neighbourhood of Nairobi. Several days later – on 13 December – the police raided the house, seizing a large quantity of weapons and fake identity papers, and
arresting more than twenty men
alleged to have been planning attacks on Western targets in Kenya.
1
By the time those arrests had been made, I had been debriefed by the triad of PET, CIA and MI6 in faraway Amsterdam. It would be my last encounter with the elegant Amanda. As always she took copious notes about my travels, though I left out some of the interludes in Bangkok.
As we said goodbye, I expected we would see each other again. But Amanda was soon back at CIA headquarters, being trained for a mission to Afghanistan. It would be her last overseas assignment. She was killed with six of her colleagues in a suicide bombing at a CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan, in December 2009. It was a tragic day for the Agency, later brought to the screen in the film
Zero Dark Thirty
. I recognized her from pictures published in newspapers; her
real name was Elizabeth Hanson
. She was from suburban Chicago and was widely regarded as one of the CIA’s most talented young analysts.
Exhausted but elated that I had completed my first real overseas mission, I left Amsterdam to return to Yemen. The Americans and Danes wanted me back in Sana’a to work the Yemeni and Somali networks, and the British, who I sensed would have preferred me to continue countering terrorist plots in the UK, had agreed. And I badly needed to be reunited with Fadia; we had not seen each other for months. She had no idea that in the last few days alone I had been on three continents working with three intelligence agencies. She thought I had been living off UK benefits in Birmingham.
As I presented my boarding pass at Amsterdam airport, I suddenly realized it was almost exactly a year since I had trawled through a camping store collecting supplies for the Islamic Courts in Somalia. Now I had finally delivered supplies to the group that had risen from its ashes, but how different were the circumstances. I shuddered to think what might have been.
The arrivals hall at Sana’a airport was the usual mixture of shouting, half-formed queues and surly immigration officers. It was so familiar, but now I observed it from the opposite end of the spectrum. I had first passed through this building as a wide-eyed convert. Now my work was to find, track and inform on people whose beliefs were those I had shared not so long ago.
Fadia was much more buoyant than during my crisis of faith in Denmark, happy to be around her family and showing greater self-assurance and maturity. She had rented and furnished a home on 40th Street, a pleasant area of the city, and her family was impressed that she seemed prosperous, though of course neither they nor she had any idea that Danish intelligence was the source of much of our income.
Days after I returned, Anwar al-Awlaki was released after more than eighteen months in detention. He had never been brought to trial. A week or so later, I visited him at his home, the same place where he had entertained a group of us nearly two years earlier. He looked pale and thin.
‘I was in solitary confinement for the first nine months,’ he told me. ‘The only contact I had with humanity was my guards, and the cell was three metres long. It was underground. There were times when I thought the isolation and the claustrophobia would drive me insane … I had no paper to write on. I got no exercise.’
Awlaki was bitter and angry, but also thankful.
‘I survived thanks to the will of Allah and the suffering has
deepened my faith. And although it was very difficult to get books, I was able to read Qutb again.’
The Egyptian religious scholar Sayyid Qutb was widely regarded by many as having provided the intellectual cornerstone of al-Qaeda’s global jihad. One of his devoted students was Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s second-in-command.
I knew my handlers would be interested in information on Awlaki’s state of mind. Prison had hardened him. I could see it in his eyes. They’d danced before; now there was steel. There was also a hint of paranoia. He saw spies everywhere.
He recounted being visited by FBI agents wanting to know more about his meetings with two of the 9/11 hijackers. He said that he had refused to speak English to them, insisting on communicating through a translator. At one point he said he had pushed a CIA officer down into a chair in protest at being questioned by the Americans. He said his only consolation was that unlike other prisoners he had never been harmed in jail. The guards were well aware that his father knew President Saleh.
His anger was directed as much towards the government that had imprisoned him as the Americans. He told me that jihad was necessary to overthrow President Saleh, who he said paid lip service to Islam but was a puppet of the Americans.
‘The mujahideen need to establish an Islamic State in Abyan, as the
hadith
have foretold,’ he told me. The
hadith
said, ‘An army of twelve thousand will come out of Aden-Abyan. They will give victory to Allah and His messenger; they are the best between myself and them.’
Awlaki believed God had given him a mission to carry the banner of jihad, and to start in southern Yemen.
By the time Anwar left prison, al-Qaeda was regenerating itself in ungoverned tribal areas east and south of Sana’a.
Wuhayshi, the bin Laden protégé who had broken out of prison in 2006, was leading a newly formed group: al-Qaeda in the Land of
Yemen. Suicide bombers in cars packed with explosives had recently attacked two oil facilities in Marib and Hadramaut provinces. Attacks on Yemeni security forces and Westerners followed. For Wuhayshi it was the first chapter in a rapid ascent towards the upper echelons of al-Qaeda.