Agent Storm: My Life Inside al-Qaeda (24 page)

Klang was accompanied by a PET agent I called Trailer because he had grown up on a farm. He had replaced Buddha, who had been incapacitated with a bad back. There was nothing designer about Trailer’s grimy jacket. He was as unpretentious as Klang was sophisticated – very tall, from rural Jutland, and once an accomplished handball player. He had been the agent who observed the handover of equipment to the al-Shabaab courier at the Intercontinental in Nairobi.

It was a cloudless spring day. As the Danish pair tried unsuccessfully
to hook a trout out of the River Dee with the help of an instructor, Matt sidled up to me on the bank, out of their hearing.

‘We don’t want you to go to Somalia for the Americans,’ he said. ‘I think you should stay here a little bit more: we need you.’ The British wanted me to develop leads in England’s inner cities as well as focus on the Somali contacts I had established.

Not long afterwards there was another exercise at an imposing country house near Aviemore in Scotland. MI6 had sent a car to pick me up at Inverness airport and the forty-minute drive took us past Loch Ness to the property, nestled in hilly woodland.

Matt was waiting for me on the steps, standing next to a striking brunette who was about thirty years old. Emma would be my new MI6 handler as Matt was being moved to other duties. Tall and athletic with high cheekbones and an immaculate complexion, she spoke in an unforced upper-class tone and seemed imperturbable. Her chiselled features and wide smile reminded me of Julia Roberts.

‘It’s good to finally meet you,’ she said, flashing me a smile.

During the retreat, Emma revealed that her grandmother was Swedish and she could speak the language. I tried out some Danish on her, and she laughed, answering back in Swedish, which Danes can more or less understand. It helped break the ice.

Again the Danes came along; and Andy was there from MI5, but the Americans were not invited. They must have resented that. The twoday course featured training by a UK Special Forces (SAS) specialist in mountain navigation, abseiling and survival skills. His name was Rob and he had just come back from undisclosed duties in Iraq.

There was also a psychologist on hand, who introduced himself as Luke. A dapper, well-educated Scot in his mid-forties, he was softly spoken and had grey-blue eyes. He had a neatly trimmed beard that made him look older than he probably was. His mission was to see how resilient and suitable I was for life as an informant on the front-line. I felt I was being fast-tracked by the British.

Luke presented me with some difficult hypothetical choices.

‘What would you do if you were with al-Qaeda and ordered to execute a prisoner?’ he asked.

As I pondered, he leaned forward and said quietly: ‘You’d execute
him to avoid attracting any suspicion or provoking any doubts among your comrades.’

We talked through the burden of living a double life, and my breakup with Karima. He understood better than I could imagine the pressure I was going to face.

The evening was more light-hearted. We played bingo, and the Danes cheated. They also thought it hysterical to point the beam of a laser pointer on to the faces of my British handlers as we tried to talk business, focusing on Matt’s outsize ears. At times their antics were embarrassing and I felt they had become much too familiar with me.

To add to my discomfort, Klang made a none too subtle play for the attention of Emma. Matt, it seemed, had more luck. I noticed, as they cooked a Scottish breakfast for the house guests, that there seemed to be a special chemistry between the two.

The British were subtle about their entreaties, but quietly insistent. I would be better off working with them; it would be a genuine commitment on both sides. I would be properly trained and supported. The unspoken implication was that at some point the CIA would hang me out to dry.

As the tension between the British and American agencies grew more palpable I sought the advice of my PET handlers. It was the wrong thing to do. They smelt money and opportunity with the CIA.

‘You’ll get to do more with the Yanks,’ Klang told me, ‘and they pay more.’

I was conflicted. Matt, Andy, Emma and the others from the two UK agencies had been good companions, straightforward and intelligent. They were trapped by bureaucracy and regulation, but they were professionals.

The American riposte to the special treatment by the British took place in the Danish coastal resort of Helsingør, sometimes called the capital of the Danish riviera. Its most famous landmark was Kronberg Castle, a Renaissance pile that Shakespeare used in inventing Elsinore for
Hamlet
. It was an appropriate place to plot against Awlaki, the future prince of jihad.

At the end of our meeting, Jed took me aside.

‘You never took your wife on a honeymoon, right?’ he asked, the iceberg eyes melting just for an instant.

‘No. I’ve not exactly had much time over the last two years.’

‘Well, consider it a gift from us. Just let us know where you’d like to go and we can make the arrangements,’ Jed said.

I was flattered. They were taking me seriously. Perhaps it was standard practice to win the loyalty of an impressionable source. And given the treats showered on me by the British it was a well-timed gesture. I began to make plans for another visit to Thailand, hopefully one that would be more relaxing.

My work for PET and the British was becoming more demanding, and more perilous. I needed cover stories. My cover, or ‘legend’, in Denmark came courtesy of a garrulous, dim-witted Danish Bosnian called Adnan Avdic, whom I knew from my extremist days. He had been held in jail before being
acquitted in a terrorism case
.
¹

One afternoon I picked him up on the outskirts of Copenhagen in a brand-new Toyota. It was rented by PET as part of the ruse but Adnan thought it was mine.

‘Nice wheels, Murad! That must have cost you a packet,’ he said. As we drove, our conversation soon turned to jihad.

‘I have to drop something off so need to take a bit of a detour.’

His curiosity got the better of him, as I knew it would.

‘What?’

‘It’s to help the cause. Don’t tell anybody this.’

I paused and made a show of looking in every direction furtively.

‘Open the glove compartment, but don’t touch what you see because you’ll leave fingerprints.’

He stared in amazement at a small bag of white powder.

‘Wow – Murad – are you sure this is permissible?’

‘I have a fatwa,’ I replied.

Little did he know that it was a mixture of flour and crumbled candle wax.

I pulled up just before the meeting point.

‘You need to get out and wait for me here,’ I told him.

A man in a brown bomber jacket was standing at the street corner. I handed him the bag and walked back to the car, knowing that Adnan would have seen the deal go down.

There was the glint of a smile on my senior handler Soren’s face as he walked off in the other direction with the bag. He had apparently enjoyed his brief cameo as a street dealer.

In England MI5 also arranged a cover for me to allay any suspicions about the cash I was receiving: fully licensed Birmingham cab driver. Her Majesty’s Government even bought me a Mercedes minivan with leather-trim seats.

I started work for an Alum Rock cab company owned by a Pakistani businessman. His son, Salim, whom I had first met in al-Muhajiroun meetings in Luton, was on MI5’s radar screen. They hoped that if we worked together I would gain greater access to his British-Pakistani extremist contacts in the city. The security service was especially concerned about this demographic because several plots in the UK had involved young men of Pakistani descent, some of whom had received bomb-making training in al-Qaeda camps in their ancestral country.

But radicalized British-Pakistanis were proving hard for me to infiltrate. They tended to be wary of Muslims from other ethnic and national groups and were especially distrustful of converts. After trekking across the deserts of Yemen, driving my cab around Birmingham was exceptionally dull. Eventually I told MI5 taxi driving was not for me.

I did not adapt well to domestic life in Birmingham. Fadia had returned with me and we had moved into a council house on Watson Road, a drab street in Alum Rock. Our new digs could not have been more depressing, but it was the price of living my cover. Discarded needles and trash littered the street. Young gangs of British-Pakistanis roamed the area, sometimes getting into knife fights. Fadia complained that the rats were bigger than the cats. I was desperate to tell her that she deserved better and I could provide it; our diminished circumstances had put up a wall between us. But, for her safety and mine, I couldn’t let her know the real reason why we were living there.

Fadia had no idea her return to Europe had been engineered by the intelligence services. PET had been true to their promise by providing
her with a student visa to return to Denmark and she had then been provided with a five-year European residence permit at the British embassy in Copenhagen, courtesy of Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

My lifeline was the mobile phone with which I communicated with my handlers. They alone knew my secret purpose. Klang and I spoke several times each day, running information and ideas past each other but always being careful with our language. My MI5 handlers called several times a week, usually to arrange meetings.

Even when things were slow I found it difficult to switch off. Often Fadia would have to ask the same question several times before I responded. My mind was elsewhere, thinking of the next email I needed to write or plotting ways I could enhance my jihadist network. I found it difficult even to fully focus on my kids on the weekends I had custody. The espionage business was all-consuming.

One evening Fadia and I sat down to watch the George Clooney movie
Syriana
, a thriller set in the Middle East. I was soon absorbed in the film, recognizing both the implausible parts and the efforts to recreate the tradecraft of espionage. But the sense of mistrust among some of its characters resonated. I was desperate to tell Fadia, to point to the screen and say, ‘That’s how I feel.’ But I knew it was impossible.

Occasionally I took long drives deep into the British countryside. I’d put on a Metallica CD, turn up the volume and breathe deeply. Sometimes after a walk I would drop into a country pub for a pint of bitter and a chat with the regulars. It was unlikely that Muslims would hang out in such places. For a few precious minutes I just needed to drop the mask.

Not all the extremists in Birmingham were blowhards. I soon encountered one of the most volatile figures in the city, a British-Pakistani I knew only as Saheer. He was in his late twenties, muscular and always wearing a tracksuit. He was clean-shaven and good-looking with a buzz-cut hairstyle, but his eyes seemed to be on the lookout for trouble and his hands itching for a fight. He already had a criminal record, having gone inside for armed robbery while still a teenager, and had only recently been released.

I met Saheer through one of the most active extremists in Birmingham at a Moroccan cake shop in Alum Rock. Like a growing number of young Muslims, Saheer had been radicalized while in prison. Perhaps like others he also sought redemption. Saheer was a man of few words but had a craving for action. When I revealed I knew Awlaki and told him of my recent meeting with him in Yemen, he started opening up.

‘Brother, we need to fight back against the
kuffar
,’ he said, as we shared
meskouta
, a Moroccan yoghurt cake.

As we walked out into the evening drizzle, Saheer looked at me with intense almond eyes.

‘Murad, I’d like to do a martyrdom operation,
Insha’Allah
.’

His words hung in the air. Had he really just said that? Was he testing me? I told myself to go slowly, let this play out. I would be neither dismissive nor overly eager to help. I tried to remember the advice of MI5’s psychologist, Luke.

‘Do you have any ideas? You know the Danish newspaper that drew the pictures of the Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him. Do you know anything about its security?’ he asked me.
²

‘I can try to find out,’ I replied.

‘Do you know how to get weapons in Denmark?’ he asked.

‘Oh, that can be done,’ I said. I dropped in my background with the Bandidos.

‘You must understand that what I want is to die in this attack. I want to get shot and I want to be killed “
fee sabeel Allah
[for the sake of Allah]”,’ he said.

Time to call Sunshine, I thought.

Sunshine worked with my senior MI5 handler, Andy, and had become my principal point of contact in the agency. Klang and the Danes had given her that name because she was irrepressibly cheerful. She was in her mid- to late twenties, clearly learning the trade but with an instinct that would carry her a long way. She also had a no-nonsense attitude. Klang had placed his hand on her leg once during an after-hours drink and she’d shouted so loudly that he recoiled like a scalded cat.

Sunshine might not be able to recite Latin poetry like Matt, but she was good at reading faces. She dyed her hair blonde and was pretty in a girl-next-door kind of way. Perhaps, I thought, she cultivated ordinariness because it set people at ease and led them to drop their guard.

‘I need to set up a meeting,’ I told her on the phone later that night.

‘Roger that – eleven a.m.,’ she said, hanging up the phone. She liked the military clichés.

The next morning I waited in the car park of a Sainsbury’s supermarket on the outskirts of Birmingham, our rendezvous. I sat in my car and watched harried mothers deal with carts of shopping and rebellious kids.

My phone started buzzing.

‘Walk to the far end of the car park. You’ll see a red Volvo. Keep going. We’ll pick you up.’

On cue a white van with a ventilation unit on its roof skidded to a stop beside me. Sunshine was there, with the trademark smile.

‘Jump in the back.’