Agent Storm: My Life Inside al-Qaeda (26 page)

Try to sound confident, I thought, as I approached the customs desk and a weathered middle-aged man perspiring through his worn uniform. He looked listless in the stifling heat, dealing with another plane-load of Yemenis returning with whatever goods they could afford to bring back from wealthier places.

Yemeni customs officials are not renowned for their dedication or perceptiveness. We had hoped that even if the equipment was discovered it would not be regarded as suspicious. I was about to find out.

‘Open it,’ the official said – pointing at the plastic belt.

‘I’m going to need a knife or something,’ I told him in Arabic.

Annoyed to have to get off his chair he shuffled off to a side room. I tried hard to remain nonchalant.

The protocol was for me to stonewall. Jed’s orders were simple.

‘On no account tell them you are working for Western intelligence. If that makes you look like you’re working for the bad guys then so be it. Leave it to us to sort out through diplomatic channels.’

The customs man returned empty-handed.

‘Go,’ he said.

It was a lucky break and, I hoped, an omen for the mission.

The Nairobi operation the previous year had shown that al-Qaeda affiliates always wanted more equipment, things that were difficult to obtain locally and expensive. My supplying that equipment was a promising way to find out more about their members and plans. By now, AQAP had become the most effective of all al-Qaeda’s franchises. The month before we arrived with supplies for Awlaki, it had carried out a coordinated
gun and car attack
on the US embassy in Sana’a. Ten Yemenis had been killed. The attack had induced a state of high anxiety among Yemen’s security services.

I decided to lie low for a few days before contacting Awlaki. I would have to take Fadia with me. Driving down solo into Yemen’s southern badlands alone as a white European was not an option. I had told her I was taking supplies to Anwar and left her with the impression that they were to help his pastoral work.

‘And then on the way back, why don’t we see your relatives in Taiz?’ I said.

She was quietly pleased that I wanted to see her family.

Less than a week after we arrived, I received a text message from Awlaki. He told me to set out south towards Aden and to text him once we got to the port city so that he could provide further directions. He was more conscious of security than before and would only specify the meeting place once I was through the final checkpoint. And he didn’t want to use the phone because he was concerned that American voice recognition software might identify him. He clearly saw himself as more of a target than the Americans did.

We set off shortly after dawn. As we navigated the checkpoints on the road out of Sana’a I was nervous about the equipment hidden in the trunk. Now we were heading towards areas where al-Qaeda was active, the discovery of night-vision goggles by some over-zealous police officer would require some explaining.

The journey south towards Taiz is dramatic. The road descends from the Sana’a plateau for a while until the Yemeni Highlands come into view. October marks the end of the rainy season in Taiz, and the mountains were shrouded in morning mist.

We found lodgings that evening in Aden, and I texted Awlaki again. He told me to take the road up the coast. We were essentially driving an exaggerated U-shaped route to avoid the more serious checkpoints. Fadia accepted the convoluted journey as a typically Yemeni inconvenience. If we were stopped and questioned, she would explain that we were going to see friends in Ataq. But for some reason – perhaps because Aden was more secular than Sana’a – vehicles tended to get less scrutiny along the coast road.

The next morning we passed through lush oases close to the ocean. Camels loped beside the road, telegraph poles bent by the onshore wind stood like matchsticks against the emptiness of the coastal plain. My final instructions were to leave the coast and climb towards the mountains. Just one look at the impenetrable ranges ahead was evidence enough of why al-Qaeda had made this area home.

The rendezvous point was near an isolated hamlet in Shabwa province. Seas of boulder-strewn shale stretched towards the horizon, to be met by steep, craggy mountains. Even at the end of October, the midday heat would generate a rippling haze. I marvelled at the survival of the few plants and bushes that dotted the lunar landscape.

I was especially nervous around a town called Lawdar, which had seen tribal violence and abductions, and was – even by Yemeni standards – an area where the word of the central government had little impact.

After several hours in the car, Fadia and I finally approached the rendezvous point in a flat, parched valley surrounded by mountains. There was an eerie beauty in the desolate landscape.

I was relieved to see the concrete structure that Anwar had told me to look for. A dusty vehicle with a canvas roof was parked a short distance away. Inside was Anwar with a young bodyguard who had a thick pitch-black beard and was clutching a Kalashnikov. I parked the car, leaving Fadia inside, and walked up to them. The cleric got out and embraced me.

‘
As salaam aleikum akhi
[brother], finally!’ he said. ‘This is my nephew, Saddam,’ he added.

Anwar was wearing a green military camouflage jacket, bin Laden style, over his robe. He had a Yemeni ceremonial dagger and a revolver in his belt and a Kalashnikov was slung over his shoulder.

I tried not to look surprised. The preacher had become a fighter.

I fetched the sports bag with the supplies: the laptop, night-vision goggles, headlamps, matches, sandals for the mujahideen and solar panels, and we walked to the shade of a solitary tree beside the road. It was the first tree I had seen for many miles. But it provided more than shade. Al-Qaeda leaders had begun instructing fighters to use the shelter of trees in case drones, now being used by the US in Pakistan’s tribal areas, should also be deployed to Yemen.

British agents had asked me to purchase the solar panels at a Maplin’s electronics store and had shown me how they worked. The laptop had a backstory to it. At the MI5 warehouse in Birmingham a technician had provided me with the computer and told me that some of the components had been switched for identical but ‘modified’ parts. Even experts would not find the programs they had installed. I assumed their modifications were designed to locate Awlaki through the laptop’s WiFi signal as well as upload data if he ever connected to the internet.

But at the final meeting before the mission, my Danish handlers told me they were exchanging the British laptop for one supplied by the Americans. Now that I had told the CIA of Awlaki’s ‘operational status’ tracking him down had become a priority for the Americans. Big Brother was pulling rank.

I handed Awlaki the laptop and the other equipment and explained how the solar panels functioned. I also gave him the $5,000.

He put it in his breast pocket without uttering a word. He looked disappointed I had not brought more. But it somehow seemed judicious not to provide his every need all at once. After all, I was a struggling jihadi.

‘
Alhamdulillah
, that’s all I could raise so far, brother,’ I told him.

After fifteen minutes sitting under the shade of the tree by the roadside, I returned to the car.

‘Anwar says we should eat,’ I told Fadia. ‘Come, follow us.’ We
walked towards the building nearby. It was a restaurant, but only half built, and I wondered how it stayed upright.

Two men in the doorway looked suspiciously at my red hair and beard. This was bandit territory. Even Yemenis not from the area were kidnapped for ransom. But we were under Awlaki’s protection and therefore safe. Or so I hoped.

The owner greeted Awlaki warmly and asked his wife to escort Fadia to the women’s section. He then took the cleric and me up to the roof, where we sat on the concrete and ate platters of lamb and rice on tin plates. A merciful breeze had begun to drift through the valley. When Awlaki finished eating he tapped on the wad of dollars in his breast pocket, and looked me straight in the eye.

‘The money from the brothers – can it be used to buy weapons?’ he asked.

For a fraction of a second, I considered how to reply.

‘You can buy anything you like with this money.’

We did not stay long. I wanted to reach the coast again before dusk. Even then we would have a long, arduous trek to Taiz and Fadia’s relatives. So immediately after we finished eating, I told Awlaki we had to go. He seemed disappointed. Although we would stay in touch, I would not see him again for nearly a year.

As the restaurant disappeared in a haze of dust and heat behind us, I handed Fadia my phone.

‘Could you shoot some video of the scenery? It’s so spectacular and I doubt we will ever see this part of Yemen again.’

But I had other reasons for wanting the footage. I knew Jed would be interested to see the area where I had met the Sheikh. It might also give him and his colleagues pause, I thought. Winning a war in this sort of territory would not come easily.

We weaved through the ravines, the hairpin bends apparently never-ending. At the top of the climb a vast barren panorama opened up below us, like a lunar sea, and we began driving downhill towards the sea.
²

Two weeks later I was in a luxurious Bangkok hotel suite being debriefed by my intelligence handlers. Fadia and I had flown in for our CIA-sponsored honeymoon, although I led her to believe that I’d been saving some money from construction and driving jobs to pay for the trip.

I had slipped away to meet my handlers on the pretence that I wanted to do some shopping.

I recounted every detail of the meeting in Shabwa and our conversation about the money.

‘You just passed the test, brother,’ Jed told me. ‘He was testing you to see if you were genuine. If you were working for an intelligence agency, you’d have to say no, this is for food or something like that.’

Jed handed me an envelope with a $6,000 bonus in cash after the meeting. ‘This is for a helluva good job – enjoy your honeymoon,’ he told me. He was not so subtly delivering a message: when it came down to choosing between the CIA and the British, it literally paid to be their guy.

Awlaki never tested me again.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Killing Mr John

Autumn 2008–Spring 2009

Through 2008 I kept in contact via draft emails with Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, the stringy Somali youth I had first met in Birmingham. What he lacked in ability he had made up for in dedication. He was now one of al-Shabaab’s senior operatives, his CV no doubt burnished by my connecting him with Awlaki.

To keep the communications going MI5 authorized my sending the first in a series of cash transfers to Warsame via Dahabshiil, an African money transfer company with a branch in Birmingham.
¹
In another email he requested I supply him with chemical suits and rubber gloves so al-Shabaab could experiment with explosives. I purchased this equipment with funds from the British but was never greenlighted to deliver it.

During the second week of November – just before my delayed honeymoon in Thailand – I returned to Nairobi to deliver new supplies Warsame had requested. He wanted another laptop and some cash. My Western intelligence handlers had welcomed the opportunity for me to enhance my credentials with the group, and had no doubt planted another tracking device in the laptop they supplied me. Warsame sent a Kenyan al-Shabaab operative who had lived in Norway to meet me. He called himself Ikrimah al-Muhajir.
²

‘You’ll recognize him because of his long hair,’ Warsame had told me.

We met at a Somali restaurant in Nairobi. He walked in with a confident stride and sat down at the corner booth I had chosen. Ikrimah did indeed have long, flowing locks and from that day my nickname for him was ‘Long Hair’. Trailing behind him was his driver, Mohammed, a Kenyan of Somali ethnicity.

Ikrimah was built like one of Kenya’s long-distance runners, and had a trimmed beard and gleaming white teeth. He was of Somali and Yemeni descent – on his father’s side he belonged to the Ansi tribe in Yemen. He would later start changing his appearance to evade detection, at one point wearing a thick Saddam Hussein-style
moustache
.

We bonded over our shared Scandinavian background. He spoke Norwegian, as well as English, French, Arabic, Somali and Swahili. He had been brought up in Kenya and his family were middle class. Ikrimah spent his early years in Mombasa on the Indian Ocean coast, before the family moved to Nairobi. He told me he had moved to Norway four years previously to look for work and had sought refugee status.

‘They never let me settle there,’ he said. ‘I never really felt accepted. I began to spend more time in the mosque.’

I found Ikrimah cheerful and sharp – smarter than Warsame, who had sent him. There was an intense ambition about him and an unshakable commitment to Holy War. Over goat meat and
canjeero
– a Somali-style pancake bread – he revealed he had been in Mogadishu, fighting for the Islamic Courts Union, when Ethiopian troops invaded in 2006.