Agent Storm: My Life Inside al-Qaeda (27 page)

‘Do you know a Danish convert called Ali?’ he asked me.

‘Of course!’ I exclaimed. ‘He called me during the fighting. He cut the head off one of the Somali
kuffar
.’

‘
Subhan’Allah
,’ Ikrimah replied, incredulous. ‘I was with him: I filmed this blessed act on my phone.’ He went on to cheerfully describe the execution: how Ali had kicked the spy’s legs from under him, and then pinned him down as he struggled for life, and slowly sawn off his head.

After Ethiopian forces finally expelled the Islamic Courts Union from the capital and much of central Somalia, Ikrimah said he had returned to Norway but failed to gain political asylum. He had spent about a year in London and then in 2008 returned to East Africa. Now he was working as a messenger for Warsame and other Shabaab leaders, splitting his time between Somalia and Kenya.

I feared he might mention the arrests in Nairobi that had followed the handover at the Intercontinental Hotel the previous year. But he didn’t and it seemed no one in al-Shabaab had made the link. I had to remind myself to be careful, to be sure my handlers never put me in a situation where someone might begin to turn apparent coincidences into related events.

After dinner Ikrimah picked up the laptop for Warsame from my hotel room.

For the next several days I travelled around Nairobi with Ikrimah in Mohammed’s white Toyota estate. Mohammed was irrepressibly cheerful and spoke Swahili and a decent smattering of English. He lived in the Eastleigh district of Nairobi and like me moonlighted as a taxi driver, but much of his time was spent helping al-Shabaab with their logistics. If you needed someone to drive you to a secret rendezvous in Nairobi, or into Somalia, Mohammed was your man. He also housed Shabaab operatives.

As we hurtled through the chaotic traffic of Nairobi, Mohammed made elaborate manoeuvres to make sure we were not being followed. He’d accelerate quickly when the traffic light went green, then a mile later screech to a halt, and take a random turn. Sometimes he ran red lights to put distance between him and the cars behind.

We stopped off at some of Ikrimah’s favourite haunts in Nairobi, including some of its shopping malls. It was a city he knew very well; I could see how useful he would be to al-Shabaab.

My time with Ikrimah fascinated and alarmed my handlers during my debriefing in Bangkok. He was not on their radar, but was evidence
of al-Shabaab’s growing reach and support network in Kenya. Western intelligence was already stretched trying to deal with al-Qaeda as it metastasized, as well as home-grown radical cells. Now al-Shabaab and its legion of foreign followers had joined the club.

In the spring of 2009, Warsame,
now in command of hundreds
of Shabaab fighters, asked for more equipment, but made the mistake of telling me – via a saved draft email – that the equipment was for a Kenyan called ‘Mr John’. He said once I sent word I was in Nairobi he would arrange for me to be smuggled across the border into Somalia to deliver the equipment and meet ‘Mr John’.

‘Mr John’, it transpired, was Saleh Ali Nabhan – an individual of great interest to Western intelligence. Even though he was only in his late twenties, Nabhan was suspected of involvement in the bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi in 1998, as well as a bomb attack on a resort in Mombasa in 2002, and on the same day a failed missile attack on an Israeli airliner taking off from Mombasa’s airport. He was now regarded as al-Qaeda’s
most dangerous operative
in East Africa – and Warsame and Ikrimah were his protégés.

Al-Shabaab might espouse a medieval view of the world and oppose television and sport, but Nabhan apparently needed a BlackBerry and a laptop. (It is a strange fact of Somali life that amid all the anarchy it had a viable mobile-phone network.)

Jed, now my chief point of contact in the CIA, asked me to come to the Hotel Ascot in Copenhagen to discuss the mission they had in mind.

Among the Danes at the meeting was a new agent, Anders. Ginger-haired, tall and burly, Anders was as informal as his colleagues, but his intelligence and background set him apart. He had studied Arabic in Syria and Lebanon, and understood the mindset of the region. He had served in the military and then studied the rise of Islamist militancy. I took to him immediately, because alone among my handlers he had worked hard to understand what made al-Qaeda and its sympathizers tick. He was principally an analyst, which led the others to tease him as a bookish nerd. They also called him ‘the puppy’ because of his relative youth. But he did his homework and provided me with invaluable details about al-Shabaab’s structure and leading lights.

Jed was even more intense than usual. He scented blood: the chance to take out one of al-Qaeda’s most dangerous. He slid a BlackBerry and laptop to me across the conference table in the penthouse suite. ‘This is for Mr Nahban with our compliments,’ he said.

I had no doubt the CIA had played around with the hardware. I was learning that mobile phones and laptops have a unique digital signature that allows their location to be pinpointed. Even a phone not being used to make calls can be located, because – when connected to a power source – it continuously transmits a weak signal to seek out the nearest base station. The same principle applies to WiFi-enabled laptops, which seek an internet connection.

By the time Nabhan came into our sights, advances in technology were already making it easier for security services. Manufacturers had started rolling out GPS-enabled phones, making it possible for security services to track targets even more precisely. The beauty for the agencies was that even if a phone was turned on in an area completely off the grid, or a laptop was powered up hundreds of miles from the nearest WiFi-hotspot, spy satellites could still lock on to the signal.

Jed said he would fly to Nairobi and link up with CIA agents there to manage the operation. He explained the protocol for getting in touch with him.

‘You’ll need to take a bunch of jabs for Somalia,’ he said with his laconic drawl.

‘Malaria will be the least of my worries,’ I laughed.

Before I departed, PET ran some weapons training at the military firing range in Jægerspris on the northern shore of Zealand. A short, stocky former special-forces soldier taught me to fire a Kalashnikov. Klang and Trailer looked on as I learned to fire at fixed and moving targets. The power of the weapon was overwhelming, but gradually my accuracy improved. I had carried a handgun during my Bandidos days, done target practice at Dammaj and had a Kalashnikov thrust into my hands in Tripoli, but this was my first real training in handling and firing a weapon. It was a humbling but invaluable experience.

It was pouring with rain when I flew into Nairobi on 12 May 2009.

‘It’s been like this for a week now,’ the cab driver told me on the drive from the airport. I booked into the Jamia Hotel, a modest
travellers’ hostel squeezed into a shabby shopping mall near Nairobi’s largest mosque. It was just the sort of place that an international jihadi might pick to stay under the radar.

The rains persisted, sheets of steamy tropical water cascading from the sky.

I sent an email to Warsame to tell him I had arrived. A day later he replied: ‘
Bad news: border closed because of flooding: working on new plan.’
The few roads across the Kenya–Somali border were not in the best repair.

My handlers were across town at the Holiday Inn. We met in a private room on the ground floor overlooking a lush tropical garden. Only a lazy ceiling fan provided relief from the steamy humidity. Jed was clearly not enjoying the monsoon conditions, and even the ever cool Klang looked overheated. Perspiration glistened on his brow and he dabbed his forehead with a monogrammed handkerchief. Despite his discomfort Klang could not help but steal furtive glances at his MI6 counterpart. Emma seemed unaffected by the heat. She was wearing a green safari shirt and beige shorts which showed off her long tanned legs.

She turned to me.

‘Morten: as you seem to have a bit of spare time on your hands, we’d like you to do something for us. There’s somebody in the East-leigh district that we’d rather like you to meet.’

She started explaining the mission.

Jed exploded. ‘You Brits always fucking do this,’ he shouted. His eyes were bulging. He threw his papers and stormed out, slamming the door. The room went silent. Klang and I exchanged looks.

Through the window I could see Jed light a cigarette and pace around in his cowboy boots.

After he finished he came back into the room.

‘All right, let’s continue,’ he said.

Emma said nothing – I had to admire her cool. I guessed Jed was furious because the CIA had funded this mission and he felt the British were trying to take advantage. An intelligence coup that could advance his career seemed to be slipping from his grasp.

The next day another email came in from Warsame. ‘New Plan: Longhair will come to you tomorrow.’

It was a risky enterprise for Ikrimah, who may by now have felt that the Kenyan security services were aware of him. When he came to my room at the Jamia, it was clear we would not be having dinner together again.

‘I can’t hang around, brother,’ he told me. I handed over the phone and computer; he checked them out and looked pleased. This Murad delivers, he seemed to be thinking.

Before he left, he mentioned other equipment al-Shabaab wanted: model aeroplanes with live transmission cameras for surveillance and remote-controlled model cars to which they could attach explosives to attack government checkpoints. I resisted the temptation to raise an eyebrow and promised to look into the possibilities. He hurried away.

A week later I received a coded email from Warsame, which said very simply:
‘Mr John says thanks.’

On 14 September, about three months after the equipment was delivered, Nabhan was travelling along the coastal road that linked Mogadishu with al-Shabaab’s heartland in the south of Somalia. Four dots appeared on the horizon. They were US assault helicopters. Unnoticed by Nabhan, they raced towards the coast above the waters of the Indian Ocean. As they crossed the sandy coastline, a volley of rockets destroyed the two-car convoy. US Navy SEALs descended from the helicopters and dragged the bodies out of the cars to try to identify them. They later positively identified Nabhan. President Obama, who had authorized the kill mission, was immediately notified. The Americans buried Nabhan’s body at sea.

The Danes later told me my equipment had allowed the SEALs to zero in on their target.
³

A week later, I received an email from Ikrimah.
‘Mr John was killed in a US helicopter attack,’
it said flatly. My other al-Shabaab contact, Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, told me that Nabhan’s entourage suspected the Americans had located him by tracking the BlackBerry and computer. He said the group blamed a Somali courier used by Ikrimah to deliver them. Al-Shabaab believed the courier was in Kenya and was trying to track him down and eliminate him.

My connection to Awlaki seemed to put me beyond suspicion.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Mujahideen Secrets

Autumn 2009

As Saleh Ali Nabhan’s body was being lowered into the Indian Ocean, I was preparing to reconnect with Awlaki – a man the Americans had been less successful in tracking. Nearly a year had passed since I had taken him supplies deep in Shabwa province. We had remained in regular touch via our shared draft email folder, but he wanted to meet, and Western intelligence very much wanted me to meet him.

Once again I had to follow his drip-by-drip directions into Shabwa, for the encounter in the compound of the tribal leader Abdullah Mehdar which begins this story. Not only had I found Awlaki (when the CIA seemed to have no idea where he was) but I gained a much clearer idea of his evolution from intellectual guide to organizational brain. Western intelligence agencies were struggling to get a handle on the strength and intentions of AQAP (al-Qaeda in Yemen’s new name after an influx of Saudi fighters) – and on what specific role Awlaki might be playing. Drones could show pick-ups moving, camps and compounds – but not who was in them. ‘Humint’ – raw, first-hand reporting from ground level – was precious.

My meeting with Awlaki that September night provided me with not only a window into his evolution from thinker into planner, but also some hard evidence of that transition.

‘I need to show you something,’ he said – reaching for his laptop and a thumb drive as we sat together after dinner. ‘This is how we need to communicate from now on.’

The thumb drive had encryption software called – appropriately – ‘Mujahideen Secrets 2.0’. Awlaki had already begun using it in his contacts with followers in the West and it was based on a 256-bit key ‘advanced encryption standard’ algorithm. He believed our draft inbox method was no longer secure.
¹

I was fascinated as he demonstrated the software. The programmers had created a few flourishes – an image of an AK-47 flashed up with a muzzle in the shape of a key as the software loaded.