Agent Storm: My Life Inside al-Qaeda (28 page)

I began taking notes.

‘You can find the software online. Never download the program to your hard drive and never load it when you are connected to the internet,’ he told me. He explained that authentic copies of the software had a particular digital fingerprint displayed in a pixilated pattern on the screen which I would need to check.

‘To communicate with me you need to create a private key,’ he said, showing me how to generate it. The private key was in essence a unique secret digital code which I could use to lock and unlock messages sent to me, protected by a personal password and saved inside the program on the thumb drive. It seemed that Awlaki had delivered this tutorial before.

‘Now you need to create a public key,’ he said, showing me how to navigate the program. ‘We can exchange our public keys through email and then start sending each other encrypted communications. When you receive an encrypted email click on the text and copy it, then open up the program. The software will prompt you to enter both our public keys and the password for your private key. Then paste the text into the program and hit decrypt.’

I was amazed how a random assortment of letters, numbers and symbols turned within fifteen seconds into clear prose. To encrypt messages I would carry out the same steps in reverse. It was possible to encode just about any file using this method, including images and video. Anwar told me to send the actual scrambled message via an anonymous email account, but I found out later that an encoded message could equally be copied on to a thumb drive.

‘We believe this method to be secure but obviously be cautious what you say on it all the same,’ he said.

Awlaki had become very aware of security. As I was about to retire, exhausted at the end of a nerve-wracking day, he stopped me.

‘There’s one other thing. You know Mohammed Usman?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He stayed with us in Sana’a for a while.’

‘He came down here – he said he was suspicious of you.’

‘Really?’

I was stunned, and anxious.

‘Yes, he said he suspected you were working for British intelligence. Of course, he had nothing to back up such a ridiculous accusation. I thought he was a strange guy.’

‘When was he here?’ I asked.

‘A few days ago. I don’t know where he went.’

‘Well, he won’t be staying with us again,’ I laughed – trying to make light of an awkward moment. Awlaki seemed to be studying my expression intently.

I had met Usman by accident, or so I had thought. On my way to Yemen from Europe, I had been politely but firmly detained by two security officers at Dubai airport and taken to a detention room. My retinas were scanned, I was fingerprinted and held for eight hours. There were few questions, and only a cursory check of my documents and belongings. Before dawn the following morning, bleary-eyed and irritable, I was escorted to the gate of the Yemenia flight to Sana’a. It was half empty, but I was given a seat next to a man in his thirties who looked as if he were Pakistani.

Halfway through the flight he introduced himself as Mohammed Usman; he was from Leyton in East London. He knew some of the
‘brothers’ in Luton and wanted to meet some like-minded radicals in Yemen. But he had no entrance visa. Would that be a problem?

I suggested that he tell the Yemenis that he had come for a wedding. It had worked before – and it worked for him. I offered him a place to stay for a few nights and he began asking about Awlaki; he wanted to meet him. I had not even told him that I knew the cleric, but replied cautiously that it might be possible.

‘But how do I know you are not a spy?’ Usman asked.

He was smiling but there was an intent in his question that I found troubling.

‘I could ask the same about you,’ I retorted.

Despite my misgivings I had connected him with some jihadist contacts and through them he had reached Shabwa – and Awlaki, only to repay my hospitality with scurrilous allegations.

I replayed in my mind time and again the way Awlaki had raised the issue and then dismissed it. I was as sure as I could be that he gave Usman’s claims no credence, and on the drive back to Sana’a I began to think more optimistically about what the trip had achieved, and especially about how the CIA would salivate over the Mujahideen Secrets software.

As Fadia dozed beside me, I sent the briefest text message to Klang.

‘Fucking good,’
it read.

As soon as I landed in London the following day, I was summoned to a debriefing. Andy and Kevin were there from MI5, Jed from the CIA, and two Danish agents. The British Foreign Intelligence Service, MI6, was represented by Emma.

I recounted every detail of the journey and meeting – the roads, the terrain, Anwar’s demeanour and security. And I showed them the encryption software as an encore.

As a thank you for my efforts, the British had arranged for me to go on a bushcraft outdoors course in East Sussex. It was run by Woodlore, the company owned by Ray Mears, a survival expert who had turned bushcraft into a television series and a successful business.
²

As we sat around the campfire, exchanging introductions, I found out that the dozen or so participants were bankers, lawyers and accountants from high-profile firms in London. They described their day jobs with smug satisfaction.

‘So what line of work are you in?’ the instructor asked me when it was my turn.

‘I’m a taxi driver in Birmingham,’ I replied.

I caught some condescending glances. If only they knew that earlier that week I had been in a remote corner of Yemen on behalf of Western intelligence.

No sooner had I left the Sussex countryside than I was asked to a meeting in Copenhagen. Jed showed me satellite images of the village where I had met Anwar and Abdullah Mehdar. He asked me to pinpoint the compound where I had stayed. There were more images from a different angle and then a third.

I could clearly make out the compound and its high walls and was quietly astonished that a satellite photograph could provide such fine resolution.

‘That is definitely the place,’ I said.

‘Thank you,’ said Jed – his glacial eyes betraying no satisfaction but the smirk at the corner of his mouth directed at the British contingent.

I detected a growing tension between the Americans and the British, who had very different priorities for me. I began to wonder whether Usman had been an MI6 plant. Perhaps they wanted to sow confusion among Awlaki and the AQAP leadership. Perhaps they were testing my loyalties; perhaps they wanted their own man close to the action – rather than acquiesce to Jed and all his money as ringmaster? The spy business was all about ‘perhaps’.

At the end of the meeting I took Emma aside and told her about the mysterious Usman.

‘That’s very interesting,’ she said and asked a few more questions about him.

I tried to read her expression. She had been well trained.

‘Come on – I know he’s working for you. Don’t play this game with me,’ I said.

‘No – you’re mistaken, Morten. He’s not.’

Perhaps it was fatigue or a budding paranoia that inevitably fed off this double life. I would never know for sure because Usman never resurfaced. But the incident made me edgy. I had always enjoyed a good relationship with my British handlers, but was apprehensive that they might be using me to develop their own exclusive sources.

My anxiety was fed by another episode when I returned home to Birmingham. As I climbed into my venerable Jaguar one morning, I noticed that the panels above the glove compartment had come loose. I thought they’d been tampered with and a bug had been hidden. I furiously ripped out the panels but found nothing.

I told Sunshine that I needed a meeting with the MI5 station chief in Birmingham. We met at a rundown local hotel, in a room which reeked of stale cigarette smoke. He looked like a middle-aged football hooligan.

He lit up a cigarette while he heard me out, and then took a long drag before responding.

‘Morten, we trust you – we wouldn’t do something like that.’

‘Do you think I’m stupid?’ I replied.

‘I swear on my son’s life.’

I doubted he even had a son, but didn’t press the point further. From that point on I presumed my car, my phone and my home were bugged by MI5.

Perhaps the pressures were beginning to get to me. By now I realized that loyalty and trust were not exactly overflowing in this business; no one got results by fair play. I might be discarded or betrayed at any moment as priorities shifted and competition intensified. For my handlers, the first rule of the game seemed ruthlessly simple: the ends always justified the means.

Even if they were not playing me, maybe one of the agencies would get careless, or I would slip up – and be unmasked by the groups I had infiltrated. The first Nairobi mission had made it all seem so easy.

I had no one to confide in, no one to test my suspicions. Fadia still knew nothing, and as the deceit went on it became impossible to
introduce her to this dark world. My mother knew vaguely what I was doing but had never been a sympathetic shoulder. The loneliness that came with being an agent began to gnaw at me.

In the autumn of 2009, the CIA was concerned by Awlaki’s evolving role, but it was an event in Texas that transformed a figure of growing interest into a target of urgent necessity.

At 1.30 p.m. on 5 November, a 39-year-old US army major named Nidal Hasan entered the sprawling Fort Hood base, some sixty miles from Austin. A psychiatrist, Hasan was assigned to the Soldier Readiness Processing Center, where troops received medical evaluation before and after deployment.

Hasan was armed with an FN Five-seven pistol, a powerful handgun which he had fitted with two laser sights. In the space of a few minutes he shot dead thirteen people and injured thirty more. Some witnesses said they heard him exclaim: ‘
Allahu Akbar
’ as he began shooting. There was so much blood at the scene that the first responders kept slipping as they tried to attend the wounded.

In Birmingham it was late evening when the news networks began reporting the story. I was at home with Fadia when I stumbled across the breathless breaking coverage. To begin with I had no idea there was some terrorist motive. When I heard the name of the suspect late that night, I sat up.

Hasan apparently picked out personnel in uniform during his brief rampage, which ended when he was shot and wounded outside the centre. As he was taken into military custody, an urgent investigation began into his background and contacts. But even before the horrendous carnage of that day, the FBI knew Hasan had been exchanging emails with Anwar al-Awlaki.

Between December 2008 and June 2009,
Hasan had written some twenty emails to Awlaki – focusing on whether it was permissible for a Muslim to serve in a foreign army and the conditions for jihad. He had been troubled and radicalized by the accounts of combat he heard from soldiers who had returned from Iraq and Afghanistan. He was clearly in awe of the cleric, whom he had heard preach at the mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, in 2001.

In one email he said he could not wait to join Awlaki in the afterlife, where they could talk over non-alcoholic wine. Two FBI Task Forces had reviewed the intercepted emails and concluded there were no grounds for action against Hasan, because the communications were seen as within the scope of an army psychiatrist’s legitimate area of interest and research.

By the morning of 6 November 2009, those communications were seen in a very different light. Federal agencies began a rushed review of communications that other Americans might have had with Awlaki, trawling through databases of intercepts.

I was not surprised that eventually someone in direct contact with Awlaki had committed an act of terror. That likelihood had increased as the cleric’s views had become more incendiary. And Awlaki was quick to celebrate Hasan’s attack. Within four days of Fort Hood, the cleric wrote on his website:
‘Nidal Hasan is a hero
. He is a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people.

‘The US is leading the war against terrorism, which in reality is a war against Islam. Its army is directly invading two Muslim countries and indirectly occupying the rest through its stooges,’ Awlaki added. And he encouraged other Muslims in America to follow Hasan’s example.

‘The heroic act of brother Nidal also shows the dilemma of the Muslim-American community. Increasingly they are being cornered into taking stances that would either make them betray Islam or betray their nation.’

It was an uncompromising clarion call to Muslims living in the West, urging them to violence.

I had seen at first hand Awlaki’s hold over his followers in the West. In March that year I had organized a secret fundraising call via Skype with a group of British-Pakistani supporters in Rochdale. Among them were several doctors eager to contribute to jihad. They listened spellbound to Awlaki’s assured answers on a variety of religious topics. MI5 had given its blessing to the event to bolster my credentials in militant circles, on the condition no funds raised reached the cleric.

I still have a recording of the event. Awlaki was as adept at fundraising as any American politician:

‘The enemy is oppressing the Muslims. It becomes important for every brother and sister who knows the
Haq
[truth] to act upon it … if Allah has blessed you with wealth then you should support the Islamic causes, whether we are talking about Somalia, Afghanistan or Iraq … and not just sit on the sidelines and watch.

‘When it comes to Yemen because it’s not on the news, it’s being forgotten and therefore I would encourage every brother who has the capability to assist.’

But now – in lionizing Nidal Hasan – Awlaki must have known that he was crossing a Rubicon. I suspected it would be a matter of hours before I was called to another meeting. I was looking forward to a weekend with my children, but would have to bow to the inevitable.

I told Fadia I might need to go to Denmark.