Agent Storm: My Life Inside al-Qaeda (29 page)

‘My mum’s not so well,’ I said, at a loss for something more original.

Jed was a bundle of nervous energy when I arrived at the designated Copenhagen hotel.

‘It’s time to take Awlaki out,’ he said bluntly.

‘You mean to arrest him?’ I asked, knowing otherwise.

‘Nah, I don’t think so.’

The CIA wanted to use the information I had gleaned to target the man who had both sanctioned and glorified an act of terrorism against American citizens. The gloves had come off.

I was not the only route to the cleric; other intelligence sources were being developed, and the Yemeni government was being heavily pressured into cooperating with a new drive against the militants. But no one had the sort of relationship with Awlaki that I did. As he realized that Western intelligence was stepping up its search for him, his trusted circle would shrink. I would most likely be one of the few on the inside.

Just six weeks after Fort Hood, US Navy warships in the Gulf of Aden fired cruise missiles at suspected al-Qaeda training camps in Yemen. The mission was claimed by the Yemeni government in an effort to mitigate a public backlash against American military action on Yemeni territory. It said that
thirty-four al-Qaeda fighters
had been killed, including some mid-level commanders.

But the intelligence behind that strike was flawed – again demonstrating the difficulty of accurate targeting where there were few
informants on the ground. The cruise missiles
destroyed a Bedouin hamlet
where an al-Qaeda operative and around a dozen other militants were staying. Local officials said many women and children were among the nearly sixty killed in one strike.

‘The Americans just scored a big own goal,’
Awlaki wrote to me shortly after the attack.

That strike took place on 17 December, and exactly one week later came the first attempt to take out Awlaki, in another cruise missile strike.

He was presumed to be attending a meeting of senior al-Qaeda figures who had been discussing a response to the previous attack.
³

First reports indicated Awlaki had been killed
. I was watching the news the next day – Christmas Day, 2009 – while on a short vacation in Scotland when I received a text from Abdullah Mehdar, the tribal fighter close to Awlaki whom I had befriended three months earlier.
‘The tall guy is fine,’
it read.

On 28 December Awlaki himself confirmed his survival in an encrypted email. ‘Phew. Maaaaaan – that was close,’ he said. He also warned me not to get in touch with Mehdar, because he was a ‘hot potato’.

At the very moment I was told ‘the tall guy is fine’, Northwest Airlines flight 253 to Detroit from Amsterdam was approaching the eastern seaboard of the United States. A young Nigerian – Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab – was in seat 19A, above the wing and close to the fuel tanks. As the flight descended through slate-grey skies to its destination he retired to the toilet for twenty minutes.

When he came back, he covered himself with a blanket and tried to detonate an explosive device hidden in his underwear. The main charge failed to explode and he was left with smoking underpants as
several passengers
– perhaps recalling Richard Reid or the heroics of the passengers on board United flight 93 on 9/11 – rushed at him.
⁴

The young Nigerian’s mission had begun in Yemen four months earlier. He had been drawn there from his studies in Dubai, enticed by the velvet tones of Awlaki and the contemplation of martyrdom. In summer 2009 he had trawled the mosques of Sana’a, looking for someone who could put him in touch with the preacher. Eventually someone had taken his mobile-phone number and a few days later he received a text with a phone number. Abdulmutallab was surprised when the voice at the other end was that of his hero, who instructed him to make his case for joining jihad – in writing.

His essay written and his plea for guidance sent, Abdulmutallab was
collected and driven
to Shabwa to meet Awlaki – just a few days after I had left the cleric to travel in the opposite direction.

Abdulmutallab told the preacher that he was ready for any mission, including one that would take his own life. Awlaki arranged for and helped write a martyrdom video for Abdulmutallab to record
. He told him not to fly directly from Yemen to Europe, aware that might provoke suspicion. And his final words, according to the young Nigerian, were chilling: be sure to wait until the plane was over the United States, and
then bring it down
.

In the hours after his arrest a badly burned Abdulmutallab began detailing these instructions to FBI agents by his
hospital bedside
. I would only discover the full extent of what he had confessed later, but my handlers made it clear that Awlaki had been both aware of and involved in the plot. Americans had only just been spared another attack on the homeland, and Awlaki was becoming almost as influential as Osama bin Laden himself.
⁵

More disturbing still
was Abdulmutallab’s claim that Awlaki had consulted directly with the man emerging as AQAP’s master bomb-maker – a young Saudi called Ibrahim al-Asiri. Al-Asiri had built the underwear device. Just months earlier he had built a bomb to be inserted into the rectum of his younger brother, Abdullah. The device contained around 100 grams of the high-explosive PETN, a difficult-to-detect white powder, also later used in the underwear device. Abdullah’s target was Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the head of Saudi counter-terrorism, whose security services had driven the brothers out of Saudi Arabia two years earlier.

Abdullah told the Saudis he wanted to become an informant and was granted an audience with bin Nayef. He went through security checks at the airport, but nothing was found. When he detonated the explosive, the force of the explosion was directed upwards. Abdullah’s body parts were scraped from the ceiling of bin Nayef’s office – but the Prince himself was only slightly injured. Despite the failure of the mission, al-Asiri’s brother and comrades had been emboldened. Never had al-Qaeda come so close to killing a member of the Saudi royal family.

As the FBI’s intense questioning of Abdulmutallab continued in Detroit, a few hundred miles to the south in Washington DC intelligence officials turned their attention to those satellite images of the compound that I had visited.

On 12 January 2010 Yemeni counter-terrorism
commandos descended
quietly on the compound in the al-Hota area of Shabwa, where the previous September I had been housed by the tribal leader Abdullah Mehdar. Their main target was undoubtedly Anwar al-Awlaki, whom I had identified as a frequent house guest. But the terrorist cleric was not there that day. Mehdar refused to surrender and fought to the bitter end, despite being urged by other fighters to flee.

I received the news a few days later from Awlaki himself, in an encrypted email:

‘Remember the guy you stayed with? Its confirmed. He was killed. I had spoken to him a while back and requested from him if the gov attacks to retreat to the mountains. He said that he will fight until he is killed and will not retreat and that is what he did. There were 20 of them and they fought against the gov and killed over 6 soldiers and then they retreated in front of overwhelming forces. He refused and fought from his house until they killed him. May Allah curse them.’ He
added in a follow-up email that he had been with Mehdar just ‘a few days’ before he was killed.
⁶

Later that day, Anders – the PET analyst who had recently joined the team – told me that the Americans had confirmed my information had led to the operation against Mehdar’s compound.
⁷

The news deeply unsettled me. My role in targeting Nabhan had not disturbed me in the slightest; he was a ruthless terrorist involved in the murder of dozens of civilians. Mehdar was different: an apparently honourable man prepared to fight for his beliefs and in defence of his territory. He had no dreams of global jihad, of bringing carnage to the streets of Europe or the skies above America.

Never before in my work as a double agent had I brought about the death of someone I knew. I recalled the last time we had met, when the tearful Sheikh had told me as he helped change the tyre on my hired car: ‘If we don’t meet again, we will see each other in paradise.’

For days I stayed at home in Birmingham, paralysed with guilt. Fadia must have thought I was having one of my dark moods. I found myself incapable of running even basic errands like going to the supermarket. A grim realization haunted me, and I cursed my naivety in not expecting and preparing for it. My work as an informant – to put it coldly – was killing people. And I had no say in who should be a target. The Americans, helped by the Yemeni government, had cast a wide net – and no distinction was drawn between men like Mehdar and men like Nabhan.

But the stakes were now too high and the urgency too great for me to wallow for long. I remembered that one of the fighters who had attached himself to Mehdar had gone on to carry out a suicide bombing against South Korean tourists in Yemen. I never found out if Mehdar had had any role in the attack, but it gave me some solace.

Several weeks after the death of Mehdar,
Awlaki declared war
on the United States in a recorded audio message. ‘We are not against Americans for just being American, we are against evil. And America as a whole has turned into a nation of evil,’ he said calmly and deliberately.

‘Jihad against America is binding upon myself, just as it is binding on every other able Muslim.’

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Anwar’s Blonde

Spring–Summer 2010

On 9 March 2010 I stood outside the international bus terminal on Erdbergstraße in Vienna, waiting for the 11 a.m. bus from Zagreb to arrive. It was cold and breezy, typical of March in the Austrian capital. A steady stream of tourists emerged from the buses and headed to see the palaces of the Habsburgs.

Jed had told me there would be a CIA team shadowing me. I looked at a man in a cowboy hat on the street corner checking his watch. Surely they would not be that obvious.

Then I saw her. She wore a long black skirt as I had anticipated, but instead of being fully veiled, she was wearing a simple headscarf. A few stray strands of blonde hair fluttered in the breeze.

‘
As salaam aleikum
. I’m Aminah,’ she said in soft-accented English, fixing me with her blue-green eyes.

Despite the fact that Awlaki had instructed me to wear Western clothes to avoid suspicion, I had to keep my distance from a woman who was not related to me. I didn’t even shake her hand. But I was impressed; the photos had not done her justice. Aminah was strikingly pretty, with full lips, high cheekbones and an angular nose. She looked several years younger than her age, thirty-two. Gwyneth Paltrow, I thought – Anwar will love this girl.

I had come across her on a Facebook fan page for Awlaki in November 2009 – two months after he had repeated his request that I find him
a wife in the West. I had left a message on the site requesting support and Aminah had replied.

‘What kind of support and are you in direct contact with Shaikh?’ she wrote in her first message on 28 November 2009.

Two days later, after we exchanged several messages, she wrote this:

‘I have one question tho. Do you know personally AAA? And if it is so, may I be so liberal to ask you something?’ AAA was our code for Anwar al-Awlaki.

‘Yes I do know him. Feel free to ask,’ I replied immediately. She had written back:

‘I sent Shaikh a letter by mail, I am not sure if I had his correct email address, but actually I was wondering will he search for a second wife, I proposed him a marriage, and I do not know how silly it is. But I tried. Now, as I am in contact with you there is a possibility for you to get know me better in a way you can recommended me.

‘I seek a way how to get out of this country, and I search a husband who will teach me and whom I can help a lot. I deeply respect him and the all things he do for this Ummah and I want to help him in any way.’

I wrote back:

‘You will be wife number 3, as he already got two wives, however he don’t stay with them because they are in the capital, and only see him now and then. But you will stay with him all the time, as you don’t have a family there. You should expect hardship, and moving from place to place once in a while. Taking care of your duties in house as a wife. Be patience with all what you will see and face, as AAA may be expose to danger etc. and Allah is our protector. Can you accept this?’

She replied within ten minutes:

‘I would go with him anywhere, I am 32 years old and I am ready for dangerous things, I am not afraid of death or to die in the sake of Allah. I didn’t know he has 2 wife already. But I do not mind at all. I want to help him in his work … I am good in housekeeping job [and] I’m willing to be a very hardworking and active wife.’