Read Agent Storm: My Life Inside al-Qaeda Online

Authors: Morten Storm,Paul Cruickshank,Tim Lister

Agent Storm: My Life Inside al-Qaeda (3 page)

The large unfurnished hall led to an even larger reception room, and the first thing I noticed was a line of weapons neatly propped against the wall – more AK-47s, vintage rifles, even a rocket-propelled-grenade launcher. This was a group ready to fight at a moment’s notice, but its enemy was as likely a rival tribe as the Yemeni security services.

A dozen men were gathered around a big silver bowl laid on the floor and piled high with chicken and saffron rice. They were young; some had been village boys just a few years ago. And in the middle of them was Anwar al-Awlaki, slim, elegant, with those intelligent eyes that had already seduced so many restless souls in Europe and America. He rose with a warm smile and embraced me.


As salaam aleikum
,’ he said with affection. He exuded natural authority, gesturing at the room as if to underline that he was master of this place and these people.

Awlaki was wearing his trademark white robes, immaculate despite the dust and heat, and the glasses that seemed to confirm his intellect. I was struck by the contrast between the simple and uneducated country boys gathered here and this scholar of Islam, a philosopher turned spiritual guide of jihad. After his greeting, the entire party rose to welcome me. They were all in awe of ‘the Sheikh’, whose magnetism was undimmed despite his seclusion.

‘Come, eat,’ Awlaki said, his American accent tinged by several years back in his Arab homeland.

He seemed delighted to have my company, a welcome interruption to his intellectual solitude. But first he must see to his guest’s needs. After introducing me to the men sitting on the floor, Awlaki found me space among them as the communal meal began. The guests were devouring the chicken and rice with their hands – and for all my familiarity with Yemeni ways I could not help but ask for a spoon. This was a source of huge amusement. I found that a couple of self-deprecating remarks and my Arabic – honed over more than a decade visiting and living in Yemen – set them at ease.

Scrutinizing Awlaki, I saw a detachment, a melancholy about him – as if his isolation in Shabwa and the American-led pressure on him were beginning to take a toll. It had been almost two years since his release from prison, thanks to the intervention of his powerful family. In the early months of 2008 he had left Sana’a and taken refuge in his ancestral homeland. The motto of the Awalik tribe was reputed to be: ‘We are the sparks of Hell; whoever interferes with us will be burned.’

In the year since I had last seen him, Awlaki’s movements had become more furtive – hence my odyssey for the sake of this brief encounter. The Sheikh was constantly on the move from one safe house to the next, occasionally retreating to mountain hideouts around the fringes of the ‘Empty Quarter’ – the ocean of sand that stretched into Saudi Arabia.

Despite the preacher’s seclusion, he continued to deliver online sermons and communicate with followers through email accounts and
texts. His messages had grown more strident – perhaps because of his months in detention, where he was held in solitary confinement most of the time, perhaps because his reading of Islamist scholarship had led him to a more radical outlook. And maybe his banishment to the mountain wilderness had fed a growing hostility to the world.

When the meal was done, Awlaki stood and asked me to accompany him to a smaller room.

I studied his face.

‘How are you?’ I asked, at a loss for anything more substantial.

‘I am here,’ Awlaki said, with a hint of fatalism. ‘But I miss my family, my wives, my children. I cannot go to Sana’a, and it is too dangerous for them to come here. The Americans want me dead. They are putting pressure on the government all the time.’

Drones wandered the skies, he said, but he was not scared of them.

‘This is the path of the Prophets and the pious men: jihad.’

He said the ‘brothers’ were disappointed that I had not made it to Marib; they had heard much about me. As we talked it became clear that Awlaki felt little threat from the Yemeni government, which would rather box the al-Qaeda problem into Shabwa and hope it went away than try to tackle the tribal feuds that had allowed militants space to settle and organize.

Awlaki told me he wanted to see the end of the Saleh government, regarding it as secular and a pawn of America. With relish he described how a recent ambush of government forces had netted heavy weapons, including anti-tank rockets, and inflicted severe casualties. Perhaps they could be transferred to Islamists in Somalia, who were badly in need of such weapons, he mused.

The spiritual guide had become the quartermaster.

A few months earlier, Awlaki had sent a message to al-Shabaab, the militant Islamist group that had brought Sharia to much of Somalia. They were, he said, setting Muslims an example on how to fight back.


The ballot has failed us, but the bullet has not,’ Awlaki had written. ‘If my circumstances had allowed, I would not have hesitated in joining you and being a soldier in your ranks.

The man who had once condemned the 9/11 attacks as un-Islamic when he lived in America had recently written on his blog, ‘
I pray that
Allah destroys America and all its allies … We will implement the rule of Allah on Earth by the tip of the sword whether the masses like it or not.

He had also begun to convey this message to Muslims living in the West, likening their situation to that faced by the Prophet Mohammed and his followers in pre-Islamic Mecca, where they were persecuted and forced to make the journey – the
hijra
– north to Medina.

And just weeks before my visit, writing from his Shabwa oupost, Awlaki had attacked the cooperation of Muslim countries with the US military, saying ‘
the blame should be placed on the soldier who is willing to follow orders … who sells his religion for a few dollars.

It was an argument that would have a deep impact on an officer in the United States army, Major Nidal Hasan, who had already exchanged emails with Awlaki.

Awlaki told me that in jihad it was acceptable that civilians would suffer and die. The cause justified the means. I swiftly disagreed, knowing that my plain-spoken views were part of my appeal to Awlaki, who was prepared to argue the point based on his reading of the Koran and
Hadith
.

Several months before, a young man who had attached himself to Mehdar had travelled to a neighbouring province and killed himself and four South Korean tourists in a
suicide attack
.

‘He is now in paradise,’ one of his friends had told me over dinner. It wasn’t clear to me whether Mehdar himself had any role in the attack or even condoned it – but the commitment of these fighters went far beyond the rhetorical.

I told Awlaki I supported attacks on military targets, but informed him flatly that I could not and would not help him obtain anything that would be used against civilians. I did not want to be scouring Europe for bomb-making equipment that would ultimately result in civilian deaths.

‘So you disagree with the mujahideen?’ Awlaki asked.

‘On this, we will have to disagree.’

I also detected a more toxic animosity towards America, as if Awlaki felt he had been victimized there as a Muslim. He had been arrested in San Diego – though never charged – for
soliciting prostitutes
. The
humiliation still gnawed at him: the way the FBI had ‘let it be known’ that Awlaki’s personal conduct was sometimes not that expected of an imam, a nod and a wink aimed at besmirching his character.

The subject of women was very much on Awlaki’s mind as we conversed into the small hours. Awlaki’s self-imposed exile meant that he no longer had any personal contact with his two wives. One he had known since childhood; they had married in their teens. More recently he had taken a second wife, not yet twenty when they were married. But, he told me, he needed the company of a woman who understood and would share the sacrifices of a jihadi’s life, someone who would be married to the cause.

‘Perhaps you can look out for someone in the West, a white convert sister,’ he suggested.

It was the second time he had broached marrying a woman from Europe and I knew he was now serious. It would not be easy and there would be risks. But I knew there were plenty of women who saw Awlaki as a gift from Allah.

There were other requests. He asked me ‘to find brothers to work for the cause and to get money from Europe and some equipment’.

He also wanted me to recruit militants to come to Yemen for training and ‘then return home – ready to wage jihad in Europe or America’. He did not specify the training – nor what they would be expected to do. But in our two-hour conversation I was left with the impression that Awlaki wanted to begin a campaign of terror attacks in Europe and the US.

The next morning, Awlaki was gone – whether for his own security or because of some meeting I was not told. Instead I spent some time with Abdullah Mehdar, the tribal leader who had met me the previous night. I could not help but admire this apparently honourable man, his unquestioning loyalty to Awlaki. He seemed to have no interest in attacking the West, but wanted Yemen to become an Islamic state with Sharia law. His commitment was so intense that he wept as one of the young fighters leading prayers spoke of the promise of paradise.

They might have a warped world-view, I thought, but these people were not hypocrites. Their loyalty was simple, intense.

I was in a hurry to get away: our flight was due to leave Sana’a for Europe the next evening, and who knew how long the journey back would take? Fadia emerged from the women’s quarters and we prepared to leave.

As those forbidding gates swung open, I discovered our car had a puncture – which was perhaps not surprising after the high-speed drive through the mountains.

Abdullah ran out and helped me change the tyre. There were again tears in his eyes: he seemed to sense an incipient danger.

‘If we don’t meet again, we will see each other in paradise,’ he said, the tears now running down his cheeks.

The mujahideen escorted us to the main road and bid us goodbye. We had left the cocoon.

I knew that in three Western capitals there were people waiting to hear every detail of the hours that I had spent with Anwar al-Awlaki. I needed to get to Sana’a – and then out of Yemen, fast.

CHAPTER TWO

Gangs, Girls, God

1976–1997

The path to my meeting with Anwar al-Awlaki in the mountains of Yemen was – to put it mildly – an unlikely one. I was born on the second day of 1976 in a windswept town on the coast of Denmark. Korsør, with its neat red-brick bungalows, could not be more different from the outer reaches of Yemen. At the edge of undulating farmland on Zeeland, it looks westwards across the grey waters of the Great Belt towards the island of Funen.

Korsør belies the conventional image of Scandinavian tolerance and progressiveness. It’s a gritty, working-class town of 25,000 people, including a sprinkling of immigrants from Yugoslavia, Turkey and the Arab world.

My family was lower middle class – but we were not really a family at all. My alcoholic father left home when I was four. In fact he vanished. There were no weekend visits, no fishing trips or days out. My mother, Lisbeth, seemed to have a weakness for flawed men. She remarried, and my stepfather was a brooding, menacing presence, exploding into fits of violence. It might be the way I was holding my fork or just a word. There was no warning, just a fist delivered with force. My mother did not escape the violence, and a few times left home only to return when promised that things would change. They never did, yet she stayed with him for nearly twenty years.

‘I’m not proud of the childhood you got,’ she would say with
sadness years later. ‘I actually feel that it is my fault that you became what you did.’

As a child I roamed the shoreline, woods and fields around Korsør. I had plenty of time to myself and wanted to be away from home from dawn till dusk. I would build camps with friends, swing ropes over the frigid waters and drop in, yelling.

The few photographs I have from those days show a face full of uncertainty. There is a wariness about my eyes that brings back a host of unwelcome memories. But I also had a manic energy – energy that seemed to invite trouble.

I celebrated turning thirteen by attempting my first armed robbery with two friends, Benjamin and Junior. It was not a triumph of planning or execution. We chose a small store run by an elderly man renowned for his meanness and his cheap cigars. Clad in balaclavas, we waited in the gloom for the shop to close and then tried to burst in as the shopkeeper began to lock up. Benjamin brandished a .22 revolver that belonged to his father.

The man’s strength belied his age as he tried to force the door shut. Perhaps it was the fear of losing the contents of the till that inspired his resistance. Somehow he managed to lock us out.

Humiliated, we turned to a takeaway restaurant nearby. This time I was sent in with the gun.

My heart sank the moment I pulled out the weapon. I recognized the young woman behind the counter, a family friend. I tried to sound older than I was, lowering my voice in a way that must have come across like a record playing at the wrong speed.

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