Agent Storm: My Life Inside al-Qaeda (33 page)

The embassy apparently thought there was nothing out of the ordinary in a Croatian blonde going to Yemen to learn Arabic and told her a visa would be ready the next day. Aminah was elated but nervous. She was leaving behind everything she knew and heading towards the unknown.

My CIA handlers had instructed me that Aminah should not take a direct flight to Yemen. I took her to the Turkish Airlines office in Vienna. I also gave her a new pair of all-weather sandals for Awlaki and an electronic Arabic pocket dictionary the CIA had provided me with, tracking device inserted.

We found a café that didn’t serve alcohol and sat down outside. Every detail of her journey had been considered. Now, as we prepared to part, I realized that I was unlikely to see her again and suddenly felt tender towards her, a yearning to protect her from her own gullibility.

‘I don’t know how I will ever pay you back,’ she said as I left. ‘You’ve done so much for me. May Allah reward you.’

Her parting words lodged in my mind. She was so grateful but I knew I might be sending her into great danger. I could not know whether the American ploy would work, nor what would follow. I glanced back as I walked away. Her blonde hair was cocooned inside her hijab. She looked slight and vulnerable as she sipped her coffee and watched the elegant Viennese stroll by.

Allah wouldn’t reward me, but Uncle Sam might.

The day of her flight I got together with my Danish and American handlers at the Hornbaek villa. It was the beginning of June and one of those endless Scandinavian summer evenings when dusk descends after 11 p.m.

Before Jed and George would let me open a beer they requested I draft Awlaki an encrypted email about Aminah’s travels to send once we got confirmation she had arrived. He had indicated it could take one or two months before his couriers could organize her travel from Sana’a to wherever he happened to be. That had made the CIA jumpy.

I wrote the following:

‘She is all by herself in Yemen, and a month or even two weeks is a very long time for her to wait, as she cannot be as a normal muslim, she constantly have to hide her reality … Try to arrange that she get picked up sooner, she will need support as she is alone.’

The entire Danish squad was present – Soren, Klang, Trailer, Jesper and the analyst Anders along with the spymaster, Tommy Chef. Buddha’s back was better and he had been invited to join the party. He had gone on a diet; we inevitably called him ‘Buddha-lite’. Jed was manning the barbecue, grilling steaks, and the atmosphere was better for Alex’s absence.

Jed got text updates on his phone as Aminah took connecting flights: Zagreb, Vienna and Istanbul. Finally word came that she had landed in Sana’a. There were bear hugs and high-fives.

The next day Aminah sent me an encrypted message from Sana’a to tell me she had arrived. As planned she had bought a Yemeni SIM card for her phone and she provided me with the number. I emailed it to Awlaki later that day.

‘Congratulations brother, you just got rich, very rich,’ Klang texted me.

My reward followed a few days later at a suite in the Crowne Plaza Hotel near Copenhagen. Klang strode in with the CIA station chief, George, and beckoned me to follow them to the elevator. He looked self-important, holding a slim black briefcase tightly in his right hand.

When we reached the room, I discovered that the briefcase was handcuffed to Klang’s wrist, and with good reason.

‘Guess the code,’ George said with a smile on his face.

I looked puzzled.

‘Try 007,’ George said with a smile on the corner of his lips. With a satisfying metallic click the case popped open. It was filled with thick bundles of $100 bills. Each of the twenty-five bundles contained $10,000.

‘How am I going to exchange all this money?’ I asked.

‘That’s your problem, not ours,’ George replied, laughing.

My train ride home to my mother’s house on Korsør was a strange experience. If only my fellow commuters had known what was inside the briefcase, wedged tightly between my knees.

‘My goodness – is this from drugs?’ my mother asked, laughing. In reality, she knew that I was now working for PET, but had no idea what I was doing – and no clue of the Aminah mission that had led to the jackpot. I took a photograph of the bill-filled briefcase. The kid from Korsør, outlawed, jailed, exiled – now standing in his mother’s kitchen with $250,000 from the US government.

After what seemed like an endless wait in late June I received encrypted messages from Awlaki and Aminah. She had managed to join him in the tribal areas:

‘Alhamdidullah I am fine and well,’ she wrote. ‘Everything went good and according to a plan.’

Then the bombshell.

‘I couldn’t take my suitcase from institute, so I need almost everything I left there.’

I stared at the screen, willing the words to change. No tracking device had made the journey with her into the tribal areas. Al-Qaeda had told her to repack her belongings in a plastic bag and leave behind all her electronics. The Americans verified this by sending an informant to her lodgings in Sana’a. They were furious that their carefully laid trap had been evaded by some conscientious al-Qaeda operative.

If the Americans were disappointed with the outcome of the Aminah mission, Anwar al-Awlaki was not.

‘Alhamdulillah we got married. May Allah reward you for all what you have done. However, according to your description of her I expected something different. I am not saying you tricked me or anything. … I do not blame you or your wife because I believe you were sincere and you were doing your best …,’ he wrote to me. ‘So she turned out to be different then what you described. Masha’Allah she turned out to be better than I expected and better than you described:)’

While Awlaki was re-energized by my matchmaking, the CIA and especially the ambitions of Alex and Jed were frustrated that the investment in Aminah had come to naught.

Danish intelligence seemed less worried and planned a trip to Barcelona for what they described as a ‘debriefing’. Soren, Klang and Jesper picked me up from Barcelona airport in a BMW hire car and drove me to a penthouse apartment overlooking the city’s main avenue.

‘I’ve organized some entertainment for the evening,’ Soren announced with a glint in his eye as we sipped champagne. After a dinner at one of the city’s best restaurants we drove through the automatic gates of a secluded villa. Soren handed over a thick wad of euros to a hostess and we were ushered into a low-lit bar. Girls in shimmering chiffon dresses and stilettos lounged on leather sofas. They bore no comparison with the escorts who had hung out at Underground in Korsør, but they had the same vacant look in their eyes.

This was clearly a different sort of debriefing to the one I anticipated.

As the others paired off, I was awoken from my reverie by a petite woman who announced she was ‘Olea from Moldova’. But when I looked up in the gloom all I saw was Aminah. Unease came over me as I thought about how the blonde Croatian was now deep behind al-Qaeda lines, sleeping beside one of the world’s most wanted men.

Olea took me by the hand and led me towards one of the bedrooms down the corridor. I told her that I couldn’t sleep with her because I was married.

‘So you want to talk?’ she said with a sigh. She looked relieved when I asked if there was any way to get high instead. I needed to blow away my guilt about Aminah. Olea walked across the room and took down
one of the oil paintings. From behind its frame she procured a vial of white powder.

I had started using cocaine again at the beginning of the year after learning that my work had resulted in the killing of the tribal leader Abdullah Mehdar. For a while his death had been all that I could think about; the guilt had paralysed me. But the first blinding high in my home in Birmingham had made it all go away for a few hours.

I was bending down next to Olea to snort a line when someone burst into the room. It was Klang.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ he protested. ‘You can’t do that!’

‘Why not?’

‘You can’t do that with us.’

‘Why the hell not?’ I snapped back. ‘First of all I’m only abusing myself. You are abusing women who are probably victims of human trafficking. And it’s not like you’re a police officer on duty here in Spain.’

The Barcelona visit increased the distance I felt from my Danish handlers. I asked myself whether their superiors had any idea of what was going on in far-off places, whether this was a rogue team, or whether PET was rotten.

The next few months would offer some answers.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

A New Cover

Summer–Winter 2010

The Americans froze contact with me after the failure of the Aminah mission.

‘They aren’t happy with you,’ Klang told me. ‘You got a quarter-million dollars, Awlaki got a beautiful blonde, and Big Brother got your charming letter,’ he laughed.

I had written an angry email to Alex, criticizing the American way of doing things and reminding them that we Danes had invented my double life long before he knew of my existence.

For a time it seemed that double life would again be a solely Danish enterprise. The British had vanished; the Americans were smarting over an expensive failure. But I was undeterred. I knew the contacts I had in jihadist groups would soon have the agencies calling again.

I poured much of my energy into a new venture – Storm Bushcraft – an adventure travel company I had registered in the UK. A couple of Birmingham militants had begun questioning how I could travel back and forth to Yemen and East Africa with such ease. I had insinuated that I was making good money from selling drugs for the cause, but I badly needed a watertight cover story.
¹

Adventure travel was in my blood. I had always loved being outdoors and had made camps as a kid in the woods around Korsør. My endurance training with the British in Aviemore had rekindled my enthusiasm. And after my trip with British intelligence to the Ice Hotel in northern Sweden in March 2010, I had gone further north for an Arctic expedition course. The cold was so intense that it was difficult to breathe. But I was in my element – learning how to survive in the Arctic by hunting, tracking and lighting fires.

The course was led by Toby Cowern, a member of the Royal Marines Reserves. He was well regarded among fellow explorers, having trained the winning team for the 2006 Polar Challenge, a race to the North Pole. Toby was one of life’s enthusiasts and had extraordinary powers of endurance. While the rest of us lay exhausted in our snow shelters at the end of each day he would be reading by torchlight.

I sensed Toby yearned to do more than teach Arctic survival. He had been frustrated that a back injury had prevented him from deploying overseas when so many of the Royal Marines were sent to Afghanistan.

I felt he was exactly the sort of person Western intelligence needed to infiltrate jihadist circles overseas. He certainly knew how to deal with extreme situations and his dark complexion meant he could be mistaken for a Middle Easterner.

‘Would you like to do something that makes a difference?’ I asked him as we trudged side by side through the snow.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Would you consider something related to intelligence?’

‘Why? What do you do?’

I laid out the contours of my work without revealing any specifics.

‘I think you could be a huge asset. Would you be interested in meeting some of my friends in the intelligence business?’

‘Why not?’ he replied.

In the midst of the Aminah mission I introduced Toby to Klang, Soren and Anders, at the holiday villa on Roskilde Fjord. We made sure the Americans were long gone. I was told I couldn’t stay in the house while my handlers spoke to him, so took a walk along the shore.

‘We like this guy,’ Klang said to me when I returned.

Soon Toby was working with me on Storm Bushcraft as I tried to build it into a vehicle for my intelligence work. I could persuade jihadis that it was a front to hide my work for the cause. In reality it would help me more deeply infiltrate their ranks.

I was meticulous in setting up the company, purchasing a camping vehicle and outdoor gear. I even approached Marek Samulski, the Australian-Polish convert I had met in militant circles in Sana’a, to design a website and Facebook page. After being deported from Yemen he had moved to South Africa, where he had found work as a web designer, but Danish intelligence still suspected he had ties to radicals. Salmulski agreed to design the site for $5,000, and so unwittingly helped me build the platform for my future work against al-Qaeda.

In order to get photographs and testimonials for the website I advertised expeditions in nature spots in northern Europe at below market rate, and employed two assistants.

My outdoor expeditions had the added benefit of attracting the attention of militants dreaming of jihad.

Earlier that year – before MI5 cut their ties to me – I had infiltrated a group of British-Pakistanis who used to work out at a gym in an immigrant area of Birmingham. As intended, word had spread like wildfire about the Awlaki call I had organized for the doctors in Rochdale, making it easier for me to gain the trust of young radicalized British-Pakistanis.