Read Agent Storm: My Life Inside al-Qaeda Online
Authors: Morten Storm,Paul Cruickshank,Tim Lister
Tucked in an alleyway behind a fish and chip shop, the gym – known locally as ‘Jimmy’s’ – was housed in a concrete and metal shed with a martial arts and boxing area on the ground floor and a weights room and prayer room above. The gym played Islamic chants on loudspeakers to pump up the young men working out. Fliers on the wall advertised paintballing trips. Many of the regulars looked like they were on steroids; some wore long Salafi beards.
‘Jimmy’ owned the gym. He was a British-Pakistani in his early forties with flecks of grey in his long beard. He saw it as his vocation to bring young British-Pakistanis who were deviating from their religion off the streets, away from drugs, and back to the true path. And there
could not have been a better place than the gym for him to instil his world-view.
Jimmy and some of the young radicals who attended the gym were impressed that I knew Awlaki. After training sessions, we would sit and listen to his online sermons. Among their number were several radicals in their late twenties. Jewel Uddin was quietly spoken and collected money locally for ‘religious’ causes. By contrast Anzal Hussain could not have been more boisterous. He had been an overweight spiritual Sufi Muslim before a sudden and complete change in his beliefs turned him into a lean, intensely serious Salafi, with a suitably serious beard to match. He had heard about the training exercises I had run for al-Muhajiroun in Barton Hills, and implored me to do the same for his group.
So one weekend seven of us squeezed into a battered Mitsubishi Pagero to drive up to Wetherby in the Yorkshire countryside. For £2,000 a year I had rented a small patch of woodland among rolling fields from a local farmer.
It did not take long for me to find out that this group had watched too many YouTube videos. When we arrived at our destination, Anzal and two others jumped out of the car with walkie-talkies in their hands.
‘
Allahu Akbar
,’ they whispered urgently, glancing furtively around the woodland. I was dumbstruck.
Anzal then went into a frenzy and started hacking at saplings wildly with a machete. Another joined in with an axe.
‘You can’t cut trees like that – they are Allah’s creation,’ I shouted.
Anzal stopped, machete in mid-air. ‘You got a point, bruv –
Subhan’Allah
, brother,’ he said in his thick Birmingham accent.
Anzal and another of the party kept us all awake that night by exchanging jihadist supplications every few minutes by walkie-talkie from their hammocks. ‘
As salaam aleikum Allah all Mujahideen!
’
The following morning after dawn prayers Anzal grabbed an airgun. He began moving stealthily about the woodland.
‘I’m going to kill some rabbits,’ he announced. I felt embarrassed for him.
Then Anzal froze and went pale. A man and a black dog were walking towards us through the trees. It was the farmer, Dr Mike, who lived just next to the woodland, coming to say hello. The dog was an amiable creature called Billy, wagging his tail at the prospect of meeting some new people. Dr Mike was rather surprised to see a gaggle of wild-eyed young men with long beards and put Billy on a leash. Anzal retreated like he had seen a demon: in some fundamentalist circles black dogs are synonymous with the Devil.
When I saw the movie
Four Lions
later that year I felt I had already witnessed one of its scenes.
Dr Mike ended up reporting what he’d seen to the local police. My MI5 handler Andy was furious the next time I saw him.
‘What the fuck were you thinking – doing this without our prior approval?’ he said. The last thing British intelligence needed was the newspapers finding out an MI5 agent was training would-be terrorists.
Despite all the information I provided on the group, MI5 dropped the ball. On 30 June 2012 – just days before the start of the London Olympic Games – several of them would head to Yorkshire once again.
This time they were travelling with an arsenal of home-made weaponry – including machetes, kitchen knives, sawn-off shotguns, a partially built pipe-bomb and an improvised explosive device built out of fireworks and shrapnel – very similar to those later used by the Boston bombers. As in that later attack, the group had built it by
downloading instructions from Awlaki’s
Inspire
magazine.
Their target was a rally by the English Defence League – an extremist anti-Muslim group – in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire. Fortuitously for the EDL, the rally ended before the British-Pakistanis arrived. Although I had alerted MI5 to the cell several years previously, police only discovered the weapons and the plot because their car was stopped on the way back to Birmingham by a traffic patrol and found to have no insurance.
Police found a message in the car addressed to the EDL. ‘Today is the day for retaliation (especially) for your blasphemy of Allah and His
blessed messenger Mohammed. We love death more than you love life.’
It later emerged that Uddin had also been on the fringes of a terrorist cell arrested in Birmingham in September 2011 which had been plotting a suicide-bombing campaign in the UK. Several of the plotters were familiar to me from Jimmy’s gym and the militant scene in Birmingham, including two of the ringleaders of the cell who received training with al-Qaeda in Pakistan in the spring of 2011. Security services suspected Uddin may have raised money for the cell but had not arrested him.
The EDL plot raised some disturbing questions. Uddin had been under observation by agents just five days before the men drove to Dewsbury, but without someone on the inside MI5 failed to detect the plot. Agents had seen him enter a shop where he purchased the knives but had not followed him inside.
In June 2013 Anzal Hussain, Jewel Uddin and
three others I knew
were sentenced to lengthy prison terms for the EDL plot.
But by the time they were planning to attack the EDL, I had long ceased working for MI5 because of British distaste for the Aminah mission.
Back in 2010 adulthood and paternity had unfortunately not made me any smarter about my resources. Rather than stow away the $250,000 reward, I poured much of it into Storm Bushcraft and travel. PET were delighted; they wanted local eyes and ears in East Africa because of the number of Scandinavian Somalis who had joined al-Shabaab, and they were getting them for free.
Despite the Ethiopian intervention and the presence of an African Union force to protect the government, al-Shabaab had taken over much of central and southern Somalia. And a lot of ethnic Somalis from Europe and North America were fighting for the group. Some had already returned to northern Europe, including a young militant called Mohammed Geele. Danish investigators
established that Geele
had close ties to al-Shabaab and senior al-Qaeda leaders in East Africa, and had emerged as an important player in the group during time he spent in Kenya in the 2000s.
I had come across Geele in the months before the attack. PET had asked me to pay a visit to Kenneth Sorensen, my former associate in Sana’a, who was now back in Denmark. The two of us ran into Geele in a Somali mosque in Copenhagen, and Sorensen suggested we have lunch. Nothing about Geele at that time indicated he was planning an attack, but had I developed a relationship with him I might have picked it up.
2
To me the growing terrorism in East Africa – in both Somalia and Kenya – was an invitation. I calculated that an outdoor adventure business there would allow Toby and myself cover to maintain contact with al-Shabaab. But first I needed to provide Toby with a ‘legend’ – credentials to make him a plausible partner.
Toby had grown his beard long. I taught him everything I knew about Islam and the circles I frequented, and shelled out thousands of dollars to send him on training courses for leading expeditions. We started peppering our emails to each other with Arabic and Islamic expressions to create a digital record of his conversion to Islamic fundamentalism.
I then spread the word to some of my radical circle in the UK that I had joined forces with a member of the Royal Marines Reserves who had converted to Islam. I introduced Cowern to Rasheed Laskar, one of my Sana’a circle, who was now back in the UK, and to a number of radicals in Luton. I won the backing of Awlaki for my plans.
‘I am happy to hear the news of your NGO and insha Allah you are the right person for the job. It is a good long term idea and could serve many needs in the future,’ he wrote to me.
But the critical breakthrough came from al-Shabaab itself. In encrypted emails I outlined to Warsame and Ikrimah how the business would make it easier for me to get money and supplies to the group in Somalia: tents, hammocks, solar panels, water purification units and GPS locators.
‘The NGO’S is really good cover for everything on Business,’ War-same wrote to me.
Ikrimah, by now a rising star among al-Shabaab operatives, was equally enthusiastic about Storm Bushcraft, writing to me: ‘how is shompole, is it a good place? how is the regestration and paper word going on? … this wil b a very good project to all muslims.’
And he ended: ‘May Allah bless this project and keep it away from the eyes and suspicions of the kufar.’
Shompole – a reserve in the Great Rift Valley in the south of Kenya – was one site I was considering for Storm Bushcraft. It had the major advantage of being very remote; there would be no prying eyes.
Ikrimah’s endorsement of the project was critical. His credentials within al-Shabaab had been burnished by the money and equipment I had provided, and his time in Europe had given him deep contacts in extremist circles there. He now supervised foreign and Western recruits joining the group, most of whom transited through Nairobi.
Ikrimah’s status in the group had also been bolstered by his ties to AQAP. And for that I and my Western intelligence handlers were entirely responsible. Awlaki had told me in the Shabwa compound the previous September that AQAP now had an arsenal of anti-tank rockets thanks to the ambush of several military convoys. I relayed the news to Ikrimah and it piqued his interest.
‘The anti-tank mine that brothers got will they be willing to sell them to us and do they have weapons that can hit a tank frm far like the ones hisbullah used to destroy israel merkeva tank? or rpg 29 etc?’ he asked.
Ikrimah asked to be put in direct contact with Awlaki, whom he called ‘Hook’. In early 2010 they started exchanging encrypted messages and began working on a plan by which al-Shabaab recruits would travel to Yemen for training before being sent back to fight – or more ominously dispatched to the West to launch attacks.
‘And as for going to hooks place … then i was told by hook that they want to train brothers and then send them back or to the west,’ Ikrimah wrote to me later that year.
As my visits multiplied and I became established in Kenya I met with al-Shabaab envoys. The local intelligence services seemed overwhelmed by the group’s growing presence and unable to stem the recruitment of young Kenyan Muslims. I would email Warsame or Ikrimah and they would pass on a number to call. Then I would use a Safaricom SIM card to make the call.
A favourite rendezvous was the Paris Hotel in Nairobi; it was there that I met a short bespectacled Kenyan sent by my two al-Shabaab contacts. He wanted to speak Arabic but I insisted we speak in English to avoid attracting attention. I handed him $3,000 to give to Warsame, which Danish intelligence had given me to keep me in favour. Before he took his leave he asked me to hand over the mobile phone I had used to contact him.
‘We need to check it out,’ he said. Realizing I had used the same phone to contact Danish agents I had to think quickly.
‘I never give my phone out – our mutual friend knows that,’ I replied.
Anders in Danish intelligence later told me I was lucky; there were indications al-Shabaab had penetrated Safaricom, the East African mobile-phone company. If they’d obtained my SIM card they could have pulled up my phone records.
A few days after that meeting,
suicide bombers affiliated with al-Shabaab blew themselves up at a restaurant and rugby club in Kampala, Uganda, where sports fans were watching the World Cup Final – killing more than seventy people
.
Many of those involved in the plot were
Kenyan
. Ikrimah later told me his envoy was among those arrested in Kenya for helping plan the attack; the crackdown in Kenya meant it was no longer safe for him to travel from Somalia to meet me in Nairobi. I never found out whether he was involved in the Kampala attack but I got the sense he was taking on a greater operational role for the group. He had developed deep connections to Kenyan militants affiliated with al-Shabaab and told me of his regular trips to Uganda.
I had begun negotiating with the Kenyan authorities and the Masai tribe to establish an adventure camp. Beside Shompole, I was trying to lease a rundown resort at the Masinga Dam, built to harness hydroelectric power from the Tana River.
However, my expenses were beginning to overwhelm me. Money had a habit of running through my hands quickly, and I had not done much bookkeeping after my windfall from the CIA. I had ploughed more than a quarter of the proceeds into the Kenyan venture but it was like throwing money into a sinkhole. I still had no base from which to launch the next stage of my intelligence work. And while the Danes offered moral support, the British were less than delighted to find out that a UK national was involved in my scheme. If word leaked that a Royal Marine reservist had become a jihadist facilitator there would be explaining to do.