Agent Storm: My Life Inside al-Qaeda (35 page)

In late 2010 Toby Cowern was planning to relocate to Kenya from his Arctic Circle base in Sweden when he
received a summons
from the British embassy in Stockholm. An MI5 agent led him to a back room and told him it would be ‘in his interest’ to drop all plans involving me. The agent never spelled out why Toby should abandon the project; perhaps he didn’t need to. The idea of a Royal Marine reservist consorting with al-Shabaab was just too much of a risk. Toby had no choice but to comply and my Kenyan venture began to unravel.

My confidence in my handlers was not enhanced when they asked me to take part in a sting operation that would have probably blown my cover.

Danish intelligence had learned that a group of radicals had bought a Kalashnikov from a Copenhagen drug dealer. The buyers were Swedes of Arab origin, and several of them had already travelled to jihadist battlegrounds.

A Tunisian in his mid-forties was the group’s leader. He had recently returned from Pakistan, where he was suspected of having links with senior al-Qaeda operatives
.

Klang asked me if I could travel to Copenhagen, where several of the group were staying.

‘We believe they are doing target reconnaissance. We’d like you to befriend them and find out their plans,’ he said.

The implication that I could sidle up to members of this group as they plotted a terrorist attack in Copenhagen was another disturbing sign of Klang’s lack of tradecraft, or even basic common sense.

‘Are you out of your mind?’ I said. ‘I don’t know these guys from Adam – don’t you think they’re going to be just slightly suspicious?’

As it turned out the surveillance of both Swedish and Danish intelligence would be enough to thwart their plans. Several weeks later in the early morning of 29 December the four men crossed the Øresund bridge from Malmö to Copenhagen. They had a machine gun, ammunition, a silencer and dozens of plastic wrist straps. Wiretaps suggested that within days they planned to storm the offices of
Jyllands-Posten
in Copenhagen, the newspaper that had first published controversial cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.
³

All four were arrested later that day.
The suspected Swedish-Yemeni mastermind of the plot went to ground and evaded capture. He soon headed to Yemen
.

On a heavily overcast day early in December I arrived at Heathrow airport from Kenya to reassess my future. The skies matched my mood. Perhaps it was time to quit the spy game; I seemed to be running into opposition at every turn and was spending my own money to help the Danish government.

On the other hand I had moved in jihadist circles for more than ten years. I knew the networks and relationships among the groups, even though it was still difficult to predict who among the would-be jihadis would go operational.

I was reminded of just how difficult on 11 December 2010.
A man plotting carnage on a huge scale drove into the centre of Stockholm with home-made explosive devices
. Parking on a busy street amid hundreds of Christmas shoppers, he sent emails to Swedish intelligence and news outlets, saying his actions were in revenge for cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed published in the Swedish press and for the Swedish presence in Afghanistan. He then set fire to his car and walked away.

His plan was to wait until crowds converged on the burning vehicle, then set off a pressure-cooker device on the passenger seat by walkie-talkie. He had positioned himself so that those fleeing the scene would run towards him. He would then trigger devices in a backpack and waist belt.

The explosives in the car did not detonate. CCTV video showed that in a nearby street the man was trying to blow himself up. For ten minutes he walked through the area, trying to make the device attached to his stomach work. Finally part of the bomb exploded, killing the man instantly. No one else was hurt.

Later that day I discovered that the lone bomber was my former Luton friend Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly. I had met him in a department store in the town and played football with him. Of all my circle in Luton I thought him the least likely to carry out an attack. In our discussions he had actually criticized me for my radical views. But that was more than five years ago.

Taimour had been operating on his own after training in Iraq. It seems no one else among the Luton set had any idea that he was preparing an act of terrorism, with the
exception of Nasserdine Menni,
an asylum seeker from Algeria who was subsequently convicted of sending funds to Taimour for the attack. It was possible that had I kept up my contacts in England I might at least have heard of Taimour’s travel to Iraq, which in itself would have been warning enough. But after the falling-out of the intelligence services I was not allowed to work sources in the UK. So I laughed when Klang called me from Copenhagen.

‘The Brits have asked us to get in touch with you about Taimour. Do you know his friends in Luton?’

‘I don’t think he was radicalized here, or at least if he was it was after I last saw him – and that was more than five years ago.’

The idea that the British could turn me on and off as a source was ridiculous. But I was soon to discover that they were not the only ones who wanted to reactivate me when it suited them.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Target Awlaki

Early 2011–Summer 2011

There was a lull in my intelligence work in early 2011. The Danes were still paying my retainer but had no overseas missions. Instead I focused on developing Storm Bushcraft. I had begun to see the venture as a real business rather than as just a cover. After all I was sinking my own funds into it. I started thinking about a new life. My negotiations to buy the resort near the Masinga Dam in Kenya were finally coming to a head. Despite my dwindling bank balance, I had paid $20,000 for the option to buy the property outright within a year.

Most of the winter was spent brooding in my house in Coventry. Everyday life seemed so mundane. The gloomy skies and early darkness only added to my sense of restlessness. Although the British had cut ties to me, I was still on PET’s books and had to keep up the pretence that I was Murad Storm, the zealous extremist. Living that lie had begun to gnaw at me. Was it really still worth it? From time to time the anxiety I felt about Abdullah Mehdar and Aminah would return, and I’d turn back to self-medicating with cocaine, snorting it joylessly alone at home.

In February I noticed on Facebook that my high school in Korsør was organizing a reunion. I signed up. I had lost contact with almost all the friends I had in Korsør as a teenager and it would be good to spend a weekend with them. But at the last minute I decided not to go – afraid that photographs of the occasion might appear online, showing
me mixing with the
kuffar
. I was living in a prison of my own making.

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of that life was the constant need to deceive Fadia. I had managed to keep the cocaine a secret from her. But I had to explain my frequent absences overseas, where the money had come from for my investment in Storm Bushcraft, the negotiations in Kenya. I created a fiction that she seemed to believe. I told her that after I had recovered my faith, I had met some devout Muslims in Sana’a – from Yemen and Saudi Arabia – who wanted to build a retreat in the Kenyan bush for pious young men to attend. I claimed they knew of my Bushcraft experience and had raised the money to contract me to research the possibilities. It was a chance to build something valuable, I told her, and one that might open up other opportunities. There were one or two elements of truth in what I told her, but a big lie was at the heart of the story. Fadia had no idea that I had received $250,000 from the US Treasury – in cash – and no idea that it was quickly vanishing.

On the weekends that I had custody of my kids I longed to tell them that my Islamic robes, my beard, my prayers were all a sham, and I was secretly working against terrorists. But I never did. Such knowledge would only have put them in danger. And in any case even my eldest, Osama, was only turning nine.

It depressed me that the only people who knew my role, my real purpose, were my Danish handlers, but our contacts had become limited to phone calls. I felt redundant. The last thing I was expecting was another approach from the CIA. But, one morning in April, I received a text from PET. Big Brother had lost track of Anwar al-Awlaki and needed my help.

Klang said a ‘very significant sum’ was on the table from the Americans if I could lead them to the cleric. Perhaps the US government budget crisis was not as grave as I had thought, or perhaps they were that desperate. They had good reason to be.

Awlaki was rapidly becoming the face of al-Qaeda. Six months previously he had been involved in an ingenious AQAP plot to blow up US-bound cargo planes with explosives concealed in printer cartridges. Two bombs designed by master bomb-maker Ibrahim al-Asiri and inserted into laser printers had been dropped off at FedEx and UPS
offices in Sana’a. They passed through airport security undetected and were then loaded on to the first leg of their journey towards the United States. Only an intelligence tip to Saudi authorities allowed authorities in Dubai and the UK to eventually intercept the deadly cargo.

Hours later President Obama
addressed the American public,
telling them that a dangerous plot had been averted.
¹

Al-Asiri had concealed the explosives so well that bomb disposal teams at both locations initially believed the printers were not bombs – even after examining them. It was the most sophisticated al-Qaeda device that Western counter-terrorism officials had ever seen and they said it had the potential to bring down a plane.

Awlaki had himself played a role in preparations for the attack. He had
asked Rajib Karim,
a British Airways employee in the UK, to provide technical details about X-ray scanning equipment deployed at airports and whether it was possible to get packages on board planes to the United States without their being scanned.

‘Our highest priority is the US. Anything there, even on a smaller scale compared to what we may do in the UK, would be our choice,’ he wrote in an encrypted email to Karim.

According to the US government, Awlaki
‘not only helped plan and oversee the plot but was also directly involved in the details of its execution – to the point that he took part in the development and testing of the explosive devices that were placed on the planes’.

US officials spoke of Awlaki’s involvement in ‘numerous other plots against the US and Western interests’. And even when not involved, he inspired. Awlaki seemed the common denominator in almost every plot being uncovered in the West. Potentially the most dangerous was the plan by three young men in the US, including a naturalized Afghan called Najibullah Zazi, to blow up New York subway trains at rush hour in September 2009. Prior to connecting with al-Qaeda on a trip to Pakistan the trio had been radicalized by listening to Awlaki’s
sermons on their iPods
.
Another devotee
was an American-Pakistani who tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square in May 2010.

AQAP was also becoming the most sophisticated of the group’s franchises in using the internet to rally supporters. In June 2010 it released the first issue of the online magazine
Inspire
. Awlaki was the driving force behind the magazine, which was edited by his protégé Samir Khan, an American Saudi-born extremist.

The first issue included a recipe
‘How to Build a Bomb in Your Mom’s Kitchen’
, which detailed how to make crude pressure-cooker bombs from gunpowder and shrapnel.
²

So there were plenty of reasons for silencing Awlaki. And the Arab Spring that erupted in the first few months of 2011 would provide another. The unrest that had come to Yemen had provided jihadis with operational oxygen. And in the southern and eastern tribal areas,
al-Qaeda began to take advantage
of President Saleh’s myopic focus on political survival and his growing unpopularity by recruiting fighters from sympathetic tribes.

Awlaki had an ever larger area in which to operate and growing resources with which to plot the next attack on the American homeland. In its publications AQAP promised it would only be a matter of time.

My Danish handlers knew me well enough by now to know that I would agree to rejoin the hunt for Awlaki – even as Yemen seemed to be imploding. They were aware of how frustrating the last several months had been for me.

At the beginning of May I was invited to a follow-up meeting in Copenhagen with them and my former CIA handler Jed. As I waited at Birmingham airport, the TV screens showed one face time and again: that of Osama bin Laden. Just a few hours earlier a team of US Navy SEALs had swooped on bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The leader of al-Qaeda had been killed, his body whisked away by helicopter to an ignominious burial at sea. Normally, few travellers bother to watch the news channels at airports; on this day there were clusters of people gazing at the screens. The great bogeyman of the West had been vanquished.