Agent Storm: My Life Inside al-Qaeda (39 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Breaking with Big Brother

Autumn 2011

‘I’m so sorry but it wasn’t us. We were so close but it wasn’t us.’

The text stared at me, black on green. It was another from Klang, several hours after Awlaki’s death had been confirmed.

‘Tell Jed and the Americans: well done. Send them my greetings and congratulations. He’s a terrorist and needed to be stopped,’
I replied.

I had to be magnanimous, even if it meant giving up the prospect of $5m. As it was, I might get a nomination as Best Supporting Actor.

Even so I was irritated and disappointed that neither Jed nor any of my other US contacts reached out to me in the following days. I also felt, despite my best efforts, sad and not a little guilty that Anwar al-Awlaki, with whom I had sat and talked for so many hours, had been incinerated. Yet I knew how dangerous he was, and how much more dangerous he would have become.

I tried to focus on a brief trip with my kids, but I was restless. I needed to know what had happened.

Two days after Awlaki was killed, I picked up a copy of the
Sunday Telegraph
,
the UK broadsheet.

‘How America finally caught up with Anwar al-Awlaki’ ran the headline on the front page. And below: ‘The capture of a low-level errand-runner was the key breakthrough that led to the al-Qaeda leader’s death.’

The sentence caught my attention.

‘Details of how the US finally managed to track down al-Qaeda’s chief mouthpiece to the West can be revealed today by the
Sunday Telegraph
, which has learned that the key breakthrough came when CIA officials caught a junior courier in Awlaki’s inner circle. The man, who is understood to have been arrested three weeks ago by Yemeni agents acting for the Agency, volunteered key details about Awlaki’s whereabouts which led to Friday’s drone strike as his convoy drove through the remote province of Jawf, 100 miles east of the capital, Sana’a.’

I felt my throat tighten. ‘
Caught a junior courier … three weeks ago
…’

I read the passage again. Had the CIA tried to hoodwink me? I recalled Kevin’s words in Edinburgh: ‘We don’t want you to get fucked over.’

I checked the date of the text message my contact had sent from Sana’a confirming the pick-up of the thumb drive. It was three weeks ago. I called him and asked him to describe the handover.
¹
He said the phone call had come in at 9 p.m. They agreed a rendezvous point and half an hour later he parked outside the City Star mall. A few minutes later a dusty battered Toyota Hilux pick-up truck pulled up. Two men in tribal outfits were sitting up front: a lanky man in the driving seat and a short fat man sitting next to him. Both were chewing khat.

The driver had come over to him. He was young, according to my contact, probably in his late teens, tall, thin, dark-skinned and dressed in a light-green
thawb
and Maribi headgear.

He said the driver had been in a hurry.

‘Can I have the flash stick Murad asked you to give me?’ he had asked after a curt greeting. My contact handed it over.

‘Thank you,’ said the driver. ‘We have a long way to travel so we must go now.’

The description closely resembled that of the courier who had delivered the first thumb drive message to me at the al-Shaibani taverna in Sana’a. It also fitted that of the junior errand runner described in the
Sunday Telegraph
article. I doubted whether the courier would have been able to lead the CIA directly to Awlaki, but he would have certainly led them to the next messenger in the chain.
²

Perhaps I was just looking for connections where none existed. I needed a second opinion.

‘Do me a favour, look at the
Sunday Telegraph
article – and tell me your opinion,’ I said to Klang on the phone. I was driving through heavy rain after dropping my kids off with Karima and my mood was darkening. I could cope with most things, but not with being cheated by people for whom I had risked my life.

Klang phoned back shortly afterwards.

‘I cannot see why it’s not ours. It really looks like our job,’ he told me.

I ended the call. The wipers were struggling to keep pace with the rain. I was a kaleidoscope of emotions. I felt a grim satisfaction that I had been involved in a successful operation. But that satisfaction soon gave way to remorse – for Awlaki’s family and Aminah – and then to anger that the Americans had discarded me without any acknowledgement for my role.

‘I’m sorry I had to do this,’ I said out loud several times, my voice breaking. I had met Awlaki’s children and now I bore responsibility for the death of their father. Perversely, I suddenly felt he was the honourable one in this struggle. He would have given up his life for me, but my handlers would not have given me a second thought had I died in their governments’ service.

The next day Klang and I spoke again. ‘We’ve been trying again to ask the Americans about this, but we have no comment from them,’ he told me.

By then fury had smothered sadness. ‘Fuck them. I don’t want to work with them any more. Actually, fuck all of you. If it wasn’t my guy who led to Anwar, then why was information leaked about him?’ I shouted down the phone.

The next day I was eating dinner at a half-empty TGI Friday’s restaurant in the English Midlands when two men installed themselves in a booth behind me. There was something unsettling about them. From their conversation, I could tell that one was British and the other American. The British man kept turning round. He did not look at me – that would be too obvious – but towards a couple sitting in the next booth in front.

I snapped. ‘What are you looking at?’ I blurted out. ‘You’re American, right?’ I said, turning to the other man. ‘Are you from the CIA or what? I’m going to expose your guys. I’m going to the media to tell them everything that your government did. I was behind that operation and your government fucked me over.’

It was not my most eloquent performance, but it was passionate, and it had the desired effect. The mask fell.

‘If you say anything, it will be dangerous for you,’ the American told me.

They got up and left. The family in the adjacent booth looked as if they had just seen an alien.

The next day I received a call from Klang, my Danish handler. ‘What did you say in the restaurant?’ he asked.

‘How did you know about that?’

‘The incident was reported at the local police station,’ said Klang.

Bullshit, I thought.

‘Listen, the Brits and Americans don’t want to have anything to do with you right now,’ Klang said.

The feeling was mutual.

But the Danes wanted to try to engineer some sort of reconciliation, not least because of my threat to go public. They implored me to come to Denmark for a meeting to clear the air. Reluctantly, I agreed.

It felt strange to be standing in the lobby of the Marienlyst Hotel in Helsingør again. It was where we had planned critical missions as a team. But this occasion seemed likely to be a post-mortem of recriminations. It was 7 October 2011 – a week after Awlaki’s death.

My PET handlers had set this up with the Americans and told me I would be meeting an agent called Michael. Jed, I was later told, had left Copenhagen abruptly – though I was sceptical about that. The meeting would be in one of the hotel’s holiday villas. Perhaps that was a sign; they wanted to avoid any public scene.

Two cars with tinted windows arrived outside the hotel. Klang and a tall, muscular man with dark-brown hair walked across to the cottages, while the ‘desk-jockey’ Jesper and Marianne, a thirty-something agent who occasionally attended debriefings, waited by the car.

Jesper beckoned me to join them in the car park.

Screw all of them, I thought. Without the Danes noticing I discreetly reached for my iPhone, set it to video mode, and hit ‘record’. Then I strode out, trying to look as menacing as possible. It wasn’t difficult.

My decision to record the meeting was spontaneous. If I was going to be duped by Western intelligence then I wanted to be able to prove my story. At the beginning of the recording there is a quick glimpse of the blue sofas and gleaming marble floors of the hotel lobby. After I tucked the phone back into my pocket the picture goes to black, but our voices are clearly audible.

We walked towards the villas. Seagulls cawed overhead. There were few people outside – the pretty blue-and-white deckchairs that adorned the beachfront in the summer months had been packed away for the season.

I took in the view. A car ferry was navigating the choppy waters on its way across to the Baltic.

‘You’ll have to talk to him. It’s no good not to talk,’ Jesper told me.
³

‘I have nothing to talk to him about,’ I said. ‘It’s so clear what happened. They arrested a boy who went to meet my contact and pick up that USB stick. It’s so clear and they have exposed themselves.’

‘Yes, that’s right but he needs to explain himself,’ Jesper said.

‘Yes,’ Marianne chimed in. ‘They need to have a chance to explain themselves.’ Not for the first time I thought she looked and sounded just like a bookkeeper.

I recounted our success stories – in Somalia, Kenya and Yemen and here in Denmark. For five years I had been on the frontline; and now the CIA wanted to disown me.

When we reached the villa, Klang opened the door and made some pleasantries about the weather. He seemed apprehensive, as if he were about to witness what the professionals call a ‘psychotic episode’.

‘There’s nothing to talk about,’ I repeated.

‘We are also searching for answers,’ Klang said. I had rarely seen the playboy of PET so serious – as if the long and close relationship of the CIA and PET could hinge on the next half-hour.

‘Michael’ was all-American – square jaw, the picture of a ‘GI Joe’. I gave him the curtest of nods and carried on talking to Klang in Danish.

Klang switched to English, keenly aware I was trying to be offensive, and offered to order coffee.

I looked at Michael.

‘You are not going to convince me,’ I said.

‘Convince you? I guess I’m not here to convince you. I’m just here to talk to you,’ he said.
⁴

He spoke slowly and deliberately with an accent that came from somewhere between New York and Boston.

We walked upstairs to the living quarters on the top floor and sat down facing each other at a glass table. Light streamed in from the windows.

I thought I would hold out an olive branch.

‘I want to congratulate you … Never mind what happened, but the good thing is that these evil guys have been removed, that’s number one,’ I said.

‘That’s right, that’s right,’ Michael interrupted. ‘And it is number one for me too. I did not come here to argue with you. I came here because I respect you, plain and simple. I know you feel upset – but I don’t know why you feel upset,’ he said – looking at me intently.

He gave a good impression of looking perplexed.

I continued: ‘There are two reasons. First of all I will honour the guy who got killed, if you understand. We honour him for being an enemy.’ But, I stressed again, he needed to be taken out.

‘That’s right,’ Michael replied. ‘He had to be taken out.’

‘And that’s fine. Because if
he
was not taken out a lot of innocent people would have been taken out,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Michael. He was doing his best to soothe me. His words were all camomile.

‘He was a good friend of mine. He was my mentor. He was my sheikh. He was a friend of mine but because of the evil in him I have done this … I felt it was a necessity to eliminate, to destroy this threat,’ I said.

‘Absolutely, and I’m gonna tell you something. These types of things happen, are necessary,’ Michael interjected, emphasizing each syllable in the second sentence with outstretched hands in a slow chopping gesture. I noticed he had strong hands. He could have been a boxer, I thought. Klang told me later he was an ex-US Navy SEAL.

He then tried to sway me with flattery.

‘This whole thing was a team effort – a team thing from my organization, from me being here with you guys, from Jed being here with you guys … We had our team, we had our whole project going forward – of which you played the highest role.’

The chopping motion again for the last three words.

‘And it is because of that that there are a lot of people in my government – when I say lot of people I want you to understand a select few that …’

‘Yeah, we know Alex, we know George and you know all the others,’ I interjected – recalling my brief interactions with the senior intelligence official from Washington and the CIA Copenhagen station chief.

‘Yeah, but I am not talking about Alex and George, you know. I am talking about …’

‘Obama?’

‘The President of the United States, okay? He knows you. The President of the United States doesn’t know who I am, okay? But he knows about your work. So the right people know your contributions. And for that we are thankful,’ Michael said with a degree of repetition that I thought overdone.