Read Agent Storm: My Life Inside al-Qaeda Online

Authors: Morten Storm,Paul Cruickshank,Tim Lister

Agent Storm: My Life Inside al-Qaeda (4 page)

‘This is a robbery.’

It did not sound convincing.

The woman peered over the counter, more puzzled than alarmed.

‘Morten, is that you?’

I turned and fled. We took out our frustrations on an elderly woman in the street by snatching her bag. But she fell and broke her hip, and the police soon beat a path to my home.

It was the start of a spiral. In school I enjoyed history, music and the discussion of religion and cultures but was bored by the demands of classwork. None of my teachers really connected with me – or even
seemed to notice me – and I would taunt them. They would respond by throwing chalkboard dusters at me – or by breaking down in tears – as the classroom was reduced to chaos.

I was sent to a ‘special school’ – one for wayward, hyperactive boys – which concentrated on sports and activities, and where students were confined to the classroom for just two hours a day. I was entrusted with a chainsaw in the woodlands and allowed to wear myself out on the football field. There was no shortage of adventure. The school organized trips abroad for the children they were trying to mould into citizens. The intention was well-meaning but the results were less rewarding. A visit to Tunisia triggered my love of travel and adventure, but we reduced the teachers to emotional wrecks, even stealing their clothes and selling them to some locals.

By fourteen I was an unstoppable force. An immigrant from the former Yugoslavia called Jalal and I unravelled water hoses in the school corridors and fired hundreds of gallons into every corner of the building. The school from which it was supposedly impossible to get expelled could take no more.

I had one last chance – at a high school near Korsør, where a maths teacher who saw my sports potential took me under his wing. I was soon playing junior football at a high level. There were mutterings that scouts for professional teams were checking my progress. But my school record, bulging with disciplinary notices, preceded me. One teacher in particular wanted me out of the school. When I was selected to play for a Danish schools’ football team at a tournament in Germany, she took me to one side. Her eyes narrowed and with an expression of grim satisfaction she told me I would not be going because my academic record was not good enough. She knew that going to the tournament was the one thing I craved. I kicked a cup of coffee out of her hand.

It was the last thing I would ever do inside a school. At sixteen, just weeks before my final exams, my formal education was finished. But my street education was just beginning. I joined up with a group branded the ‘Raiders’ by local police because we roamed the town wearing Oakland Raiders baseball hats and baggy trousers.

The Raiders were mainly Palestinians, Turks and Iranian Muslims.
We made an unlikely group: the young Dane with red hair and thick biceps (looking like a Norse raider) and his Muslim friends. I gravitated to the Raiders because like many of the immigrant kids I felt like an outsider in Korsør, and I always identified with the underdog. We had few prospects and a lot of time on our hands; most of our energy was devoted to drinking as much cheap beer as we could afford and scoring with as many girls as would let us. My teenage Muslim friends wore their faith lightly. They drank and partied like the rest of us. They would defend Islam in the face of a growing anti-Muslim mood, but did not feel bound by its more demanding restrictions.

Their families had come to settle in Denmark – escaping violence or poverty in their homelands. By 1990, Denmark, like other Scandinavian countries, had a sizeable immigrant population. It had granted refugee or guest-worker status to thousands of families from Turkey, Yugoslavia, Iran and Pakistan. In the first dozen years of my life, Denmark’s immigrant population from ‘non-Western’ countries more than doubled. The influx had begun to test Denmark’s reputation as a liberal and progressive society. Skinhead gangs would descend on Korsør with sticks and bats but the Raiders were ready for them. I was never far from the action and found the rush addictive.

It helped that I had a talent for boxing and spent plenty of time in the gym. One of Korsør’s few claims to fame was that it had been the point of departure for Viking raids on England a millennium ago. So it seemed appropriate that one of its more recent sons was Denmark’s best-known boxer, Brian Nielsen, who would fight Evander Holyfield and Mike Tyson.

Nielsen was involved with a thriving amateur boxing club in Korsør, where the youth programme was run by a professional boxer named Mark Hulstrøm. A heavyweight in his late twenties, Hulstrøm was still fighting. Built like an ox, balding with a goatee, he was a man of few emotions. But he was excited by my potential as a young welterweight. I was quick on my feet, with a fast jab, a solid right-hook and a strong jaw. And I loved the physical exertion. Boxing – as well as jujitsu – was a release for the anger I felt, towards my brutal stepfather and against every attempt to make me conform.

I went to the gym – an anonymous grey building on the edge of Korsør – for three years. One day, soon after my sixteenth birthday, Mark took me aside.

‘You have real class,’ he said – his dark-brown eyes gleaming. ‘You could make the Olympic squad, even turn pro.’

Mark visited my mother to explain why I should get more boxing training. Young enough to remember how chaotic a teenager’s life could be, he was also old enough to be a figure of authority. He was as close to a surrogate father as I would get.

My talent took me to tournaments in Czechoslovakia and Holland. Denmark’s national coach came to watch me and I was selected for the national school sports squad. The Korsør club had provided several of Denmark’s Olympic boxers; there seemed every possibility that I could join that elite.

For a while I dreamt of making it as a boxer. But, to Hulstrøm’s disappointment, the discipline demanded was beyond me and I spent as much time using my boxing training in brawls as I did in the ring.

My mother, the essence of lower-middle-class Danish propriety, had long given up on me, and by the age of sixteen I was rarely at home. Rather than face her disapproving looks I bunked down at the homes of my Raider friends. I was never quite sure where I would lay my head the next night. Frequently it was long after midnight, because by now I had discovered the down-at-heel pubs and clubs of Korsør.

Shortly before my seventeenth birthday, there was a big street festival in Korsør. A thug confronted me and accused me of trying to take his girlfriend. With one blow I floored him, knocking him nearly unconscious. It would prove a busy weekend. Another girl’s boyfriend threatened me with a carving knife. With the blade against my throat, my welterweight training kicked in. I stepped back quickly and delivered a right-hook. Two punches; two knockouts. Maybe the Olympics were not such a pipedream after all.

On weekdays I would visit Hulstrøm’s boxing club. At weekends the action would continue, but without gloves. I was rarely hurt, thanks to my speed and a sense of when I was about to be hit. To combine partying, drinking and fighting was far more fun than nine minutes in the
ring. And I could look after my friends whenever racist baiting erupted at the clubs. ‘Paki’, ‘black pig’ … the insults would fly. And I would step forward and put the assailant on the deck with a couple of punches.

Hulstrøm was a man of many parts. Beside the boxing club, he ran a Korsør disco called Underground. I could be found there several nights a week, even though my musical tastes were more Metallica and death metal than Abba. It was at Underground that I met my first love – a slim, red-haired girl called Vibeke.

Vibeke was a postal worker but her passion was dance and she took ballet lessons in Copenhagen with the sort of dedication that I lacked. She was a calming influence. I found work as an apprentice in a furniture workshop, and with time Vibeke might have tamed my wilder side.

But trouble seemed to follow me. One evening, after plenty of beer, I made out with another girl at a Korsør youth club. Unfortunately her boyfriend heard about our connection. He threatened me with a Danish army assault rifle and was subsequently picked up by the police. Incredibly, they released him without charge after a few hours. Perhaps they reasoned that such a threat was understandable if the target was Morten Storm.

I decided to take matters into my own hands. The boyfriend had supposedly turned up at a party in a grim apartment block on the outskirts of Korsør. When I arrived with three friends the host insisted he had not been there. Convinced he was lying, we beat him with pots and pans we found in the kitchen.

I never found the boyfriend, but the Korsør police found me. I was convicted of aggravated assault and sentenced to four months in a juvenile remand centre.

My prospects were not exactly blossoming. I had been kicked out of five schools and my mother had washed her hands of me. I also had a criminal record. The chances of my choosing the ‘straight and narrow’ were diminishing by the day. And far from leading me away from crime, my apprenticeship inside the remand centre made me harder.

My eighteenth birthday – spent in jail – offered little to celebrate. But at least when I came out I was eligible to drive, and that proved a passport to easy money. Mark Hulstrøm was supplementing his income
from the gym with a thriving business smuggling cigarettes from Poland through Germany and into Denmark. We called it the ‘Nicotine Triangle’.

By the mid-1990s cigarette smuggling had become the
third-largest illegal business
in Germany behind drugs and gambling. The business model was simple. Low taxes and no custom duty meant that a carton of cigarettes in Poland was one third the price of a carton in Germany or Denmark.

Our cover story was that we were buying spare car parts in Germany, where they were cheaper, and bringing them to Denmark. Hulstrøm saw me as a loyal, fearless operator. I spoke some German and was trusted to exchange currencies. We used hired cars – to minimize losses in case the driver was stopped and the vehicle impounded. The cars picked up a few dents – but it was a lucrative circuit.

The distribution centre was a remote farmhouse near the Polish border. At the gates of the farm, an unkempt guard who smelt of sour cabbage would wave me in. I would place a pile of Deutschmarks on the table, and a few minutes later an entire toilet would be moved to one side, revealing a cellar crammed with cartons of cigarettes.

On the drive back, I would look out for foreigners – preferably dark-skinned ones – approaching the Danish border and then follow them. The Danish border police were usually far more interested in questioning them and examining their passports than stopping a young Dane in a van. Occasionally I would cross from Germany into Denmark on tracks or unmarked roads. It was tradecraft that would prove useful when I moved on.

Sometimes I was making the trip two or three times a week and earning the equivalent of $1,000 each time. Not only was the money good: I loved feeling like an apprentice gangster, alert for the police, hiding the contraband, keeping my nerve at border crossings, handling large piles of crisp banknotes.

Just months after emerging from a remand centre penniless and homeless, I had wads of cash, wore smart clothes and was living the high life. Mark Hulstrøm entrusted me with the keys to Underground – now frequented by escorts from Copenhagen who had smelt the money. For the first time in my life I felt important, part of something
big. I may have given up making it as a boxer, but I still enjoyed sparring and wanted to stay in shape. I continued to train in Hulstrøm’s gym, and as I bulked up I moved into the light-heavyweight bracket.

My biological father had moved across the Great Belt to Nyborg. I had not seen him in well over a decade but now I was an adult and felt obliged to try to reconnect with him, even if not wildly enthusiastic about what would at best be an awkward encounter. My cousin Lars agreed to come with me and we took the ferry one slate-grey morning from Korsør across to Nyborg.

My apprehension was justified. My father was gruff and unrepentant about abandoning me and my mother. His breath, at midday, reeked of alcohol. We left him after less than an hour; I felt deeply depressed and angry.

Lars and I dropped by a bar in Nyborg to recover. A mistake. A drunk man disrupted our game of pool and then tried to pick a fight. I did my best to ignore him, but when he shaped up to strike me, I responded with a sharp upper cut. The bartender said he was calling the police and closing the place, and Lars and I left. We split up but Lars was arrested almost immediately, and so was I soon after returning to Korsør.

Convicted of assault, I was sentenced to my second spell behind bars – this time six months in Helsingør. The fact that I was provoked made no difference. By now I had what they call ‘form’ – a record of violence. From jail I wrote a confession to Vibeke. This was the person I was, I wrote, suggesting trouble followed me like a dog. But we could still make a life together, I added. Casting us as American gangsters, I imagined Vibeke as my ‘Bonnie’ and signed my letters ‘Your Clyde’.

I could not see much alternative to a life of crime, with jail time an occupational hazard and violence never far away. I rarely derived pleasure from hitting anyone; none of my friends would have ever called me vicious. But I was loyal to a fault and would defend others and myself if threatened. I was not the sort who would walk away from a confrontation.

I did have one score to settle, one that had been a long time waiting.

At a family birthday party soon after my release from jail in April
1995, tensions flared between my mother and stepfather. He had a venomous tongue and knew how to wound her. I saw tears well in her eyes. I warned him to back off but the sniping continued. Without thinking, I stepped forward and struck him hard in the face. He looked stunned, as if suddenly realizing the boy he had so long abused was now a man – and much stronger than him. His glasses shattered and he fell backwards across a table. I watched him go, a tablecloth wrapping itself like a shroud around him.

There was stunned silence. My mother looked at me with a mixture of horror and gratitude; it was perhaps the strangest expression I have ever seen. I walked out of the hall, my knuckles throbbing but my eyes gleaming with pride.

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