Agent Storm: My Life Inside al-Qaeda (43 page)

I had to think on my feet. ‘Sheikh, that might not be possible. I told the soldiers at the checkpoints that I was on my way to Aden and if they don’t see me there soon they may raise an alarm,’ I told Wuhayshi.

It was a lame excuse but I knew the Yemeni government, under pressure from the Americans, was trying to keep tabs on the movements of Westerners.

‘You will need to carry on to Aden, then. But when you get there you should set up email accounts with Abdul and Hartaba so we can communicate,’ Wuhayshi replied.

We piled back into the vehicle and Wuhayshi gave me a tour of the al-Qaeda emirate. ‘Make sure you keep your head wrapped up – we are worried about spies,’ al-Abab told me.

The town was an alternative universe. Rusty old police cars patrolled the streets, driven by heavily bearded Islamist fighters. Strict Islamic law had been introduced and those who flouted it were punished.

Just a few days after my visit to Jaar, al-Qaeda’s punishments reached a new level when an Islamic court ruled that a man suspected of spying for the Americans should be executed and crucified. According to residents his body was
left hanging
by a main road in Jaar for days. I would
most likely have suffered the same fate had my true intent been uncovered.
⁴

The code of laws imposed by al-Qaeda was called
Hudood
, a medieval form of justice long obsolete in most of the Muslim world. The al-Qaeda figure instrumental in setting up and overseeing
Hudood
courts in Yemen was none other than Sheikh Adil al-Abab, AQAP’s amiable religious emir, whose portly frame was squeezed into the back seat next to me.

Wuhayshi would later depict
AQAP’s administration of justice as a model of restraint. A few months later, he wrote to the al-Qaeda group occupying part of Mali in West Africa, advising: ‘Try to avoid enforcing Islamic punishments as much as possible, unless you are forced to do so … we used this approach with the people and came away with good results.’

As we drove around Jaar, Wuhayshi pointed out various public works projects. Al-Qaeda was handing out food, digging wells and storage tanks, driving water trucks around, bringing in free electricity to areas that had never known it, and providing other services that the central government in Sana’a had neglected for decades.

For Wuhayshi this was a means to an end. In his letter of advice to the jihadis occupying northern Mali he would write: ‘
Try to win them over through the conveniences of life and by taking care of their daily needs like food, electricity and water. Providing these necessities will have a great effect on people, and will make them sympathize with us.’

We stopped for a while at a cemetery for the martyrs of al-Qaeda in the semi-desert outside the town – row upon row of graves marked with little more than a stone. Their puritanical beliefs prohibited any sort of tombs. There were hundreds of fighters buried but you could walk right through it and never even know it was a graveyard.
Wuhayshi made a supplication – ‘
As salaam aleikum ya ahlul-qubur!
…’ [Peace be upon you, O inhabitants of the grave] and we moved on.

I told Wuhayshi I planned to take a bodyguard course in the UK. ‘Then you should become my personal bodyguard,’ he replied. He told me his own team of bodyguards had not followed them after the picnic.

‘They didn’t notice me getting back in the car with you – you could have kidnapped me,’ he said. We laughed. It bordered on the absurd.

It was time for AQAP’s leader to depart and he embraced me before jumping into the car with Adil al-Abab. ‘Wait here, I’ll be back shortly,’ AQAP’s religious emir told me and Abdul.

An hour later the sound of screeching wheels announced his return. Al-Abab walked over to us with a grave expression on his face. Had someone told him about the flash drive? But he addressed Abdul.

‘
Alhamdulillah
, we think your brother has just been martyred – can you come to see his body?’ he blurted out.

Abdul, already affected by his exposure to the frontline in Jaar, could not summon the courage to go. He asked me if I would view the body; I had met his brother a few times in Sana’a. I was taken to a makeshift morgue to see the corpse. The man had horrific injuries. A mortar shell had entered through his cheek and blown out the left side of his brain and there were shrapnel wounds all over the chest. But the right side of his face was more or less intact, with his mouth curled up in a smile. He definitely looked like Abdul’s brother. I stared at him.

I went back to tell Abdul and this time he came with me to take a look. ‘It’s him,’ he said. He crouched beside him in a moment of silence to pay his respects and then turned on his heels. But then he hesitated and doubled back to inspect the dead man’s teeth.

‘This man has no fillings – it’s not my brother,’ he said, breaking into the first smile I had seen from him since we arrived. It seemed a fitting finale in what had been a surreal visit.

I was glad I would soon be travelling on to Aden. If a missile strike or mortar round were to kill me here I would be buried in the anonymous strip of dirt with al-Qaeda’s other martyrs, and the truth about which side I was fighting for would surely be buried with me for ever.

We bade farewell to Adil al-Abab and the other fighters, including the would-be Saudi suicide bomber and Wuhayshi’s younger brother. The Saudi kissed me on the forehead and then Wuhayshi’s younger brother looked at me earnestly:

‘Do you love the martyrs?’

‘Yes,’ I replied. I got the feeling he wanted to be one of them.

‘May He whom you love, love me for loving you,’ he said.

‘
As salaam aleikum
,’ I replied – peace be with you. He would never understand the irony.

I got in the car with Hartaba and Abdul for the dangerous drive to Hartaba’s village, where we picked up Abdul’s car. All the way to Aden, I pictured the look on Jesper’s and Klang’s faces at our future debriefing. I had enjoyed lunch and a few jokes with the leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Wuhayshi’s task for me in Aden was simple: create three email accounts for our future communications and hand them to Abdul, who would pass them on to Wuhayshi’s men in the city.

After I created the accounts at an internet café, Abdul parked the car in a commercial street in Aden, just down the road from a call centre, the safest option for calling Wuhayshi’s contacts. I watched dozens of customers walking in and out.

It shouldn’t be taking this long, I thought, my suspicions about Abdul racing.

Across the street, something caught my eye. A car had pulled up and the driver was cleaning one of the side mirrors with a bucket of water and a sponge, glancing up occasionally. His surveillance training was good, except that he cleaned the same mirror time and again. And with all the dust and chaos of Aden, the exercise was pointless.

Was I about to become the victim of a set-up? I was relieved but also irritated when Abdul finally emerged.

‘The emir’s men will meet me here in an hour so that I can show them the email addresses – you should stay in the car.’

I had little option. When they came, Wuhayshi’s emissaries did not look like jihadis. Both were clean-shaven, dark-skinned like many in Aden, and wore long
thawb
s. They greeted Abdul and disappeared
inside a shop. The avid mirror cleaner was still across the street. He stared at them, his sponge dripping water.

I insisted on driving when Abdul got back in the car, and took a random route to shake off any tail. I ran through scenarios. Whose side was Abdul on? Had al-Qaeda sent somebody to monitor the pick-up? Or had Abdul spent so long in the call centre because he was calling a CIA handler to arrange for surveillance so the Americans could put a tail on Wuhayshi’s representatives in Aden? As my mind raced I also wondered if this was all part of an American ploy for Abdul to take my place in Yemen. Might he have given Wuhayshi’s men different email addresses so that he and not I would be in touch with Wuhayshi? He certainly had many jihadist contacts but given all the precautions taken by AQAP’s leadership he was too low in the pecking order to get an audience with Wuhayshi. He had one ticket to the top table of al-Qaeda and that was through me. But that made me vulnerable.

I was relieved to leave Aden and escape Abdul’s company. Maybe it was paranoia, but stranger things had happened. Back in Sana’a, I called Klang.

‘I just met the big guy,’ I told him in a thick Danish dialect.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Operation Amanda

January–May 2012

The one inevitable part of a successful mission was a debriefing invitation with PET. This time Klang chose Lisbon.

I was put up at the luxury Altis Avenida Hotel. Klang and Jesper had brought along a young analyst whose nickname was ‘the Virgin’. It was obvious why. ‘This is the biggest thing I’ve been part of,’ he told me excitedly.

PET’s spymaster, Tommy Chef, flew in later to join us, clearing his schedule. He handed me an envelope with 100,000 DKK – around $15,000. In the debriefing, I noticed how much the Danish team already knew about whom I had met in Jaar. Had they received word from the Americans courtesy of Abdul? If so, they were being very clumsy in tipping me off.

We all realized there was an opportunity to plant tracking devices in the fridge that Wuhayshi still wanted me to deliver. The fridge would most likely be sent on to Ibrahim al-Asiri, the bomb-maker, to store explosives, and thus could offer a unique chance to target him and also locate Wuhayshi. I told the agents I was willing to return to Yemen within two weeks.

‘To be honest most people in the office thought you were done – finished,’ Jesper told me on the balcony of our hotel after business was concluded that evening. ‘Very few of us thought you could continue to work after what happened to Anwar.’

He paused. We watched the traffic drift past below on the Praça dos Restauradores.

‘It’s fucking good you are on our side – imagine the problems you would have caused us,’ he added, slapping me on the back.

Of course, Klang organized a night out. We hit some of Lisbon’s most exclusive bars and a gentlemen’s club, champagne flowing freely, generating a bill of about $8,000 for the Danish taxpayer. The Danish agents all found ‘companions’ for the evening. Even Tommy Chef paired up with an East European woman. They were entangled on the couch when I left to return to the hotel.

Soon afterwards I travelled to Denmark to set up another meeting with the Hajdib clan, across the bridge in Malmö.

Oblivious to the raw cold of a February afternoon, Abu Arab and his nephew sat on a park bench enraptured as I recounted the details of my journey to and experiences in Jaar. It was as if I were Homer reciting the
Iliad
for the first time. The IT student wanted to know how soon they could travel. I told them I was awaiting instructions from the AQAP leadership.

What I did not know was that PET had finally come clean with Swedish intelligence about the Malmö ploy. The Swedes quashed it immediately. The idea of Swedish citizens being sent to join a terrorist group was beyond the pale.

On my return to Copenhagen I vented my frustrations with Klang: ‘How the hell am I meant to maintain my networks if the rug is going to be pulled from beneath me like this?’

He had no answer; the decision had been taken higher up.

It turned out that we had missed a promising opportunity. A short while later AQAP released a new issue of
Inspire
magazine with a section entitled
‘Rise Up and Board with Us’
. From now on, it said, ‘those who want to execute a slaughter to the enemies of Islam’ should seek approval for their targets from AQAP’s military committee. The magazine provided email addresses and details of how to download the Mujahideen Secrets software. It was essentially promoting itself as a clearing house for would-be terrorists in the West. Had our IT student been involved with
Inspire
, we could have had a window on AQAP’s overseas recruitment drive and plots being hatched by its supporters in the West.

In any case, I had lost contact with Wuhayshi: no replies came back from the encrypted messages I sent to the three email accounts I had opened in Aden. Perhaps Abdul had deliberately passed on different email addresses to the ones I had created. I sent an encrypted email to Aminah telling her I needed to get in touch with Wuhayshi because I wanted to connect him to my contacts in al-Shabaab but received no reply. I wondered if she had already attained martyrdom.

For weeks I heard nothing from Danish intelligence, and the nightmares started to return, given fresh fuel by my eventful visit to Jaar. It was not until the beginning of March that PET finally summoned me. Klang arranged for us to meet in the same villa in the Marienlyst Hotel in which I had confronted the CIA agent months earlier.

It was good to be inside. An icy wind was blowing in from the Baltic, sending waves crashing on to the shore. Klang and I sat in the kitchen.

‘We’ve been in touch with the Americans,’ he said. ‘They are prepared to offer you one million dollars if our mission leads to Wuhayshi and one million for al-Asiri.