Agent Storm: My Life Inside al-Qaeda (48 page)

Jesper tried his pitch once more.

‘The offer they are coming up with now – I have never, never seen anything like it before. And this is a confession. It is a confession they make. And you can use that positively.’

I told him I needed to think about it. I badly needed the money – an informant’s CV has plenty of gaps and whatever I could wring from them would need to sustain me and Fadia – and provide for a fresh start far from my former ‘brothers’. Reinventing myself would not come cheap. This was my one shot.

I devised a proposal and called Jesper. In return for 4 million DKK ($700,000) I would hand them my computers and my file of corroborating emails and recordings and never speak of my work for Western intelligence. He called back, saying PET could not improve on their previous offer.

‘I just can’t accept that offer. I can only say thank you to you, Jesper, and I can only tell the leadership that they should feel ashamed,’ I said.

‘And the same from me to you. Sometimes you have been a bit difficult but you have never been boring,’ he said with more than a hint of understatement.

Somehow, Danish intelligence must have been aware that I had begun to lay out my story to three journalists from
Jyllands-Posten
,
because on 19 September Jesper called again. PET would give me the equivalent of five years’ salary plus a cash payment of almost 700,000 DKK: a total of almost 2.2 million DKK or $400,000.

I asked Jesper if we could draw up a contract.

‘It’s very, very difficult to sign something. I don’t know if it would make you feel more safe to go and speak to Jakob,’ he said, referring to Jakob Scharf, the director of PET.

After some haggling over the details,
I called Jesper one more time
.

‘Done deal,’ I told Jesper when I called him back.

‘Thank you – that was fucking difficult,’ he replied.

Not as difficult as what was to follow. That same afternoon, the journalists at
Jyllands-Posten
told me that a Danish TV station was planning to break the story about my work for PET. It seems that the station had been approached by PET as part of a damage limitation exercise: throw enough mud and throw it first. I had no idea whether wires had been crossed at PET or whether they had planned this while trying to spin out negotiations. Whatever the case, a journalist at the station later confirmed to me that he had received a call from Danish intelligence offering their take on my story.

I felt it likely that PET would backtrack on the settlement. I suspected their offer was just a ploy while they figured out a way of separating me from the cache of electronic evidence I had built up. Incensed, I called Jesper back to say the deal was off the table.

Jesper made it clear PET would not protect me if I broke my cover.

‘If you go public just to get revenge you have to think, was it worth it? You won’t be able to travel around freely with your kids. They won’t be able to see their grandparents freely. Just because you needed that satisfaction,’ he told me in a rare burst of spite.

But his increasingly desperate arguments fell on deaf ears.

Just before the first article ran in
Jyllands-Posten
on 7 October 2012, I texted Jesper
.

‘Just wanted to let you know I recorded all our conversations,’ I wrote.

‘Why did you do that?’ came his reply.

‘Because I’m a spy – and that’s what you taught me
.’

Epilogue

Undisclosed Location in the UK, Spring 2014

The first
Jyllands-Posten
article on 7 October 2012 caused a sensation in Denmark. The piece outlined the role I played in tracking down Awlaki for the CIA and PET so that he could be targeted with a drone strike: explosive allegations in Denmark, where the government is forbidden to take part in any such assassination. The
Jyllands-Posten
journalists were later awarded the inaugural European Press Prize for their stories.

The news was picked up around the world. In December 2012 I sat down with CBS’s
60 Minutes
, the celebrated US news magazine show, for an interview which focused on my role in tracking down Awlaki.

After all the years operating in the shadows it felt surreal seeing my name in newspapers and on television and my work for Western intelligence made public. It was satisfying to go public with what I perceived to be both the achievements and the failings in my work with intelligence. But away from the cameras, I felt vulnerable. And my wife, Fadia, was still coming to terms with the fact that I had deceived her for so long with so many lies.

A couple of weeks before
Jyllands-Posten
published my story, I suggested to her that we go for a long country walk. I chose a beautiful late-summer’s day; the air was fragrant with the harvest of barley and wheat. We sat at the edge of a field; I had even put together a picnic.

As we watched the skylarks above, I told her everything: my recruitment, my work in Yemen and Kenya, in Lebanon and Birmingham, Denmark and Sweden, my falling-out with the CIA and PET – my role in the assassination of Awlaki, the money, the cocaine and my mission to southern Yemen to see Wuhayshi. The strain had
already affected our marriage; I warned Fadia that once my story was in the press the pressure would only grow. I could expect no protection from the intelligence agencies and plenty of people would want me dead. Our world would shrink; we would always be on our guard.

Fadia was traumatized.

‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Could you not trust me? Five years of endless lies. And have you any idea how lonely I was? You were hardly ever there, and when you were it was in body only. Your mind was always somewhere else.’

I tried to explain that I wanted to protect her, that it was better she knew nothing, that in any case I could have told her so little.

‘But I’m your wife,’ she said – looking at me through eyes swollen with tears.

In the autumn of 2012, the pressures generated by my ‘coming out’ weighed heavily on both of us and we agreed to separate – at least for a while. I was diagnosed as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, unable to work, unable to get a new National Insurance number in Britain, where I still lived, for fear that a militant sympathizer working in a government office would uncover and locate me.

The moment
Jyllands-Posten
went on sale on 7 October, I was a marked man. On jihadist forums and Facebook pages, animosity and threats to me and my family poured out. Among militants Anwar al-Awlaki had been a beloved figure. To avenge his killing would be an honour, an act on which Allah would smile. My bitter fall-out with Danish intelligence meant, as Jesper had warned, that I could expect no help from my own government.

One of the Americans who had been at Dammaj with me,
Khalid Green, took to YouTube
to denounce me for pretending to love Allah but betraying Islam.

‘Someone we considered a companion and a friend,’ he intoned – sitting in front of shelves full of Islamic texts – ‘who was with us in one of the most esteemed places of knowledge in the camp in Dammaj studying with Sheikh Muqbil … we find out that this person has worked for the CIA.’

Others among my circle were shocked and even grudgingly impressed. Rasheed Laskar, the young man from Britain whom I had
known in Sana’a,
wrote on an Islamist blog
under the name Abu Mu’aadh:

‘I knew Murad personally since 2005/6 & we lived together in Yemen … When I was first informed about the news from Danish friends I was in shock … his contacts with Sheikh Anwar raheemahullah are true.

‘Believe me if his – whole ex-CIA-PET agent story – is true – & it really does go back to 2006 – then he was quite honestly – back in those days – brilliant at his job.

‘Since 2005/6 I have had a lot of contact with Murad … and I never suspected him of being an agent. I know many brothers that have been in & out of Arab prisons, tortured, deported and hounded from country to country (and even assassinated) with one common element in our stories – knowing Murad Storm.

‘From the bottom of my heart – I ask Allah to give him what he deserves both in this life & the hereafter.’

His tone suggested he didn’t have seventy-two virgins in mind.

More seriously, in August 2013 a group of Danes who had travelled to Syria and joined forces with an al-Qaeda affliate released a video calling for my murder, along with several other high-profile Danes they considered enemies of Islam.

‘It’s important that we shoot with our Kalashnikovs at these
murtadeen
and those
kuffar
attacking Islam,’ a Danish jihadi calling himself Abu Khattab said to the camera, overlooking a hilltop town in Syria. His face was familiar. I had seen him in Copenhagen. He was one of the followers of an al-Muhajiroun spin-off in Denmark.

The camera then scans along six pictures against a stone wall. My picture is the first that comes into view, followed by that of Naser Khader, a moderate Muslim politician in Denmark whose murder I had once called for, as well as Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish Secretary General of NATO, and the cartoonist Kurt Westergaard. A caption comes on to the screen: ‘Enemies of Islam’.

The fighters crouch and take aim – shouting ‘
Allahu Akbar!
’ as they unleash a volley of gunfire at the posters. Another clip posted by the same band of jihadists in Syria featured Shiraz Tariq, a Pakistani extremist I had gone paintballing with a decade previously in Odense.

In a follow-up video Abu Khattab was asked why they chose to include me on the execution list.

‘His task was to kill our beloved Sheikh Anwar al-Awlaki.’

Sure enough a threatening message appeared on my Facebook account. Its author was Abdallah Andersen, one of the Danes convicted in relation to the 2006 Vollsmose terrorist plot. He was now out of jail but his views had hardly softened; he now called himself ‘Abu Taliban’ on his Facebook profile.

‘How’s the family? Everyone hates you. Everyone wants you dead,’ he said.

I passed the comment to Danish police. Everyone on the ‘execution list’ not already under police protection had been offered a round-the-clock guard by PET, except me. For weeks PET did not return my emails even when the story was all over the Danish media, and they never offered protection.

But there were compensations for going public, chief among them restoring my reputation among those who had been my friends before I vanished into the world of radical Islam. Many had cut ties with me, some just thought me a lunatic. Apart from my mother – and more recently Fadia – I had told nobody that I had become an agent.

Several of my friends and family didn’t believe me when in the weeks before I went public I told them the truth. To them it must have seemed one twist too many in my already improbable story.

Jyllands-Posten
’s series of articles gave my story the stamp of credibility. Slowly I was able to rekindle some old friendships. I was given a chance to say sorry to a lot of people. Sorry for my behaviour. Sorry for disappearing. Sorry for the lies. But above all, sorry for hating you because you did not accede to my beliefs.

Many of my former friends, including Vibeke, my first love, were astonished by my story.

‘I simply never guessed,’ she said. ‘I thought you had become this crazy guy always vanishing overseas and spending your life praying. I felt I didn’t know you any more.’

It was also a relief to be able to escape the pretence of being a hardline Salafist. Murad Storm was finally history, and gone with him were
the Islamic robes, the long beard and the pretend prayers. It felt good to wear jeans and a T-shirt and grab a beer without worrying that my cover would be compromised.

In early 2014 I went on Danish television to
apologize to Naser Khader
, the moderate Muslim politician whose killing I had once called for. Now we were both literally in al-Qaeda’s crosshairs, as the video from Syria had made clear. After the cartoon controversy had erupted Khader had attracted further ire from jihadis by bravely defending the cartoonists’ right of free speech.

I handed him a drawing I had asked my daughter, Sarah, to do. It showed me apologizing to him. ‘Dude Naser. I was wrong. I am sorry!!! Forgive me,’ the speech bubble said. Underneath was written ‘Free Speech is not negotiable. Long Live Democracy.’

He embraced me, saying all was forgiven. ‘I am very touched and think it is extremely nice of you. I’ll keep this in my home,’ he said. We both had tears in our eyes; we had both been through a great deal and might yet face more.

Naser told me that PET had informed him more than ten years previously that I had threatened him. He had received many death threats since. He asked me to join him in an initiative to deradicalize Danish youngsters sucked into extremism. I readily accepted. If I could help just one person turn his back on al-Qaeda’s murderous world-view, the shame I still felt would be slightly less.

From Danish, British and US intelligence there was a predictable wall of silence after I went public. PET had tried to cover their tracks by dissolving their front company, Mola Consult, after I told them I planned to go public.
¹