Read Agent Storm: My Life Inside al-Qaeda Online
Authors: Morten Storm,Paul Cruickshank,Tim Lister
Jakob Scharf – the head of PET – limited himself to a carefully worded statement.
‘Out of consideration for PET’s operational work, the PET neither can nor will confirm publicly that specific persons have been used as sources by the PET … However, the PET does not participate in or
support operations where the objective is to kill civilians. The PET did therefore not contribute to the military operation that led to the killing of al-Awlaki in Yemen.’
His denial of involvement in ‘the military operation’ was a very precise formulation. No one was accusing the Danes of actually firing the drones that killed Awlaki, but one of their agents had been leading the hunt for him. And it wasn’t to inquire after his health.
The revelations led Danish parliamentarians to demand new oversight rules for PET. In January 2013 I met with several of them. At the same time Denmark’s Ministry of Justice announced it would set up a supervisory board to oversee the Danish intelligence agency. The Justice Minister, Morten Bødskov, a close friend of Jakob Scharf, said the new board would strike
‘the right balance that will ensure that we have an effective intelligence agency and a good rule of law’
.
In March 2013 my account received
heavyweight backing from Hans Jørgen Bonnichsen
, Scharf’s predecessor as head of PET. He told Danish television that the corroborating evidence confirmed to his satisfaction the agency had used me to track down terrorist operatives overseas to help the US target them for assassination. ‘I now have no reason to doubt that they have participated,’ he said.
The establishment closed ranks. Denmark’s two main parties blocked a parliamentary inquiry. It was perhaps no accident that they had both been in power while I was working for PET.
2
They seemed to believe the story would eventually go away. For a while I thought perhaps they were right. Danes take pride in the transparency of their democratic institutions but I have long believed that in the process they have become too trustful of the state – almost complacent.
My time working for PET revealed an agency with some competent, decent people, but with too many others incapable of worthwhile intelligence work. Many were ex-cops who had spent most of their lives in vice or drug squads. Handling foreign intelligence and
understanding terrorism seemed beyond them. Others seemed to see the agency as a gravy train – and me as a source of income or expensive trips.
In late 2013 stories of impropriety within PET exploded in the Danish media. The first centred on the previous year’s riotous office Christmas party. It was revealed that Director Scharf, in a rare act of transparency, had drunkenly
made out with a subordinate
in a glass-walled corridor in full view of everybody. Klang had at least been more discreet in his choice of rendezvous with Scharf’s mistress.
Revelations followed about discord and expensive trips Scharf and senior aides made overseas. According to internal complaints leaked to the media, Scharf was ‘unprepared’ and ‘frivolous’ during meetings in Washington DC and more interested in sightseeing, leading the
CIA to lose confidence
in his leadership.
Government insiders revealed
that this trust had already been eroded after I went public. The CIA expected friendly agencies to keep their informants under control.
Finally it emerged that Scharf had instructed subordinates to obtain information on the movements of a Danish MP. The scandal forced the resignations of both Scharf and his boss, the Justice Minister,
Morten Bødskov
. The revelations put my story back in the public spotlight. Scharf’s predecessor,
Bonnichsen, sharpened his criticism
of the agency, asserting that my disclosures on Danish involvement in assassination plans overseas were so serious there was a basis for a criminal investigation.
The tide seemed to be turning. At the end of the year the beleaguered agency was put under more pressure when
Jyllands-Posten
disclosed PET’s refusal to offer me protection after the Syrian death threat video.
‘Is it really a satisfactory way for the security services to carry out their task in that it takes three weeks before you answer a former employee who – rightly – felt threatened by Islamists?’
the chairman of the Danish People’s Party said to the newspaper.
Such were my jihadist networks that hardly a month went by without a former associate being arrested, martyred in the service of jihad, or identified as an emerging leader in a terror group.
Kenneth Sorensen, who had been part of my circle in Sana’a, was killed
fighting
alongside jihadis in Syria in March 2013, one of a staggering 2,000 European militants who would travel to fight there. Jihadis in Syria released a martyrdom video to honour his sacrifice to the cause. His mortal wounds were horrendous. The video showed the congealed blood streaked across his face and then fighters bulldozing dirt over his unmarked grave.
It was a fate I too could have shared, for I was led to believe by one of my handlers at PET that by 2013 Sorensen was working as a double agent.
In February 2014 Abdul Waheed Majeed, the British-Pakistani al-Muhajiroun follower who had so assiduously taken minutes during Omar Bakri’s talks in Luton, became the
first British suicide bomber
in Syria. He had been recruited by Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria. A video released by the group showed him in a white tunic and black Islamist bandana cheerily speaking to other fighters beside a heavily armoured truck before the attack. Fighters cheered ‘
Allah Akbar!
’ as he set off towards the central prison in Aleppo, where he detonated the vehicle in a huge fireball.
Only a small number of my jihadist contacts paid their debt to society.
Clifford Newman, the American convert who had assisted John Walker Lindh – ‘the American Taliban’ – in getting to Afghanistan served five years in prison in Dubai from 2004 to 2009 for attempted robbery. He then served a three-year sentence in the United States for child abduction.
Aminah, as far as I know, remained in Yemen – still committed to her deceased husband’s cause. On 18 July 2012 – just before I left the intelligence fold – I received one last encrypted message from her.
She revealed she had spent several months under Wuhayshi’s protection, but with the government retaking territory across the tribal areas she had relocated to Awlaki’s village, and was hoping eventually to go to Sana’a.
‘You are always in my
duas
[supplications]. Sometimes I cry when I
remember all things you have done for me and my dear Anwar, may Allah have mercy on him.’
How she must hate me now.
As for Abdul, he eventually returned to Yemen, and I received a message from him in which he recanted his previous accusations that the Americans had wanted me to go to southern Yemen and planned to have me killed there.
‘The yanks never ever, never ever, never ever mentioned harming you at any time, never said they will kill you, the car was not for you,’ he wrote.
But he maintained the CIA had warned him that I was on my way back to Yemen – an extraordinary breach of faith if true.
‘They told me Morten is coming, leave everything behind and stay with him because we think he is up to no good.’
Abdul appears never to have entertained the thought that I too was an informant.
‘I did not want you to come to yemen and go back to the south and get deeper with the misguided, and therfore, you might be a target one day. I made up the story just to make you stay out of yemen and out of the trouble in this miserable country.’
Abdul said his CIA handlers had been furious that he had travelled to China and then met with me – and had cut ties with him afterwards.
I will never know what the CIA’s plans for me were. It is conceivable that someone at the Agency wanted me out of the way, and that Abdul’s final message to me was a desperate attempt to cover his and their tracks. Perhaps Abdul was a compulsive liar. Perhaps the Americans had originally wanted us both to return to southern Yemen and complete a mission that could have helped decapitate AQAP.
Looking back at the hectic events of 2011 and 2012, I think that to the CIA I had become expendable, worth sending on one last mission to southern Yemen on my own just in case it came off – even though they and the Danes knew the risk to my safety was exorbitant.
What is beyond dispute is that a real chance to track and eliminate Wuhayshi and other leaders of AQAP was lost in the mishandling of
that final mission. Despite losing territory in the latter half of 2012, the group remained a potent threat well beyond Yemen.
In September 2012
three of its operatives took part in the terrorist attack on the US diplomatic compound in Benghazi
. At a large gathering in Spring 2014 Wuhayshi made clear to fighters that attacking the West was a priority and made good on another pledge by greeting several operatives recently
liberated
from prison.
Intelligence agencies believed Ibrahim al-Asiri was developing a
new generation of explosives
that would be more difficult for scanners to detect. In February 2014 the US Department of Homeland Security sent out an alert to airlines after intelligence indicated he was developing a
new shoe bomb design
. With every year that passed the Saudi terrorist was becoming more ingenious – and
instructing apprentices
in the mechanics of terror. So high was concern over an emboldened AQAP that the US and Yemen carried out a large wave of strikes in April 2014. When this book went to press a week later no key figure had been confirmed killed.
The temporary closure of US embassies in the summer of 2013 – from Libya in the west to Madagascar in the south and Bangladesh in the east – illustrated how much of the world had become unsafe for Westerners. Al-Qaeda’s black banners fluttered in the deserts of Mauritania, close to the Atlantic shore, in the Sinai desert, throughout Syria, in western Iraq and in southern Somalia. In many of these places, AQAP had a role, a presence or contacts. It was the first among equals of al-Qaeda’s affiliates.
Al-Shabaab too shifted its centre of gravity from insurgency in Somalia to more ‘classic’ terrorism after formally becoming an affiliate of al-Qaeda. And I knew some of its most accomplished operatives.
On the morning of Saturday, 21 September 2013, at least four heavily armed gunmen in jeans and T-shirts marauded through the upscale Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi. In a
siege that lasted four days
and appeared to have been modelled on the Mumbai attacks in 2008, more than sixty men, women and children were killed.
Al-Shabaab claimed the attack was in retaliation for Kenya’s 2011–12 military offensive in Somalia which had pushed the group out of the port city of Kismayo, an important source of income for the group.
The suspected mastermind was none other than my main point of contact in al-Shabaab – Ikrimah
, the long-haired Kenyan who spoke Norwegian.
Unlike the American jihadi Omar
Hammami, who was killed a week before
the Westgate attack, Ikrimah had survived the infighting within al-Shabaab. Kenyan intelligence believed that he had emerged as the key figure plotting attacks in Kenya because of his militant contacts inside the country.
3
One of his previous schemes, disrupted by the Kenyan security services in late 2011, envisioned multiple attacks on the Kenyan parliament, United Nations offices in Nairobi and politicians, which Kenyan intelligence learned had been sanctioned by al-Qaeda in Pakistan.
4
Ikrimah escaped alive and became more dangerous as a result. Not only was he still free to plot terrorist attacks in East Africa but by
surviving a Navy SEAL attack his credentials had been burnished. In our communications between 2008 and 2012 Ikrimah made it clear that his ambitions stretched further than just Africa. His goal was to dispatch Western al-Shabaab recruits to launch attacks in their home countries. If he finally suceeded in his attempt to connect with Wuhayshi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Yemen, both men could pool resources in plots to attack the West and Western targets around the world.
To some degree Western intelligence created Ikrimah. The CIA, MI6 and PET helped him rise through the ranks in al-Shabaab because the supplies and contacts I provided him with impressed his superiors. But my contacts with Ikrimah netted valuable results, including the removal of one of the most dangerous al-Qaeda operatives in East Africa – Saleh Ali Nabhan – and gave us a window into the operations of al-Shabaab. Helping Ikrimah was the price paid for a greater gain.
After the Westgate attack I wondered if Ikrimah might have been apprehended or killed had I continued my relationship with him. Had I been able to build up Storm Bushcraft in Kenya, I might have had a better sense of his place in al-Shabaab, his plans and even some of the recruits he was training. Of course, it would have been difficult and hazardous to meet with him. By the middle of 2012 Ikrimah’s emails suggested he rarely ventured beyond Somalia. But it would have been possible to deliver a tracking device to him hidden in equipment – as I had arranged for Nabhan.