Agent Storm: My Life Inside al-Qaeda (65 page)

Michael Adebolajo:
‘Two guilty of Lee Rigby murder’, BBC, 19 December 2013.

The Boston bombers built …
Inspire
magazine:
See Indictment:
US v. Dzokhar Tsarnaev
, 27 June 2013.

avenge the cleric’s death:
James McKinley Jnr, ‘Man Pleads Guilty to Reduced Charge in Terrorism Case’,
The New York Times
, 19 February 2014.

A group I had known in Luton:
‘Four “planned to bomb Territorial Army base” with toy car’, BBC, 15 April 2013.

Acknowledgements

Morten Storm

I would like to thank all my family members and friends in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Holland, the UK, Kenya and around the world for their support.

Thank you, Paul Cruickshank and Tim Lister, for masterfully making sense of it all during the many weeks we spent together and for the many months you spent investigating every last detail of my story and peeling back the layers of my memory. I will always be in your debt. I first met Paul during my ‘radical years’, when he came to Luton in 2005 to report on the extremist group al-Muhajiroun. He is now CNN’s terrorism analyst and the editor of a recent five-volume collection of scholarship on al-Qaeda. It seems like a lifetime ago we met in Luton.

Paul and Tim have reported on al-Qaeda terrorism and international security for many years, and their expertise was invaluable in providing context to this story. Tim travelled across Yemen well before I did and unlike me made it to Afghanistan, where he reported on the US bombing of Osama bin Laden’s redoubt in Tora Bora for CNN.

Thanks to the
Jyllands-Posten
reporters Carsten Ellegaard Christensen, Orla Borg, Morten Pihl and Michael Holbek Jensen who broke the story about my work for Western intelligence. You deservedly won the inaugural European Press Prize. Thanks also to all the Danish journalists who have believed in and supported me.

I’d also like to thank our literary agents, Richard Pine and Euan Thorneycroft, and our editors, Joel Rickett at Viking and Jamison Stoltz at Grove Atlantic, for giving me the chance to tell the world my story. If this book makes just one person think twice about following the path of violent extremism it will have been worth it.

Thanks to the Danish politician Irena Simonsen for her huge help
and backing, and thanks too to my lawyer, Karoly Nemeth, in Denmark for all his guidance and support.

There are several others I would like to thank for their support, including Nic Robertson at CNN, Mark Stout at the Washington Spy Museum, Frederik Obermaier at
Süddeutsche Zeitung
, Howard Rosenberg at
60 Minutes
and Bent Skjaerstad at TV2 in Norway. Thank you also Joost in Holland. There are many others I can’t thank for security reasons, but you know who you are.

Thanks to the bands Metallica, Slayer and Anthrax for your great music. You helped me wind up and wind down after missions.

Finally a massive thank you to all the lovely, kind and generous people and families I met in the Middle East and in North and East Africa. They enriched me with great knowledge and taught me how to live with honour and be a generous human being.

Paul Cruickshank and Tim Lister

Thank you, Morten Storm, for making it necessary and for allowing us to burrow deep into your life during stressful times for you and your family. We were staying with you when al-Qaeda types in Syria threatened your life in an online video and were struck by your humour and poise.

Thank you to your friends and family and ex-girlfriends we met in Denmark. Thanks to the Danish politician Irena Simonsen for inviting us into her home and helping us understand the political dynamics.

A giant thank you to Richard Pine, our literary agent at Inkwell in New York, for making it all possible. Huge thanks also to Euan Thorneycroft at A. M. Heath in London for working with Richard to bring this story to the world, and for your valuable feedback.

We have been blessed in having two of the best editors in the business: Joel Rickett at Penguin and Jamison Stoltz at Grove Atlantic. Thank you for working so seamlessly together and for your brilliant edits and ideas which immeasurably improved the book. Thanks also to the team of people working with you who helped put the book
together, including Ellie Smith, Allison Malecha, Ben Brusey, Sara Granger and the copy-editor, Mark Handsley.

Thank you Eliza Rothstein and Lyndsey Blessing at Inkwell for all your assistance and getting this book translated around the globe. Thanks to Taryn Eckstein for her legal advice.

Thanks to Carsten Ellegaard Christensen at
Jyllands-Posten
. You are a pro and it was Morten’s good fortune to first approach you with his story. Thanks for the help you provided when we visited you in Copenhagen and keeping us in the loop on your investigations. You and your
Jyllands-Posten
colleagues deserve all the accolades for first breaking the story.

A special thanks to the Croatian journalist Sandra Veljkovic at the Croatian newspaper
Večeřnji List
for her help on the Aminah side of the story. Thanks to Bent Skjaerstad at Norway’s TV2 for sharing information on Ikrimah’s time in Norway.

Big thanks to Nic and Margaret Lowrie Robertson, as well as Ken Shiffman, for their counsel on the project. We are indebted to Magnus Ranstorp, one of Scandinavia’s leading counter-terrorism academics, for casting his expert eye over the text and his smorgasbord of insights on the Danish context.

Thanks to those who read various iterations of the book and provided precious feedback. Some cannot be named because of the sensitivity of their positions, but you know who you are.

Thanks to our friends and family who indulged us while we disappeared off the map for a year to write this book.

And finally thanks to our wives for their love, support, feedback, ideas … and transcribing.

THE BEGINNING

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VIKING

Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

www.penguin.co.uk

First published 2014

Copyright © Morten Storm, Paul Cruickshank, Tim Lister, 2014

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved

Typeset by Jouve (UK), Milton Keynes

ISBN: 978-0-241-96880-2

1
Fadia is not her real name. For her safety and that of her family, I have given her a pseudonym.

2
Sheikh Muqbil bin Haadi was a local preacher from the Wadi’a tribe who had studied for two decades in Saudi Arabia before being imprisoned and then expelled from the country. He had been suspected of links to the jihadist group that had briefly and violently occupied the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979. Despite his persistent criticism of the relatively secularist government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen, Muqbil continued teaching unhindered. This was in part because he taught that rebellion against rulers was only permissible if they acted as disbelievers. Muqbil had rejected the overtures of Osama bin Laden, who was recruiting many of al-Qaeda’s foot soldiers from Yemen, frequently poor and illiterate young men who were easily persuaded to travel for jihad. He had asked Muqbil to provide shelter and guns for his fighters, but Muqbil had refused, wary that too close an embrace of bin Laden could provoke unwelcome consequences. Muqbil wrote polemics against aspects of popular culture such as television and against other Islamic sects. He saw equality of the sexes and democracy as un-Islamic. And the enemies of Islam included both communists and America.

3
Some Houthis in northern Yemen subscribe to a form of Shi’ism that is close to that of Iranian Shia. Others subscribe to a Zaydi Shia revivalist movement that is strongest around Saa’da. Until the 1962 revolution Zaydi imams – who claimed they were directly descended from the Prophet Mohammed – ruled North Yemen. Despite the fact that the Zaydi creed is closer to Sunni Islam than any other branch of Shia Islam, hardline Sunnis in Yemen regarded them as apostates.

4
Al-Zindani would later be described by some as the spiritual leader of al-Qaeda in Yemen. In 2004 the US designated him as a ‘global terrorist’, noting his long-standing connection to Osama bin Laden. In reality he was his own man, sympathetic to bin Laden’s world-view but jealous of his status – and freedom. For example, in the early 1990s he had refused to support a plan by bin Laden to overthrow the Saleh regime.

5
The near simultaneous 7 August 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam killed over 200, including twelve Americans.

1
Barbi eventually returned to North Carolina. The last time I heard from him was around 2009. He had married a Somali woman and was working in a factory.

2
Tariq claimed he had connections to the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar e Taiba and that he had taken several young men to train in Pakistan. He was killed fighting with al-Qaeda-linked jihadists in Syria in late 2013.

3
Karima is a pseudonym. I am not using her real name to protect her identity for security reasons.

1
Among my circle was a Moroccan called Said Mansour who had married a Danish woman. He often came to my home and spent much of his time producing CDs and DVDs of sermons and speeches by al-Qaeda figures. He was also alleged to have been in contact with Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric convicted of conspiracy in the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. After three police raids on his home, Mansour would eventually become the first person in Denmark to be prosecuted and convicted under new legislation that criminalized incitement to terrorism. But by 2009 he was freed and disappeared underground. After spending time in jail he was arrested again for ‘incitement’ in February 2014.

2
Cindy is not her real name. I have used a pseudonym.

1
Omar Bakri announced the dissolution of al-Muhajiroun in October 2004, citing the need for Muslims to ‘merge together as one global sect against the crusaders and occupiers of Muslim land’, but in practice the disbandment was a ruse to confuse those investigating his activities. The group’s operations continued and have done ever since. Al-Muhajiroun has periodically changed its name to avoid being banned. For example, recently it operated under the name ‘Shariah4UK’.

2
Abu Hamza had been charged in 2004 with encouraging the murder of non-Muslims and incitement to racial hatred. At the time of my meeting with Robert the beginning of Hamza’s trial was just days away. After being convicted and serving jail time he was extradited in 2012 to face trial on terrorism charges in the US.

1
Awlaki later claimed to have made a trip to Afghanistan to wage jihad in this period, but said he abandoned attempts to fight after the Mujahideen ‘opened’ Kabul. While there is little evidence that he had already become radicalized in the mid-1990s, Awlaki even then had connections that were unusual and unexplained. In 1999 the FBI had opened but not pursued an investigation into Awlaki’s association with one of the men in the entourage of Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called Blind Sheikh convicted of conspiracy in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.