Agent Storm: My Life Inside al-Qaeda (66 page)

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Handwritten notes by Special Agents – released in 2013 under the Freedom of Information Act and posted by Judicial Watch – show Awlaki was frequently under surveillance between November 2001 and January 2002. Comings and goings at his suburban Falls Church home were noted, as were his travels in his white Dodge Caravan, the times of his mobile-phone calls, and his visits to the mosque and the Islamic Society at Woodlawn, Maryland.

On 15 November 2001 he was tailed on his way to National Public Radio in Washington DC, where he took part in a panel discussion for the show
Talk of the Nation
.

The surveillance of Awlaki revealed no contacts that might have had consequences for US national security, but did uncover an almost compulsive appetite for sex. Agents found that Awlaki was making visits to area hotels but staying just an hour or so, and they began contacting escorts known to have worked out of those hotels.

On 9 November an escort met FBI officers at the Loews Hotel in Washington. She showed them notes about a customer who had paid her $400 in cash four days previously for oral sex. The listed name was Anwar Aulaqi, with an address in Falls Church. Another escort working out of the Washington Suites Hotel told agents that on 23 November she had met a client who ‘was tall and thin with a full beard, and polite. He claimed to be from India and employed as a computer engineer’, according to the agents’ notes of an interview with the woman. She recognized Awlaki from a photograph and said he had paid $400 for an hour with her.

The documents show that Awlaki had several more encounters with different escorts at a number of Washington-area hotels in the winter of 2001. He paid between $220 and $400 for a variety of acts. One escort who met him at the Melrose Hotel told agents that he looked very much like Osama bin Laden. Altogether, the FBI interviewed seven women about their appointments with Awlaki, but he was never charged.

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Ali’s last name is omitted for legal reasons.

4
Another member of the study circle was Abdullah Mustafa Ayub, an Australian militant whose father was allegedly a leading figure in the terrorist group Jamaat al-Islamiyya. Ayub’s convert mother – Rabiah Hutchison, an ex-surfer girl, dubbed the ‘the matriarch of radical Islam’ in Australia – was even more notorious; rumour had it Osama bin Laden had once courted her in Afghanistan.

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Abu Talha al-Sudani was suspected of involvement in al-Qaeda’s bombing of US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998. In 2003 he ordered the casing of a US military base in Djibouti. He was killed in an air strike in Somalia in 2007.

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Documents obtained by the group Judicial Watch under the US Freedom of Information Act – and posted in July 2013 – showed that the FBI’s interest in Awlaki had certainly grown in the years since he had left America. A memo marked ‘Secret’ and written by the Bureau’s San Diego office on 1 December 2006 requested access to Awlaki while in jail.

‘Aulaqi left the United States in the early part of 2002. Significant information regarding Aulaqi has developed since this time and since the time he was interviewed in September 2001,’ it said. ‘It is unknown at this time whether the interview will take one or two days or if a polygraph will be conducted. Specific requests from San Diego will be made after approval for access to Aulaqi from Yemen officials,’ the memo continued.

The same document recalled an FBI interview with a man called Eyad al-Rarabah, who had helped some of the 9/11 hijackers find accommodation in Virginia as well as illegal driving licences. Al-Rababah ‘later stated that he met [9/11 hijackers] Hani Hanjour and Nawaf Alhamzi [sic] at the Dar al-Hijrah mosque with Anwar Aulaqi’.

There were a host of other topics the Bureau wanted to discuss with Awlaki, including ‘his overseas travel in 2000 and 2001; his association with San Diego individuals believed to be involved with international terrorism; his involvement in fund raising in the United States for known terrorist organizations; and his involvement in criminal activity in an effort to support terrorist organizations’.

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He was not using his real name.

1
Saddam al-Hajdib knew al-Qaeda in Iraq’s then newly installed Egyptian operations’ chief, Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, who, along with an Iraqi, took over after Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s death in a US strike in June 2006. Al-Hajdib had recently brought funds back from Iraq to Lebanon with him and had killed a Syrian soldier on his return across the border.

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Youssef al-Hajdib – caught as he tried to escape to Denmark – would receive a life sentence without parole, a punishment he would greet in court by raising both middle fingers in defiance.

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One of the Danish agents subsequently told me my operation led to the arrests.

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Among the other guests was a young black South African and a nineteen-year-old Somali called Issa Hussein Barre. The latter would soon take advantage of my connection to Warsame to join the struggle in Somalia. The usually cautious MI5 even approved cash transfers to him to finance his wedding so that I could nourish my connection for information. Unfortunately he was killed while fighting for al-Shabaab – a young husband sacrificed in an ever more brutal cause.

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Perhaps it wasn’t just the taste. Control of stores selling top-grade Yemeni honey had once been used by Osama bin Laden to fund al-Qaeda.

1
Avdic was arrested in 2005 in connection with a terror plot uncovered in Bosnia. A jury ruled there was sufficient evidence to convict him, but he was acquitted a few days later by a three-judge panel who disagreed.

2
The Danish newspaper in question was
Jyllands-Posten
, which had published controversial cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in September 2005.

1
Avid consumers of Awlaki’s videos included the so-called Toronto 18, who plotted to launch attacks across Canada in 2006, and the British al-Qaeda cell that plotted to blow up transatlantic airliners the same year. Several of those who conspired to attack the Fort Dix military base in New Jersey in 2007 were also devotees of the cleric’s sermons.

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I have a saved copy of this video and dozens of pictures during the journey.

1
I have receipts for the Dahabshiil transfers made to Warsame: $100 in March 2008, $200 in July 2008, $400 in September 2008, $138 in January 2009 and $500 in January 2010.

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Al-Muhajir means ‘the foreigner’ in Arabic. His real name was Mohamed Abdikadir Mohamed.

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Klang, Trailer and Soren were later honoured at a ceremony in Washington DC for their role in the mission that led to the successful targeting of Nabhan. Klang told me each of them had received gold coins from the Americans. He said the equipment had indeed allowed the Navy SEALs to zero in on their target. I neither requested nor was offered any reward for helping track down Nabhan.

1
Awlaki reiterated his concern over the draft message technique in a February 2010 encrypted email to me: ‘some brs have advised me that the draft system is suspicious because the enemy know that the brs use it.’ In the same email he also revealed that he was not now opening emails himself. He had presumably switched to using a courier to open and send emails for him.

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I later met Mears on a course that I signed up for in the Arctic Circle. He never knew of my work for the intelligence services.

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A statement from the Yemeni embassy
in Washington said Awlaki was ‘presumed’ to have been at the site of an al-Qaeda meeting south of the capital city of Sana’a.

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Bomb experts later theorized that the only reason the device didn’t work was that Abdulmutallab’s perspiration had desensitized the main charge: the result of wearing the explosive underwear for three weeks as he travelled from Yemen through Africa to Nigeria. But all agreed he had come terrifyingly close to bringing down a US airliner over a major city.

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Within weeks, lawyers at the US Department of Justice took the unprecedented step of writing up a short memorandum justifying the targeted killing of an American citizen overseas.

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On 29 January 2010 Awlaki sent me this follow-up email: ‘a few days [before] Shaykh Abdullah [Mehdar] died (btw he was the chief of his tribe) I was talking to him about you and remembering your visit to his house. He was a brave and sincere brother. A few weeks before his death I was advising him that if the government attacks him he should retreat to the mountains. He refused and said if they come to me I will not retreat but will fight until I am killed, and that is what he did. Alhamdulillah his family is doing well.’

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Several weeks later AQAP released a short video eulogy claiming the raid on Mehdar’s compound was a joint US–Yemeni operation. US officials have not publicly acknowledged US special forces were involved.

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Storm Buschcraft was not the only cover company I set up to justify my travel overseas. In October 2009 MI5 helped me register a company called ‘HelpHandtoHand’, which we described as an NGO providing aid for the needy in Africa and the Middle East. I even opened up a Twitter account to advertise the new venture. But I was eventually forced to abandon it after MI5 cut ties with me in April 2010.

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PET was also worried by the influence of Abu Musab al-Somali, a Somali refugee I knew from my radical days, who had returned to Somalia. Phone intercepts indicated a number of Somali extremists in Denmark were contacting him. Al-Somali had come to Denmark as a refugee in his youth, then moved to Yemen, and had been arrested in 2006 along with several other members of my Sana’a circle for his part in the plan to smuggle guns from Yemen to militants in Somalia. But he had only received a two-year sentence and when freed had crossed the Gulf of Aden to Somalia. Danish intelligence were now concerned he might be plotting attacks in Denmark.

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The men travelled to Denmark on 28 December 2010 and were arrested the next day. Mounir Dhahri was the Tunisian cell leader. Another member of the cell – Munir Awad, a Swede of Lebanese descent, whose curly, well-maintained long hair fell over his shoulders – had fought with the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia.

Western intelligence believed the plan was part of a wider conspiracy by al-Qaeda to launch ‘Mumbai-style’ attacks across Europe, which had triggered an unprecedented US State Department warning for Americans in Europe that October.

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Later British authorities revealed that one of the devices had been set to blow up over the eastern seaboard of the United States.

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In the following years the recipe would be downloaded and used by militants in multiple terrorism plots on both sides of the Atlantic, including the Boston bombing.

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He was transferred to a New York courtroom, where he pleaded guilty to nine terror charges, among them conspiracy and providing material support to al-Shabaab and AQAP.

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Although I did not know it at the time, Awlaki was then penning an Islamic justification for chemical and biological attacks on the United States and other Western countries. ‘
The use of poisons
of chemical and biological weapons against population centers is allowed and strongly recommended due to its great effect on the enemy,’ the cleric wrote in an article later that year in
Inspire
magazine.

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I have a recording, which I provided to Paul Cruickshank and Tim Lister, of a phone conversation in which my contact confirmed the details of this handover.

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There was recent precedent for such an operation. The CIA located Osama bin Laden through his most trusted messenger, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. The courier was used by al-Qaeda’s leader as his single point of contact with his senior deputies. Bin Laden’s way of operating was similar to that of Awlaki: he composed messages on a computer, uploaded them to a thumb drive and passed them to a courier.

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The extracts from this conversation with the Danish agents are translated verbatim from my recording.

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The extracts from this conversation with Michael are reproduced verbatim from my recording.

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AQAP had proposed providing the Dammaj students with weapons training so they could fight the Houthis – a Shia revivalist movement – in the surrounding area. The Houthis had taken advantage of political turmoil to seize territory in northern Yemen. It was yet another reason why Yemen, despite its grinding poverty and relative lack of oil, was critical to the entire Arabian Gulf. In 2009 Saudi Arabia had sent troops across the border to confront the Houthis out of concern for its own security and (as yet unproven) suspicions that the Houthis were being supported by Iran.

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Ikrimah had recently emailed, asking me to deliver a long letter to Wuhayshi from an Islamic teacher who had taught the AQAP leader in Afghanistan many years previously. The teacher had recently been killed in Somalia.