Agent Storm: My Life Inside al-Qaeda (8 page)

To begin with I was the only fair-skinned Caucasian at Dammaj. That made me an object of curiosity for many of the students and the local tribes. Yet I never felt excluded or ostracized because of my ethnicity.

I was later joined by a soft-spoken American convert from Ohio, called Clifford Allen Newman, and his four-year-old son, Abdullah. Newman went by the name Amin. He looked and sounded like what some Americans would call a ‘redneck’, but he spoke Arabic well and had spent time in Pakistan before moving to Yemen. We struck up a friendship. Like me he seemed to be fleeing a bad relationship.
US authorities had a warrant for his arrest on international kidnapping charges because he had brought Abdullah with him to Yemen after a judge awarded custody to his ex-wife in their divorce the year before
. Newman had wanted his son to have a strict Muslim upbringing.

I spent four months in Dammaj. In early 1998 I left the isolation of the seminary and travelled back to the capital, where I found myself a basic apartment. Newman and his son moved in with me briefly, while they looked for a place of their own.

I was serious about my faith; it was my compass and I planned to return to Dammaj. By the time I travelled back to Sana’a I was a hardcore Salafi. I could argue against the accursed ‘innovators’.

In Sana’a I was introduced to some radical preachers, including one Mohammed al-Hazmi – who three years later would take to the pulpit and welcome the events of 9/11 as ‘justified revenge’ against America.
Another was Sheikh Abdul Majid al-Zindani, one of the most powerful religious figures in Yemen and prominent in the main opposition party, which he had co-founded. Al-Zindani, who was in his late fifties, had thousands of followers. He ran a university in Sana’a – al-Iman – whose mosque was crammed with several thousand worshippers every Friday.
⁴

When my first experience of Ramadan as a devout Muslim came about, I was invited to break the fast with him one evening. Al-Zindani wanted me to enrol in al-Iman University.

A man of great wealth, he had a fabulous library at his house in Sana’a.

‘What can I do to help you?’ he asked.

He was not expecting my answer.

‘Is it true you are with the Muslim Brotherhood?’ I asked. ‘If that is so, you will lead me to hellfire.’

We had been taught at Dammaj that the Muslim Brotherhood, a political movement that was one of the few sources of dissent in Arab countries, had abandoned true Sharia and were innovators where it suited their political ends, in some countries supporting the concept of democratic elections. This was anathema to true Salafis, because it pretended that mere mortals could make laws.

I did not ask the question with any animosity but al-Zindani looked stunned. Despite his radical profile, the Sheikh was not sufficiently militant for my taste. And as a strident Salafist and no respecter of status, I was not afraid to tell him as much.

He was clearly not used to being challenged by a novice but recovered his composure.

‘It seems that if you come to al-Iman, we will have many interesting debates. But you must not believe everything you are told. Even good Muslims are sometimes confused or misguided,’ he said, smiling.

To show he had no hard feelings about my insolence, al-Zindani let
me see some of his most precious volumes, and we talked more about the early days of Islam. I was learning fast.

A friend from Dammaj introduced me to a network of young Salafis in the city. Some were veterans of jihad who had fought the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s and more recently had been in the Balkans. Of the growing pool of militants in Yemen, some were beginning to see the West, and especially America, as the enemy of Islam. There had already been bomb attacks against US interests in Saudi Arabia; and more were being planned. One of this circle was an Egyptian named Hussein al-Masri. Although he did not acknowledge it directly he was very likely a member of the Egyptian group Islamic Jihad. Al-Masri was a wanted man in his homeland. In his mid-thirties, he had a diffident manner and soft voice that belied his experience as a militant with extensive contacts. He was also the first person I heard utter the name Osama bin Laden.

At that time – in early 1998 – bin Laden was building al-Qaeda’s presence in south and eastern Afghanistan, in Kandahar and around Jalalabad. Welcomed by the Taliban, his organization was already plotting attacks against Western targets, including a deadly bombing it would carry out months later on US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.
⁵
Al-Masri told me of the training camps al-Qaeda had established in Afghanistan and how to travel there via Pakistan. He said he could arrange passage if I ever wanted to go.

I was in two minds: the adventurer in me was tempted, but as a Salafi I had not yet accepted that waging such a jihad was legitimate. Pure Salafis also looked down on groups like the Taliban, whose practices we saw as unorthodox.

To Western eyes, such differences might seem like semantics, but to teachers at Dammaj or in Riyadh, the Taliban’s philosophy bordered on heresy. They encouraged ‘excessive’ praying beyond the five times a day mandated by the Prophet. Sheikh Muqbil had taught that one should not even countenance sitting down with such men. While they might be Muslims, they could lead you to damnation.

In making this point he liked to quote a famous
hadith
of the Prophet: ‘My Ummah [nation] will break into seventy-three sects – only one will be in paradise and the rest will be in hell.’

For now, my sense of ideological purity won out.

Among my companions in Sana’a was a dark-skinned seventeen-year-old Yemeni with a generous smile and a shy courtesy. Abdul had curly, short-cropped hair and the beginnings of a beard. He can’t have weighed more than seven stone; his legs were like stalks. But even at his age he was well connected with militants in Sana’a – men who had fought the communists in Afghanistan, the Serbs in Bosnia. Abdul and I often talked late into the night at his home, fuelled by endless glasses of sugary mint tea. I loved his natural enthusiasm and curiosity. He was full of questions about Europe, amazed and delighted that Islam had gained a foothold in these northern heathen lands. He yearned to travel and enjoyed practising his rudimentary English on me. I was impressed by his deep religious commitment. He was not unusual in knowing the Koran by heart but his voice was so melodic that he was often asked to recite prayers in the mosque.

My time in Yemen had deepened my faith. It had been little more than a year since I had entered a mosque for the first time and mumbled my Declaration of Faith. Now I knew the Koran, could recite
hadith
and discuss Islamic law. The man who had sent me, Mahmud al-Tayyib, had probably expected I would return home within weeks, unable to cope with the hardships of the poorest country in the Arab world.

But after the best part of a year in Yemen I was ready for a change. I had endured two bouts of dysentery, had no money and was beginning to tire of being stared at in the streets of Sana’a. I dug out my return ticket to London.

CHAPTER FIVE

Londonistan

Summer 1998–Early 2000

I arrived at Heathrow airport on a muggy late summer’s day in 1998, relieved to be free of the dust and heat of Sana’a and faintly amused by the orderly appearance of suburban London. I was soon reunited with Mahmud al-Tayyib at the Regent’s Park mosque and regaled him with stories of Dammaj and Sana’a.

I helped teach Muslims who came to the mosque and began accompanying an elderly Iraqi preacher and several converts to Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, where we would try to spread the word of Islam. We must have been a strange sight in our long Islamic
thawb
s, the ankle-length robe. Sometimes we would get into heated debates with evangelical Christians.

‘The Koran is the pure word of God,’ I would shout, remembering to quote a famous verse from the Koran. ‘
Had it issued from any but God, they would surely have found in it many a contradiction.
’

We were usually greeted by a mixture of indifference and suspicion, which only reinforced our determination to continue proselytizing.

For radical Muslims London had become a cauldron of debate and rivalry. There were many echoes of the discussions that had occupied our afternoons under the date-palms of Dammaj. And the gritty district of Brixton, south of the River Thames, had become the centre of this tussle for the soul of Islam.

Brixton had seen riots in the early 1980s, pitching Afro-Caribbean youth against the Metropolitan Police. Disturbances had then spread to a dozen cities. The area had since become somewhat gentrified, but its
housing was rundown and there was still plenty of poverty. Even on a bright summer’s day in 1998 the high street was gloomy – a collection of down-at-heel stores and roads strewn with escaped plastic bags. But Brixton mosque was thriving and its reputation for Salafism was attracting devotees from across Europe. I had first heard about the mosque from British Muslims who had come to Yemen.

Most of my friends and flatmates were of a similar outlook. My experiences in Yemen and especially my time at Dammaj fascinated them. I even met the singer Cat Stevens several times. He had changed his name to Yusuf Islam and become a Sufi Muslim; I had some animated conversations with him about the true path of Islam. Salafis scorned Sufi Muslims for their veneration of saints and other perceived distortions of the faith.

I picked up temporary jobs, mostly driving, which helped me find radical mosques throughout London: in Hounslow, Shepherd’s Bush and Finchley. None was as grand as Regent’s Park; some were no more than shabby basements. But they were energized by a fervour which was by then challenging – and worrying – more moderate preachers, as well as the British security services.

The new circle I had entered included plenty of angry young men looking to inflict revenge on the West for its persecution of Muslims. A few clearly had emotional or psychological issues, displaying wild mood swings or budding paranoia, but most were driven by an unshakable belief that they had found the true way to obey Allah and that obedience called for waging jihad. A surprising number of French converts had come to Brixton, including one called Mukhtar. We talked about everything, shared a passion for martial arts and attended the mosque together.

Mukhtar was a French convert in his thirties, with a lean physique and close-set dark eyes. He reminded me a little of the French footballer Zinedine Zidane. We had met at Brixton mosque and he told me he had come to London to get away from police brutality in the rundown suburb of Paris where he had lived.

I soon met his French-Moroccan flatmate, one Zacarias Moussaoui. They lived in a decrepit 1960s council tower block that reeked of decay.
Their apartment was bare: no beds or sofas, just a couple of mattresses and rough hessian mats on the floor. It was a typical Salafists’ pad.

Moussaoui had just turned thirty. He was well-built but beginning to put on weight. A thin black beard ran from his sideburns down his jaw and petered out at his chin. His receding hair was swept back. He would often cook tagine and couscous for everyone.

Moussaoui was clearly intelligent and had recently received a
Master’s degree
at London’s South Bank University, which was not far from Brixton. Most of the time he was quiet and unassuming, but brooding. He rarely talked about himself and never about his family. He did, however, have a passion for martial arts, especially Filipino knife-fighting.

Occasionally he would talk in general terms about jihad in Afghanistan and especially in Chechnya, which was at that time the cause célèbre of jihadis. Islamist rebels were battling the might of the Russian army. We all agreed that there was an obligation to support the rebels, through prayer, money or even waging jihad ourselves.

‘It would be sinful if we don’t at least raise money,’ Moussaoui once said in his soft French-accented voice, as we sat cross-legged on the floor.

The age of online videos had dawned and we would watch stuttering, blurry images on websites which championed the Chechen struggle: ambushes of Russian troops, but more often human rights atrocities by the Russians against Chechen civilians in the Chechen capital, Grozny. Moussaoui would stare at the screen, his eyes glistening and his head shaking.

‘
Kuffar
[infidel] Russians,’ he muttered one day. ‘I would happily die in Grozny if I could take a platoon of them with me.’

What he never told us was that he had already been to Chechnya and worked for the rebels – helping tell the world of their cause with his IT skills. He had also helped recruit others from abroad to join the Chechen war
. Nor did he tell us he had spent time in
one of al-Qaeda’s camps
in Afghanistan in the spring of 1998. While the rest of us debated jihad, Moussaoui had already lived it.

In October 1999 the Russians began a ground offensive against
Grozny. Television coverage and videos posted online revealed the true horror of what amounted to a scorched-earth campaign, with tens of thousands of civilians forced to flee their homes.