The New Spymasters (22 page)

Based on my own meeting with him, it struck me that the French would have always taken care to maintain a distance between themselves and Nasiri. While they would have been eager to encourage his adventures and listen to their outcome, he might have had more of a semi-detached relationship with French intelligence than he made out. They subsidized his activities and extensively debriefed him, but they clearly had substantial doubts about his qualities as a secret agent and his loyalty. For instance, if the French had really wanted him to spy inside the Afghan camps, they would have given him some training first.

I challenged Nasiri about whether in fact he really had been living the kind of dual spy-jihadi existence in Afghanistan that his book implied. Instead, I suggested, maybe he had become at ease with the philosophy of jihad and stopped even thinking of himself as a spy?

‘It's true,' he admitted, ‘I was genuine.'

Nasiri said that the book had been a ‘negotiation' with publishers in which he had had to ‘close my eyes' to some of what was written. He struggled most to get the book to reflect his own radical perspective: namely, that while the GIA was wrong to attack civilians, the bomb attack on the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, for example, which took place while he was in the camps, was justifiable. Attacks on the Russians in Chechnya were praiseworthy. He admitted that his real goal in going to the camps – which the French had unwittingly assisted – was to be sent on a mission to Chechnya. ‘I really did want to go and kill Russians. Not civilians but the soldiers, the ones killing Muslims,' he said. Only when Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi insisted that he go back to Europe did the other side of his mission, to spy for the French, kick back in. In other words, although he returned and delivered his report, if circumstances had been different he might never have gone back.

*   *   *

When I met Nasiri, it seemed obvious that, in an almost schizophrenic way, he thoroughly accepted both the dogma of jihad and having worked with some of its enemies. In the camps, he had gone a long way down the militant path. He even volunteered to defuse an improvised bomb that had failed to explode. His group was asked, ‘Who wants to become a
shaheed
[martyr]?' Only Nasiri raised his hand and walked off to dismantle the device. That kind of devotion gave him the credibility a penetration agent needed to survive. But, he said, he did it ‘because I believe in Islam'. It meant he had little to hide. ‘I was genuine. I was not lying. I was not fabricating. And you know why? This is the best way to get anywhere you want in life because they can even cut off your hand or nose and you will still just say the truth.'

There is a lesson here about spycraft. A successful spymaster is said to have an ability to get inside an enemy's mind. But if you draw close to that dividing line between friend and foe and begin to think like your opponent, you risk slipping over. This goes some way to explain why intelligence agencies themselves present such an ‘insider threat'. From Kim Philby to Edward Snowden, the biggest betrayals were from agencies established to prevent betrayal that made so much of their role in defence of the nation.

As Nasiri put it, trying to recruit spies inside Islamist organizations required a wholehearted approach. Cheap tactics, such as offering them money, were bound to fail. ‘Because those people in the camps, those people in the groups, they always know who is really attracted to this life they lead.' The only effective way to penetrate groups like al-Qaeda, he said, was to ‘build up a Muslim guy, really Muslim guy, 100 per cent Muslim guy and send him back to spy on the Muslims'. But, he claimed, there was a 99 per cent chance it would backfire and the agent would come back and kill. ‘When he will come back, if he comes back, he will blow you up.' Nasiri laughed as he said it, although he insisted he was not joking.

Although he may have become hardened over the years, it was obvious from meeting him that he must always have been incredibly headstrong. At Khalden he was one of the few who questioned the orders of the camp's ‘sheikh', al-Libi. Such poise may have protected him from exposure and suspicion. But, he admitted, he was equally uncompromising with his unfortunate handlers in Western intelligence. They tried in vain to control him and he regarded them as consistently dishonest.

*   *   *

In the winter of late 1995/early 1996 Nasiri moved on, via Peshawar again, to a second, more specialized camp. This was Darunta, on the road from the Khyber Pass to Kabul, near the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad. The camp was under the control of an Afghan mujahideen group, Hesbi-Islami, but a portion was reserved for training militants under the authority of al-Libi. This was more like a terrorist camp than Khalden had been. Rather than use supplied military hardware, trainees were taught how to make and then detonate explosives themselves. At this time, the camp leadership was deciding what to do with Nasiri. He was still hoping to go to Chechnya, but al-Libi told him his mission was to return to Europe and establish himself there.
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It was not important exactly where, but he was to set up his own cell and then identify targets that the ‘brothers' could use for future assaults.

Nasiri returned to Europe in May 1996, just as Osama bin Laden took a chartered jet from Sudan to Afghanistan to lead the jihadi movement.

*   *   *

By the time of the 9/11 attacks, agents like Nasiri who had infiltrated al-Qaeda were still a rarity. The lack of effort by Western intelligence agencies was due not only to the dangers and difficulties but also to the cuts made in intelligence budgets since the end of the Cold War, as well as what became known as the ‘wash' of disreputable sources (for example, those with records of human rights abuses). Former officers of both the CIA and SIS rightly said that human intelligence efforts were then at a low point. The British had cut their budget for human intelligence operations nearly as much as the Americans had done, as several former SIS officers confirmed.

But the main reason why there was so little effort to get spies among the extreme Sunni Islamists was the failure of most in the West to grasp the scale of the threat posed. Until agencies realized the true measure of the danger, hard-to-control agents like Nasiri were rarely going to be seen as worth the trouble. The French, whose citizens had been murdered in numerous terrorist attacks in Paris during the 1990s, had a better grasp of the risk. And they were highly critical of the British, for instance, for being almost wilfully blind to the operational role of extremists living in their midst and actively plotting terrorism. Officials at MI5 would later acknowledge that failure.

*   *   *

When he returned from Afghanistan, Nasiri made contact with the French again. He felt vindicated. ‘I was on top of the world. No one had believed in me; no one thought I had anything to offer. The DGSE had been ready to throw me in jail and wash their hands of me. Then they tried to pay me off to disappear. But now here I was, just back from the Afghan training camps with vast stores of information. They wouldn't try and get rid of me this time. Now they needed me.'
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The DGSE responded, he recalled, with a mixture of joy that he was alive, disbelief about what he had done and, most of all, uncertainty about what to do with him next. They did debrief him extensively, in a hotel in Istanbul, but they hardly seemed interested in the level of detail he could provide about the location and layout of the camps, the training programmes and the personalities who were coming and going. While much of his account cannot be independently verified, his description of the camps did accord with what other intelligence operatives and visitors there would later indicate.

Nasiri ended up in London, where the GIA had regrouped and where the French decided he should be run jointly with the British. But he did not get on with his MI5 handler, ‘Daniel', whom he disliked in almost all respects. ‘I disliked the way he threw his briefcase, I disliked the way he spoke, I disliked the way he told me he'd be “handling” me as if I were a circus animal.'
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Like him or not, Nasiri presented MI5 with another dilemma. Al-Libi had sent Nasiri back in part to fund-raise, meaning he was expected to wire money to the camp. At first the French and British baulked at giving him cash that would essentially fund terror training, but on three occasions, he said, they agreed.

Nasiri began hearing about a preacher based at a mosque at the Four Feathers Youth Centre near Baker Street in London. He was known as Abu Qatada, a Palestinian-Jordanian whose real name was Omar Mahmoud Othman and who was later labelled, with justification, bin Laden's ambassador in Europe. He was one of the key clerics who gave vital scholarly endorsement to bin Laden's actions. Nasiri identified him as the most compelling threat in the city. He also says he passed on messages between Abu Qatada in London and Abu Zubaydah and al-Libi in Pakistan.

At the time, though, British intelligence had little ability to identify real operational extremists like Abu Qatada, according to Nasiri. They were more interested in far less credible preachers like the Finsbury Park mosque's Abu Hamza (an Egyptian whose real name was Mustafa Kamel Mustafa). Despite his previous training in Afghanistan, Abu Hamza was then little more than a rabble-rousing fraud. He had little or no active connection to the hard-core jihadi network. Nasiri knew someone who had trained with him and had learned that – contrary to what Abu Hamza claimed in his speeches – he had lost his arm not in combat but in an accident while making explosives. In the years that followed Abu Hamza's influence grew in London among young radicals. He was extradited in 2012 to the United States on terrorism charges and was found guilty in 2014.

Nasiri never discovered why MI5 told him to drop his focus on Abu Qatada. (At the time of writing, and after a legal battle stretching over many years, Abu Qatada had just been deported from the UK back to Jordan, where he was acquitted on the initial charges, but indicted on new ones.) Meanwhile, Nasiri's French contacts, whom he also saw in London, were still focused on finding the camps where Algerians trained and had little interest in the wider threat from Islamists. There was a basic lack of trust based on the belief that Nasiri was still uncertain as to where his loyalties lay. ‘I think they were afraid of me and what I would do. They were following me everywhere.' A divorce seemed inevitable.

After his relationship with MI5 broke down, it was made clear to Nasiri that he should leave the country, particularly after he proved uncooperative following al-Qaeda's 1998 embassy attacks. That day, fed up with surveillance, he took the battery out of his mobile phone and left it in his flat. ‘I let them go and they don't know where I was any more. They was crazy, they had to call my future wife to tell her, “Please, please where is he?” They called her and said, “Where is he?” and I was just in London.'

After a spell back in North Africa, Nasiri agreed to move on to assist German intelligence in combating Islamists on their soil. But he lost patience with the Germans too. He never got the new identity and the protection he had hoped for. ‘I feel I risked my life for nothing. For absolutely nothing,' he said.
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*   *   *

In the years after Nasiri's spying missions, the ‘Afghan Arabs' became more prominent and the name they had adopted, al-Qaeda, became known to the world. Al-Qaeda-linked groups attacked US interests in Yemen, Somalia, Kenya and Tanzania. There were further attacks, and attempted attacks, in the US and Jordan at the time of the millennium celebrations.

Only a small group of people, inside or outside the secret services, fully understood the threat that al-Qaeda posed. And the CIA, working with anti-Taliban factions, did make some attempts to kick-start a programme to infiltrate the jihadists. Still, when the strike came on 11 September 2001, the US and Britain had not a single spy inside al-Qaeda. It was a critical weakness.

As the official US inquiry into 9/11 confirmed, there had been a ‘lack of reliable and knowledgeable human sources' inside al-Qaeda. ‘Prior to September 11, 2001, the Intelligence Community did not effectively develop and use human sources to penetrate the al-Qa'ida inner circle.'
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Michael Scheuer – one of those at the CIA who had rung alarm bells – asserted, ‘The reason we didn't prevent 9/11 is simple: neither CIA nor its intelligence allies, Western or Muslim, had a spy or an informant inside al-Qaeda's command structure.'

Watching coverage of the attacks at home in Germany, Nasiri felt physically sick. He wondered whether, if people had listened to him and the authorities had kept a closer eye on those who had gone for training in the Afghan camps, they might have been prevented. ‘I tried to get them to understand the reason that all those boys go to Afghanistan and train and be ready to die for a cause – not for their mother or son but because of the humiliation of Islam and Muslims.'
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Nasiri had his weaknesses as an agent and seemed at times perilously uncertain of his own loyalties. As he warned, someone able to think like a radical and live among them for months might easily be drawn into their ranks. But these questions of loyalty are always present in the spy business, particularly with long-term infiltrations. What emerges from his story is not that finding a way into such groups was too difficult but rather that there was little serious attempt to try. This came from a failure to listen, a basic lack of interest or concern at that time by the secret services (and by the policymakers who directed them) about a movement that was forming far beyond their borders. Even if, no doubt, another more compliant and level-headed person would have made a better agent, Nasiri showed that the Afghan camps could be infiltrated.

There would be great challenges ahead and new tradecraft and new specialists would be required if the Western agencies were to succeed. ‘We're still kind of stuck in the Cold War approach to this,' said Scheuer in a newspaper interview a dozen years after Nasiri's venture. ‘This is a much more difficult target than the Soviets were. These people are true believers. They're living according to their beliefs, not in the lap of luxury.'
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In other words, bribery would not motivate them to spy. But none of these differences were insurmountable; they were instead a reason to adapt.