‘I was in al-Qaeda. Deradicalisation is naive’
Aimen Dean went from jihadist to MI6 spy. He tells Cara McGoogan his story and how Britain can tackle terror threats
When Sudesh Amman, the Streatham attacker, ran out of a high street shop and began indiscriminately stabbing passers-by last weekend, Aimen Dean worried that his prediction was coming true. A former al-Qaeda member turned MI6 spy, Dean had told me days beforehand of his certainty that the next big terror threat to civilian life was from offenders leaving prison.
“They could form the next wave of lone wolf attacks in the UK,” said Dean, just over a week before the incident in south London. “It’s a problem we’re facing right now.”
Dean’s fears weren’t unfounded
– it was the second such attack in as many months, following the fatal stabbing of two people by Usman Khan at an offender rehabilitation conference near London Bridge. In the wake of the attacks, the Government has announced plans to increase prison sentences for people convicted of terrorism offences, and has said it will introduce emergency legislation to prevent their early release. But the problem will only intensify existing problems, with the UK demand for prison spaces due to outstrip supply by 2022.
“The dangerous message Amman and Khan have sent is that if you’re a convicted terrorist, you either go out in a blaze of glory or you’re watched for your whole life,” says Dean. The release of more such convicts in the coming months and years means, he warns, that “the appeal of this kind of atrocity will intensify” – here and across France, Germany, the US, Canada and Australia, where prosecutions for terrorism-related offences are highest.
When we meet in January, 41-yearold Dean speaks rapidly and with authority on subjects from Islamic history to deradicalisation. On the latter, he is well versed, having undergone “a very strange career progression from “trainee imam, to jihadist, to terrorist bomb-maker, to spy, to banker” – as well as host of Conflicted, a podcast about the Middle East, which returns for a second series this week.
Born in Saudi Arabia as the youngest of six boys, Dean’s world fell apart after his mother died of a brain aneurysm when he was just 14. He sought solace in religion, which his brothers believed “was the perfect life I could have led, because there would be no bad habits like drinking and smoking. It didn’t cross their minds that it would lead me to the path of jihad.”
At 15, that “respectable crowd” encouraged Dean to travel to Bosnia to join the Mujahideen Brigade, where he witnessed horrific violence, including his friend decapitating a prisoner. Once the war ended in 1995, he was recruited by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the September 11 attacks, to join al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. There, he met Osama bin Laden “for about two hours, and he talked about his vision to fight the Americans”, Dean recalls. Bin Laden roused them with plans for glory. “It’s different when you hear the plan from when you see it in practice.”
After al-Qaeda’s first major terror attack in 1998, when suicide bombers killed 224 at US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, however, Dean “realised the foolishness” of their mission, understanding for the first time that “a group of 400 people in the mountains did not have the right to hijack the decision of war and peace for 1.5 billion people”. He fled to Qatar in search of “a quiet life” – entering the country by using a fake passport – and was picked up by security services, who gave him the choice between prison or spying for the Americans, French or British. Dean chose the latter, based on familial connections to the British Empire.
Dean, then 20, would go on to spy on al-Qaeda for eight years, “working” for them as a bomb-maker in Afghanistan, and travelling the world to conduct business on their behalf. “Fear was always in the back of my mind,” he says, “but if I was willing to risk my life for al-Qaeda’s wrong cause, I would be a hypocrite if I didn’t risk my life for the right one.”
The information he gathered foiled terror plots, such as a deadly poison attack on the New York subway, and landed on the desk of Tony Blair, the then prime minister. His biggest regret, he says, “is that I had information something big was about to happen [in summer 2001], but I didn’t know what”. Even if they had stopped September 11, he believes it would only have been a matter of time before a similar attack was carried out.
An American journalist blew Dean’s cover in 2006. But after initial anger, he was relieved; MI6 smuggled him to a safe house, and as time wore on, he could start to live a normal life. When an outgoing MI6 boss offered him a job in counter-terrorism and money laundering, working at a global bank, he jokes: “I exchanged one form of terrorism for another: alQaeda to banking.” Now, Dean advises governments and banks on terrorism, as well as his podcasting duties.
With this background it is perhaps strange that Dean believes there “is no such thing as a rehabilitated jihadist”. He thinks he is different because he left of his own volition: “The only way [a jihadist] can demonstrate that they’ve renounced violent extremism is if they have sung like a canary and provided damaging intelligence on the networks that recruited them.”
The other test is for them to show they will put loyalty to their country above religion. “I don’t believe in deradicalisation,” says Dean. “The efforts are riddled with naivety and a lack of understanding.”
Prison is the safest place for violent extremists, adds Dean, and more places should be built to house convicts. “Use the deterrent of much longer sentences and make them serve the minimum in its entirety unless they show remorse and co-operation,” he says. “If you need
‘Unless they have co-operated fully and come clean, you can’t trust them’
another Belmarsh, build one.” To halt the spread of extremism within prison, “conditions need to be harsher, with less time for them to congregate”.
But he would never take his expertise into that area, pointing out that Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones, the victims of the London Bridge attack, were “two well-meaning people stabbed by the person they helped”. Jihadists are “extremely treacherous”, Dean adds. “Unless they have come completely clean, co-operated fully and done damage to their previous cause, you can’t trust them.”
As a Tory voter, Dean supports the Government’s increased sentences for terrorists and ban on Isil recruits coming home – like Shamima Begum, the east London teenager who lost her appeal against her citizenship being revoked on Friday. But he thinks the security services should work more closely with the police to see if suspects will share information about recruitment networks. The UK should also set up a processing centre in Cyprus, which would not be like Guantánamo Bay, he says, because “if you don’t exercise control over them in a safe environment, they will show up somewhere else with false identities and be a greater menace”.
Dean may have distanced himself from al-Qaeda, but it haunts him. He lives with diabetes, developed from the stress of being undercover in Afghanistan, and there is a fatwa calling for his head. In 2016, two men attempted to assassinate him when he was in Bahrain for a family wedding, but the security services foiled the plot. The only way he can sleep at night is by loudly playing audio books on repeat.
“It annoys my wife, but she puts up with it,” he says. Happily married since 2014, Dean and his wife – whom he met through a friend, and to whom he told his story on their second date – have two children under four.
On a bookshelf at his London home, Dean has two signed copies of his autobiography, Nine Lives: My Time as MI6’s Top Spy Inside al-Qaeda, one for each child. In them, he has written the note: “This is your father, this is what he did. First of all, don’t repeat his mistakes. Secondly, follow his example in correcting those mistakes.”
The new series of Conflicted is on major podcast platforms from Feb 12
‘Prison is the safest place for violent extremists... with longer sentences’