My life as an al-qa’eda double agent
Aimen Dean was MI6’S most important spy during the war on terror. Matthew Campbell reports “Osama bin Laden arrived at the camp. Meeting him felt like being summoned to the office of a very popular headmaster”
Standing outside Finsbury Park Mosque, Aimen Dean seems uneasy, and with good reason: the last time he came here, he was a spy gathering information on Islamist extremists. A former member of al-qa’eda, he betrayed the terror group to become an informant for British intelligence. Now his life is in danger: the “brothers” put a fatwa on him and want him dead. Dean is diminutive, with thick glasses and fine hair. Hard as it is to guess from his unthreatening demeanour, Dean, a Bahraini who grew up in Saudi Arabia, was once a Kalashnikov-toting jihadist, a graduate of a terrorist “finishing school” in Afghanistan and, for years, the most important spy the West had in al-qa’eda.
Under the codename Lawrence – as in Lawrence of Arabia – he tipped off his controllers about terror plots. His information sometimes ended up on the prime minister’s or US president’s desk, his identity among the most closely guarded secrets in the history of British espionage. He might never have emerged from the shadows had his cover not been blown by what MI6, the foreign intelligence service, called a “very unfortunate” leak – by the Americans. Now he feels the time has come to tell his remarkable tale.
British intelligence has nothing to fear. Dean is at pains to point out how charming its operatives were and how they cosseted him, even taking him on a holiday to Scotland when they thought he needed a rest. Dean, 39, was in his early 20s, but already a battle-hardened jihadist, when he began his spying career. He had been born into a family of conservative Sunni Arabs in the Saudi city of Khobar, the youngest of six boys. His father, a businessman, was killed in a traffic accident when he was four. His mother was from Lebanon and indignant about Israel’s occupation of its south, which helped to politicise him. When he was nine, he used his “photographic memory” to learn the Koran by heart. But when his mother died, just before he turned 13, “I lost my moral compass”, he says.
Other adults Dean respected had left to fight in Bosnia, where a civil war had erupted in 1992. And at 16, he set off for the Balkans. “Within days I met white American converts to Islam, Britons of Pakistani origin and plenty of Egyptians,” he recalls. His first doubts surfaced when he witnessed his “brothers” torturing and beheading Serb prisoners. “Axes, knives and even chainsaws were used,” he recalls. “We were supposed to be noble warriors. This was an appalling level of brutality and bloodlust.”
Late in 1995, Dean met Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, later the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, in Bosnia. He suggested that Dean visit Afghanistan to join the greater struggle against America and its allies. In 1996, Dean duly went to Peshawar, Pakistan, the gateway to al-qa’eda’s Afghan bases, where Abu Zubaydah, the group’s suspicious Saudi quartermaster, grilled him about his upbringing before sending him to a training camp near Kandahar. Osama bin Laden arrived at the camp in August that year. Meeting him “felt like being summoned to the office of a very popular headmaster”, Dean says. “I was in awe.” Yet, he adds, there was “just that little nagging in the back of my head, telling me that he is not that intellectual or bright. There was a naivety about him believing that we, sitting there in a camp in the middle of nowhere, would be marching all the way, and against all the nuclear powers in the West, to Jerusalem.”
In the camp, Dean was asked to train new recruits in theology. He also became an apprentice to Abu Khabab, an Egyptian former army officer with a reputation as a master bomb-maker. Khabab’s interests went well beyond conventional explosives, to poison gases such as hydrogen cyanide. Dean helped him to conduct experiments on rabbits. “Only much later did I appreciate how naive I had been,” says Dean. “These were not weapons for use on the front lines.”
On 7 August 1998, explosions ripped through the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The bombings killed 224 people, most of them Kenyans. Dean was appalled by the carnage. This was not what he had signed up for: the idea of defending Muslims in foreign countries had turned into a terrorist war on the West. He wanted no part of it. But how could he escape? The previous year he had been treated for malaria in the Gulf. In November 1998, he told his superiors that he needed to return to Qatar for a check-up. They agreed. In Qatar, he was questioned by the security service as a suspected al-qa’eda member. He decided to cooperate. The Qataris quickly realised that he was an intelligence goldmine – and that they could win great credit for passing him on to a Western spy agency. They offered him the choice of being handed over to America, France or Britain.
He had a family link to Britain: his grandfather had been head of the colonial police in the Iraqi city of Basra and had always spoken of the British in glowing terms. The choice was made and, on 16 December 1998, Dean was met off the plane at Heathrow by Tom, from MI5, and Harry, from MI6. The debriefing began straight away, in a meeting room at the airport. Dean had kept some crucial information from the Qataris, including details of a plot to kidnap Westerners in Yemen, which he now spilt to his new masters. They were impressed. He was then taken to hospital – to maintain a “legend” that the Qataris had sent him to Britain for medical checks.
Over the next few years Dean met a variety of other officers in hotels all over London. Nick bore a resemblance to the actor Sam Neill and smoked Cuban cigars. Richard, who had a penchant for double-breasted suits, addressed him in “perfect Arabic with a Bedouin twang”. Freddie was an economics graduate from Loughborough University and, like Dean, a big fan of
The
Simpsons. He liked impersonating Mr Burns, the series villain, by tapping his fingertips together and saying “excellent”.
In exchange for a modest salary, Dean provided information about al-qa’eda’s network in London, including Abu Qatada, a Jordanian-palestinian cleric. The intelligence services set him up in a gloomy one-bedroom flat in Purley. As far as al-qa’eda knew, he was convalescing. With MI5 listening in, he would regale home-grown jihadists with tales about life in the Afghan camps before quizzing them about their plans. “So rich was south London in jihadist contacts that I could jump off at pretty much any stop of the No. 77 bus and find a ‘like-minded’ militant,” he says. He passed on everything he heard, including details of a plot by a group of jihadists from the Midlands. Calling him “bruva”, they had tried to enlist his help in a plan to smear poisonous cream on door handles of luxury cars to punish the “f**king rich pricks”.
One day, not long after the holiday in Scotland, Richard asked Dean if he would mind going back to Afghanistan, this time as an agent for MI6. Dean had developed a taste for spying and he quickly agreed. His handlers trained him. In an emergency, if he needed to get out, he was advised to smash his spectacles. This would allow him to leave Afghanistan to get a new pair in Peshawar, where he could meet British intelligence in a safe house. He let al-qa’eda contacts in London know that he was desperate to get back to Afghanistan. Rather than suspect him, they gave him radios and a satellite phone to take with him to the camps. These were secretly modified by British intelligence.
Back at the camp, Dean resumed work with Khabab, who was now manufacturing TATP explosives. In London, meanwhile, British intelligence was able to track calls into and out of alQa’eda’s main terrorist training camp. To justify his frequent comings and goings, Dean had set himself up as a luxury food exporter; al-qa’eda approved of anything that brought in an income. He decided to play the businessman one day to arrange a meeting with his handlers in Peshawar after Abu Musab al-zarqawi turned up in the camp. He knew the British would be intrigued to hear about this Jordanian jihadist, who was destined to play a savage role as the leader of al-qa’eda in Iraq.
The protocol Dean had to follow to be “landed” in the safe house was elaborate. After calling a number from a phone booth in Peshawar, he was told to walk up the road, where he was bundled into a van. When the door opened, he was in a suburban garage. “Ah, if it’s not the cat come to meet the kittens,” Richard laughed, holding up two mewing balls of fur. Richard and his colleagues sat around a kitchen table taking notes as Dean told them the latest news.
In the summer of 2001, Dean was summoned to meet one of bin Laden’s closest lieutenants. He feared he might have been rumbled. Instead, the man asked him to deliver a message to four “brothers” in London: “They must leave the country and come here before 1 September. Something big is going to happen and we expect the Americans to come to Afghanistan.” Dean was strolling along Oxford Street later that year when he noticed a crowd outside a shop window watching television footage of a plane hitting a New York skyscraper. Dean had heard no whisper of the 9/11 attacks, but now the “something big” comment came back to haunt him. In the aftermath, he helped British intelligence to track possible culprits and identify targets for the American-led attacks on Afghanistan.
Then he heard worrying news: Khabab had come up with a delivery device for his poisonous gas. Al-qa’eda was planning to use it in an attack on the New York subway. Dean alerted his handlers, who passed it on to the Americans, who took it to the Oval Office. In the event, al-qa’eda backed off from the attack, but Dean was now a hero in the eyes of his handlers. Dean, on the other hand, was struggling. The American-led invasion of Iraq and the civilian casualties it caused filled him with dismay, rattling his faith in Britain for having participated.
When one of his handlers reprimanded him for not having reported the poisoned car handle plot sooner, Dean snapped at him: “Honestly, I think I’m done.” But he was not. A week later he was invited to a placatory dinner at Albannach, a Scottish restaurant on Trafalgar Square, and introduced to a new handler, Alastair, who had studied Arabic at Oxford, was deeply sceptical about the invasion of Iraq and “would restore my confidence in the mission”, Dean writes. For further pampering, he was invited to Fort Monckton, MI6’S field operations training centre, near Portsmouth. Richard, now promoted to a senior role, was there to greet him: he had arranged for a select group of officials to hear Dean speak about his missions. Dean returned to work “with a fresh sense of resolve”. But his spying days were coming to an end.
In 2006, he was in Paris having a few days off when his phone lit up with a text message. His blood froze. It said: “Brother go into hiding there is a spy among us. Go read Time website now.” Time’s report described the planned New York poison gas attack and a Western spy in al-qa’eda called Ali. Dean’s birth name was Ali Durrani. Ali is a common name, but there were enough other details to expose Dean. “We’re going to look after you,” a British handler told him in a hastily arranged meeting when Dean stepped off the Eurostar from Paris. “We’ve no idea how all this emerged,” said another. “But it’s seriously bad news. People like you don’t walk through our door every day.”
He got a pension and “a good send-off” at Fort Monckton. They suggested he pick a new name. Aimen Dean, he says, “could be anything from Pakistani to Irish”. These days he lives with his wife and child somewhere in the British Isles. Many of those who wanted him dead are either dead themselves or imprisoned. The threat remains, though: in 2016, Dean was warned to stay away from a nephew’s wedding in Bahrain. One of the guests was planning to kill him. Dean now works as a consultant on Islamist extremism. His experiences have left him with uncompromising views about the need for British Muslims to integrate. “You can’t set yourself up as a parallel society and not expect the rest not to feel a bit anxious and distrustful,” he says. As for Islamic militancy, it is like a landmine, he says. “You’ve got to keep your foot on it or it’ll blow up in your face.”
A longer version of this article first appeared in The Sunday Times. Nine Lives by Aimen Dean, Paul Cruickshank and Tim Lister is published by Oneworld at £18.99.