Dirty Wars (55 page)

One of the contributors to Khan's Inshallahshaheed blog was
Zachary Chesser
, an American who would be arrested in 2010 for attempting to travel to Somalia and join al Shabab. On his various websites, Khan would celebrate attacks against US soldiers in Iraq, promote the writings of bin Laden and call for victory of jihadists over US and Israeli forces across the globe.

During this period, Khan began to receive attention from the press, notably the
New York Times
, which first profiled him in 2007, describing the American as an “
unlikely foot soldier
in what Al Qaeda calls ‘Islamic jihadi media.'” In the United States, Khan became a new face of the emergent and diversifying digital militant culture, which had started with grainy video uploads of Zarqawi severing heads in Iraq and had found full expression in what the
Times
called a “constellation of apparently independent media operators who are broadcasting the message of Al Qaeda and other groups,” to people all over the world, including, increasingly, the West.

Khan told the
New York Times
that a video of a suicide bomber hitting a US outpost in Iraq “
brought great happiness to me
.” Of the American families who had relatives serving in Iraq, he said, “Whatever happens to their sons and daughters is none of my concern,” calling them “people of hellfire.”

Although he denied links to terrorist groups and
told a local news station
that he was not actively recruiting American fighters, Khan hinted that he might go on to wage violent jihad himself one day, but he stopped just
shy of directly inciting violence. He even
hired a lawyer
to counsel him on the parameters of protected speech before the launch of his first blog. Sure enough, the authorities barely touched him, though he had certainly gotten their attention: Homeland Security agents, as well as analysts at the Combating Terrorism Center, were
following him closely
. Sue Myrick, a Republican representative from North Carolina, later told the
Washington Post
that she had been involved in efforts to “
shut [Khan] down
through the FBI,” which were ultimately unsuccessful, “because he was not inciting violence, he was simply putting out information, and because he kept changing his server.”

Khan believed the authorities were doing more than reading his blogs. “Back in NC, the
FBI dispatched a spy
on me who pretended to convert to Islam,” Khan later wrote. On several occasions, FBI agents visited the Khan home in an attempt to get Samir's parents to encourage him to stop blogging. According to Sarah Khan, the FBI agents told the family that Samir was not breaking any laws and was engaged in free speech, but that they were concerned about the direction he appeared to be heading. Samir's father, Zafar, had gone as far as to disconnect the home's Internet connection and attempted more rounds of interventions. He
invited an imam
, Mustapha Elturk, to try to persuade Samir to reconsider his radicalism. Elturk knew Samir's father as “
a moderate Muslim
devoted to his faith.” He said Zafar “tried whatever he could within his means to talk to his son and also [to] have him meet with imams and Muslim scholars to persuade” Samir that “the ideology of violence is not the right course.” Samir “
became very much convinced
that America is an imperialist country that supports dictators and supports Israel blindly.... He had the opinion that the use of indiscriminate killing was justified,” Elturk recalled. “
I tried to bring arguments
from the Koran and scholars, and said, ‘Whatever you are thinking it is not true.'”

Samir was unmoved and continued with his work. The fruit of his final months in the United States was
Jihad Recollections
, an online PDF magazine, overrelying on graphics and featuring translations of al Qaeda speeches as well as original pieces by Khan and other contributors. By late 2009, Samir had made a decision to leave the United States. As he saw it, the FBI was watching him around the clock and he was sick of being around Muslims he considered to be co-opted by American culture.

Khan put out the fourth and final issue of
Jihad Recollections
in September 2009. “I knew the real truth wouldn't be able to reach the masses unless and until I was above the law,” he later wrote. Khan left for Yemen the following month, under the pretense of studying Arabic and teaching English. Terror analysts in the United States speculated that he had
already received an invitation
from Awlaki to come to Yemen and help lead the “media jihad.” But according to Sarah Khan, Yemen was not Samir's first choice. He had looked at schools in Pakistan and the United Kingdom, but the Yemen paperwork came through first. “We knew his desire to learn Arabic, and he was searching to find proper schools that would teach him the Arabic language as well as where he could learn more about Islam and understand the Koran better,” she recalled. When Samir told his parents he was leaving for Yemen, Sarah was worried but thought “he will be fine, he's grown up. He needs to probably look around, see the world for himself.”

But Khan was going through a very different thought process than his parents understood. He had decided he was finished with what he regarded as the banality and sins of suburban America. The Internet had been his best classroom, where he found the preaching of Muslim leaders who inspired him. He had watched the horrors of the post-9/11 wars and invasions and concluded that it was his obligation to join other Muslims in fighting against forces he perceived as Crusaders. “After my faith took a 180-degree turn, I knew I could no longer reside in America as a compliant citizen. My beliefs had turned me into a rebel of Washington's imperialism,” he later wrote. “
How could anyone claim sanity
and remain sitting on their hands? For me, it wasn't possible. My guilty [conscience] became my mode of thinking; I could never imagine myself as one who left the opportunity of a lifetime, to save the Islamic nation from its plight.”

Despite the surveillance, Khan had little trouble leaving the United States. “It took thirty minutes extra to get my boarding pass in North Carolina since, as the receptionist told me, I was being watched,” Khan later wrote, admitting surprise that his exit went almost totally unremarked. Khan spent some time in Sana'a teaching English before he made plans to head south to seek out the mujahedeen. “I was about to officially become a traitor of the country I grew up in for most of my life,” he recalled. “I thought about many of the possible effects it could have on my life; but whatever they were, I was ready for it.”

MORTEN STORM
says he
first met Anwar Awlaki
in Sana'a in 2006, shortly before Awlaki was tossed in a Yemeni prison for eighteen months at Washington's request. Storm was a former motorcycle gang member and a convicted criminal who converted to Islam. In the late 1990s, the Denmark native began running in radical Islamist circles under the name
Murad Storm
. He'd had a troubled childhood, committing his
first armed robbery
at the age of thirteen, and circulated in and out of jail as a teen. Storm eventually fell in with the
Bandidos
biker gang. In 1997, however, he renounced his
life of drugs and crime, telling friends and family that he had
converted to Islam
. He moved to Yemen, where he married a Moroccan woman in 2000. Two years later they had a son. They
named him Osama
.

A
video from 2005
shows Storm attending a speech given by radical Muslim cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed in London. Storm claimed he met Awlaki a year later in Sana'a. At the time Storm was a
student at Iman University
, where Awlaki was taking classes and delivering lectures. Storm claimed he and Awlaki “
talked freely
to each other” in the months that led up to Awlaki's arrest and developed a friendship. While Awlaki was imprisoned, Storm said he began to have a change of heart about the version of Islam he was practicing: “I found out that what I believed in was, unfortunately,
not what I thought
it was.” Storm
claimed he approached
the Danish Intelligence Service, PET, and offered his assistance. He said he was introduced to British intelligence representatives and the CIA. The PET, he claimed, assigned him a handler.

When Awlaki was released from prison, Storm became a potentially important asset for the CIA. The CIA and the PET “knew that Anwar
saw me as his friend
and confidant. They knew that I could reach him, and find out where he stayed,” Storm said in an interview with Denmark's second-largest newspaper,
Jyllands-Posten
. Storm claimed that Danish intelligence officials provided him with money “to bring
materials and electronic equipment
” to Awlaki. According to Storm, the CIA wanted to install a tracking device in the equipment he was providing to Awlaki, making it possible for the Americans to monitor and potentially kill the cleric with a drone strike.

In September 2009, Storm returned to Yemen and traveled to Shabwah Province, where Awlaki was in hiding. Storm said he stayed at the home of someone he described as an al Qaeda sympathizer in Shabwah. Storm alleged that when he met with Awlaki, he asked Storm to get hold of some solar panels or a transportable refrigerator, materials he could use to cool explosives parts. “We also
discussed the terrorist attacks
. He had some plans that would hit large shopping centers in the West or elsewhere with many people with poison attacks,” Storm alleged. Storm's claims cannot be independently verified, but he definitely passed them on to the CIA at a time when the United States was building a case against Awlaki.

I asked Awlaki's father about Storm's allegations. “I don't believe many things he said about Anwar,” Nasser said. “I think this man was
part of a conspiracy to get Anwar
—the man and the character—in order to reduce or eliminate his influence on Muslim men and women around the world. So, America and Denmark found a guy who was all his life an evil man and committed an armed robbery when he was only thirteen years old. Anwar,
during his forty years in this life, never was involved in any act of violence against any person or group.”

What is indisputable is that Awlaki asked Storm to find him an additional wife. Awlaki had
married a second Yemeni wife
while he was on the run and had a daughter with her. But this time, he specifically wanted a white Muslim convert to act as his “
companion in hiding
,” Storm claimed. “He asked if I knew a woman from the West he could marry. I think that he lacked someone who could better understand his Western mindset,” Storm told the Danish paper. Storm agreed to help. “
There are two things
that I would like to stress,” Awlaki allegedly wrote Storm in a late 2009 e-mail, which he asked Storm to relay to a potential bride. “The first is that I don't live in a fixed location. Therefore my living conditions vary widely. Sometimes I even live in a tent. Second, because of my security situation I sometimes have to seclude myself, which means me and my family would not meet with any persons for extended periods. If you can live in difficult conditions, do not mind loneliness and can live with restrictions on your communications with others then alhamdulillah [thanks be to God] that is great.”

When Storm returned to Copenhagen, he met with CIA and PET officials. He said he was shown satellite images of the area where he had been in Shabwah and he identified the home where he had stayed. Yemeni forces
launched an assault
on the house a short time later, but Awlaki had already moved on. The owner of the home was killed. Storm had also told them about Awlaki's desire to find a Western wife. In that request, the CIA saw opportunity. The American agents, he said, were “
overjoyed
.” Along with agents from the PET, Storm claimed, the CIA came up with a plan. “
The idea was to find someone
who shared [Awlaki's] ideology and mentality so that both of them would be killed in an American drone attack,” Storm said. “I helped the CIA and PET track Anwar so the Americans could send a drone after him.
That was the plan
.”

SOMALIA AND WASHINGTON, DC
, 2009—As summer 2009 began, JSOC was well aware of the fact that the men they had identified as the most dangerous threats to US interests in East Africa, Saleh Ali Nabhan and Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, were still at large. The latter was believed to have undergone
plastic surgery
, and intelligence analysts could only guess his exact whereabouts. The trail on both men had gone largely cold as al Shabab spread its areas of control in Somalia, giving them more options to hide or operate discreetly.

US intelligence believed that Nabhan had become more deeply embedded within al Shabab's operations since the overthrow of the ICU and was running three training camps that produced several suicide bombers, including a US citizen. A secret diplomatic cable from the Nairobi Embassy noted, “Since Nabhan's selection as
senior trainer
for al-Shabab's training in summer 2008, the flow of foreigners to Somalia has broadened to encompass fighters from south Asia, Europe, and North America, Sudan, and East Africa, particularly trainees from Kenya.” Those fighters would, according to the cable, travel to Mogadishu to fight against the US-backed African Union and Somali government forces. The “camps continue to generate increasing quantities of foreign graduates,” it concluded.

Washington was desperate to take Nabhan out and in July 2009, US intelligence facilitated a potential breakthrough. That month, Kenyan security forces
burst through the door
of the home of a young Kenyan of Somali descent named Ahmed Abdullahi Hassan, who was living in Eastleigh, the congested Somali slum in Nairobi. The next night, Hassan's captors took him to Wilson Airport: “
They put a bag on my head
, Guantánamo style. They tied my hands behind my back and put me on a plane,” Hassan recalled, according to a statement from Hassan provided to me by a human rights investigator. “In the early hours we landed in Mogadishu. The way I realized I was in Mogadishu was because of the smell of the sea—the runway is just next to the sea-shore.” From there, Hassan was
taken to a secret prison
in the basement of Somalia's National Security Agency, where he was interrogated by US intelligence officials. An intelligence report leaked
by the Kenyan Anti-Terrorism Police Unit alleged that “Ahmed Abdulahi Hassan aka Anas” was a “
former personal assistant
to Nabhan” and “was injured while fighting near the presidential palace in Mogadishu in 2009.” He was viewed as a high-value prisoner. “I have been interrogated so many times,” Hassan alleged in the statement, which was smuggled from the prison and provided to me. “Interrogated by Somali men and white men. Every day new faces show up.”