The New Spymasters (21 page)

Put in touch with an intelligence officer whom he refers to as ‘Gilles', Nasiri was told his knowledge of the group was of only limited worth; his real value would come from staying inside it and feeding live information to the French. Gilles told him, ‘I can protect your family … but I can't give you everything you want. You haven't given us enough yet. If you want all these things you'll have to do more for us.'
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According to Nasiri:

[Gilles] had the temperament of a dictator: he always wanted to be in control. He wanted to tell me what to do, what to tell the members of the GIA cell … He was constantly pushing me to get into their ‘inner circle' and telling me how to do it. But I had the power. I had the information he needed – and I didn't like him ordering me around. I told him so, again and again, and I knew he was frustrated.
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Without proper control over him, the French were in dangerous waters. Nasiri was involved in the trafficking of weapons and the French would have wanted to track his every step to prevent potential catastrophe. But he constantly resisted their authority. Nasiri said he was encouraged by the French to become more immersed in the group. This culminated in his drive from Belgium to Morocco – through France and Spain – in a car packed with explosives, weapons and money. The car kept overheating because it was so weighed down: ‘every piece of the structure of the car didn't work … even the electric window did not work'.
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The Semtex explosives he was transporting were later taken on to Algeria, he was told. Based on the timing, it seemed impossible they were not used in the police station attack.

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As the British had found in Northern Ireland, a secret agent inside a terror group faced a standard dilemma: how far to go. ‘Of course, that's why handling agents is so difficult,' said Caprioli. ‘When an agent is in the core of an organization and one day they are told to go kill someone, what do we do?' He said in France the aim was to ‘withdraw the source as soon as you've identified all the members of the network. So one of our principles is to avoid letting the agent go too far, because if he goes too far he is part of the attack.'

Hank Crumpton, a former head of operations of the CIA counterterrorism centre, wrote in his memoirs that the first problem encountered in recruiting agent-terrorists was the physical danger to a CIA case officer when approaching someone and asking them to spy. This is known in intelligence jargon as the ‘pitch'. ‘It was different from pitching a foreign diplomat, military officer, or trade official.' It was much riskier. ‘A foreign diplomat could report the pitch, perhaps resulting in a diplomatic flap. A terrorist could respond in other ways, such as tossing a grenade at the case officer – which had recently happened. Our officer barely escaped down a stairwell as the grenade exploded behind him.'
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Then there was, as Crumpton wrote, ‘the dilemma of employing those who may have murdered people or supported those who did'. There had to be some limits on whom they recruited. ‘We did not recruit, support, and encourage any asset to murder innocent people – even if such action advanced their access and influence within a terrorist group. That was flat wrong. But where did we draw the line?'
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The answer, he said, was to consult lawyers at the Department of Justice. He did not elaborate on what they advised.

Few with knowledge of such counterterrorist operations would argue that an entirely clean and harm-free approach to running spies among terrorists could possibly work. There was always an inescapable judgement call: was it worth being complicit in a lesser crime for the sake of preventing a bigger one? Everyone involved agreed there was a line to draw – but they differed on where to draw it and who should draw it. And rules needed to be flexible, Caprioli suggested: ‘The situation itself dictates how you handle it. The reality on the ground is more than theory. You can have theories and principles, but when you're dealing with reality that's what dictates your behaviour.' Nevertheless, principles were important. ‘You have to have principles to say, “OK, time to stop.”'

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In March 1995, the French and Belgians decided it was time to arrest members of Nasiri's cell in Brussels. He objected. He thought it was too early, and he feared that he would be double-crossed by the DGSE and arrested and prosecuted too. While he took its money, he never trusted the French agency; and his actions then showed why they were also right to not trust him. In his anger, Nasiri said, he confessed to fellow members of the cell that he had been spying for the French. ‘I did tip them off. I gave them twenty-four hours' warning' ahead of the arrests, he admitted – a fact he had never told the DGSE. The gang had a day to dispose of evidence, though it meant one of them was caught with a gun in his car on a Brussels street as he tried to move it.

The DGSE did not know about – or at least did not mention – his betrayal. So after the arrests the relationship resumed. But with the Belgian cell dismantled and suspicion directed at him, Nasiri and the French concluded that his cover was blown as an agent in Europe. He could no longer work safely. Oddly, the confession Nasiri said he made to his GIA comrades (and there must be some doubt about his account here) had either not been believed or, for whatever reason, not been widely circulated. But in militant circles there were still questions about why he was the only cell member to avoid arrest. Meanwhile, the French were content to pay him off and ‘would have been happy if I just disappeared'. But Nasiri wanted more. ‘I hadn't even started,' he said. In the months that followed, he was to journey even deeper into the dark network of jihadism.

Both Gilles and Nasiri knew of the whispers in militant circles about people who were disappearing. They were said to be going for training in special camps in Afghanistan. After the Soviet defeat, Afghanistan had passed into the control of different mujahideen fighters-turned-warlords. Some of the many Arabs who had joined the mujahideen (the so-called ‘Afghan Arabs') had also stayed behind. They were regrouping and setting up camps in districts close to the Pakistan border where they had operated during the war. It was rumoured they were training fresh recruits to continue their jihad on new fronts – whether Bosnia, Kashmir, Algeria, Egypt or Chechnya. What was missing was first-hand information from the camps themselves. No outsider had penetrated the set-up.

Nasiri and his French case officer discussed how it might be possible to get inside the Afghan camps. In his impetuous way, Nasiri suggested flying straight out to Pakistan, but the French thought that too brazen, he recalled. They felt he should head for Turkey and find a radical circle there that would direct him onwards with the right introductions. Nasiri tried that, but after weeks of fruitless travelling and a scare when he crashed his car the French finally accepted Nasiri's plan.

In the spring of 1995, he took a flight to Karachi with $15,000 in his pocket from the French.
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What followed was a combination of luck and guile. On the plane, he met an observant Muslim who gave him directions to the headquarters in Lahore of the conservative-minded Islamic evangelical movement Tablighi Jamaat. They welcomed young Muslims from across the world, including Nasiri. But he found they had a philosophy of peace, not of violent jihad. Nasiri was disappointed. He wasn't looking for peace-mongers.

What he hadn't realized was that Tablighi Jamaat was also infiltrated by radicals. When Nasiri decided to leave, disillusioned by their peaceful preaching, a spotter who had been present at Tablighi Jamaat stopped him and passed on the introductions he needed to go further into the militant network. He was heading for the border city of Peshawar, at the start of the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan. Nasiri said he met a man called Abu Zubaydah there, a militant whom the US government later named as one of the top leaders of al-Qaeda. Abu Zubaydah was the gatekeeper to the Arab mujahideen camps, the man to decide who would be accepted for jihad training. Some called Abu Zubaydah a sort of ‘travel agent' for al-Qaeda. ‘He was a master counterfeiter. He made identity documents,' said Nasiri, ‘and he was a master of knowing how to get people from A to B without getting caught.'
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After 9/11, he was interrogated and water-boarded in CIA secret prisons known as black sites. Thinking about his encounters with the man, Nasiri wondered if Abu Zubaydah was mildly autistic. (He was brilliant at many things, but never put in charge of any planning.) Abu Zubaydah sent Nasiri across the border to the movement's most important camp, Khalden. Another person who would later be named by the US as an infamous terrorist leader, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, was in charge. He was a genial but commanding figure. ‘He was a tall man, very, very shy. When he gave you his hand to salute you, you wouldn't feel his hand, it was so soft, so warm, so incredibly paternal, and when he spoke with you, you would see this smile spread over his face.'
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Captured in November 2001, al-Libi would be interrogated later by both the CIA and the Egyptian secret police. He was finally transferred by extraordinary rendition to Gaddafi's Libya, where he died in prison. While Nasiri was at al-Libi's camp, he heard that funds were coming from another mysterious ‘Sheikh'. This was Osama bin Laden, who was then still in Sudan.
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It had all happened incredibly quickly. Less than a month after he had said goodbye to Gilles in Turkey, Nasiri was ensconced in what had become ‘jihad central'. Al-Libi's Khalden camp was where recruits combined basic training in military skills with instruction in both religion and the ethics of jihad. And it was here that almost every famous al-Qaeda recruit had been or would go. In 1993, at the same camp, Ramzi Yousef and others had plotted the first bomb attack later that year on Manhattan's World Trade Center. Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian leader of the 9/11 hijackers, was taught here too.
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Nasiri was present in the summer and autumn of 1995. The training was about 30 per cent with weapons and 70 per cent religious ideology. The weapons training felt like a gift: ‘For me it was like a present for a boy who had expected something for many years and then he got it.'
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It was also much more about classic guerrilla warfare than terrorist attacks.

Despite their significant role for what became al-Qaeda, these camps catered for a much wider coalition of jihadi groups at war with their own governments, whether Chechens fighting the Russian army, Pakistan-backed Kashmiris fighting the Indian army or Algerians. Al-Libi was regularly asked, said Nasiri, about a particular group in some country. ‘He would stop and say, “No, we are not here to make the difference between this one and that one. Our enemy is the same: Saddam [Hussein of Iraq] or [Hafez al-] Assad [of Syria].” So Ibn Sheikh's job was to train people to fight the first target of the [radical Islamists] which was their own government.'
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Talking to prisoners in Bagram, Afghanistan, before his rendition onwards to Libya, al-Libi was asked, ‘Ibn Sheikh, are you al-Qaeda?' He was said to have replied, ‘No, I'm not.' But he said he was happy to be arrested as a member of the group. ‘I'm proud my enemy, the Americans, names me as part of al-Qaeda.'
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*   *   *

In the mountains of Afghanistan, Nasiri began to be absorbed by the appeal of the jihadis. ‘As the weeks passed,' he wrote in his book, ‘it became harder for me to separate myself from my brothers. It took more and more effort each night to remember that I was not one of them. That I was a spy.'
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Nasiri rationalized his confusion in Afghanistan like this:

My two missions, spy and mujahid were now one and the same. I had lost myself totally in my role. But that's what any spy must do to succeed. No one can lead a double life for long and expect to get away with it. I had to immerse myself completely … Was I a good spy because I could lose myself so completely in my role as mujahid? Or was I a good mujahid who just happened to be a spy?
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Nasiri's account raised the question of whether his susceptibility to militant propaganda (some might say gullibility) had been an important safety net. His own true beliefs, it appeared, were in flux. But should his account of the camps and elsewhere be taken at face value? In general, much of what he said was credible, revealing deep knowledge of the nature of the camps and the people involved across militant circles. Security sources in different agencies have also confirmed aspects of his account, including his later work in Britain and France. Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA's bin Laden unit, said that Nasiri's tale ‘tracks very well with the information we had in classified holdings during the late 90s and since then'.
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But parts of his account, described in his book
Inside the Global Jihad,
did not ring true and seemed like the words of a ghostwriter chosen for an American audience.