The New Spymasters (27 page)

• Intelligence from the Ukrainian Intelligence Service about the Russians helping to move compromising material out of Iraq into Syria before the inspections got under way?

• Satellite ‘overhead' images covering the passage of vehicles over the border (Iraq to Syria)?

These questions could be seen as clutching at straws. But that misses the point. The spying game is never over. However difficult, gathering good intelligence needs people to listen to the tunes played in a minor key – and to never, ever stop challenging the received wisdom, whatever it is.

*   *   *

As we were having coffee, Curveball said that he had been offered plastic surgery by the BND and a new home and identity in Italy. But he had refused. ‘I want to stay Rafid Alwan. That's who I am,' he said. He also said the Americans asked, as recently as 2008, for help with information about Syria. He promised me there were many more explosive revelations to come from his story. He hoped to make some money. It is possible, of course, that he will do just that. But few will believe him.

PART THREE

The Flock of Birds (2008–13)

Chapter 7

Cover Blown

‘All over the world, people in terrorist groups are living like normal people'

– French secret agent, code-named F1

On Wednesday 16 January 2008, a Pakistani man with a well-trimmed black beard stepped off the train and on to one of the neon-lit underground platforms of the Estación de Francia, the second busiest mainline station in Barcelona.
1
Asim had travelled all night from Paris. He was tired and sweaty – and he was nervous, for good reason. He was on a dangerous, secret mission. But after travelling for nearly twelve hours across Europe he had escaped attention. Spain and France were both inside the common borders of the European Union's Schengen scheme. So no one had checked his passport or identity card at the frontier in the Pyrenees.

He took the escalator up into the wide and crowded concourse. The people around were diverse – businessmen, manual workers, hawkers and tramps, brightly dressed, chattering tourists, and plenty too from India and Pakistan. He blended in. Glancing around the crowd, he looked for a fellow Muslim.

‘As-salaam aleikum. Peace be with you. Can you tell me the way to Tariq bin Ziyad mosque?' he asked a passer-by.

Asim noticed that there were policemen everywhere. In two months' time, Spain was holding a general election and the atmosphere was febrile. ‘Everyone was expecting another attack,' recalled Antonio Baquero, a security correspondent with the regional paper. Three days before the last elections, four years earlier, Islamists had planted bombs on commuter trains in Madrid, killing 191 people and injuring over 1,500. Some claimed that the handling of that attack had cost the ruling conservative party (Partido Popular) the election. (Initially the government wrongly blamed Basque separatists for planting the bombs.) This time round, security forces were taking no chances and were watching out for a repeat incident.

After receiving directions, Asim walked down the street to the nearest metro. Looking around, he wondered if he stood out. His destination was the working-class Raval district, on the edge of the rabbit warren of medieval streets known as the Ramblas. This was one of Barcelona's main tourist attractions, but the Raval was a little poorer, bleaker. He jumped on the metro, then changed once, taking the L3 line to Liceu station. Along the platform was a McDonald's advertisement and pictures of half-naked girls promoting a travel company. At the far end there were electronic barriers and, beyond the stone steps, the Ramblas. Later in the day the wide boulevard would be filled with tourists and strolling families, all wandering down the famous central pavement shaded by tall plane trees, with its newspaper kiosks, café and stands of parked scooters. A sign in the window advertised a 30-euro massage.

The way to the Raval was down a one-way side street, Carrer de l'Hospital, with a pavement that became gradually narrower. The five-storey apartment buildings on each side appeared to lean inwards, the balconies jutting out. The T-shirt shops and youth hostels gave way to drab-looking mobile phone stores and halal butchers. After passing the forbidding fortress-like walls of the medieval Catalonia Hospital, now a school and art gallery, he reached the unmarked back door to the mosque at number 91, just before a Pakistani bakery and a Sikh temple.

This entrance was locked, so he was sent down a narrow echoing alleyway sliced between the apartment buildings, laundry flapping from the balconies above. Turning right into a new road, he felt the atmosphere suddenly become more edgy. He could see young men with mobile phones making whispered drug deals; fake blonde prostitutes were leaning against the walls. Then he saw the sign: the Mezquita Tariq bin Ziyad.

It was the biggest mosque in Barcelona. Hidden behind the shabby entrance were six floors of prayer rooms. But even this was not enough space. Up to 1,000 people gathered here for midday prayers on a Friday, sometimes spilling into the streets. The mosque's name had symbolic resonance. Bin Ziyad was an eighth-century governor of Tangiers who became a general, defeated the Visigoths and conquered Spain for Islam. (Gibraltar is named after him too: a corruption of Jabal Tariq, the mountain of Tariq.)

Asim had arrived too early. The front entrance of the mosque was closed too. He found a nearby kebab restaurant and waited. But he returned at noon and joined the worshippers. Afterwards, he introduced himself to some of the religious leaders. He addressed them as ‘Maulana', the honorific title given to Muslim clerics by South Asians. ‘At the time,' he remembered, ‘I talked to them like a normal person. I didn't know they were part of the organization.'
2

The people who ran the mosque and all those he met were ostensibly devotees of the Muslim proselytizing group called Tablighi Jamaat. This was the same conservative global movement that had welcomed Nasiri in Pakistan – and disgusted him with its moderate views. But among its millions of followers violent militants were not unknown. Tablighi Jamaat is proscribed in five countries even though the organization denies any links with violence.
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Later, a prosecuting judge in Barcelona, Ismael Moreno, would accuse it of promoting ‘indiscriminate' violence for political ends.
4
But this was an unusual viewpoint.

As Asim would recall, the group he met in Barcelona was under the authority of al-Qaeda itself; its orders came directly from one of al-Qaeda's sworn allies, the Pakistani Taliban (known as the TTP). Asim claimed that his instructions came from Baitullah Mehsud, the TTP commander.

Asim would claim he had been working secretly for the TTP around Europe for two years.
5
Mehsud had personally given him the code name Ahmed. Ostensibly, Asim lived the normal life of an illegal immigrant in Paris, working ‘in the black' – in other words, without being officially registered – for a French electricity company. But, he said later, ‘all over the world, people in terrorist groups are living like normal people'. During his holidays and at weekends he had travelled around France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy, delivering cash to militant cells. He also claimed to have taken several breaks from work to go on training missions in Waziristan, the most lawless part of the Pakistan frontier region, and on into Afghanistan itself. Sometimes he was away for months on end. ‘I was a member of al-Qaeda,' he declared later in court.
6

He had come to Barcelona on fresh orders from his immediate commanders in Paris. ‘They told me maybe I would stay in Barcelona or maybe I would go to another country to take part in an explosion.' He had not been briefed on his role in the attack. His Paris contacts said that all would be explained by the leader of the radical group based at the mosque, who used the code name Ashraf.

As Asim waited after the noon prayers, Maulana Ahmed Maroof, a 38-year-old imam, came downstairs. Asim was obviously looking tense, so Maroof told him to relax and speak freely. He explained that he was the Ashraf that Asim was looking for and that the small group of eight now gathering in the corridor were to be trusted. Most of them were recent immigrants to Spain.

The following account is based on later testimony given by Asim. His version of events is disputed by the others involved, but a Spanish court held that he was telling the truth.

According to Asim, that afternoon Maroof outlined some details of an audacious plan to blow up Barcelona's underground railway. He was speaking in a mixture of Punjabi and Urdu.

‘Why are we going to attack the metro?' asked Asim.

‘Because if we attack the metro, the emergency services cannot get there. One person will wear a rucksack, another one will detonate the bomb from a distance … If the first [attack] does not work, we will mount a second and a third in Spain.'
7

Asim was still waiting to hear what his role would be in the attack. Later that day, he joined the group as they left together. ‘It's too dangerous to sleep in the mosque,' Maroof told him. They went to an apartment half a mile away, the home of a Maulana Shahid Iqbal.
8
The latter's expertise, it was becoming clear to Asim, was in bomb-making and not holy scripture. Asim spent the night there.

From a hidden lookout post in a building opposite, a surveillance team – officers of the National Intelligence Centre – was watching. They snapped pictures of Asim and the others entering the apartment block.

The next day, Thursday 17 January, Asim and the bomb-maker, Maulana Shahid, returned to the main mosque. Asim was introduced to two fellow Pakistanis, Mohamed Shoaib and Mehmood Khalid. The former had arrived from Germany the previous November; the latter from Stockholm the previous October. The terrorist cell was now complete. Its commander, Maroof, gave them more details of the plan. There would be two waves of attacks.

‘After the first bomb blast, there will be demands from al-Qaeda, and Baitullah Mehsud will announce them,' said Maroof.

About 5 p.m. that day, Maulana Shahid asked Asim if he wanted to call his wife.
9

‘I can't. It's forbidden.'

Shahid handed him a mobile. ‘Here, call her. Maulana Maroof has given you permission to speak with your wife.'

Using a prepaid phone card that Shahid gave him, Asim rang his wife. After the call, the men went for a walk and Shahid broke the news.
10

‘That was the last talk with your family. You won't see them again.'

Asim was destined to be a suicide bomber. When he agreed to come to Barcelona, it had never occurred to him that this would happen – nor had he thought that the attack would be so soon.

‘Why did you not tell me before?' he asked.

‘You might have been too emotional on the phone.'

Asim was now thinking quietly to himself that he had to do something to stop this.

Around 10 p.m., the Spanish surveillance team watched Maulana Qadeer Malik, one of the other leaders of the group, leave the apartment with a black bag that he dropped in a street bin, which they later searched.
11
It contained a cable cutter, a screwdriver, a box cutter, nine pairs of latex gloves, one pair of rubber gloves, eight empty firework carton cylinders and four pieces of plastic also belonging to the fireworks, an empty metal box for shot pellets, an empty shot pellet tin, two bundles of batteries, three devices described by police as ‘mechanical timers', eight electric plugs, pieces of fifteen-centimetre cable and a mobile phone top-up card.
12

The next day was Friday, the day of prayer. At the big mosque, Asim stayed with the group; it was hard to break away. But just after 4 p.m., he said he had to use the toilet. He then checked that the other wooden booths of the men's toilet were empty. At last he had a few moments alone. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out his own mobile phone and switched it on. Using the same prepaid calling card that Shahid had forgotten to take back, he dialled a number in Paris.

Asim spoke quickly. ‘I am here in Barcelona. I am in the Tariq bin Zayid mosque. Tomorrow morning in Barcelona, something bad will happen, some terrorism.'

He listened to the reply and then continued: ‘I am living with the group and can't stop it … If there is anything you can do, please stop it.'

Asim switched off his phone. He had been speaking to a man, he explained during the trial, he knew to be an undercover police officer.

‘I have one friend in France,' he told a court later. ‘He is French. Sometimes he sits there in the bar near my house. I know he works for the police, but I don't know which department.'
13

The officer was in fact a member of the French secret service (it is not clear if he was working then for one of the service's two domestic branches or its foreign branch, the DGSE
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). The French officer had been in contact with Asim for nearly two years. Whether Asim knew who the officer really was, was already being run as an agent and had travelled to Spain with French knowledge were matters of later debate. In court, Asim denied it. He said, ‘In all Europe, I just know one policeman as my friend. I just took a chance to call this man.' But regardless of when he was actually recruited, his phone call back to France was the culmination of French efforts. Here was a mole inside al-Qaeda who was delivering news of a live plot. A modern spymaster could ask for no more.

People like Asim were indeed rare, but it was even rarer for the existence of such an infiltration to be made public almost immediately. Within a few hours of Asim's phone call, most members of the group were inside a jail cell and Spain's Guardia Civil would be persuading Asim to give a statement as a special ‘protected witness'. Within a fortnight, the revelation of a French spy in the Barcelona terror plot would be front-page news in Spain, thanks to a news agency that reported on 2 February that the ‘French secret service' had urgently warned of a ‘terrorist plot' in Barcelona and sent an agent to the city.
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