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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Nine Lives My Time As the West's Top Spy Inside Al-Qaeda by Aimen Dean Nine Lives: My Time As MI6’S Top Spy Inside Al-Qaida – Review Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Nine Lives My time as the West's top spy inside al-Qaeda by Aimen Dean Nine Lives: My Time as MI6’s Top Spy Inside Al-Qaida – review. W hen the Taliban regime in Afghanistan collapsed in November 2001, journalists who had been waiting in parts of the country outside the Islamist regime’s authority or in neighbouring Pakistan rushed to bombed-out and deserted training camps where al-Qaida had built the strike force that had carried out the 9/11 attacks. I was in the eastern city of Jalalabad as opposition forces still skirmished with al-Qaida remnants on the evening of the city’s fall. After a night in the one functioning hotel, I drove a few miles down the rutted road to Kabul. On several reporting trips into Afghanistan under the Taliban I had heard of a training camp near a reservoir called Darunta, a mile off the main road. It wasn’t hard to reach: a complex of mud huts and barracks down a short road. Darunta plays a key role in the extraordinary story told in Nine Lives . It is rare that western secret services place an agent within an organisation such as al-Qaida. It is rarer still that the identity of that agent becomes known. It is unprecedented that any such individual publishes a detailed memoir of more than a decade of his activity at very nearly the highest possible levels of Islamist militancy. Aimen Dean – not, inevitably, his real name – tells the story well. He has been ably assisted by Paul Cruickshank, a US-based researcher and journalist who has both a deep knowledge of the subject and the ability to transform the raw material of an agent’s memories into something digestible to the general public. (The other contributor, Tim Lister, is a CNN reporter with long experience in the topic.) Nine Lives works on many levels: as a human story of faith, violence, trauma and eventually a form of redemption, a deep dive into the inner workings of one of the most infamous terrorist organisations of all time and as a short history of the threat that we still face. Dean recounts his early life in Saudi Arabia, and how he is drawn into a religious study group that appears innocent but goes on to produce a large number of high-level militants. By 1994, still a teenager, he is in Bosnia, fighting with committed Muslims alongside Croats. He is involved in battles and atrocities. These mark him permanently but reinforce his commitment to the struggle to defend the Ummah , the global community of Muslims, against the supposed aggression of the west and its local allies within the Islamic world. He travels to Afghanistan, and to Darunta, where he becomes involved in the attempted manufacture of chemical and biological weapons. He also joins al-Qaida, and is interviewed by Osama bin Laden himself. Bin Laden is far from the only top-level militant Dean meets. every major figure active in Islamic militancy in this period – from preachers in the UK through to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who planned the 9/11 strikes, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who went on to found and lead al-Qaida in Iraq – feature in the narrative. These are amazing “up-close and personal” portraits of leading figures whose thinking and actions are essential for understanding how Islamic militancy evolved as it did. Particularly significant is the importance of eschatological prophesies to jihadists. For a long time, often well-educated al-Qaida higher command have been thought to have despised such apocalyptic thinking. In fact, Dean points out, the belief that they could hurry the coming of the end times was central to their worldview and strategy. Cookie Consent and Choices. NPR’s sites use cookies, similar tracking and storage technologies, and information about the device you use to access our sites (together, “cookies”) to enhance your viewing, listening and user experience, personalize content, personalize messages from NPR’s sponsors, provide social media features, and analyze NPR’s traffic. This information is shared with social media, sponsorship, analytics, and other vendors or service providers. See details. You may click on “ Your Choices ” below to learn about and use cookie management tools to limit use of cookies when you visit NPR’s sites. You can adjust your cookie choices in those tools at any time. If you click “ Agree and Continue ” below, you acknowledge that your cookie choices in those tools will be respected and that you otherwise agree to the use of cookies on NPR’s sites. He spied on al Qaeda from the inside, until he had to run for his life. In both a new book and an interview with NBC News, a British spy inside al Qaeda says his cover was blown by a leak to reporters that likely emanated from Vice President Dick Cheney's office. The leaked information ended his seven-and-a-half-year stint as a mole inside the terror group. The spy, who now goes by the name Aimen Dean, writes of his career and its dramatic end in "Nine Lives: My Time as the West's Top Spy Inside al Qaeda," co-authored by Tim Lister and Paul Cruikshank and released in the U.S. Tuesday. Dean, a Saudi national who went to Bosnia to fight for al Qaeda at age 16, was an expert in weapons of mass destruction as well as the terror group's complicated hierarchy. He writes in "Nine Lives" of meeting both Osama Bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, on multiple occasions. He also met famed American jihadi Adam Gadahn, which would later come back to haunt him. After becoming disillusioned with al Qaeda, Dean flipped and became a mole for the British in 1999. American intelligence officials say that by staying inside al Qaeda and working undercover he thwarted attacks and saved lives. Ex-spy details his infiltration of Al Qaeda in new book. But his career as a double agent ended in June 2006 when details of some of his biggest successes showed up, without warning, in a Time Magazine excerpt of the book "The One Percent Doctrine," by journalist Ron Suskind. Dean, who traveled between the Middle East and Europe, was in Paris on vacation when one of his al Qaeda comrades sent him a text with a link to the Suskind story, warning, "Brother, go into hiding. There is a spy among us." The text didn't accuse Dean of being the spy but he believed it was only a matter of time before he was outed. "I was angry," Dean told NBC News. "I thought, 'The information was supposed to be under wraps! Why is it splashed all over Time Magazine?' Both MI6 and MI5 were shocked. Neither knew about it." His British handlers pulled him from the field immediately. They ordered him to take the Eurostar train to London as soon as possible. Within five hours, he was being greeted on the platform at Waterloo Station by one of his MI6 handlers. Dean noted that the book's portrait of the mole, a trusted member of al Qaeda who had provided details of a planned 2003 attack on New York's subway, identified the head of al Qaeda's WMD program and stolen the group's design for a terror weapon and given it to Western intelligence, was so detailed it could only fit a few people. The spy was even identified as "Ali" — his birth name and the one he used within al Qaeda. "Every paragraph provided another detail about Ali, until the full picture emerged looking distinctly like me," he writes in "Nine Lives." After a flurry of cables between British intelligence and the CIA, Dean said his handlers told him who they believed was responsible for the leak — someone in Cheney's office. "The whole saga of discussions took about two weeks for them to ascertain who was responsible," Dean told NBC News. "There were lots of cables that went from MI6 into the CIA and back. MI6 wanted to know why information that was shared in good faith had been leaked when there was no necessity to identify who the spy was. "The CIA defended itself by saying [the leak] had most likely come from someone in the political sphere who had access to the information," said Dean. "The book was centered around Vice President Cheney and burnished the image of Cheney." A former U.S. intelligence official tells NBC News that at the time "there was a lot of angst inside the agency about the Suskind book for a variety of reasons," without providing details on classified materials. When contacted by NBC News, Ron Suskind said, "Like all major disclosures in my books, the array in ‘One Percent Doctrine’ were vetted just prior to publication with CIA officials to ensure sources and methods would not be compromised." 'I was a powder keg yearning for a spark' Dean, a Saudi national, had been critical to British — and by extension U.S. — intelligence since the late '90s, when he soured on al Qaeda over what he says were moral concerns. He had gone to Bosnia as an idealistic teenage jihadi to fight the Serbs, following in the footsteps of a teacher who was a role model. Says Dean, now in his 40s, "I was imbued with an ideology, but I was also a powder keg yearning for a spark. I did not want history passing me by." The loss of more than 200 civilian lives in the East Africa embassy bombings of August 1998 had sickened him, he says, and al Qaeda leaders' justification of the attacks on Koranic grounds felt thin at best.
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