I mean, one thing you should know
about espionage, as well as bomb making,
the first mistake is your last mistake.
You're not going to live to make another mistake.
And therefore, you have to be absolutely careful.
One wrong word and you are a head shorter
and six feet under.
Of course, I didn't wake up one day
and say to myself, "I'm going to be a spy,"
just as I didn't wake up one day
four years earlier and told myself,
"I'm going to become a terrorist."
You just slip into these things, I think, unconsciously.
It all started when I was 16.
I was, of course, at the time residing
in my home country, Saudi Arabia.
I was more or less a religious student,
but of the rebellious nature,
if you see what I mean.
So, I decided that I have no idea
what took over me to go and fight in Bosnia.
That was in the year 1994. I was only 16.
The idea of going and fighting the war
in a foreign country,
that was seen as defensive, in the defence
of defenceless civilians, I would say.
That was, in itself, honourable.
I think I wanted to be part of history,
part of making it and shaping it rather
than being a spectator.
INTERVIEWER: Why were you then recruited by Al-Qaeda?
By the end of the conflict in Bosnia,
one of Osama bin Laden's senior associates,
the well-known mastermind of 9/11,
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, he actually visited Bosnia.
He was looking for talent among the veterans
of the jihad in Bosnia to recruit into the ranks
of Al-Qaeda and to bring them into Afghanistan.
For example, you know, he recruited many
of the future leaders of Al-Qaeda,
Ramzi bin al-Shibh, two of the 9/11 hijackers.
He told me that, "For the next war,
for the next jihad you need to be
better trained militarily.
The training camps in Afghanistan will be opening again
and it's better that you go there for training."
And so I did.
INTERVIEWER: And is it here that you meet
Osama bin Laden?
Yes, I mean, my first meeting of Osama bin Laden
is not exactly, you know, the first impression
that people will have when you mention
the name Osama bin Laden.
The first time I met him was just when he arrived
to Afghanistan from Sudan, in summer of 1996.
He, along with the rest of Al-Qaeda,
they were escaping from Sudan with their lives
and they looked like refugees.
They looked dishevelled and he was, you know,
wearing creased robes and his head scarf
was in a bad state.
And so, the first impression wasn't great
in terms of the appearance.
But, the way he spoke, I think, was quite powerful.
He was soft spoken.
That is something that everyone who met him
will agree on, that he wasn't someone
who gives the impression of being power hungry,
power crazy or someone who would go
on to commit atrocities.
You would think basically, that he is, you know,
a quiet shrewd businessman
who certainly has goals and ambitions
and he wants to fulfil.
That's how you would, he would come across to you.
And also, he would come across as sincere,
not someone who's trying to sell you something
by deception or by trying to employ underhanded tactics.
No, you really feel that he believe
in that product that he is selling you.
He was very clear about his aims and his goals
and what he wanted to do, what he wanted to achieve.
Even though it sounded like the dreams of a lunatic,
nonetheless, you know, this lunatic
would in five years' time change the course of history.
One thing I remember about Osama bin Laden
is that he was able to read people.
I mean, he would look at me and he would think
that, "Hmmm, you are not a commander's type."
You know, young, bespectacled, you know, nerdish,
you know, bookish boy from Saudi Arabia.
"You're not gonna make it into the elite
urban warfare unit of Al-Qaeda."
However, he thought of a better use for me
and he sent me to Al-Qaeda's WMD research and development unit.
And every day we wake up, from dawn all the way
until mid-afternoon, that is where we are learning
and sometimes, either experimenting
in blowing up new kind of explosives
we are trying to perfect, or unfortunately,
testing, you know, the latest batch of poisons
or chemical weapons on poor rabbits.
INTERVIEWER: At this point do you consider
yourself a terrorist?
When we started talking in details
about the usage of the weapons we were
constructing there, these are bombs
or chemical gas devices to be left
on trains, inside cinemas, nightclubs.
These are civilian targets,
and this is why we have the indoctrination lessons,
the religious, ideological indoctrination,
in order to tell us that there are no civilians,
as far as our enemies are concerned.
There are no civilians.
So, we have to redefine what a civilian is
to the point where we come to the conclusion
that if you pay taxes in the West
and if you go and vote at the voting booths,
then you are electing your government,
which basically sanctioned the bombings
against Muslim countries and populations,
sanctioning the siege against Iraq
and the killing of many hundreds of thousands
of young children, or so the propaganda was at that time.
So, that is why we ended up coming to the conclusion,
you know, which is a twisted conclusion I would say,
that there are no civilians as far as the West is concerned.
INTERVIEWER: What was the trigger for having
you realise that this had gone too far?
I think the first time I realised that I was
in the wrong place with the wrong people
at the wrong time in history was in early August of 1998.
I woke up to the news that the American embassies
in Nairobi, in Kenya, and in Dar es Salaam,
in Tanzania, were razed to the ground
by vehicle bombs designed and driven by Al-Qaeda members,
one of our Al-Qaeda members.
It was the first-ever atrocity committed by Al-Qaeda.
It was the first.
It was the opening salvo of this war
that they're telling us
we were preparing for against the Americans.
And details were coming that in fact,
it was an embassy, that 220-plus innocent people
from Kenya, from Uganda and from Somalia were killed
at that attack because they were
at the wrong place at the wrong time.
150 were blinded for life.
The number of, the total number of people
who were wounded exceeded 5,000.
The reason is because the device was so big,
but also they embedded thousands of shrapnels
within the device to maximise, you know,
the number of casualties,
which wasn't excusable because the target
is the embassy. You wanna destroy it.
Why you wanna harm every single one
who is in the vicinity?
What we are doing here is no longer
the acts of revolutionaries or insurgents.
It's more or less pure terrorism.
When I went to the de facto mufti
of Al-Qaeda at that time and asked him the question,
"How can we justify this?"
I said to him, "Look, I'm
not doubting anything, but I want
to be at peace in my heart that we did the right thing
because it's just 220 people dying
in order to get at 12 Americans,
and these 220 had nothing to do with what America
is doing in Saudi Arabia."
So, his answer was quite chilling.
I mean, he said, "Look, we have all this justification
that if the enemy is hiding among civilians
then we have the right to go and kill them,
even if it means the killing of the civilians
and then God will sort them out."
I mean, he went as far as saying
that, "After all, they are a bunch of Africans. Who cares?"
I made the conscious decision to leave
and I just waited for the right moment to go.
I mean, I already had the perfect excuse.
I had a medical condition that I needed to go
and leave Afghanistan in order to get it treated.
I left in December of 1998, just three
and a half months after the atrocity.
And through some, some incredible circumstances
I ended up in the lap of the British intelligence.
INTERVIEWER: Can you tell us how you were turned
by the British?
It so happened that I went to Qatar
in order to just regroup and to think
where to go from there
and to decide what next to do with my life,
that I now left Al-Qaeda.
I remember on the aircraft from Peshawar to Doha,
in Qatar, I was even recounting and renouncing
my oath of allegiance to Al-Qaeda.
I just wanted to be out and I didn't
wanna continue with them.
When I went to Qatar, I ended up actually
being detained there.
However, those who detained me in Qatar,
the authorities there were extremely kind
and they were more or less understanding
of my circumstances, especially after I explained
that actually I was leaving.
They told me that while they admire
my idea that I wanted to go to university,
basically to study history and become a teacher
in the future, that while it is noble and nice
and wonderful that you wanna turn your life around,
there is a catch here, which is that Qatar
is a very small country.
So, the reality is that you would end up,
you know, I would end up meeting my former associates
on a daily basis, you know, in mosques or shopping centres
and therefore, the objective of hiding
away from them is more or less
gone out of the window altogether.
And so, they suggested that I should be
more or less protected and utilised
by a much bigger agency in a bigger country
that will understand the value
of what I would be able to do
and then take it from there.
And so, that is why I more or less
found myself accepting.
On the same day I had to say either yes or no. I said yes.
On the same day I was on a British Airways flight to London.
INTERVIEWER: What was your mission?
I think the question should be,
"What wasn't my mission?"
There were so many tasks.
You see, when you're a spy,
within an organisation like Al-Qaeda
in a place like Afghanistan, which was a black hole.
By the way, Afghanistan was literally
the black hole of telecommunications
in the entire globe at that time.
It was even more disconnected than North Korea.
There were no landlines
and there were no mobile phones.
The only way you can transmit information
to the outside world is by going out.
And therefore, your task is to absorb
everything around you.
So, you are learning about the camps,
locations, the number of people attending,
the names, aliases, the breakdown
in terms of demographics, you know, ethnicities
of people coming in, nationalities
of people coming in, their ages, where they come from,
what are their aims.
And then when you come out you spend literally
hundreds of hours putting it back together
from your mind, from your memory,
and reconstructing it again
for the benefit of the intelligence services.
INTERVIEWER: Were you nervous?
Okay.
I get asked this question so many times,
"Were I nervous?"
I mean, one thing you should know about espionage,
as well as bomb making, the first mistake
is your last mistake.
You're not going to live to make another mistake.
And therefore, you have to be absolutely careful.
One wrong word and you are a head shorter
and six feet under.
If you are nervous, it will show.
It will show.
When you go there, before you reach there,
you really convince yourself that you are back
to that old persona, that you are
a genuine West-hating, bloodthirsty jihadist
and you have no qualms whatsoever about killing
all of those who stand in our way.
You bury your nervousness so deep
in order to make sure that it doesn't show on my face.
I remember in 1999, in one of the camps
I was in the kitchen, there were other people.
But then, I realised that the people
around me were leaving towards the door
behind my back.
I didn't know why.
But then, before I wanted to turn around
and look around and see why, I distinctly felt
the end of a pistol against my spine.
I distinctly heard the voice of one
of our fellow jihadists in the camp
menacingly uttering these words.
"Now it's over.
Give it up.
We know who you are.
We know who you're working for.
It's over.
Now, you have to come with me quietly."
If he said the British or mentioned specific, you know,
organisation I would be really nervous,
possibly even, you know, maybe faint,
because I know what fate would befall me.
But, because the accusations were so random
I realised that this is actually
one of the tactics they taught us about, which is
to have random checks.
So, I turned around, told him in no uncertain terms,
"Lower your weapon. It is forbidden,
explicitly forbidden to point a gun
at a fellow jihadist
and I won't tolerate this joke."
So, the ferocity, you know, with which I confronted him
with more or less took him aback, lowered his weapon
and asked for forgiveness that it was, you know,
his duty and my name was on the list.
After he left, you know, the kitchen,
even though it was November in Afghanistan,
it was starting to snow, you know, I was sweating buckets.
INTERVIEWER: Can you tell us anything
that your intelligence gathering stopped?
One of the things about spying against
a big organisation like Al-Qaeda and being involved
with multiple cells is that your information
leads, either directly or indirectly,
to the prevention of terrorism.
But, in some cases, the plot is so advanced
that, you know, you end up being part of it.
Why?
Because I was an explosive expert.
Being an explosive expert within Al-Qaeda
means that other cells will come and seek
your help and expertise.
So, this happened already in a plot
in order to attack the subway system in New York
in 2003, so I was more or less
part of that plot.
I was asked for help and I provided the help.
But, in exchange for that help I was able
to more or less understand the outline
of the plot, the participants and the direction
where the plot was taking place.
It was disrupted in the end.
Also, there was a plot in 2005, not far away
from where we are recording this in Canary Wharf here
as well as the City and Mayfair, to poison
the car handles of luxury car brands,
and the idea is that if you want to attack
the elite of the bankers and the hedge fund managers,
that would have been the right thing to do.
This cell sought my help in 2005
and they were already obtaining the materials
to put the poisons together.
That was disrupted.
The leader of the cell escaped Britain
before he was caught and later he became
one of the senior bomb makers for ISIS
in Iraq and Syria,
just to show how serious that plot was.
INTERVIEWER: Obviously, eventually it was discovered
you were a spy.
Are Al-Qaeda angry with you?
Given the fact that I caused the death
of at least one or two of their senior leaders
in Saudi Arabia, and I have no regret about that,
they resisted arrest, I would say yes.
They are angry, enough to try to kill me twice,
once in 2009 and once in 2016.
It's a badge of honour, as far as I'm concerned.
All I did, everything in my life,
even when I went to Bosnia, was to protect.
It wasn't my intention to go out
to the world and harm people.
I jumped ship as soon as the first atrocity took place.
Al-Qaeda, ISIS or any other terror organisation
are the true enemies.
Betraying them is an act of honour,
not an act of dishonour.