Nine Lives

June 11, 2018
Dean (a pseudonym), a founder of al-Qaeda, tells his story of becoming disgusted with the terrorist group and becoming an agent for British intelligence agency MI6 in a memoir that reads like a John le Carré novel. Dean writes of being drawn into jihadism to defend Muslim lives in Bosnia, how the destruction he witnessed “made me so angry that I wanted to fight those responsible for such horrors until my dying breath.” Ably assisted by Lister and Cruickshank, Dean exposes fascinating details of life on the front lines (“celebratory gunfire... had a pattern unlike hostile fire”), from Chechnya to the Philippines to Afghanistan, as well as within extremist circles in the Gulf and in Europe. Increasingly alienated by his “bloodthirsty” al-Qaeda comrades (who relished testing chemical weapons on rabbits) and the group’s casual acceptance of civilian casualties, in 1999 Dean concocted a medical excuse to slip away from the group to Qatar, whose government brought him in for questioning. He immediately flipped and was offered the chance to work as a double agent for the British. Though British intelligence is far from perfect, Dean contrasts his employers favorably with the hapless Americans—he was first imprisoned and, in 2006, outed as a double agent due to errors made by vice president Dick Cheney’s office. After he was “burned,” he was hired by the Chinese, who paid much better, but he found this a “small reward for the intensity of demands.” Fast-paced and sometimes stretching the bounds of credulity, Dean’s tale will be a welcome diversion for those missing the recently ended espionage television show The Americans.

Insider account, by a well-placed double agent, of the world and worldview of al-Qaida.Osama bin Laden's organization is not much in the news these days, overshadowed and "almost forgotten during the subliminal explosion of ISIS." So writes Dean, with the assistance of CNN and BBC producer Lister and CNN terrorism analyst Cruickshank. Yet it is still there, biding its time and playing a long game. Dean knows this well: Growing up as a conservative Sunni, he was inspired by Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait to wage jihad. Time spent on the front line in Bosnia and near death due to a Serbian booby trap solidified his position--yet not so much that he was ideologically immune to being recruited by British (and, later, Chinese) intelligence. Dean recounts several brushes with destiny, including meeting key figures in the 9/11 attacks, and more than a few close calls, as when a keen-eyed Pakistani border guard correctly pegged him as a bin Laden associate. Of considerable interest to students of international terrorism is the author's view of the politics within al-Qaida and its relations with other groups, leading to such things as the initiative not to attack the Sydney Olympic Games--which would have been easy enough to engineer given the "gangster jihadism" prevalent among young Lebanese-Australians. Any presumed alliances, however, collapsed in Syria; remarked one comrade of Dean's, "it's like Bosnia, but it's going to last a lot longer....It will end only when the last man is left standing." The author closes with an assessment of the current political scene in the Middle East, with al-Qaida and IS competing to lead, echoing the larger rivalry between Shia and Sunni Islam. If peace is ever going to arrive in the region, then "we as Muslims have to begin to build some middle ground that allows rapprochement, coexistence at least, between Sunni and Shia."As sinuous and engrossing as a John le Carré story but all true--a welcome addition to the literature surrounding the war on terror.

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