Nine Lives: My Time as MI6's Top Spy Inside Al-Qaida – review
(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. 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. Yet Dean’s involvement in the manufacture of gas
bombs – tested on hundreds of rabbits – worries him. Should such weapons
be used on civilians? Is jihad justified at all? Eventually his
commitment to the cause wavers. He ends up detained in Bahrain,
then passed to Britain’s MI6, who run him as an agent for several years,
sending him back to Afghanistan and Darunta. It is an astonishing
revelation to learn that the UK had an agent close to the top of
al-Qaida, and working in such a sensitive place. Plots
are uncovered. Secret communications are sent. But above all it is the
human story that captivates. Dean ends up spying on his own family, and
is only reluctantly forced to give up his espionage after White House
sources blow his cover in leaks to a journalist.
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.
Dean’s accounts
of this double life – both before and after 9/11 – offer a fascinating
glimpse into the reality of spying. A lot of this is mundane, involving
innumerable debriefings in bland hotel bedrooms, but much is gripping.
One thing jars:
it’s unlikely that Dean can actually remember the exact dialogue during
conversations that occurred almost 20 years before he wrote his account,
or that an MI6 officer doodled on a pad during a particular interview
in 2003, or how someone answered the phone in 2008. But without such
details, even if imagined, any account would be dry indeed.
There
is a tragic end to Nine Lives. Dean’s own nephew, his favourite young
relative, was not blessed with the author’s remarkable ability to get
out of trouble and was killed fighting with Islamists in Syria. At some
risk, Dean visits the 18-year-old’s hastily dug grave. He says a short
prayer, turns away and does not look back.
Nine Lives: My Time as MI6's Top Spy Inside Al-Qaida – review
When 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 wher