Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times
November 17, 2006
Pg. 6
By Mark Landler
PARIS, Nov. 10 — Sitting in a hotel suite here, a cigarette and late-morning beer in hand, Omar Nasiri does not look the part of a radical Islamic terrorist. But then appearances may mean little to a man whose name is not really Omar Nasiri and whose life is cloaked in layers of deception.
For seven years, beginning in the mid-1990s and ending before 9/11, Mr. Nasiri, a Moroccan, says he was involved with militant Muslim groups in Europe that later coalesced into Al Qaeda. He says he trained with weapons and explosives at camps in Afghanistan, meeting some of the world’s most wanted terrorists. Later, in London, he funneled messages between those men and radical Islamic clerics.
All the while, Mr. Nasiri says, he was operating as an agent for the intelligence services of France, Britain and Germany.
“Of course I felt guilty about being a spy, but I understood the reasons I did it,” he said in an interview to promote “Inside the Jihad: My Life With Al Qaeda, a Spy’s Story,” a memoir of his double life, beginning in Belgium and ending in Germany, where he now lives in hiding.
“People who read the book might conclude that I’m either a pathological liar or a cynical calculator,” Mr. Nasiri said. “I’m neither. There’s no difference between me and every other Muslim.”
With its politically charged subject matter and a pseudonymous author whose job it was to deceive those closest to him, “Inside the Jihad” is an altogether new addition to the growing library of books about Islamic terrorism after the 9/11 attacks. The question is whether the account is true.
Basic Books, which is selling the book in the United States, said it was confident that Mr. Nasiri’s main story was reliable. One of the key events he describes — a police raid on his mother’s apartment in Brussels in 1995 that led to the arrest of three of his brothers — is corroborated in press accounts.
Lara Heimert, the executive editor of Basic Books, also cited reporting by the BBC and other European news organizations that substantiated his intelligence links. The BBC broadcast a 45-minute documentary on Mr. Nasiri on Thursday evening.
Still, Ms. Heimert, who edited the book, acknowledged that other parts of the story, particularly his account of training at camps in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, were impossible to confirm. To vet those parts, she gave the manuscript to Michael Scheuer, a former senior intelligence officer at the Central Intelligence Agency who was the head of a unit that focused on Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
“I’ve never seen anything from that period that was so complete and rang so true,” Mr. Scheuer said in a telephone interview. “It really tied together and resonated with the information we had in classified form.”
Representatives of the French, British, and German intelligence services declined to comment on whether they had links to Mr. Nasiri.
One official in the German domestic intelligence agency, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that the agency had had contact with Mr. Nasiri but questioned the value of the intelligence he provided.
Mr. Nasiri’s original motive for writing, he said, was revenge. He said that after seven years of dangerous work, principally for the Directorate General of External Security in France, he felt hung out to dry by the Western agencies.
The bombings of two American Embassies in East Africa in 1998 left Mr. Nasiri appalled by the violence of Islamic terrorism but also uncomfortable at the role of the West, according to the book. He decided to ask his intelligence contacts to help him get a fresh start in Germany, where he had a new wife. He had no money and no false identity with which to seek a decent job.
They offered him scant help, he said. “They put me in a tough place, and I wanted to put them in a tough place,” said Mr. Nasiri, who has graying hair — he says he is in his mid-40s — and a manner that is by turns charming and combative.
Certainly he is unsparing about the spy services. The French, he writes, are ruthless but professional, and the British parochial, concerned only about attacks in their own country.
Despite being suffused with Islamic theory and culture, “Inside Jihad” reads like a John le Carré novel. It is replete with tales of phony passports, envelopes stuffed with cash and cloak-and-dagger meetings in various European capitals. “I’m scared that I did some of these things, but at the time, I lived it like it was a totally normal life,” he said.
Life for Mr. Nasiri went off the rails early. Raised in a broken family in Brussels and Tangier, Morocco, he fell into drug dealing and gun running. Through an older brother, Mr. Nasiri said, he came into contact with a radical set and began procuring guns and ammunition for a militant Algerian organization, the Armed Islamic Group.
After he was caught stealing money from the people he was working with, he writes, he turned to French intelligence agents for protection. He says he became a valuable source of information on the militants who passed through his mother’s home. Several were arrested and jailed by the Belgian police in the raid in March 1995.
Fearful of staying in Europe and inspired to become a warrior for Islam, Mr. Nasiri proposed to go to Afghanistan, where young Muslims were being trained in camps. The French agreed and gave him money to fly to Pakistan via Turkey, he said.
On his way to Afghanistan, he said, he met Abu Zubaida, a Palestinian who acted as a gatekeeper to some of the camps. The American authorities later identified Abu Zubaida as a senior figure in Al Qaeda.
Despite his proximity to such figures, Mr. Nasiri attests that he did not take part directly in terror.
Mr. Nasiri’s account of the camps is detailed and chilling. Recruits were drilled in the manufacture and use of sophisticated explosives, as well as in the Koran. It was there, Mr. Nasiri said, that he concluded that those mujahedeen had gone dangerously astray in their faith.
Even now, though, Mr. Nasiri seems conflicted. He does not, for example, flatly condemn suicide bombers. “How can I say that these young, educated Muslims who blow themselves up in Baghdad are stupid?” he said.
Much like the spies of fiction, Mr. Nasiri wants to put a principled veneer on what was essentially a dirty game. He says he wrote the book to help people in the West understand the rage in the Islamic world. Equally, he wants to rescue Muslims from their “degraded” state.
Yet there is also the money — an advance in the “low six figures,” according to an executive at Basic Books — and a promotional blitz that includes interviews with CNN and the “CBS Evening News.”
“If I sell a million copies I will enjoy it — before they start shooting at me,” Mr. Nasiri said with a strained laugh.
Souad Mekhennet contributed reporting from Frankfurt.
November 17, 2006
Pg. 6
By Mark Landler
PARIS, Nov. 10 — Sitting in a hotel suite here, a cigarette and late-morning beer in hand, Omar Nasiri does not look the part of a radical Islamic terrorist. But then appearances may mean little to a man whose name is not really Omar Nasiri and whose life is cloaked in layers of deception.
For seven years, beginning in the mid-1990s and ending before 9/11, Mr. Nasiri, a Moroccan, says he was involved with militant Muslim groups in Europe that later coalesced into Al Qaeda. He says he trained with weapons and explosives at camps in Afghanistan, meeting some of the world’s most wanted terrorists. Later, in London, he funneled messages between those men and radical Islamic clerics.
All the while, Mr. Nasiri says, he was operating as an agent for the intelligence services of France, Britain and Germany.
“Of course I felt guilty about being a spy, but I understood the reasons I did it,” he said in an interview to promote “Inside the Jihad: My Life With Al Qaeda, a Spy’s Story,” a memoir of his double life, beginning in Belgium and ending in Germany, where he now lives in hiding.
“People who read the book might conclude that I’m either a pathological liar or a cynical calculator,” Mr. Nasiri said. “I’m neither. There’s no difference between me and every other Muslim.”
With its politically charged subject matter and a pseudonymous author whose job it was to deceive those closest to him, “Inside the Jihad” is an altogether new addition to the growing library of books about Islamic terrorism after the 9/11 attacks. The question is whether the account is true.
Basic Books, which is selling the book in the United States, said it was confident that Mr. Nasiri’s main story was reliable. One of the key events he describes — a police raid on his mother’s apartment in Brussels in 1995 that led to the arrest of three of his brothers — is corroborated in press accounts.
Lara Heimert, the executive editor of Basic Books, also cited reporting by the BBC and other European news organizations that substantiated his intelligence links. The BBC broadcast a 45-minute documentary on Mr. Nasiri on Thursday evening.
Still, Ms. Heimert, who edited the book, acknowledged that other parts of the story, particularly his account of training at camps in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, were impossible to confirm. To vet those parts, she gave the manuscript to Michael Scheuer, a former senior intelligence officer at the Central Intelligence Agency who was the head of a unit that focused on Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
“I’ve never seen anything from that period that was so complete and rang so true,” Mr. Scheuer said in a telephone interview. “It really tied together and resonated with the information we had in classified form.”
Representatives of the French, British, and German intelligence services declined to comment on whether they had links to Mr. Nasiri.
One official in the German domestic intelligence agency, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that the agency had had contact with Mr. Nasiri but questioned the value of the intelligence he provided.
Mr. Nasiri’s original motive for writing, he said, was revenge. He said that after seven years of dangerous work, principally for the Directorate General of External Security in France, he felt hung out to dry by the Western agencies.
The bombings of two American Embassies in East Africa in 1998 left Mr. Nasiri appalled by the violence of Islamic terrorism but also uncomfortable at the role of the West, according to the book. He decided to ask his intelligence contacts to help him get a fresh start in Germany, where he had a new wife. He had no money and no false identity with which to seek a decent job.
They offered him scant help, he said. “They put me in a tough place, and I wanted to put them in a tough place,” said Mr. Nasiri, who has graying hair — he says he is in his mid-40s — and a manner that is by turns charming and combative.
Certainly he is unsparing about the spy services. The French, he writes, are ruthless but professional, and the British parochial, concerned only about attacks in their own country.
Despite being suffused with Islamic theory and culture, “Inside Jihad” reads like a John le Carré novel. It is replete with tales of phony passports, envelopes stuffed with cash and cloak-and-dagger meetings in various European capitals. “I’m scared that I did some of these things, but at the time, I lived it like it was a totally normal life,” he said.
Life for Mr. Nasiri went off the rails early. Raised in a broken family in Brussels and Tangier, Morocco, he fell into drug dealing and gun running. Through an older brother, Mr. Nasiri said, he came into contact with a radical set and began procuring guns and ammunition for a militant Algerian organization, the Armed Islamic Group.
After he was caught stealing money from the people he was working with, he writes, he turned to French intelligence agents for protection. He says he became a valuable source of information on the militants who passed through his mother’s home. Several were arrested and jailed by the Belgian police in the raid in March 1995.
Fearful of staying in Europe and inspired to become a warrior for Islam, Mr. Nasiri proposed to go to Afghanistan, where young Muslims were being trained in camps. The French agreed and gave him money to fly to Pakistan via Turkey, he said.
On his way to Afghanistan, he said, he met Abu Zubaida, a Palestinian who acted as a gatekeeper to some of the camps. The American authorities later identified Abu Zubaida as a senior figure in Al Qaeda.
Despite his proximity to such figures, Mr. Nasiri attests that he did not take part directly in terror.
Mr. Nasiri’s account of the camps is detailed and chilling. Recruits were drilled in the manufacture and use of sophisticated explosives, as well as in the Koran. It was there, Mr. Nasiri said, that he concluded that those mujahedeen had gone dangerously astray in their faith.
Even now, though, Mr. Nasiri seems conflicted. He does not, for example, flatly condemn suicide bombers. “How can I say that these young, educated Muslims who blow themselves up in Baghdad are stupid?” he said.
Much like the spies of fiction, Mr. Nasiri wants to put a principled veneer on what was essentially a dirty game. He says he wrote the book to help people in the West understand the rage in the Islamic world. Equally, he wants to rescue Muslims from their “degraded” state.
Yet there is also the money — an advance in the “low six figures,” according to an executive at Basic Books — and a promotional blitz that includes interviews with CNN and the “CBS Evening News.”
“If I sell a million copies I will enjoy it — before they start shooting at me,” Mr. Nasiri said with a strained laugh.
Souad Mekhennet contributed reporting from Frankfurt.
