Your Book Review: Nine Lives

(This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked)

Cats have nine lives but they don’t get involved in jungle wars in the Philippines

Aimen Dean (pseudonym) compares himself to the proverbial cat: he has nine lives, surviving every impossible situation and starting new lives under strange new conditions. 

Cats pack their nine lives in an average of 12-18 years, which is a quite impressive speed, but Aimen Dean was committed to living his lives even quicker than that. 

Born in 1978, he was 16 when he left the comfort of his Saudi home, learned to fire a mortar, and fought in the battles of the Bosnian War. He and two friends ran a million dollar fraudulent charity to smuggle supplies to the Chechens when he was 18. He was 19 when he swore an oath of allegiance in front of Osama bin Laden, and started making chemical weapons. He was 20 when he got disillusioned with al-Qaeda, left, got caught by the Qatari secret police and became a British informant. He was 24 when he unraveled a plot to release poison gas in the New York subway. And by the time he was 28, due to an embarrassingly stupid leak from the American intelligence agencies, his spying career was over and he was a man in hiding.

(The jungle war in the Philippines sounded cool in the section title, but his brief stint there at 18 is actually one of the least exciting stories of his life: it was mostly a frozen conflict and the jihadists spent their time playing beach volleyball.)

One good consequence of his cover being blown is that twelve years after his retirement, he could finally tell his story, resulting in one of the most fascinating books I ever read. The stories were presented in a believable enough way, not over-exaggerating his own importance, that I developed a lot of trust in most of his claims being true. I also mostly believe his journalist coauthors that they corroborated many details of his story. This makes his testimony a very useful source on the inner workings of jihadist organizations, and the intelligence agencies trying to stop them.

The book is also a real page-turner, a spy novel in real life. I will share the most interesting things I learned from this book, but for all the adventure stories, read the original, I really enjoyed it more than most novels.

I know, shocking.

But really, the writer is constantly complaining how Western analysts are always trying to understand the jihadists’ motivations and plans through their own lens: economy, strategy, nationalism, fighting against oppression. Dean claims that these all overlook a major goal that motivated him and many of his comrades: fulfilling the prophecies.

There are many prophecies about the End Times in the Koran and the hadiths (deeds and words of Muhammad, transmitted through oral tradition, the authenticities of some of which are hotly debated among Islamic scholars). Some of these prophecies are thought to be already fulfilled, others are not. But the glorious coming of the Mahdi can only happen once all the events that are prophesied to happen before him have passed. 

The logical conclusion for humanity is clear: go through the prophecies like a checklist and fulfill them all, bringing forward the day the Mahdi arrives and Jesus returns, and justice is served to the world!

(An aside: I knew that Jesus is considered a prophet in Islam, but I didn’t know before reading the book how important he is, and I was surprised by the jihadists constantly talking about the return of Jesus. Apparently, Muslims believe that Jesus is the Messiah foretold in the Old Testament, and that he ascended to heaven alive and will return in the End Times to rule gloriously beside another messianic figure, the Mahdi. After that, he will die and be buried in the Green Dome in a tomb left vacant for him next to Muhammad’s. The Last Judgment will happen after his death.)

Anyways, the End Times are here. (According to a Pew Research poll, more than half of Muslims believe that the Mahdi will arrive within their lifetime, and this belief is universally accepted among jihadists). This means that you should contribute to fulfilling the prerequisite prophecies as quickly as possible. Nothing else really matters. The young Dean travels to the Philippines to fight in the Muslim independence movement there, but later gets embarrassed about this as a wasteful diversion: the Philippines don’t feature in any of the prophecies, so it’s not important.

Dean originally joins the jihad because he is horrified by the news of the sometimes genocidal mistreatment of Bosnian Muslims by the Serbian army. But later he gets told off by one of his superiors even for this: what good it is to save the lives of some Muslims, if Bosnia will just have a secular government anyway, that allows “alcohol and nightclubs”? Bosnia will never be the cradle of a new Caliphate, so it’s not important either.

(Other fighters disagree: Bosnia really is important, because it gets Islam a foothold closer to Rome, and this will help fulfill an important prophecy about conquering Rome. You need to pay attention to the later items on the checklist too!)

On the other hand, other fights matter a lot. Dean writes:

It is not possible to understand al-Qaeda’s strategy without understanding its fixation on fulfilling the prophecies. Creating the preconditions for the arrival of the Mahdi also explained the group’s later establishment of affiliates in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and the Maghreb, which along with Afghanistan are the lands of the Five Armies of Jihad prophesied to fight in the epic battles.

I find it suspicious that these were unstable regions anyway, how convenient for fulfilling the prophecies! It’s also suspicious that I can’t find any reference to the prophesied Five Armies of Jihad anywhere on the internet. Maybe I would find more if I searched in Arabic, but it definitely doesn’t seem to be a mainstream prophecy in Islam. If I understand correctly, the trick is that there are a lot of hadith of somewhat questionable authenticity, so the jihadist scholars can pick and choose, and of course there are often a lot of degrees of freedom in interpreting them too. 

Still, we shouldn’t imagine this as just a cynical leadership fabricating prophecies that fit their strategic goals to manipulate the rank and file. My understanding is that the people interpreting the prophecies are true believers too, it’s just natural to interpret an ambiguous location to refer to Syria if you are already fixated on the idea that your group is the one fulfilling the prophecies, and now there are rebels in Syria asking for your help.

Also, there is no clean distinction between the ‘leadership’ and the ‘rank and file’: jihadist leadership has a sky-high attrition rate (the US army really is quite impressive in taking them down), so it’s not that hard to rise through the ranks. This means that the people on the top at any given moment usually just received and believe the prophecies as given. After some time,  there might be no one left alive who even knows if the prophecies were massaged for strategic purposes. 

Other times, there is a prophecy with a clear interpretation, so they follow it even if it goes against any strategic reason. A hadith says: “The Last Hour would not come until the Romans land at al-A’maq or in Dabiq. An army consisting of the best (soldiers) of the people of the earth at that time will come from Medina (to counteract them).” So ISIS put crazy amount of effort into defending the otherwise unimportant village of Dabiq in northern Syria for three years, and they provoked the West with their brutality, openly admitting that their hope is for the West to send ground troops, so they can defeat them in Dabiq:

In November 2014, another ISIS executioner, Mohammed Emwazi, appeared in Dabiq with the severed head of an American hostage, saying, ‘Here we are, burying the first American Crusader in Dabiq, eagerly waiting for the remainder of your armies to arrive.’ 

In a message released after the group’s attack in Paris in 2015, Baghdadi mocked the West for not sending in ground troops. ‘They know what awaits them in Dabiq (in) terms of defeat, death, and destruction. They know that it is the final war and after it, God permitting, we will invade them and they will not invade us, and Islam will dominate the world anew until the Day of Judgement.’

The West was wise enough not to send ground troops, and only bombed ISIS, until the Turkish and some Syrian militias finally drove ISIS out of Dabiq. I guess the Last Hour needs to wait for now. 

This is a good moment to note that that jihadists in the book are all obsessed with Israel, mostly not because they are angry at the oppression of Palestinians (Muslims are oppressed in many places around the world), but because Jerusalem features in a lot of prophecies, so it’s really important for it to be under Muslim rule. They also passionately hate the USA, partly because of its support of Israel, but maybe even more importantly because the US has stationed troops in Saudi Arabia since the Gulf War. This was a reasonable thing to do against a potential Iraqi invasion that was a very real threat while Saddam was in power. But Infidel soldiers staying in the country of Mecca and Medina was considered a huge sacrilege by the jihadists and made them hate the US a lot.

Other than occupying specific Syrian villages for prophecy reasons, is there a general Grand Strategy that the jihadists follow? I already alluded to how ISIS was thinking, and these plans were often very explicitly laid down by Dean’s comrades and superiors inside al-Qaeda. Roughly, this is the four step Jihadist Master Plan:

1. We commit lots of horrific terrorist attacks both at home and in the West, to provoke the western governments and the local secular governments.

2. They get mad, and either the West starts bombing things, or the local secular dictatorship responds with disproportionate repression against devout Muslims.

3. The people revolt, chaos ensues, jihadist groups fill the power vacuum and try to hold on to their territories against the combined firepower of the world, while the region descends into a war of all against all.

4. …

5. Profit.

You might notice the missing step 4. They intentionally don’t really plan ahead for this step, this is the part where God is supposed to step in and make it so that the jihadists win against all odds, the Mahdi and Jesus return, the faithful get their reward, etc. 

Steps 1 to 3 often go kind of according to plan, but step 4 hasn’t seen much success yet. Maybe they need to go through their prophecy-checklist more diligently the next time. 

I need to say that it’s kind of embarrassing that the West plays into their hands so much in step 2. The most glaring example from the book is a right-hand man of Osama bin Laden, known now to be one of the main masterminds of 9/11, telling his comrades in the winter of 2001:

‘Our generation started the war, the next generation will fight the war, and the generation after that will win the war,’ al-Masri declared. ‘You know there’s a group in America that wants to overthrow Saddam Hussein? But they say the American people won’t support a war in Iraq unless there’s an event on the scale of Pearl Harbor.’ Then, with a rare flash of amusement in his eyes, he added, ‘We should – with God’s help and grace – give them a Pearl Harbor! Let them come into Iraq, let them come into Afghanistan, let them come into Somalia.’

‘Unlike the Japanese we don’t have aircraft carriers,’ retorted al-Suri.

‘Maybe we don’t need aircraft carriers,’ Abu Hafs replied with a smirk.

As I said, a little embarrassing on our part. 

(Though I need to mention for fairness’ sake that many jihadists were angry at Osama bin Laden after 9/11 for causing the downfall of their stronghold in Afghanistan. So when the West invades a territory already controlled by jihadists, that’s not necessarily “playing into their hands” that much.)

It’s easy to notice how eerily similar the jihadists’ thinking is to communist and far-right accelerationism. The eventual victory of our ideology is inevitable, either because of divine prophecy, or some “arc of history”.  But in the current world order, we are severely overpowered, and there is no clear way how we could win. So we make things worse for everyone until everything breaks down, and our ideology will inevitably emerge victoriously from the chaos. What could go wrong?

It’s kind of surprising that so many different ideologies converged on this counter-intuitive strategy that didn’t really work for any of them. I suspect that part of the answer is that accelerationism is just a general purpose ideology of Evil. If you have a group of violent people, who enjoy cruelty, killing and destruction, but still want to believe themselves to be the good guys, what kind of ideology do you give them? “Bad things are good, because they bring forward the glorious ___. So do your thing.” The content of ___ doesn’t really matter, only that you can accelerate towards it by being evil.

(I really wanted to make some joke about e/acc, but it would actually be unfair. E/acc has its vices, but despite its name it doesn’t fit the general pattern: as far as I know, they don’t want to make things worse, so things get better later — they just want to accelerate AI, which they consider a simple good thing. So the above criticism doesn’t really apply to them.)

Given the above-described “strategy” of Islamic Accelerationism, it’s not surprising how much of their planning is based in the social instead of the physical reality. This makes them obsessed with getting things that can be classified as Weapons of Mass Destruction, somewhat divorced from what would be actually practical ways of destroying people en masse. 

As a smart, bookish guy with photographic memory, Dean was assigned to the group making bombs and chemical and biological weapons in the al-Qaeda camp. Unsurprisingly, the British encouraged him to stay involved even after he changed sides. This gives him a lot of insight into how al-Qaeda was thinking about WMDs. 

A chemical weapon, used in the New York subway, even if their most ambitious plans came true, would only kill a handful of people — fewer than what could be killed by one man with a gun, or maybe even a knife. 

The Western intelligence agencies knew this. Al-Qaeda knew this. Still, it was a top priority for the MI6 and CIA to prevent any kind of chemical attack, as they knew how oversized the public response would be. And al-Qaeda pursued chemical weapons for the same reason.

Looking at the list of chemical terror attacks, it still doesn’t seem to be a very practical weapon for them, as they have only managed to kill a handful of people so far, and none in Western countries. But certainly, they are trying, and some of their plots might have gone through if one of their few chemical weapons experts, a certain Aimen Dean, hadn’t always dutifully informed the MI6 about their plans. 

Their obsession with “biological weapons” is even more bizarre. In the book, the chemical and biological experiments group doesn’t even try creating actually dangerous biological weapons that could cause pandemics, as they know it’s well beyond their reach. However, they can still extract scorpion venom, and it’s kind of like a biological weapon! It’s incredibly impractical, but that’s not really the point. The point is that WHO defines biological weapons as “Biological and toxin weapons are either microorganisms like virus, bacteria or fungi, or toxic substances produced by living organisms that are produced and released deliberately to cause disease and death in humans, animals or plants”. Scorpion venom fits the definition, so Western intelligence agencies can say “al-Qaeda has chemical and biological capabilities”, and all of this sounds scary, and being scary and provoking a response is the whole point. 

I would really want to redefine our categories in a reasonable way, and have a category for “pandemic-causing biological capabilities” that definitely doesn’t include scorpion venom. Similarly, poison gas weapons can be very destructive (though it turns out they are not that bad when low-tech terrorists need to assemble them and then smuggle the gas-container to the target), and this makes “chemical attacks” sound bad, but then the Wikipedia list of examples includes things like “In one case, nails and bolts packed into explosives detonated by a Hamas suicide bomber in a December 2001 attack at the Ben-Yehuda street in Jerusalem were soaked in rat poison”. This is really not a central example of a “weapon of mass destruction”, and we only confuse ourselves if we put it in the same category with more dangerous things.

And confusing ourselves can have very real costs in this case: the next time our intelligence agencies say that a country or a terrorist organization possesses WMDs and “chemical and biological capabilities” so we need to do something about them, I really want to know whether they are going to release super-smallpox, or they just soaked some nails in rat poison. Also, pretty please, if the terrorists finally manage to commit a poison gas attack in the West, but only kill a handful of people, can we just react the same way as we would if the attack happened with a gun or knife, instead of going crazy?

Nuclear is somewhat similar.

‘You know what I think about these so-called dirty bombs,’ he said one mid-winter evening as we huddled round the fire wrapped in a cocoon of blankets. ‘They’re a waste of our time, more likely to kill us than anyone else.’ Even the materials for a primitive ‘dirty bomb’ would be hard to come by, he said, and the radiation from such a weapon would cause little harm.

For others in al-Qaeda’s orbit, the fear and panic that would be provoked by some sort of workable nuclear capability – however crude – remained the holy grail. And the group went to some lengths to play up its nuclear capability in an effort to sow uncertainty among the intelligence agencies. Abu Hamza al-Ghamdi had told me, in typically subversive fashion: ‘It would be a good thing for our enemies to be afraid that we have them.’

Fortunately, for all their efforts to acquire nukes, they achieved nothing other than getting scammed by the Uzbek mafia a few times, so they resorted to just bluffing to Western journalists about possessing nukes. 

I really don’t want terrorists to access real nukes, but if reports come out in the future about terrorists possessing “nuclear capabilities”, I want everyone to remember that not all nukes are created equal, and investigate closely whether the report is talking about city-destroying bombs, or crude radiological devices “more likely to kill us than anyone else”, or nothing more than a bluff. 

How good are the terrorists at making all these weapons? That depends on how many competent engineers they have. At least at the time Aimen Dean was there, around the turn of the millennium, al-Qeada had a serious shortage of experts on explosives and especially chemical weapons. They didn’t even have that many people who could do the simple lab-work of the experiments, and they had a lot of fatalities and serious injuries while working with explosives. But they were even more constrained on people who could lead their “research”. Almost all the innovation was centered around one man: Abu Khabab, a chemistry expert and bomb-maker who defected from the Egyptian army. 

Abu Khabab was an interesting figure. He never took an oath of allegiance to Osama bin Laden, and was proud of his independence. He extracted promises that he would have control over the use of his inventions. While he believed in the jihadist cause, and wanted them to have access to as strong weapons as their enemies had, he didn’t like attacks on civilians (and even had a bad conscience about the animals he killed and tortured through his experiments). 

Here is how he and Dean reacted when they first figured out how to make efficient chemical weapons that they (at that moment) believed could kill significant number of civilians in a terror attack:

‘This will change everything. Imagine if we’d used poison gas in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam,’ he said.

Abu Khabab responded with a sharpness I had rarely heard in him.

‘It’s one thing developing such weapons and quite another using them. The scholars will have to be unified in justifying with a fatwah any use of a device like this.’

From my conversations with him, it seemed clear that Abu Khabab felt he was developing al-Qaeda’s equivalent of a nuclear device, for use in very defined circumstances. I had clung to the belief that these weapons would only be used as a deterrent, that somehow al-Qaeda would let the world know that it had developed a WMD capability but would hold it in reserve unless attacked. But my grip on that belief was loosening almost daily.

Abu Khabab was a smart man, smart enough to develop dangerous explosives and chemical weapons on his own from very limited raw materials, and he could still deceive himself into believing that his inventions won’t be used in irresponsible ways, while he was developing weapons for al-Qaeda.

Needless to say, the blueprints of his invention of how to assemble chemical weapons from relatively simple ingredients soon got disseminated on the Internet and various terrorist groups tried to use it later for killing civilians, without consulting any unified assembly of scholars.

When I watched Oppenheimer, I thought of the story of Abu Khabab. As above, so below.

This is one of the main questions I wanted to get an answer to when I started reading the book. Why? Why do people become terrorists? Is it just simple evil with a smoke-screen of ideological rationalizations, as I previously speculated in this post? Or is there anything more?

From the book, you can glimpse three primary motivations for taking up jihad.

First, some people really are evil. People who visibly enjoy torturing animals when doing experiments for chemical weapons, or whose “eyes gleam with excitement” as they learn that their proposed poisoning method not only kills the infidels but kills in a very painful way. To these people ideology might really be nothing more than a smokescreen. If they didn’t find jihad, they might have just been simple criminals. (Indeed, many of them were. Prisons are a very fertile recruiting ground for the terrorists.) 

But the majority don’t seem to fall into this category, or at least they don’t start out like this. I remember that it hit me as a surprise when the book first used the word “psychopath”. It was 100 pages in. Dean had already been hanging out for years with al-Qaeda fighters, he had seen Serbian prisoners of war being beheaded with blunt knives, and this is the first time he said of someone “Wow, this guy is a psycho”. Apparently, most of them weren’t like that.

Second, some people really want to be heroes. Dean first joined the jihad because he wanted to defend his Muslim brothers in Bosnia against the Serbian oppression and genocidal atrocities. Many others joined for similar reasons: to help the oppressed in Bosnia, or before that in the Afghan war against the Soviet occupation. But there aren’t that many “just wars” going on in the modern world. So these aspiring heroes convince themselves that one side of a horrible-against-horrible civil war is actually the just cause, and join that. Or they just find Islamic Accelerationism, which very conveniently claims that all kinds of new wars are just and heroic, as the instability brings forward the final victory of the Faithful. There is something tragic about the mis-directed energies of all these would-be heroes, and I sometimes wonder if we should stage fake alien invasions to keep these people occupied. 

The third group is, again, people who take their religion really seriously and literally. Aimen Dean has some of the characteristics of the second group, but mostly falls into this category. He knew the Koran by heart by the time he was twelve. (He has a photographic memory, something that was very useful in his career as a spy.) He spent all his youth learning and thinking about his religion, being taught by some radical clerics who ran the study group in his neighborhood. By the time he volunteered to fight in Bosnia, he truly believed that there is no higher calling than dying in a holy war, and truly believed in his heart that Paradise awaits the martyrs.

‘Stop! Stop!’ yelled the fighters behind me.

My legs were entangled in wire. I had dragged up no fewer than four landmines. Things seemed to move in slow motion: I saw the Arab fighters throwing themselves to the ground, bracing for the explosion.

I stood motionless, expecting to be cut down by a sniper’s bullet at any second but knowing that one step in any direction would bring the certainty of death.

One of the fighters crawled towards me very slowly. I held my breath. He began to pick away at the wires curling around my legs. His fingers moved carefully but with extraordinary calmness. As he disentangled me, he spoke softly.

‘God be praised. For one of these not to explode I would call you lucky. Two would be extremely fortunate; three a miracle. And four, well, God must be watching over you,’ he said.

‘Maybe God doesn’t want me,’ I told him.

As I clambered back down the hill, I was jolted from shock to disappointment. After a year in Bosnia, I was still very much alive. I had been sure this would be my bridge to paradise, a place the Prophet had described as beyond imagination. Of the five medics assigned that day, only two of us had survived. My brothers in arms were now in paradise but I had been left behind. I could not hold back the tears. I felt like a loser among winners. I made a silent prayer asking God to reunite me with my friends soon and vowed to embrace jihad as never before. Maybe God would then find me worthy.

Their vision of heaven is also interesting: 

As the Prophet had said, with the first drop of blood all the sins of a martyr are forgiven. With the second they see their place in heaven. There would be no purgatory and no anxiety on the Day of Judgment. Not only would seventy-two virgins await, but as a martyr I could ask the Lord to grant eternal life to seventy of my relatives and friends. I would be reunited with the mother I so missed and the father I had never got to know.

This is actually a very good deal on utilitarian terms! One in seventy people dies as a martyr, distributed around the world, and all of humanity is saved! 

(The promise of 72 virgins was also something they often thought of, given that the rank and file couldn’t afford supporting a wife in the al-Qaeda camps, and the practice of kidnapping sex slaves only started later.)

So they really wanted to die as martyrs. But why terrorism? Again, there aren’t that many just wars to die in. And if you accept the prophecies being true, and accept the authority of imams quoting great scholars justifying the means to the end, Islamic Accelerationism is actually quite logical…

I was somewhat disturbed reading how many normal Muslims Dean interacted with were on board with all of this in theory. Dean comes from a nice urban middle-class family in Saudi Arabia, and several of his relatives joined the jihad at various points, and all other relatives supported that. His neighborhood Islamic study group, that I imagine as the equivalent of Sunday School, was all in favor of very radical interpretations. Some Muslim communities Dean interacted with in London were even more radical than the ones he grew up with, constantly preaching about Hellfire and the only sure way to avoid it. On a plane from Kuwait to the Philippines, a flight attendant figured out they were traveling to join the jihad, but didn’t turn them in, but instead introduced them to the captain of the plane, because they were both proud supporters of the jihad. People did successful door-to-door fundraising for jihadist causes in Kuwait. Everyone was on board, it was just that not that many took the implications as seriously as Dean.

(My impression from the book is that after 9/11, America put pressure on the Arab states to crack down on radicalization, and it worked to some extent. Unfortunately, I don’t know how strong the “to some extent” is.)

I find the story of these true believers killing and dying for jihad maybe even sadder than the story of the wannabe heroes, because it just so strongly depends on blind luck. These people probably become committed followers of the first religion (or secular religion) they encounter. If they were first introduced to something else, for better or worse, they could have been missionaries spreading the Good News, nurses going to Africa, communist activists or super-committed EAs. Instead, the first religion they got introduced to was a radical, apocalyptic branch of Islam. Tough luck.

Aimen Dean is not only deeply religious, but also a huge nerd. He is very interested in Islamic history and theology and studies them obsessively. This is surprisingly common among jihadists, especially the higher-ups. Maybe it’s not even that surprising that the people who are committed to following their beliefs to their (according to them) logical conclusions, are also huge nerds about the details of their religion. 

The special thing about Dean is, however, that he double-checks the details enough to find the holes. When he talks about why he left al-Qaeda, he mentions being disturbed by the brutal executions and the civilian deaths in terror attacks, but his disillusionment seems to be at least as much intellectual as moral and emotional. Here is the pivotal moment of doubt:

‘Sheikh,’ I said, ‘how do we respond to criticism that we have killed innocent civilians while attacking the Crusaders?’

Al-Muhajir smiled. It was an invitation to show off his great erudition. He launched into a detailed description of the Mongol invasions of Muslim lands in the thirteenth century. The scholar Ibn Taymiyyah had issued a fatwah that clearly legitimized the deaths of Muslims and non-Muslims alike where the enemy is using them as a human shield.

‘This fatwah is comprehensive; it gives us justification,’ he said firmly.

Al-Muhajir probably assumed I would go away reassured and impressed. I didn’t. Instead I took advantage of a long-planned trip to the villa which served as al-Qaeda’s guest house in Kabul to consult its well stocked library of Islamic texts. I sought out the fatwah – in the twenty-eighth volume of a thirty-seven-volume encyclopaedia – and found that it had no relevance whatsoever.

It had been issued in response to Mongol attacks on Muslim cities in Central Asia. Every time the Mongols sacked a city, they took civilians – sometimes as many as a couple of thousand – and forced them to push siege towers towards the walls of the next city. The fatwah said the defenders of a city were permitted to kill Muslims being used as human shields – because otherwise they and their families would end up being killed, and the Mongols would go on conquering more Muslim cities.

But the fatwah (known as al-Tatarus) had been proclaimed in very specific circumstances.

To me, there was no resemblance or parallel between Muslims being used as human shields by Mongol armies and the attacks in East Africa. Al-Muhajir’s precedent was a castle of sand. Were al-Qaeda’s other theological justifications, including its interpretation of the prophecies, built on equally shaky foundations? Was al-Qaeda really the Vanguard that would fight with the Mahdi or was it set on a path that future generations of Muslims would reject rather than celebrate?

Later, he learns that the hadiths prophesying a victorious army coming out of Afghanistan are probably Abbasid forgeries (the Abbasids’ base was in the Afghan territories). He also realizes that there are some prophecies about evil traitors to the faith that apply to the terrorists groups equally well as the prophecies about heroic armies that they like to apply to themselves.

He firmly believes that the best way to dissuade young people from joining the jihadists is to show them these facts. He is very frustrated that there aren’t enough people debating with jihadist agitators online, showing how they misrepresent the holy texts. (Dean himself is a very moderate, though still devout, Muslim these days, but he thinks the best people to make these arguments would be hardcore Salafi scholars.)

I suspect he is at least partially committing a typical mind fallacy, and these arguments wouldn’t be as persuasive to most jihadists as they were to him. But Dean has seen many, many different people going down the path of radicalization, and maybe we should believe him when he says that these scholarly counter-arguments would make a big difference.

Someone writing The Authenticity of Various Hadiths: Much More Than You Wanted to Know  probably won’t bring peace to the Middle East in itself, but still, Dean’s advice is good encouragement that actually engaging in debate with people on their own terms can be worthwhile, even with people who are as deeply lost as the jihadists.

This point doesn’t really fit among the overarching themes of the book, but is still very important information, so I shoehorn it into the review here.

In fact, this was the original reason I started reading this book. Two years ago, soon after the Ukraine invasion, I tried to figure out what happened in the 1999 apartment bombings that are widely considered a false flag operation. For example, Scott writes in his book review on Putin: “The standard position in the West is now that Putin orchestrated the apartment bombings himself – killing 300 Russians – as a justification for escalating the war on Chechnya and to make himself look good after he framed some perpetrators.”  However, there was a throwaway line on Wikipedia about a British informant claiming the opposite. Later, this line was removed from Wikipedia for reasons that are unclear to me, and I found no other source mentioning this, so I tracked down the original book that was referenced. That was Aimen Dean’s memoir.

When the bombings happened, and the suspicious details about the Ryazan case emerged, most of Dean’s British handlers suspected the bombings to be an inside job. So did his comrades in al-Qaeda. It was just too convenient for Putin, and no Chechen leader publicly acknowledged involvement. However, soon after the bombings and the start of the Russian invasion of Chechnya, some al-Qaeda higher-ups had a phone call with an important Chechen leader called al-Kurdi. Dean was trusted enough to attend the call.

‘So Putin killed his own people in Moscow so he could kill hundreds and thousands more of ours.’

There was a pause.

‘No,’ al-Kurdi replied. ‘There’s been a lot of talk about the bombings in Moscow. All of it is wrong. The Islamic Emirate was responsible.’

There was a stunned silence.

His brow furrowed, Abu Qatada asked: ‘But why? Didn’t it invite Putin to attack?’

‘It was revenge,’ came the curt reply.

Al-Kurdi said that members of the brutal Moscow Region OMON militia unit had been involved in previous atrocities in the Caucasus. The jihadis had tracked a few of them to the Moscow apartment buildings that had been bombed.

‘We have our informants; there are plenty of Chechens in Moscow,’ al-Kurdi added. ‘It took us nineteen months of surveillance, preparations and bribes, because we smuggled all the bombs and materials and trucks. This is Russia. People will sell you their mothers for $100.’

Perhaps he could sense the doubt in the silence at the other end. ‘I want you to remember that we as mujahideen on the ground assess the situation better than you because we are here, so trust us that we made the right choice. The war was coming whether now or in a year or two. So when we took vengeance we knew what we were doing.

‘Believe me, it was ridiculously easy.’

(…)

‘All were in agreement,’ al-Kurdi continued, ‘except Maskhadov, who didn’t know. But Shamil Basayev and Ibn Khattab were in on the plan.’

(A dark note on Russians in the 90s selling their mothers for $100: Wikipedia writes about a traffic police inspector, who was sentenced to prison because he allegedly “helped the truck with explosives pass the checkpoint after getting a sack of sugar as a bribe”.)

Aimen Dean visibly dislikes Putin, and has no reason to lie about any of this, so I trust his report. It is possible that al-Kurdi was lying, claiming an attack that was not his, but when he saw his jihadist brothers not being happy about it, he decided not to air this lie in public. I find this unlikely though, especially because it seems dangerous for him to claim the involvement of his bosses, Basayev and Khattab, if it was in fact not their attacks and these two would probably not be happy that he connected them to attacks that they didn’t commit and which caused the downfall of independent Chechnya. So I consider Dean’s testimony a very strong evidence against the false flag theory.

Also, why would Putin organize five false flag bombings? Wouldn’t just one or two be enough, all the others just increasing the risk of getting caught in the act? This seems like a crazy overkill, especially given that the Chechens were literally invading the Russian province of Dagestan at the time, seizing whole villages and massacring captives, which could be enough casus belli in itself. 

Dean alludes to the possibility that even if it was the Chechens who carried out the attacks, the Russian police knowingly let them happen (as I said, Dean really dislikes Putin). I guess, this is a possibility, but it’s not compatible with the main evidence that people usually use for the false flag theory, that in Ryazan FSB agents were caught planting a potential bomb in a house.

Altogether, this is what I think happened:

Chechen extremists, while invading Dagestan, decided to blow up some buildings in Russia as a revenge for earlier Russian atrocities. In response, Russia invaded Chechnya (which had been basically independent since the First Chechen War), and was unexpectedly successful in the invasion. The Chechen group responsible for the attacks realized that their comrades would be angry at them for causing the downfall of independent Chechnya, so decided not to go public about their involvement in the bombings.

And what happened in Ryazan, where FSB agents were caught planting a bomb and then the Russian government clearly tried to cover up the details? My best guess is that that was indeed an FSB plot. After four real Chechen bombings already happened, a local FSB leader decided to get some credit by placing a fake bomb somewhere, then heroically finding the bomb and preventing the “attack”. This went wrong when a resident noticed the bomb and alerted the local police which was not involved in the plot. (In this theory, the bomb was indeed fake, which is consistent with the bomb not detonating in the substance test, but I need to assume that the early test detecting RDX was mistaken.) 

After the FSB agents getting caught, Putin and his circle realized that people won’t believe them if they tell the truth that “sorry, this last bomb was indeed planted by some idiots from the intelligence agency, but we promise we had nothing to do with it and all the previous bombings were real Chechen attacks”. So instead they decided to deny and cover up everything. Later, the journalists investigating the issue were arrested or assassinated, but this doesn’t really prove their guilt in the four actual bombings: they were just in the habit of assassinating investigative journalists.

I am aware that it’s a somewhat inelegant explanation to claim that the Ryazan bomb-planting was committed by a different group than all the other bombings, but this is my best interpretation of the events, given Dean’s testimony.

Turns out, spying is hard. When you hear news about evidence emerging that intelligence agencies knew about an attack before it happened but didn’t prevent it, or evidence that one agency didn’t share their information with another in a way that looks self-defeating, consider the possibility that these all might have good reasons.

The CIA knew that 9/11 was going to happen but didn’t do anything! Yes, obviously, they knew it. Dean knew that al-Qeada was planning something big for September, as he was warned by a superior to stay out of Afghanistan for the time. There were many other sources too pointing to an impending attack. All this information is just not really worth anything if you don’t know the details of the attack, and unfortunately the perpetrators had very good infosec around the details.

Evidence emerges that MI6 was funneling money to terrorists! Yeah, they did that. They needed a cover story for why Dean is traveling back and forth between Britain and Afghanistan, something that puts him in good standing in al-Qaeda and also prevents them from conscripting him to dangerous local battles against other Afghan warlords. So they invented a honey exporting business where Dean brought honey from Afghanistan to Britain (Afghan honey is allegedly really good, and honey exports were legitimately a major source of al-Qaeda’s funding), and MI6 gave him money that he could return to the camps. It was a few thousand dollars at a time, which was good money for the cash-strapped terrorists, but I trust MI6’s judgment that keeping a spy inside al-Qaeda’s inner circles was well worth this price.

The British secret service knew about a Thing for years, but withheld it from America! This sometimes happens, sharing information is often costly. The more details are shared, the more likely other intelligence agencies are to figure out who the sources are. The more agencies know about an informant, the more possibility there is for a leak. 

The British never shared Dean’s identity with the USA, and tried to provide as little revealing detail as possible, but apparently the Americans still figured it out after a while. Then some unknown insider talked to a journalist, who wrote a book, The One Percent Doctrine, containing all sorts of information on the informant, and then Time ran a frontpage article based on the book that revealed some things about Dean, including his real first name. We have all since learned that journalists are strangely committed to sharing people’s real names, but I wouldn’t have expected it to extend to literal spies inside al-Qaeda. Fortunately, Dean was in Europe when it happened, but his comrades soon figured out based on the news that he was the spy, and he could never return to his job, thus ending his seven years as an important informant.

(To be fair, I think revealing the real first name was probably just an accident. Aimean Dean’s real first name is Ali, and my guess is that the journalist just wanted to use a generic Arabic pseudonym and got unlucky. Revealing all sorts of other information that helped the terrorists identify Dean is less understandable.)

While this section is generally about intelligence agencies being well-meaning and competent but faced with hard problems, this particular story is not exactly flattering to the US agencies involved. But at least it helps explain why the British are sometimes reluctant to share information, or why one agency might keep secrets from another even within the same country.

Britain helps release a dangerous terrorist from prison! This one was actually in the news at the time, and the event was a result of another tragicomical communication failure between agencies, though this time no one was clearly at fault. 

In 2003, there was a serious plot to use chemical weapons (and good old-fashioned machine guns) to kill American soldiers partying on New Year’s Eve in Bahrain. As so often when chemical weapons were involved, the terrorists consulted that reliable expert, Aimen Dean. The plot was organized by a real higher-up, with personal contact to the hiding Osama bin Laden, so the British let the plot seemingly proceed, while observing everything through Dean, planning to lure the organizer into a trap and track him back to bin Laden’s hiding place. 

This might have worked, except suddenly all the terrorists involved, including Dean, got arrested by the Bahraini police. Turns out, the British needed to inform the Americans about the existence of the plot, but didn’t share details on how they planned to keep it under control, so as not to reveal Dean’s identity (see the previous point). Dick Cheney, quite understandably, panicked, and personally called up the King of Bahrain to arrest the people involved. After that, the British needed to go to considerable lengths to release Dean in a way that even found its way to the press. I’m a little surprised that the jihadists didn’t realize at that point that he was a spy, but the British had a reasonable cover story this time, so it all worked out okay. Except for the part where they squandered the opportunity to track down Osama bin Laden.

All of this was to show that spy networks have a hard job to do. But the individual spy is the one who has it actually hard. 

Like, who is he supposed to date and marry? If it’s a moderate or secular woman from Britain, his comrades will immediately realize he is no longer the fanatic jihadist he pretends to be. If he asks his relatives to find him a wife (as he sometimes considered doing so) from their Saudi circles, among women who would be proud to marry a jihadist… well, that’s going to end badly, isn’t it? Finding friends is not much easier for similar reasons. And the job itself — constantly pretending to be someone else, and fraternizing with extremists in the Middle East, Britain and on the Internet — is not anyone’s dream job. It’s not even very spy-novel-y most of the time: Dean would only get involved in an actually dangerous plot or learn an important secret once every year or two, otherwise it’s mostly boring monitoring. It’s no surprise that he considered quitting many times. But then the world would lose a vital information source on terrorist plots, and who knows what attack would go through that he could otherwise prevent, so he never quit, until an American journalist accidentally ended his career.

Since then, he has started doing consultancy work for Middle Eastern firms for preventing their employees from becoming extremists, and for banks for helping to monitor transactions that might be connected to terrorists. He probably saves fewer lives now, but seems much happier with these jobs. He married a moderate Muslim woman in Britain and now they have a child. I wish them the best.

Meanwhile, it doesn’t seem like the situation around Islamic terrorism has gotten much better since the book was written. Someone should really hurry up and write that The Authenticity of Various Hadiths: Much More Than You Wanted to Know explainer that will finally deradicalize everyone.