The red-headed Dane who became a jihadi and then a CIA spy

Morten Storm, a red-headed Scandinavian with a troubled youth, tells of his contacts with some of the best-known terrorists of the last decade in the book Agent Storm.

Morten Storm is not shocked by the images of Islamic State fighters emerging from Iraq and Syria. Sickened, saddened, worried, but not shocked.

 

He once considered many of them friends before switching sides and becoming their worst enemy.

According to the Star, The 38-year-old’s story as a radical-turned-spy is almost too fantastical to be true: Storm, a jihadi Forrest Gump, stumbling upon terrorists from Sanaa to Birmingham and spies from Washington to Reykjavik.

Like the Tom Hanks character, who had an uncanny knack of becoming part of significant historic events, Storm has been involved in many of the most critical terrorism cases since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. This means if the revelations in his newly released memoir, Agent Storm, are true, he is not only this decade’s most intriguing informant: he could also be the most important.

And with the world suddenly waking to the menace of the Islamic State’s reign over large swaths of Syria and Iraq, Storm also offers an insider’s perspective into where we are now.

“I think it’s just the beginning,” Storm told the Star in his first Canadian interview. “Many of those who are going over there from Britain are old friends of mine.”

He said the recent beheading videos of American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff are reminiscent of the videos he watched as he was groomed to fight — “the material they used to encourage us or even to make us more certain or firm in our ideology.”

Storm, by all accounts, was an unusual jihadist. The six-foot-one red-headed Dane had liked Metallica, beer and bacon and was once a Bandido biker.

But after a turbulent youth growing up in a Danish coastal town, in and out of school and jail, and with an abusive stepfather and alcoholic father, Storm found peace with the discipline and serenity of Islam.

And is often the case with Muslim converts, he zealously embraced the religion. Wanting more, Storm travelled to Yemen to study and began what he calls his “radical years,” meeting some of today’s top terror leaders.

Then, in early 2007, almost as suddenly as he adopted the pursuit of jihad, Storm tired of the message, switched sides and became an informant for some of the world’s top spy agencies.

“I had lapped up the words of scholars who had found vindication for the events of 9/11 in scripture,” he writes in Agent Storm. “But now I thought of the Twin Towers, the Bali bombings, Madrid in 2004, London in 2005. These were acts of violence targeting ordinary people. If they were part of Allah’s preordained plan, I now wanted no part of it.”

Close to ‘Terrorist No. 1’

Before Storm became a spy, he had been invited to a banquet at the Sanaa home of American-born Yemeni preacher Anwar Awlaki in early 2006.

Awlaki would later become known in the U.S. as “Terrorist No. 1,” killed six years later in a U.S. drone strike. His preaching has inspired a number of young Muslims in Europe and the West, including the members of the so-called Toronto 18, who plotted attacks in Canada before their arrests.

It was Storm’s access to Awlaki that the spy services craved and over the years he worked for them, he was dispatched from Europe to Yemen to meet Awlaki.

They communicated by email using encryption software known as Mujahideen Secrets. In one message reproduced in his book, Awlaki had asked Storm to bring chocolate, cheese and sandals the next time he visited. Awlaki signed the email with his initials, AA and a happy face.

Awlaki also requested a Western wife, and with the CIA’s blessing, Storm became a matchmaker. He believes his work helped the U.S. pinpoint Awlaki, although he was not credited by the CIA.

Killing Awlaki, an America citizen living outside a war zone, remains controversial in the U.S. Storm has no qualms about the legality of the act, but he does remain conflicted and somewhat bitter for personal reasons.

“I knew that he had to go, there’s no doubt about it,” Storm said.

“When the Danish government told me it wasn’t my information that the Americans used to kill him, I was in a way relieved because I know his family, my family knows his family,” he said.

But later Storm read news reports describing how Awlaki was targeted through one of his couriers and believed that was linked to his information. Then he said he felt the Americans owed him the millions the CIA promised if Awlaki was killed or captured.

“Yes, I did not pull the trigger, I did not press the button, I was not the one who controlled the drone from Washington or wherever it is they have their drones from, but it was me who did all the groundwork … I felt I was cheated because I wanted to retire.”

Awlaki was but one high-level leader he met since 2000. In addition, there was “Ikrima,” the alleged mastermind of Somalia-based Al Shabab’s attack on Nairobi’s Westgate Mall last September. He also said he knew Nasir al-Wuhayshi, the powerful leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemen group, and Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged 9/11 “20th hijacker.”

Then there are the many lesser players who have become the faces of terrorism today.

Abdul Waheed Majeed, the first known British suicide bomber in Syria, who smiled and joked with fellow jihadis on video before they screamed “Allah akbar” as he blew himself up at the gates of an Aleppo prison? Storm met Majeed about 10 years ago at lectures held by a radical British preacher.

Storm’s former paintballing partner Shiraz Tariq? Also dead in Syria. So is Kenneth Sorensen, who like Storm was a Danish convert to Islam. A 2013 martyrdom video posted online to honour his sacrifice showed Sorensen’s mutilated body before dirt covers his unmarked grave.

Concern is growing in Canada about the number of citizens who have left home to fight in Syria. Michel Coulombe, head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, testified before a Senate committee that 130 Canadians have left Canada in recent years to fight in Somalia, Libya, Pakistan and elsewhere. About 30 have gone to Syria and Iraq, although unofficial estimates say more than 100 may have joined the Islamic State.

Many who leave are converts, like Storm, and he says he met a few Canadians during his travels in Yemen.

“Eight-five per cent of converts are from backgrounds that have a low social life. Maybe they’ve been neglected by parents, maybe they have been in prisons, maybe they have been in gangs because of poverty. Something has driven them to Islam which means to belong to something with a higher purpose …”

He believes the converts are easily manipulated, and often become the most radical. The current widespread coverage of Western recruits joining the Islamic State may make it more difficult for security services or relatives to spot warning signs. “They will try to hide their agenda … hide their real ideology, because they don’t want to be on the radar.”

CIA, MI5, MI6 …

Storm’s stories about cozying up to terrorists are only eclipsed by his dealings with the CIA, Britain’s MI5 and MI6, and PET, the Danish intelligence service. They provide a window into the operations of an otherwise secret world that former U.S. vice-president Dick Cheney famously called the “dark side,” and the portrayal is indeed dark.

He admired the British agents the most, as he claims they told him not to trust the Americans and refused to be part of the drone operation to kill Awlaki. They also disagreed with the plan to send Awlaki his third wife.

In his role as matchmaker, Storm hooked up Irena Horak, an unwitting Croatian woman who converted to Islam, with Awlaki and helped arrange her move to Yemen in 2010. The CIA bugged her belongings. Her whereabouts today are unknown.

Storm still has much of their correspondence and the video Horak sent to Awlaki, which is part of a huge electronic file that helps give his story credibility.

“What was key in terms of our confidence in his story was the overwhelming amount of corroborating evidence he presented us from his hard drive, from his phone, from his passport, from his bank transfers … there are gigabytes of this stuff,” says Paul Cruickshank, CNN’s terrorism analyst, who co-wrote the book with Storm and journalist Tom Lister. “His story fit this huge amount of audiovisual material.”

Storm eventually feared the CIA was trying to get rid of him as “collateral damage” in targeting Wuhayshi and felt telling his story was his only way out. Of course by going public, first in 2012 to Denmark’s newspaper Jyllands-Posten, heburnt his bridges with the intelligence agencies.

He is also a target of those he duped. A video released by a group of radicalized Danes who went to Syria called for his death, demanding revenge for his part in targeting Awlaki.

“I have to be very honest — very, very honest with you,” he said from an undisclosed location in the U.K. “I don’t care anymore. I’ve reached the level now where I say, you know what, of course I’m not going to show on the Internet where I live, but … if it’s going to happen, it happens.”

He says he believes the British government is quietly protecting him. “I don’t have police outside my house but I know they’re monitoring those who get on the radar.”

M. Wassouf