TWO
REVIEWS FROM THE FRONT LINES—The media blitz has begun for quadruple agent
Morten Storm and his new book “Agent Storm: My Life Inside Al Qaeda and the
CIA.
FROM
THE NEW YORK TIMES:
The
title of the review is “Mission Almost Impossible” by Scott Shane:
“...It
was June 2010, and American intelligence agencies were desperate to track down
Anwar al-Awlaki, the American cleric who had joined Al Qaeda and was believed
to be plotting from the wilds of Yemen. But Awlaki had other things on his
mind. From his hide-out, he sent an encrypted email to Morten Storm to thank
him for dispatching to Yemen the Croatian convert to Islam who had become his
third wife. She had turned out to be even “better than I expected and better
than you described,” Awlaki wrote, adding a lascivious smiley face.
Like
many of the colorful tales in “Agent Storm,” this might seem a figment of
Storm’s imagination if not for the book’s appendix, which includes an image of
Awlaki’s email, one of many items of corroboration. In the end, the big
red-haired Dane’s story of his checkered career as a chapter leader in a biker
gang, a radical Muslim activist and finally a spy infiltrating Al Qaeda for
three Western intelligence agencies comes across as highly credible, even if
every detail cannot be checked...”
FROM
THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC:
Below
is a snippet of Simon Worrall’s Q&A book review in National Geographic titled “How Former Muslim Radical Helped U.S.
Nab one of World’s Top Terrorists”
“...Q:
You then had a crisis of faith in your life as a jihadist. Can you talk about
why that happened?
A:
We were told that Allah has preordained your destiny. If you're going to
paradise or hell before you actually reach the Earth, that was something that I
couldn't really comprehend. What's the point of doing good actions, if
everything is already preordained?
Then,
in 2006, I had an invitation to go to Somalia. One of the friends I used to
hang out with in Yemen, Jehad Serwan Mostafa, was on the American Most Wanted
list. He was now in Somalia. There were also other Danes and Australian
nationals.
But
I didn't have money, so I had to go to Denmark to work before flying to
Mogadishu. I was in Copenhagen buying clothes and shoes and other stuff for my
friends in Somalia, when I got a phone call from one of my contacts in
Mogadishu. He said: Murad, we lost the airport. You cannot come. You'll get
arrested. It's dangerous.
Allah
had let me down. I threw my bag on the floor and opened my laptop. That seed of
doubt I had from the beginning began to play on my mind. Why would Allah
prevent me from going and fighting jihad when Allah encouraged all believers in
the Koran to do it?
So
I Googled dozens of websites talking about contradictions in the Koran and
found to my amazement that there really were huge contradictions. And it
completely wiped away my faith.
By
then I'd also begun to be deeply troubled by the killing or maiming of
civilians in the name of Allah. The Bali bombings, Madrid, London—these were
acts of violence targeting ordinary people. If this was part of Allah's
preordained plan, I wanted no part of it. But I also knew that if I told people
how I felt, I could be killed for apostasy. I would lose all my friends. I had
a wife and two kids...”
FULL
ARTICLE LINKS:
National Geographic:
New York Times:
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