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Monday, October 13, 2014

MEDIA MONDAY / ESPIONAGE WARS


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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