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CHAPTER ONE

DESERT ROAD

Mid-September 2009

I sat in my grey Hyundai peering into the liquid darkness, exhausted and apprehensive. Exhausted because my day had started before dawn in Sana’a, Yemen’s capital, some 200 miles to the north-west. Apprehensive because I had no idea who was coming to meet me or when they would arrive. Would they greet me as a comrade or seize me as a traitor?

The desert night had an intensity I had never seen in Europe. There were no lights on the road that led from the coast into the mountains of Shabwa province, a lawless part of Yemen. At times there hadn’t been much of a road either. A fine coating of sand had drifted on to the baking tarmac. Long after sunset, a humid breeze wafted in from the Arabian Sea.

My apprehension was fed by guilt: I had only been able to drive into this no-man’s-land, where al-Qaeda’s presence was growing as the ­government’s authority waned, because my young Yemeni wife, Fadia, was beside me.1 On the pretext of visiting her brother we had negotiated one checkpoint after another on a dangerous route south.

In my quest to reconnect with Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-­Yemeni cleric who had become one of al-Qaeda’s most influential and charismatic figures, I knew I was risking my life. Yemen’s military and intelligence services had recently stepped up their attempts to combat al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), one of the most active and dangerous franchises of Osama bin Laden’s group. There was the risk of an ambush, a shoot-out at a checkpoint or just a lethal misunderstanding.

There was also the danger that Awlaki – now dubbed ‘al-Qaeda’s rock star’ by Western newspapers – might no longer trust me. My trip had been at his request. In an email he had saved in the draft folder of an anonymous email account we shared, he had told me:

‘Come to Yemen. I need to see you.’

It had been nearly a year since I had seen Awlaki and in that time he had continued a remorseless and fateful journey. The radical preacher sympathetic to al-Qaeda had become an influential figure within its leadership, aware of and involved in its plans to export terror.

I had already missed one rendezvous. Awlaki had invited me to come out to a meeting of Yemen’s leading jihadis in a remote part of Marib, a desert province that had reputedly been the home of the Queen of Sheba centuries earlier. Awlaki’s younger brother, Omar, was meant to organize my travel to Marib, but had insisted I dress as a woman in a full veil, or niqab, so that we could get through the checkpoints. At 6 foot 1 inch tall and weighing nearly eighteen stone, I was dubious. I had declined the offer, even though the driver who would take me to meet these wanted men was a police officer. Such were the contradictions of Yemen. My absence from such an important gathering of al-Qaeda’s leaders in Yemen had gnawed at me. So a few days later my wife and I undertook this odyssey to Shabwa.

After a few minutes I heard the muffled growl of a distant engine, then saw headlights and the approach of a Toyota Land Cruiser packed with serious young men brandishing AK-47s. The escort party had arrived. I grasped my wife’s hand. If things were about to go very wrong, we would know in the next few moments.

All day we had followed curt directions texted from Awlaki, as if they were clues in some bizarre treasure hunt. ‘Take this road, turn left, pretend to the police that you are going to Mukalla along the coast.’

I could hardly blend in with the locals. As a heavy-set Dane with a shock of ginger hair and a long beard, I might as well have been an alien life form in a country of wiry, dark-skinned Arabs. In a land where kidnapping and tribal rivalries, trigger-happy police and militant jihadis made travelling an unpredictable venture, the sight of someone like me, with a petite Yemeni woman at my side, crammed into a hired car heading towards the rebellious south was – to say the least – an unusual one.

The day had started well enough. The morning cool before the intense heat took hold was invigorating. There had been a hold-up at the first checkpoint outside Sana’a, always the most troublesome. Why would anyone want to leave the relative security of the capital for the badlands of the south? I chatted in Arabic, which always impressed my inquisitors, while my wife – her face and hair covered in the black niqab – sat mutely in the passenger seat. It was no accident that a CD in the car was playing verses from the Koran. I told them we were going to see my wife’s brother and join a wedding party on the coast and would be travelling via Aden – Yemen’s main port on the Arabian Sea and the hub of commercial life.

The police at the roadblock had difficulty deciphering my passport. Few of them were likely to read Arabic well, let alone be able to understand the Roman alphabet. They seemed to think I was ­Turkish – perhaps because the very idea of a European travelling across Yemen was so unfathomable. My broad smile and apparent ease with my surroundings were enough for them. It probably helped that it was not only September – a scorching month in Arabia – but also the middle of Ramadan. The men were tired from fasting.

Once we were clear of that first checkpoint, the challenge was to stay on the road, or at least to prevent others from driving us off it. Several times I caught a glimpse down sheer cliffs of the rusting carcass of a truck or bus. Roads in Yemen seemed to attract pedestrians with a death wish, whether camels, dogs, cows or kids. As vehicles hurtled towards them they would wander into the middle.

The colours of the morning gave way to the white heat of the mid-afternoon, and I struggled to stay focused on the road and on the risks of our journey. At last the mountains began to give way to the coastal lowlands – the Tehama. In the distance lay the port of Aden. The city had suffered since the collapse of South Yemen and the ruthless military campaign of the North’s President, Ali Abdullah Saleh, to unify the two halves of Yemen in the 1990s. The people of the south saw themselves as neglected. A separatist movement was gaining strength, compounding the challenge to the Yemeni government from al-Qaeda militants.

In my rear-view mirror, the mountains were swallowing the glowering sun. I tried to navigate my way around Aden’s chaotic fringe – to join the long coastal road that I had been instructed to take by another of Awlaki’s text messages.

Anwar al-Awlaki was from a powerful clan in the mountainous Shabwa province. His father had been a respected academic and a minister in Yemen’s government who had gone to America on a Fulbright fellowship and had a Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska. The younger Awlaki had himself been a university lecturer in Sana’a after abandoning the United States in the wake of 9/11, worried (with justification) he was being targeted by the FBI. He had met two of the hijackers in California months before the attack, though there was no evidence that he knew their plans.

Seven years on, the landscape – and Awlaki – had changed. President Saleh was ever more desperate for US aid and was under growing pressure to take a harder line against al-Qaeda sympathizers. There had already been a suicide bomb attack on the US embassy in September 2008, which killed ten, and mass breakouts of al-Qaeda inmates from supposedly top-security prisons. Yemen was al-Qaeda’s favourite recruiting ground – it had provided a pipeline of young men with little education who were dispatched to Osama bin Laden’s training camps before 9/11. Some of them had become bin Laden’s bodyguards before being caught escaping from the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan and sent to Guantanamo Bay.

Now Yemen was the base for al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen, AQAP, and a top destination for European and American militants dreaming of jihad. And Awlaki’s militancy had hardened. His sermons – carried around the world on YouTube – were a guiding light for would-be jihadis. In rural townships in Pennsylvania, cramped flats in England, the suburbs of Toronto, young men were consuming his every word.

For the CIA and MI6, Awlaki represented the future of al-Qaeda. His knowledge of Western societies, his fluent English and his command of social media posed a new and more lethal threat than grainy videos and arcane statements from bin Laden.

In 2006 he had been arrested and charged with being involved in a vague kidnapping conspiracy. He had spent eighteen months in jail in Sana’a and had even received a visit from FBI agents wanting to know more about his meetings with the 9/11 hijackers. And then he had vanished into Yemen’s vast and unforgiving interior.

And so I found myself heading east out of Aden, on the last leg of my mystery tour of Yemen. We arrived at another rudimentary checkpoint, a couple of battered ‘STOP’ signs either side of a shed of corrugated metal that only concentrated the searing heat. In some ways this shed was a frontier, marking the effective limit of the state’s authority. Beyond was a road that foreigners could only travel if escorted by soldiers, forbidding lands roamed by al-Qaeda fighters and bandits.

We repeated the wedding story; how I knew the route to Mukalla along the coast and could converse in Arabic. Should we decline protection, we were told, we would have to return to Aden and sign a document absolving the authorities of all responsibility for our safety.

An hour later the sun had gone but its red rays still illuminated the dusk. We returned to the checkpoint, document in hand. By then, the guards were about to break their Ramadan fast with the meal known as iftar. They couldn’t care less what happened to this crazy European and his silent Yemeni bride.

The southern coast of Yemen could be the perfect vacation destination: endless beaches of soft sand, warm waters, superb fishing. It was untouched but sadly untouchable, the fringe of a failing state – ­interrupted only by scruffy coastal towns like Zinjibar, where scattered breeze blocks spoke of projects unfinished or not yet begun.

As we drove, now free of the last barrier, our spirits lifted. Adrenalin coursed through me.

The final text instruction from Awlaki arrived. I should tell the police I needed petrol and then head north.

Shaqra was little more than a fishing village. On this steamy night it was deserted, the occasional dog hobbling across the main street. If anything it was more dilapidated than when we had passed through a year before on our previous voyage to meet Awlaki.

Outside the town, a grandiose junction with signs showing a smiling President marked the point at which the road divided, one branch going inland and up into the rebellious interior, the other continuing along the coast. I knew I would never be allowed to head inland, so my instructions were to tell the police checkpoint that I was going along the coast but needed fuel from the petrol station a couple of miles in the other direction. It was a ruse that had clearly worked before. The police, rendered dozy by iftar, waved us on. They would not see us return.

Now I sat with Fadia – our pulses racing on a lonely desert road – ­dazzled by the headlights of a vehicle packed with armed men.

A bearded man in his mid-thirties with sharp, dark eyes, and a ­red-chequered scarf around his head, emerged from a cloud of dust drifting across the beam of the Land Cruiser’s headlights. The way the rest of the group fell in behind him made it clear that Abdullah Mehdar was their leader. He was known as being fearless, and having militant leanings. I scrutinized his face as he walked towards us.

‘As salaam aleikum [Peace be with you],’ he said at last, greeting me in Arabic and breaking into a broad smile. The tension left my body as if a fever had broken. In my relief I hugged every one of Mehdar’s companions. They had brought food – bananas, bread – and we broke the Ramadan fast together. I felt safe for the first time that day. I was with some of Yemen’s most wanted, a group of armed men I did not know, in the dead of night, heading towards the wilderness of Shabwa. But it was as if I were in a cocoon, admitted to a brotherhood of simple beliefs and unquestioned loyalties.

Mehdar was Awlaki’s personal emissary, like him a member of the Awalik tribe – and Yemen was a country where tribal loyalties trumped all others. Knowing that I had been invited here by Awlaki and was the cleric’s friend, he was deeply respectful and courteous.

After a few minutes, he said we should move. This was an area where highway robbery was all too common, and where criminals were as well armed as militants. It must have been gone 9 p.m. by the time the convoy arrived at its destination: the Land Cruiser followed my little Hyundai – surely the first hire car ever to have puttered through this remote corner of Shabwa. The vehicles threw up a cloud of dust as we sped down a track outside an unlit hamlet. Mountains loomed beyond, though on this moonless night there was no telling where the land ended and the vast sky began.

I could not know it then but I was in the vicinity of al-Hota, a settlement nestled in the shadow of a towering rocky plateau in the Mayfa’a district of Shabwa – the heart of al-Qaeda country.

We arrived at an imposing two-storey house inside a compound with high walls. The gates were opened and swiftly closed by two men with AK-47s slung over their shoulders. I felt a surge of panic. My journey to meet Anwar al-Awlaki was complete, but what if Yemen’s security services knew of my plans and had let me make this journey, or Awlaki himself no longer trusted me? And then there was Fadia. She knew Awlaki, and knew we were friends, but had no inkling of my true purpose.

I glanced up at the constellations before climbing the steps. My feet were made of lead; the few paces up to the house felt like an eternity. There was no way out now. Images of Nick Berg and Daniel Pearl, two Americans who had met gruesome deaths at the hands of al-Qaeda, beheaded on video, flashed through my mind.

Fadia was escorted to the back, where the tribesmen’s womenfolk were waiting. In this part of Yemen the sexes would never mix socially. Later she told me about the stoicism of the women, many of whose husbands had been killed in the cause of jihad. It was common for the widows to marry another jihadi – but hardly a recipe for domestic tranquillity.

The large unfurnished hall led to an even larger reception room, and the first thing I noticed was a line of weapons neatly propped against the wall – more AK-47s, vintage rifles, even a rocket-propelled-grenade launcher. This was a group ready to fight at a moment’s notice, but its enemy was as likely a rival tribe as the Yemeni security services.

A dozen men were gathered around a big silver bowl laid on the floor and piled high with chicken and saffron rice. They were young; some had been village boys just a few years ago. And in the middle of them was Anwar al-Awlaki, slim, elegant, with those intelligent eyes that had already seduced so many restless souls in Europe and America. He rose with a warm smile and embraced me.

‘As salaam aleikum,’ he said with affection. He exuded natural authority, gesturing at the room as if to underline that he was master of this place and these people.

Awlaki was wearing his trademark white robes, immaculate despite the dust and heat, and the glasses that seemed to confirm his intellect. I was struck by the contrast between the simple and uneducated country boys gathered here and this scholar of Islam, a philosopher turned spiritual guide of jihad. After his greeting, the entire party rose to welcome me. They were all in awe of ‘the Sheikh’, whose magnetism was undimmed despite his seclusion.

‘Come, eat,’ Awlaki said, his American accent tinged by several years back in his Arab homeland.

He seemed delighted to have my company, a welcome interruption to his intellectual solitude. But first he must see to his guest’s needs. After introducing me to the men sitting on the floor, Awlaki found me space among them as the communal meal began. The guests were devouring the chicken and rice with their hands – and for all my familiarity with Yemeni ways I could not help but ask for a spoon. This was a source of huge amusement. I found that a couple of self-deprecating remarks and my Arabic – honed over more than a decade visiting and living in Yemen – set them at ease.

Scrutinizing Awlaki, I saw a detachment, a melancholy about him – as if his isolation in Shabwa and the American-led pressure on him were beginning to take a toll. It had been almost two years since his release from prison, thanks to the intervention of his powerful family. In the early months of 2008 he had left Sana’a and taken refuge in his ancestral homeland. The motto of the Awalik tribe was reputed to be: ‘We are the sparks of Hell; whoever interferes with us will be burned.’

In the year since I had last seen him, Awlaki’s movements had become more furtive – hence my odyssey for the sake of this brief encounter. The Sheikh was constantly on the move from one safe house to the next, occasionally retreating to mountain hideouts around the fringes of the ‘Empty Quarter’ – the ocean of sand that stretched into Saudi Arabia.

Despite the preacher’s seclusion, he continued to deliver online sermons and communicate with followers through email accounts and texts. His messages had grown more strident – perhaps because of his months in detention, where he was held in solitary confinement most of the time, perhaps because his reading of Islamist scholarship had led him to a more radical outlook. And maybe his banishment to the mountain wilderness had fed a growing hostility to the world.

When the meal was done, Awlaki stood and asked me to accompany him to a smaller room.

I studied his face.

‘How are you?’ I asked, at a loss for anything more substantial.

‘I am here,’ Awlaki said, with a hint of fatalism. ‘But I miss my family, my wives, my children. I cannot go to Sana’a, and it is too dangerous for them to come here. The Americans want me dead. They are putting pressure on the government all the time.’

Drones wandered the skies, he said, but he was not scared of them.

‘This is the path of the Prophets and the pious men: jihad.’

He said the ‘brothers’ were disappointed that I had not made it to Marib; they had heard much about me. As we talked it became clear that Awlaki felt little threat from the Yemeni government, which would rather box the al-Qaeda problem into Shabwa and hope it went away than try to tackle the tribal feuds that had allowed militants space to settle and organize.

Awlaki told me he wanted to see the end of the Saleh government, regarding it as secular and a pawn of America. With relish he described how a recent ambush of government forces had netted heavy ­weapons, including anti-tank rockets, and inflicted severe casualties. Perhaps they could be transferred to Islamists in Somalia, who were badly in need of such weapons, he mused.

The spiritual guide had become the quartermaster.

A few months earlier, Awlaki had sent a message to al-Shabaab, the militant Islamist group that had brought Sharia to much of Somalia. They were, he said, setting Muslims an example on how to fight back.

‘The ballot has failed us, but the bullet has not,’ Awlaki had written. ‘If my circumstances had allowed, I would not have hesitated in joining you and being a soldier in your ranks.’

The man who had once condemned the 9/11 attacks as un-Islamic when he lived in America had recently written on his blog, ‘I pray that Allah destroys America and all its allies . . . We will implement the rule of Allah on Earth by the tip of the sword whether the masses like it or not.’

He had also begun to convey this message to Muslims living in the West, likening their situation to that faced by the Prophet Mohammed and his followers in pre-Islamic Mecca, where they were persecuted and forced to make the journey – the hijra – north to Medina.

And just weeks before my visit, writing from his Shabwa outpost, Awlaki had attacked the cooperation of Muslim countries with the US military, saying ‘the blame should be placed on the soldier who is willing to follow orders . . . who sells his religion for a few dollars.’

It was an argument that would have a deep impact on an officer in the United States army, Major Nidal Hasan, who had already exchanged emails with Awlaki.

Awlaki told me that in jihad it was acceptable that civilians would suffer and die. The cause justified the means. I swiftly disagreed, knowing that my plain-spoken views were part of my appeal to Awlaki, who was prepared to argue the point based on his reading of the Koran and Hadith.

Several months before, a young man who had attached himself to Mehdar had travelled to a neighbouring province and killed himself and four South Korean tourists in a suicide attack.

‘He is now in paradise,’ one of his friends had told me over dinner. It wasn’t clear to me whether Mehdar himself had any role in the attack or even condoned it – but the commitment of these fighters went far beyond the rhetorical.

I told Awlaki I supported attacks on military targets, but informed him flatly that I could not and would not help him obtain anything that would be used against civilians. I did not want to be scouring Europe for bomb-making equipment that would ultimately result in civilian deaths.

‘So you disagree with the mujahideen?’ Awlaki asked.

‘On this, we will have to disagree.’

I also detected a more toxic animosity towards America, as if Awlaki felt he had been victimized there as a Muslim. He had been arrested in San Diego – though never charged – for soliciting prostitutes. The humiliation still gnawed at him: the way the FBI had ‘let it be known’ that Awlaki’s personal conduct was sometimes not that expected of an imam, a nod and a wink aimed at besmirching his character.

The subject of women was very much on Awlaki’s mind as we conversed into the small hours. Awlaki’s self-imposed exile meant that he no longer had any personal contact with his two wives. One he had known since childhood; they had married in their teens. More recently he had taken a second wife, not yet twenty when they were married. But, he told me, he needed the company of a woman who understood and would share the sacrifices of a jihadi’s life, someone who would be married to the cause.

‘Perhaps you can look out for someone in the West, a white convert sister,’ he suggested.

It was the second time he had broached marrying a woman from Europe and I knew he was now serious. It would not be easy and there would be risks. But I knew there were plenty of women who saw Awlaki as a gift from Allah.

There were other requests. He asked me ‘to find brothers to work for the cause and to get money from Europe and some equipment’.

He also wanted me to recruit militants to come to Yemen for training and ‘then return home – ready to wage jihad in Europe or America’. He did not specify the training – nor what they would be expected to do. But in our two-hour conversation I was left with the impression that Awlaki wanted to begin a campaign of terror attacks in Europe and the US.

The next morning, Awlaki was gone – whether for his own security or because of some meeting I was not told. Instead I spent some time with Abdullah Mehdar, the tribal leader who had met me the ­previous night. I could not help but admire this apparently honourable man, his unquestioning loyalty to Awlaki. He seemed to have no interest in attacking the West, but wanted Yemen to become an Islamic state with Sharia law. His commitment was so intense that he wept as one of the young fighters leading prayers spoke of the promise of paradise.

They might have a warped world-view, I thought, but these people were not hypocrites. Their loyalty was simple, intense.

I was in a hurry to get away: our flight was due to leave Sana’a for Europe the next evening, and who knew how long the journey back would take? Fadia emerged from the women’s quarters and we prepared to leave.

As those forbidding gates swung open, I discovered our car had a puncture – which was perhaps not surprising after the high-speed drive through the mountains.

Abdullah ran out and helped me change the tyre. There were again tears in his eyes: he seemed to sense an incipient danger.

‘If we don’t meet again, we will see each other in paradise,’ he said, the tears now running down his cheeks.

The mujahideen escorted us to the main road and bid us goodbye. We had left the cocoon.

I knew that in three Western capitals there were people waiting to hear every detail of the hours that I had spent with Anwar al-Awlaki. I needed to get to Sana’a – and then out of Yemen, fast.

1 Fadia is not her real name. For her safety and that of her family, I have given her a pseudonym.