We are deep inside intelligence headquarters in Kabul. On the faded sofa opposite is an extraordinary new weapon – a 17-year-old Pakistani peasant boy called Farman Ullah. He is the world’s first remotely detonated human bomb.

Farman is from the wilds of northern Pakistan and his mission was to blow up and kill the pro-Western Governor of Jalabad, an important Afghan city close to the Pakistan frontier. “Even before you blow yourself up, virgins come to the site of the explosion and wait to take you to Paradise,” he says, parroting the propaganda he learnt from his Taleban indoctrinators.

The attack failed and Farman and another 17-year-old accomplice, Abdul Quboshi, were captured. But Farman’s fanatic certainty about his scheduled appointment with the virgins of Paradise was not enough for his Taleban trainers. Attached to Farman’s suicide bomb vest was a radio transmitter. If Farman’s nerve failed or something went wrong, Abdul Quboshi’s job was to press the detonator. As Farman told me: “The Taleban said God himself would ignite the vest. I did not have to do anything.”

Farman may have thought God was taking him to Paradise but the real initiator was almost certainly a high-frequency radio signal.

Farman wanted to blow people up. He was a willing killer. But he was also a victim of the cult of the suicide bomber. Both he and Abdul were schoolboys, innocents, who for a thin dream of glory volunteered to fight and die in a holy war, a jihad.

Farman could not read the Koran and when I asked him he had no idea where Iraq was, or Palestine, though he did tell me that President Musharraf of Pakistan was “a Jew”.

When I asked Farman why he wanted to kill the Governor he said “because he was an infidel and worked with the Americans”. That was justification enough for the Governor to die. Farman believed that Afghanistan had been invaded by Christian foreigners who were raping Muslim women and killing innocent Muslims.

This deadly, vengeful child is every Western intelligence chief’s ultimate nightmare. A programmed human bomb that cannot be reasoned with. And against whom there is little real defence. The suicide bomber. But a weapon that we must find some way to neutralise.

I used to work for the CIA in the Middle East. In the CIA I saw terrible things but Farman’s indoctrination was a new twist in the depths of human depravity; recruiting an ignorant child for his own remotely-controlled death. In the CIA my job was to stop terrorist organisations from attacking the United States and its interests. I used to recruit agents inside those terrorist organisations to gain intelligence.

And I know personally about the cost of intelligence failures. Six of my CIA colleagues died in the first suicide-bomb attack on a Western target in the bombing of our Beirut embassy in April 1983.

I’ve left the CIA but for the past three years I’ve gone back on the intelligence trail to investigate the cult of the suicide bomber. That journey has taken me through Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and on to the grim back streets of Leeds, where the suicide bombers of July 7, 2005, came from. Along the way I have interviewed dozens of members of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Western intelligence chiefs and failed suicide bombers and their families.

The lessons learnt are complex but there is an answer. The cult of the suicide bomber will burn itself out. This cult of death will one day burn itself out and perish from the face of the earth.

But we will not defeat that cult by intelligence or military means alone. It is simply impossible. Across the Islamic world, even through the internet in some British Asian teenager’s bedroom, it is all too easy to join the cult of the bomber. You don’t need a gun or an RPG, just a keyboard and an ISP connection.

Within minutes you can be electronically downloading the poisonous propaganda that Farman was inculcated with by his Taleban controllers in the lawless border regions of Waziristan. You can share beheading video files with your new internet friends. And listen to Osama bin Laden’s warped interpretation of the Koran that portrays the West as an aggressor and calls upon all Muslims to join in a “defensive jihad” to protect Muslim lands against Crusader invaders.

To stop suicide bombing we must first recognise the kind of war we are facing. This is a war of belief, of ideology. The key concept in suicide bombing is not martyrdom but this notion of jihad – of what constitutes a righteous holy war. In the Koran there are many different interpretations of jihad, some personal and some charitable – alms to the poor. But bin Laden and the Taleban rely upon just one Koranic verse that declares jihad a religious obligation on all Muslims if another Muslim land has been invaded.

For this “defensive jihad” to work the West must be clearly identified as the aggressor. In this warped morality the 7/7 attacks are a justifiable act of war in revenge for the invasion of Iraq.

Bin Laden’s world view is false. And there are many, many Islamic scholars who disagree with his theology and the killing of civilians. And it is obvious that the vast majority of the Muslim faith reject the cult of the suicide bomber. But it is that silent army of fathers, brothers, sisters and mothers who are the only real weapon against another generation of Farmans. It is only when this majority engages in a counter-ideological war that suicide bombing will finally die out. As one former Mujahidin commander told me: “You cannot make Allah happy by killing civilians.”

But this is an ideological battle that will be won, or lost, at the local mosque, at the family dinner table or between friends across the Islamic world. Suicide bombing will be defeated not by a gun or a fancy scanner but by the religious principles of Koran itself.

Robert Baer’s Cult of the Suicide Bomber is broadcast tonight on Channel 4 at 8pm

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