“I’M VERY HAPPY," Reda Hassaine said, a few minutes before almost breaking down in tears. His joy came from his role in gathering evidence against Abu Qatada, an extremist Muslim cleric said to be a key al-Qaeda figure, who had just been arrested in London.
That was last October. Less than three months later, his usefulness compromised after he was told his cover had been blown, Hassaine has been dumped by his former handlers in the intelligence services and left out in the cold, an unprotected target for the Islamist extremists he once spied on.
Hassaine, 41, is an Algerian Muslim who has infiltrated militant Islamist groups for the secret services in Algeria and France, for Scotland Yard’s Special Branch and for M15. He says that Abu Qatada and Abu Hamza, another London-based Islamist, “raise money, encourage people to kill, claim assassinations”. He knows because he has seen them at work. Hassaine has a sad face and a stammer that improves with each bottle of Chianti, though it is fast replaced by melancholy. He chain smokes as he describes his journey from up-and-coming Algerian reporter to down-on-his-luck London ex-spy. His story is a reminder that Muslims themselves have been the biggest victims of the rise of Islamist extremists. And it’s not difficult to discern the moral in his tale: that worldwide indifference to the horrors of Algeria in the 1990s helped pave Osama bin Laden’s path to the World Trade Centre. Moreover, Hassaine suggests that the West has been — and probably still is — unprepared to fend off the Islamist threat.
“On September 11, I was happy in one way,” he admits. He was, of course, horrified by the attacks, but “for years I’ve been trying to warn people about what the Islamists are doing. Now I know George Bush is with me. Now I know Tony Blair is with me. ”
In the early 1990s, during Algeria’s brief flirtation with democracy, Hassaine was an official in the populist hotchpotch of opposition groups known as the Islamic Salvation Front, or FIS. He quit when he realised that the party’s chosen path to power was a campaign of violence and murder. “The policemen first. Then the journalists. They had lists of people to be killed,” he says.
More than 120 foreign citizens were murdered. A car bomb was driven into the national police headquarters in 1995, killing 42 and wounding 265. Entire villages were massacred. Human rights organisations estimate that up to 100,000 Algerians have been killed since 1992.
“They started to kill everyone,” says Hassaine. “Kill, kill, as much as you can. How can I explain this to Westerners? These kind of people, they had been brainwashed in Afghanistan. When I left Algeria, people wanted to kill me. My closest friend, 35 of my colleagues, had been killed by Islamists. They were taking babies and putting them in ovens.” Hassaine says the West’s mistake was to view such atrocities as an internal matter for Algeria. In fact, the extremists behind them were already feeding Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network.
In 1994, Hassaine and his family fled to London. “I was not going to let my baby get put in an oven,” he says. He was able to leave only by making a deal with the Algerian security services to help them spy on Islamic extremists. Then in 1998, as France prepared to host the World Cup, its law enforcement agencies anticipated terrorist violence. A man from the French Embassy in London, whom Hassaine knew only as Jerome, recruited him to obtain information about any possible attacks.
“They were giving me the chance to get revenge,” Hassaine says. A bin Ladenist newspaper was set up, with Hassaine as editor. “People knew me as a journalist in Algeria, so it was a nice cover.” He began providing the French with as much information as he could glean from days and nights spent praying, eating, talking with various extremists.
When the French didn’t come through with an offer of citizenship, Hassaine volunteered to help the British. In 1999, Special Branch asked him to infiltrate the now notorious Finsbury Park mosque in North London, where the imam, Abu Hamza, preached jihad to the likes of the shoebomber Richard Reid. Hassaine was already familiar with Abu Hamza and his ally Abu Qatada — both of them among the top supporters in London of Islamic extremists in Algeria. He held them responsible in no small way for what had happened in his home country. According to the BBC, Abu Qatada has circulated a pamphlet revelling in the murders of Algerian policemen, while Abu Hamza once issued a fatwa urging the assassination of various Middle Eastern public figures as well as a two-year-old Algerian child.
In December 1998, 12 Britons, two Australians, two Americans and four locals were taken hostage by Yemeni terrorists, who telephoned Abu Hamza within an hour of the kidnapping. The Yemeni Government attempted a rescue, in which four of the hostages were killed. The Yemenis also accused Abu Hamza of sending ten jihadists (including his own son) there to attack Western targets in Aden, and sought Abu Hamza’s extradition “to be tried on charges of carrying out terrorist activities in Yemen and in several other Arab states”. The request was denied; the British Government has no extradition agreement with Yemen, a fact that has irritated numerous governments, from Jordan to the United States, in their attempts to fight terrorism.
As this international struggle went on, British authorities asked Hassaine for reports on Abu Hamza and his associates, as well as a detailed map of the Finsbury Park mosque and all its escape routes. The information presumably proved useful when Scotland Yard arrested Abu Hamza and two other men in a morning raid in March 1999. Four days later they were released. The authorities didn’t feel the case was strong enough. “I was shocked,” Hassaine says. “There is a big problem in the law here in London. Islamists can claim assassinations, they can do propaganda. And all these things are ‘freedom of expression’ — even if you call for killing people. The law is very, very weak. In France, these people would have been in jail a long time ago.”
Having separated from his wife, at least partly out of concern for her and their two children, and still seeking non-Algerian citizenship, Hassaine was assured that his asylum application would soon be taken care of. In the meantime, Special Branch passed his name on to MI5, which soon had him hanging out with Algerian extremists in London plotting various attacks.He saw a lot from the inside. Abu Qatada recruited the shoebomber Richard Reid and the “20th hijacker” Zacarias Moussaoui, Hassaine says. “I saw them. Abu Qatada is the best brainwasher there is.”
