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The first step was to create a newspaper to attract them by publishing the extremists’ communiqués and polemic. I acted as editor, employing a team of 16 writers. The front page of the first issue quoted a call by Osama Bin Laden for a holy war against the United States.

However, soon afterwards I parted company with the DGSE, which was worried about my possible friendship with a colonel in the Algerian intelligence service stationed in London. It had been a privilege working for the French, who knew their job. It was perhaps a measure of our success that no terrorist attacks took place during the World Cup in France.

I spent a week sitting in my flat in north London, deep in thought, before deciding to approach Scotland Yard. I met two men from the anti-terrorist branch, who were very polite and helpful when I explained that I had been working for French intelligence.

However, they didn’t seem to want to understand my proposal that I was prepared to act as an agent who would do a proper investigation. They were looking to recruit petty informers, such as minicab drivers, to spy on people in the Islamic community. I told them I was not an informer and they said they would call me back in a few weeks’ time.

A month later I was summoned to a meeting with an officer from Special Branch, who said they were very interested in the cleric I had been shadowing because press reports had connected him with specific events overseas. I was amazed. This man was also responsible for thousands of deaths in my country, yet that did not seem to matter.

I agreed to continue the sort of work I had been doing for the French, reporting to a Special Branch handler at hotels. I was also concentrating on Abu Qatada, another radical cleric who rented a sports centre known as the Four Feathers club, a few hundred yards from the mosque in Regent’s Park.

To my mind, Abu Qatada was the more dangerous figure — a view apparently shared by a British judge who recently described him in much the same terms. He addressed small gatherings and used rhetoric that was both more inflammatory and had a more intensely religious content. And, unlike other mosques, where most of the worshippers were not extremists, those attending Abu Qatada’s prayer meetings already shared his outlook.

I saw few British Muslims among Abu Qatada’s followers, who were a mixture of Algerians, Moroccans, Yemenis, Libyans, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Sudanese. These were already recruits, eager to hear the preacher who reinforced their brainwashing. He told them to go out and recruit as many as possible and to give generously.

Audiences would be told: “Now is the time for war — war against the West, which is killing God and wants to destroy Islam. Our duty is to destroy them before they destroy us. Please give as much as you can and your reward will be in heaven, where 72 virgins await you.” They were also promised that 77 members of their family would accompany them to paradise, even if they were unbelievers.

I was perplexed and shocked by the attitude of the British. It was as if they had a contract with the fundamentalists: don’t harm Britain and we’ll leave you alone.

They didn’t seem to understand that when you play with fire you can get burnt. They had a linguistic difficulty that equated incitement to murder with freedom of expression. I told Special Branch that these clerics were recruiting people who were being trained to kill you, the British. And the authorities were protecting them.

Soon after this episode, a security officer asked to speak to me at a hotel in Victoria. He wanted to know everything about me, how I had spent my childhood, where I went to school. I became angry, believing I had been accused by informers of working for Algerian security.