WASHINGTON, Nov. 27 (UPI) -- A Muslim man who was a spy in the mid-1990s for several European intelligence services inside the global jihadi network that later became al-Qaida has written a memoir saying the agencies did not understand the nature of the threat it posed.
"Inside the Jihad," written under the pseudonym Omar Nasiri, is an astonishingly detailed account of a young man's journey from the fringe of the Islamic extremist movement in Belgium to two terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.
Along the way, Nasiri says he smuggled a car load of high explosives from Brussels to Morocco; fingered one of the organizers of the 1995 Paris metro bomb attacks In London; and met Abu Zubaydah, who later became one of Osama bin Laden's top recruiters of Western jihadis, in the training camps at Khalden and Darunta in Afghanistan.
"The broad outlines of the story have been confirmed to me," and to a growing list of other major media outlets, "by intelligence officials from several European countries," said Gordon Corera, a British Broadcasting Corp. correspondent who Nasiri first approached with his story after the London subway bombings last year.
The account has also been deemed credible by several experts and reporters that had advance access to Nasiri, or to his tightly held manuscript, before its publication this week. They include Michael Scheuer, who led Alec Station, the CIA's bin Laden hunting unit, from 1996-99.
He called the account of life in the camps the most detailed and complete he had seen.
Several former senior U.S. officials also told United Press International that the account rang true.
"It's very plausible," said Roger Cressey, former deputy White House counter-terrorism czar.
"There were agents run into the camps," said Jack Cloonan, a retired FBI agent who led the bureau's efforts against al-Qaida. "But most of them were not very well placed," and lacked access to the network's inner circles.
Nasiri doesn't claim to have been in al-Qaida's inner circles, and says he never met bin Laden, which al-Qaida analyst and author Peter Bergen says increases his comfort level about its credibility.
"If you were going to make something up, you'd include a bin Laden meeting, wouldn't you?" he told UPI.
But while the broad outlines may be confirmable much of the story's fascinating detail remains effectively un-checkable.
Nasiri, a Moroccan raised in Belgium, says he first approached the French intelligence service, DGSE, after stealing money from a Brussels-based cell of the Algerian terror group GIA he had become involved with through his brother.
The DGSE helped him out, and in return he became their agent. While working for them, he says, he drove a car load of explosives, money and other materiel from Brussels to Morocco. He believes that the explosives may have been used in a subsequent bomb attack in Algeria that killed 40 people.
If true, that would prove highly embarrassing to the DGSE, and the first challenge to detail of the account came Wednesday from a former official of the French service, who said on Belgian TV that colleagues still at the agency alleged Nasiri was mischaracterizing his relationship with it.
In the spring of 1995, Nasiri says, the French sent him to Pakistan and Afghanistan to try and infiltrate the training camps that were blooming there in the chaos following the victory of the U.S.-backed mujahedin over the Soviets.
In an interview with the BBC, Nasiri says he was given no leads, phone numbers or addresses -- and no way to report back to his French handlers. They told him "Just go find the route to Jihad," he said.
He says after he returned to Europe a year later the French and the British used him to keep an eye on Islamic radicals in London that the French believed were connected to the 1995 attack on the Paris metro by Algerian.
But he says his British and French handlers seemed uninterested in his experience in the camps. The French cared only about what they saw as the spill-over from the Islamic insurgency in Algeria, while the British were focused on the operational capabilities and intentions of militants based in London.
A British handler, he believes from MI5, "seemed interested only in the immediate danger these men posed to Britons." His handlers "just didn't seem to understand what the West was facing: that jihad is not a political movement. It is not the IRA or the Baader-Meinhof gang. It is an order from God."
A former British intelligence official told UPI that in the mid-1990s, Britain's domestic intelligence service, MI5 was focused on counter-terrorist work elsewhere.
"The service's top priority was Northern Ireland. Nothing else even came close."
Because Islamic extremism was not a priority, and MI5's resources were anyway strained, the former official said, the service's non-IRA counter-terror department, dubbed G Division, had only a tiny handful of officers working the issue.
And even they tended to focus primarily on North Africa and the Middle East, rather than Afghanistan.
Islamic extremists were not seen as presenting any immediate threat in Britain, and many in MI5 saw monitoring them "primarily as a support function for our allies" in Europe and elsewhere.
The former official said there were also political considerations at play in the work MI5 was doing on the issue. "There was a sense that the French and our other allies in Europe had been helping us following IRA guys around (in Europe), and that (MI5) needed to return the favor."
Corera told UPI he believes the story shows that British intelligence "really didn't understand the scale of the threat from what was coming out of those camps."
"No one understood the importance of the global network that was being created" by the camp's graduates, he said.
But the former British official, who said he had no knowledge of the Nasiri story and could not comment on its veracity, was resistant to the suggestion that MI5 were clueless as to the existence of a global threat, even before Sept. 11, 2001.
"We've always known that everything comes back to London in the end. There's hardly a terrorist group in history -- as far back as the Russian anarchists -- who haven't tried to attack here," the official said.
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First of three parts. In Part Two: why did Nasiri's British and French handlers cut him loose after al-Qaida bombed two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998?
