Inside the Global Jihad

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Who is Omar Nasiri? Why does he matter? What makes his story worth telling? In the early 1990s, Nasiri, a Moroccan brought up in Europe, fell in with a gang of North African Islamist extremists who were planning attacks, raising money, and buying weapons and explosives. The DGSE, France's foreign espionage arm, recruited Nasiri as an informer – routine, workaday stuff at first, but his talents for dissimulation meant he became increasingly useful to his handlers. After proving himself to his superiors in Paris, they set him a seemingly impossible task: to infiltrate Al Qaeda's training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan. This he readily accomplished, to the great surprise of the intelligence services, learning about Al Qaeda's chemical weapons programme and meeting internationally known jihadi luminaries. Because of his intelligence, linguistic skills and sang-froid, Al Qaeda in turn fast-tracked Nasiri to serve its cause overseas, and sent him to London, Europe's Islamist hub, suggesting that he had been selected for a special mission as a long-term sleeper agent. Bearing personal recommendations from Al Qaeda's Khalden and Derunta training camps, Nasiri quickly convinced London's Islamists of his bona fides, yet all the while he fed back to MI6 and other Western intelligence agencies a stream of unique insights into the Islamists' global objectives. This is the story – attested by specialists in international espionage and security – of the man who infiltrated Al Qaeda. Gordon Corera, the BBC's security correspondent, has written an introduction to Omar Nasiri's memoir, setting in context his involvement in the global jihad.