Book Review: Nine Lives

This was the second prize winner in Scott Alexander's book review contest. It was submitted anonymously, but there is a bit about the author in the contest results:

reviewed by David Matolcsi. David is an AI safety researcher from Hungary, currently living in Berkeley.

From the review:

Aimen Dean (pseudonym) compares himself to the proverbial cat: he has nine lives, surviving every impossible situation and starting new lives under strange new conditions.

Cats pack their nine lives in an average of 12-18 years, which is a quite impressive speed, but Aimen Dean was committed to living his lives even quicker than that.

Born in 1978, he was 16 when he left the comfort of his Saudi home, learned to fire a mortar, and fought in the battles of the Bosnian War. He and two friends ran a million dollar fraudulent charity to smuggle supplies to the Chechens when he was 18. He was 19 when he swore an oath of allegiance in front of Osama bin Laden, and started making chemical weapons. He was 20 when he got disillusioned with al-Qaeda, left, got caught by the Qatari secret police and became a British informant. He was 24 when he unraveled a plot to release poison gas in the New York subway. And by the time he was 28, due to an embarrassingly stupid leak from the American intelligence agencies, his spying career was over and he was a man in hiding.

(The jungle war in the Philippines sounded cool in the section title, but his brief stint there at 18 is actually one of the least exciting stories of his life: it was mostly a frozen conflict and the jihadists spent their time playing beach volleyball.)

One good consequence of his cover being blown is that twelve years after his retirement, he could finally tell his story, resulting in one of the most fascinating books I ever read. The stories were presented in a believable enough way, not over-exaggerating his own importance, that I developed a lot of trust in most of his claims being true. I also mostly believe his journalist coauthors that they corroborated many details of his story. This makes his testimony a very useful source on the inner workings of jihadist organizations, and the intelligence agencies trying to stop them.

...

[T]he writer is constantly complaining how Western analysts are always trying to understand the jihadists’ motivations and plans through their own lens: economy, strategy, nationalism, fighting against oppression. Dean claims that these all overlook a major goal that motivated him and many of his comrades: fulfilling the prophecies.

...

Anyways, the End Times are here. (According to a Pew Research poll, more than half of Muslims believe that the Mahdi will arrive within their lifetime, and this belief is universally accepted among jihadists). This means that you should contribute to fulfilling the prerequisite prophecies as quickly as possible. Nothing else really matters. The young Dean travels to the Philippines to fight in the Muslim independence movement there, but later gets embarrassed about this as a wasteful diversion: the Philippines don’t feature in any of the prophecies, so it’s not important.

...

This is a good moment to note that that jihadists in the book are all obsessed with Israel, mostly not because they are angry at the oppression of Palestinians (Muslims are oppressed in many places around the world), but because Jerusalem features in a lot of prophecies, so it’s really important for it to be under Muslim rule. They also passionately hate the USA, partly because of its support of Israel, but maybe even more importantly because the US has stationed troops in Saudi Arabia since the Gulf War.

...

A chemical weapon, used in the New York subway, even if their most ambitious plans came true, would only kill a handful of people — fewer than what could be killed by one man with a gun, or maybe even a knife.

The Western intelligence agencies knew this. Al-Qaeda knew this. Still, it was a top priority for the MI6 and CIA to prevent any kind of chemical attack, as they knew how oversized the public response would be. And al-Qaeda pursued chemical weapons for the same reason.

Looking at the list of chemical terror attacks, it still doesn’t seem to be a very practical weapon for them, as they have only managed to kill a handful of people so far, and none in Western countries. But certainly, they are trying, and some of their plots might have gone through if one of their few chemical weapons experts, a certain Aimen Dean, hadn’t always dutifully informed the MI6 about their plans.

...

The CIA knew that 9/11 was going to happen but didn’t do anything! Yes, obviously, they knew it. Dean knew that al-Qeada was planning something big for September, as he was warned by a superior to stay out of Afghanistan for the time. There were many other sources too pointing to an impending attack. All this information is just not really worth anything if you don’t know the details of the attack, and unfortunately the perpetrators had very good infosec around the details.

...

The British never shared Dean’s identity with the USA, and tried to provide as little revealing detail as possible, but apparently the Americans still figured it out after a while. Then some unknown insider talked to a journalist, who wrote a book, The One Percent Doctrine, containing all sorts of information on the informant, and then Time ran a frontpage article based on the book that revealed some things about Dean, including his real first name. We have all since learned that journalists are strangely committed to sharing people’s real names, but I wouldn’t have expected it to extend to literal spies inside al-Qaeda. Fortunately, Dean was in Europe when it happened, but his comrades soon figured out based on the news that he was the spy, and he could never return to his job, thus ending his seven years as an important informant.