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The leaked information ended his seven-and-a-half-year stint as a mole inside the terror group. The spy, who now goes by the name Aimen Dean, writes of his career and its dramatic end in "Nine...
- Investigative Reporter/Producer
- 4 min
Aug 6, 2018 · In 1999, four years after taking up jihad, the man now known as Aimen Dean had seen enough. What had begun as saving Muslims from persecution in Bosnia had morphed into being part of a cell...
- Early Life
- Al-Qaeda
- Spying
- Later Career
- External Links
Dean was born in Saudi Arabia. By the age of 12, he had memorised the Quran (thereby becoming a Hafiz). Following the death of his mother he sought solace in Sayyid Qutb's In the Shade of the Quran. He was part of an Islamic Awareness circle at Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz Mosque in Khobar, where one of the instructors was al-Ayiri. In 1989, his eldest bro...
Following Bosnia, Dean was invited to Kandahar to swear allegiance to Osama bin Laden and join al-Qaeda. In Afghanistan, he trained al-Qaeda recruits in the basics of Islamic theology, history and the essentials of religious practice. He was worried by the 1998 United States embassy bombingsand asked Abdullah al-Mohaja for the religious justificati...
Dean decided to leave al-Qaeda, going to Qataron the pretext of his health with the intention to disappear. He was captured on arrival in Qatar by Qatari Intelligence, who gave him a choice of intelligence agency and he chose to work with MI6. MI6 then spent seven months debriefing him, after which he agreed to go back to Afghanistan as a spy. Dean...
After being exposed, Dean started a career as a speaker and security consultant.Since 2019 Dean has been hosting the podcast "Conflicted", which analyzes the political situation and historical background of todays Middle East. Dean is the author of two books: 1. The Eternal Bridge Over the River Innocence: A novel about the story of what happens to...
Aimen Dean, born Ali Al-Duranni, was MI6’s spy inside Al Qaeda from 1998 to 2006. In this episode I do a critical view of his autobiography Nine Lives: My Time as MI6’s Top Spy Inside Al Qaeda, and how Dean’s story connects to other people and events explored in this series.
Mar 3, 2015 · Valued first by al-Qaeda and then British security and intelligence, Aimen Dean's life under cover came to an abrupt end when the cover was blown. An American writer disclosed his identity...
Aimen Dean: ISIS is a separate issue, because after the fall of ISIS in 2019, when their last territory was taken over and extinguished, their cash was not recovered, and there were hundreds of millions of dollars of it. There was a question of what happened to that cash.
Jul 13, 2018 · Raw, uneditorialised footage, shot by the jihadis themselves, captures the young men at play and in action, complicating the popular image of fanatical “death to the West” extremists. The ...
