HUNDREDS of sleeper agents living in the shadows of the UK are ready to unleash carnage, a former MI6 spy has warned.
Aimen Dean spent eight years in the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) – forming close bonds with Al-Qaeda operatives and gaining exclusive insight into their insidious minds.
His risky work for MI5 and MI6 helped foil a number of attempted terror attacks, including a plot to bomb the New York Subway.
Despite the SIS’s valiant work, Dean told The Sun there are “hundreds” of enemy agents waiting in the shadows – ready to unleash carnage in the UK.
As a former Al-Qaeda member himself, and armed with a deep knowledge of the Quran, few understand the terror group’s inner workings as well as Dean.
It’s this intimate understanding that saw the dad-of-one thrust into numerous close-call situations as a spy.
Living with terrorist agents in London, he became a “kind of spiritual coach” to them – gaining him unique access into the group’s terrifying sphere of influence.
“It’s a bit brutal,” he recalled as he spoke to The Sun about the men who disclosed their deepest, darkest secrets to him.
During this time, he also discovered Iran‘s authority was gaining worrying momentum domestically – and warned the country’s threat needed to be “countered” to protect British nationals.
Dean explained Al-Qaeda was “hosted” by Iran for 25 years, which opened the floodgates for sleeper cells to carry out deadly rampages against Brits.
Some of the attacks that killed British nationals in Saudi Arabia, for example, were orders that came from inside Iran, he said.
He added: “Unfortunately, I would love to tell you the world is an amazing place, but it’s not.
“The problem is the new world order is now the new world nightmare.
“We have rogue nations such as Iran aspiring to become nuclear powers.
“And a threat like Iran needs to be countered because of the fact that they are a nation that has sponsored terrorism.”
He’s described Europe’s Russian angst misplaced and has called on the UK to channel its energy into stemming the spread of Islamic fundamentalism.
According to Dean, “it’s not about if another 9/11 or 7/7 attack will happen; it’s about when”.
He said: “The biggest threat to the UK and Europe right now isn’t Russia but the spread of Iranian influence.
“We’re going to see many more lone-wolves acting for the regime. When it comes to sleeper agents in the UK, it’s impossible to tell how many there are but there are hundreds.
“Islamic fundamentalism is much more sinister as it undermines from within. It pushes people to distrust institutions and in some ways is much more dangerous than violent extremism.
“The violence is just the tip of the iceberg.”
From terror to espionage
The dad-of-one was 17 when he met Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, which killed almost 3,000 civilians.
He had just emerged from a year battling the Serbs in the Bosnian war, where he was exposed to “charred remains, mutilated bodies, and mass graves”.
Aged 18, Aimen travelled to a secluded mountainous spot in Afghanistan where he would spend the next 11 months learning how to build bombs.
As a self-confessed bookworm and “nerd”, the intellectual rigour and mathematical precision required for bomb making proved an exciting – albeit risky – endeavour for the teenager.
Joined by three other men – including Moez Fezzani, now an ISIS leader in Libya – he spent his days mixing highly toxic chemicals under the watchful leadership of vengeful chemist and terror mastermind Abu Khabab.
Khabab was in charge of developing Al Qaeda’s mass-casualty weapons and was linked to a series of terror plots before being killed in a CIA drone strike in 2008.
But just under a year after Aimen joined the terror group, his life took a drastic turn when news of a suicide bomb attack in East Africa upended his views and beliefs.
The devastating assault on U.S embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Tanzania resulted in 200 deaths and an estimated 4,000 wounded.
“This is when I started to have doubts and I realised things were going in the wrong direction,” he said.
How ISIS is using AI to recruit new wave of Brit jihadis
ISLAMIC State is weaponising artificial intelligence in a chilling new recruitment drive aimed at vulnerable young Brits.
The new recruitment approach has sparked fresh concerns amongst UK intelligence agencies that Jihadist insurgency could once again be on the rise.
Both MI5 and MI6 are understood to be monitoring the growing use of AI as a propaganda weapon amid rising concerns that Islamic State and al-Qaeda are mounting a comeback in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa.
It follows reports that MI5 is now handling a near-record number of terror investigations alongside fast-increasing state-based threats.
In his annual threat update last month, Sir Ken McCallum, MI5’s director-general, warned: “Groups overseas are continuing their attempts to direct terrorism into the UK and Europe.
“Al-Qaeda and Islamic State are once again becoming more ambitious, taking advantage of instability overseas to gain firmer footholds.
“They are both personally encouraging and indirectly inciting would-be attackers in the West.”
Sir Ken said that state threats from Russia, China and Iran are also escalating, with MI5 seeing a 35 per cent rise in the number of individuals under investigation in the past year.
He also revealed that MI5 and police have disrupted 19 late-stage attack plots and intervened in “many hundreds of developing threats” since the start of 2020.
Alongside their increasing use of technology in Europe, IS is also believed to have launched a fresh recruitment campaign for foreign fighters in Syria.
“I realised it was about making gas canisters full of hydrogen cyanide to attack nightclubs and cinemas.
“My good moral compass and critical thinking kicked in.
“I thought, what if I build something for someone that is then used on civilians? I disagreed completely with this.”
Feigning sickness, Aimen was sent to Qatar where he renounced his oath to the terror group and decided he would never go back.
Within nine days he “landed in the lap” of MI5, who he said enthusiastically whisked him back to the UK after quickly recognising his impressive knack for map reading and photographic memory.
When asked about any close calls, he told The Times about a period in 2001, when he was called to meet one of bin Laden’s closest lieutenants.
He feared they had clocked on but was instead asked to deliver a message to four “brothers” in Londoninstructing them to “leave the country”.
The message read: “They must leave the country and come here before September 1. Something big is going to happen and we expect the Americans to come to Afghanistan.”
Aimen was walking along Oxford Street later that year when he learned of the terror attack on America’s Twin Towers and remembered those haunting words: “something big”.
Not long after, he caught wind of a worrying plot engineered by his former leader Khabab to bomb the New York Subway.
Thanks to Aimen’s tip, news of the planned attack was passed to the Oval office and successfully foiled.