Al-Qaeda agent reveals secrets

Paris (France): Four years ago, a video of a puppy killed in a chemical gas test at one of al-Qaeda's secret training camps in Afghanistan shocked the world.

Now, a man who says he was an Islamic holy warrior — a Jehadi — at the camp is ready to reveal its dark secrets. But Omar Nasiri — a pseudonym — is unlike other holy warriors.

In his new book Inside the Jihad, released on Monday, he claims he was a spy, used by French, British, and then German intelligence agencies. He's says he's lied to stay alive and even today fears he'll be killed.

In his book, Nasiri says he was born in Morocco in 1967. But in an interview with CNN, he admits that "almost nothing" of what he writes about his identity is true.

Still, his account reveals so much about al-Qaeda, terrorism and even Iraq that experts are taking him seriously.

Ten years ago former CIA station chief Michael Scheuer, now a CBS terrorism analyst, headed the agency's hunt for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. That's when Nasiri claimed to have attended an al-Qaeda training camp in the country.

"For this to be a fabrication would be beyond my imagination," said Scheuer, who was asked to review the book for accuracy prior to publication.

"It's really the most detailed first hand account into al-Qaeda. I wish I'd had it at the CIA," Scheuer told CNN. Scheuer says Nasiri's inside information helps to explain how the US got into the war in Iraq.

In the book, Nasiri claims al-Qaeda wanted the US to attack Iraq in order to expand their own holy war.

When the US captured his former camp commander Ibn Sheik al Libi in Afghanistan, he did what he'd trained Nasiri and other recruits to do, lying to his captors that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons and al-Qaeda was going to get there hands on them.

When asked by CNN whether he believed al Libi had lied to the Americans, Nasiri says: "I'm sure of it... Let's say by telling them exactly what they wanted to hear."

Watching tapes of al-Qaeda buildings where he claims to have been trained in explosives and to have seen chemical experiments performed on rabbits, it becomes clear that Nasiri, even though he claims to have attended the camps as a spy — as a paid informant for the French in Afghanistan — actually came to believe in the cause of jehad.

So much so, in fact, that he volunteered to go to Chechnya to fight with Islamic rebels against Russia.

"I wanted to go to Chechnya," he told CNN. "I trained with Chechens... young, very young Chechens. We spent seven months together. We know each other like I know myself."

But al-Qaeda had other plans. They sent Nasiri to Europe to spread their holy war there. His French spymasters couldn't have been happier because his cover identity was impeccable.

By then, Nasiri says, he was in so deep he convinced British intelligence to give him money to send to a senior al-Qaeda leader in Pakistan.

Incredibly, he says no intelligence agency ever appeared interested enough to follow the money trail to Pakistan. The man who received the money was vital to the success of the 9/11 bombings.

Nasiri says it was a critical missed opportunity, and that European intelligence agencies were only worried about al-Qaeda attacks in their countries and failed to spot the global connection to the impending attack in the US. In frustration, he says, he quit spying.

For Scheuer, Nasiri's insights are not just history, but a road map for the future.

"The coming defeat of the US in Afghanistan and Iraq no matter how we dress it up it will be perceived as the Mujahadeen prevailing in two countries. It will spur the enthusiasm of young men, " he told CNN.

Nasiri says few Westerners really appreciate that the threat from al-Qaeda is not limited to expansion in one country or another. It's about why Muslims support them worldwide, and about a global holy war.

"I am just telling you how the things I am seeing through my eyes, nothing else," he says. "Take it how they take it... Put it in a dossier. They put it in an archive and forget it... but it's better you understand it."

Better understand it, he says, because the global holy war is only getting bigger. And pulling out of Iraq won't make any difference.