Adam’s booming voice and thick New York accent reminded me of a character from a detective movie. He told me he’d heard that Jihadi John was of Yemeni descent, that his first name was Mohammed, and that he came from East London. He asked if I had good contacts in the Yemeni community in London. Not exactly, I told him, but I did have sources among radical Muslims there. I had reported in London and its suburbs after the transit attacks of 2005, and I’d interviewed Omar Bakri, a prominent British Islamist cleric, and some others who didn’t often talk to reporters. I told Adam I’d ask around.
I made some calls, but no one wanted to talk on the phone, so I flew to London. Once there, I reached out to ISIS and Al Qaeda supporters, jihadi recruiters, and a handful of Bakri’s former students. The identities of “the Beatles” was a hot topic around London, I learned. Some of my sources told me that even if they knew who the men were, they wouldn’t tell me for fear of being punished as collaborators or supporters, since they hadn’t shared their information with the police.
One of my sources was a bit older and lived outside the city. He had been involved with a couple of high-level Al Qaeda operatives and was seen as a sort of godfather by many radical young men in and around London. The man said he’d heard rumors about Jihadi John, and he thought he might have met him before he left to join ISIS.
“Is he Yemeni?” I asked.
There was silence, then laughter. “Who told you Yemeni?”
“So it isn’t Mohammed from Yemen?”
“It is Mohammed, but not from Yemen.”
“East London?”
“Not East. And I tell you, Souad, this man’s story is different than anything before. I can’t say more than that.”
He wouldn’t tell me the man’s surname or his country of origin. The name “Mohammed” is as common as John, Paul, or George in London.
I called Adam. Was he sure that Jihadi John was Yemeni? That’s what his sources had told him, he said. I suggested we broaden our search. I spent the next day in my hotel room, going over notes from my interview with Abu Yusaf, especially the parts when he talked about the “brothers from Britain.” I also reviewed published interviews with released ISIS hostages in which they spoke about “the Beatles” and learned that one hostage reported that Jihadi John was obsessed with Somalia and would show the captives videos about it. I had met one former French hostage myself, and I pored over my notes from our conversation, looking for clues. Finally I watched some of the terrible ISIS beheading videos again and listened to what Jihadi John said and how he said it. Then I made a list:
Mohammed
videos of Somalia
London (not East)
not Yemeni
The ISIS commander told me, “We have brothers from Britain of various descents: Pakistani, Somali, Yemeni, and even Kuwaiti.”
educated/university degree
deep hatred/personal vendetta
The last two items were based in part on instinct. In the ISIS videos, Jihadi John sounded educated; Abu Yusaf had also told me about the “brothers from Britain” with university degrees, and one of the freed hostages had said that his captors seemed well educated. “Deep hatred/personal vendetta” was a hunch based on Jihadi John’s tone as he raged against British prime minister David Cameron, President Obama, and U.S. foreign policy. Something had angered him; the wound seemed personal.
I looked again at Abu Yusaf’s words: We have brothers from Britain of various descents: Pakistani, Somali, Yemeni, and even Kuwaiti. I knew already from Adam’s information that Jihadi John must be of Arab descent, so I crossed out “Pakistani” and “Somali.” That left Kuwait as his most likely country of origin. I made a new list:
Mohammed
Kuwaiti
London
hatred/personal vendetta
educated/university degree
videos about Somalia
I set up another round of meetings, including one with a source linked to the Finsbury Park mosque in North London, a well-known center of jihadist recruiting. We met at 2:00 a.m. on the outskirts of the city. I took a taxi to a cabstand, paying in cash so the intelligence services, if they were watching, couldn’t track my whereabouts too easily. My source picked me up there and drove me to a coffee shop owned by a friend. The place was closed at that hour, and it was just the three of us: my source and me sitting at a small table while the owner did paperwork at his desk in back.
My source was an ISIS sympathizer, and he knew people who had gone to fight in Somalia. Years before, he had been an acolyte of Abu Hamza al-Masri, the radical former imam at Finsbury Park, who was extradited to the United States in 2012, found guilty of terrorism, and sentenced to life in prison.
I asked if he knew anything about a Kuwaiti named Mohammed who had problems with the British authorities. He thought about it.
“Kuwaiti, Kuwaiti … yes! I remember there had been a Mohammed who got into trouble in Tanzania.”
“What trouble?”
“I don’t remember. It was related to Somalia, I think.”
I tried to keep my cool.
“Do you know his full name?”
“Why are you so interested in him?”
I didn’t tell him that I suspected this man might be Jihadi John. Instead, I said that I was trying find out if this Mohammed had gone to Syria.
“I’ll see what I can do for you,” he said, “but it will take some days.”
He dropped me off at the same cabstand. It was almost 4:00 a.m. when I finally made it back to my hotel in central London.
I decided that I had to get in touch with a senior Islamic State official I’d known for years, the man who had helped arrange my meeting with Abu Yusaf. After that story ran, he’d asked somebody to deliver a message to me: Salam. The Turks were pissed about your story; intel is asking about you. Don’t come to the border region again, and don’t reach out to me unless it’s an emergency.
This is an emergency, I thought. But to make contact with him, I had to go back to Germany, where I had a secure, if circuitous, way of reaching him. I would observe a strict protocol we’d developed years earlier to avoid detection by intelligence agencies or militants, who might punish him for talking to me.
First, I had to talk to a woman who was living in northern Germany. I called her and took a train north to speak to her in person. I told her I needed to talk to my source. She knew it had to be important and agreed to pass on the message to him. She also gave me an unregistered SIM card, which I would put into one of four old Nokia phones that I kept for communicating with people like him. Unlike smartphones, these primitive devices were hard for authorities to track.
A few days later, I got a text message from the woman I’d visited: “Will you be jogging at 4:00 p.m. tomorrow?”
“Yes,” I replied.