Agent Storm: My Life Inside al-Qaeda Read Online Free PDF Page A

trouble seemed to follow me. One evening, after plenty of beer, I made out with another girl at a Korsør youth club. Unfortunately her boyfriend heard about our connection. He threatened me with a Danish army assault rifle and was subsequently picked up by the police. Incredibly, they released him without charge after a few hours. Perhaps they reasoned that such a threat was understandable if the target was Morten Storm.
    I decided to take matters into my own hands. The boyfriend had supposedly turned up at a party in a grim apartment block on the outskirts of Korsør. When I arrived with three friends the host insisted he had not been there. Convinced he was lying, we beat him with pots and pans we found in the kitchen.
    I never found the boyfriend, but the Korsør police found me. I was convicted of aggravated assault and sentenced to four months in a juvenile remand centre.
    My prospects were not exactly blossoming. I had been kicked out of five schools and my mother had washed her hands of me. I also had a criminal record. The chances of my choosing the ‘straight and narrow’ were diminishing by the day. And far from leading me away from crime, my apprenticeship inside the remand centre made me harder.
    My eighteenth birthday – spent in jail – offered little to celebrate. But at least when I came out I was eligible to drive, and that proved a passport to easy money. Mark Hulstrøm was supplementing his incomefrom the gym with a thriving business smuggling cigarettes from Poland through Germany and into Denmark. We called it the ‘Nicotine Triangle’.
    By the mid-1990s cigarette smuggling had become the third-largest illegal business in Germany behind drugs and gambling. The business model was simple. Low taxes and no custom duty meant that a carton of cigarettes in Poland was one third the price of a carton in Germany or Denmark.
    Our cover story was that we were buying spare car parts in Germany, where they were cheaper, and bringing them to Denmark. Hulstrøm saw me as a loyal, fearless operator. I spoke some German and was trusted to exchange currencies. We used hired cars – to minimize losses in case the driver was stopped and the vehicle impounded. The cars picked up a few dents – but it was a lucrative circuit.
    The distribution centre was a remote farmhouse near the Polish border. At the gates of the farm, an unkempt guard who smelt of sour cabbage would wave me in. I would place a pile of Deutschmarks on the table, and a few minutes later an entire toilet would be moved to one side, revealing a cellar crammed with cartons of cigarettes.
    On the drive back, I would look out for foreigners – preferably dark-skinned ones – approaching the Danish border and then follow them. The Danish border police were usually far more interested in questioning them and examining their passports than stopping a young Dane in a van. Occasionally I would cross from Germany into Denmark on tracks or unmarked roads. It was tradecraft that would prove useful when I moved on.
    Sometimes I was making the trip two or three times a week and earning the equivalent of $1,000 each time. Not only was the money good: I loved feeling like an apprentice gangster, alert for the police, hiding the contraband, keeping my nerve at border crossings, handling large piles of crisp banknotes.
    Just months after emerging from a remand centre penniless and homeless, I had wads of cash, wore smart clothes and was living the high life. Mark Hulstrøm entrusted me with the keys to Underground – now frequented by escorts from Copenhagen who had smelt the money. For the first time in my life I felt important, part of somethingbig. I may have given up making it as a boxer, but I still enjoyed sparring and wanted to stay in shape. I continued to train in Hulstrøm’s gym, and as I bulked up I moved into the light-heavyweight bracket.
    My biological father had moved across the Great Belt to Nyborg. I had not seen him in well over a decade but now