The Double Agent
Collins survived the assassination attempt by driving the car away through a hail of bullets. Though enraged by the attempted assassination, Collins realized there was a deeper problem. He asked himself why one billion Muslims in the world could not stop the slaughters in Chechnya or Bosnia or Kosovo. The answer, he believed, was not just corrupt Arabs, like those in Baku, but the terrorists and extremists. Collins decided he had to do something to stop them.
One afternoon he walked into the U.S. embassy in Baku and asked to see a CIA agent. The request was relayed to Washington. Several days later, an agent interviewed him. After multiple meetings, both agreed that Collins could be most useful in the FBI’s domestic counterterrorism program. When Collins got off the plane in Los Angeles, he met with Special Agent Ishiguro. After several days of debriefing, Ishiguro told Collins he would be infiltrating Muslim organizations that might be financing or training terrorists.
Before getting down to work, Collins made an excruciating decision. “As it was, I would always walk with a limp, and I would never run again. There were drawbacks to being an amputee, but I knew I’d be able to walk and run again with a good prosthetic.” Several weeks after having his right leg amputated below the knee, Collins was jogging on his new prosthetic leg.
Working with two FBI field agents, Collins’ work expanded from Phoenix into Los Angeles, San Diego, and even Chicago. Though he is not able to reveal the details of his classified operations, his work included acting as a driver for a ranking member of the Palestinian Authority and alerting various local law enforcement agencies to the activities of some “shady Arabs who were connected to fraud and drug trafficking.” At one point he and the FBI set up a mock training camp in the Arizona mountains to train mujahideen fighters, an operation they hoped would net them some sleeper agents. One of the men he met in Phoenix was Hani Hanjoor, the terrorist who would later fly American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon.
Collins’ relationship with the FBI and CIA changed when they asked him to go back into Chechnya and infiltrate the camp of one of his old leaders, Commander Khattab.
The agency had decided in its infinite wisdom that in order for me to proceed to the next phase of the operation—entering Chechnya—as a diplomatic nicety they would first have to declare me to their Russian counterparts. The FSB [Russian federal security service] was thoroughly compromised. If the agency declared me as an asset, I would surely be killed before reaching Khattab.
We had another absurd meeting. They decided that in order for me to transit through Azerbaijan they’d have to declare me to the Azeris. If declaring me to the Russians would get me killed before I reached Chechnya, then declaring me to the Azeris would get me killed before I left London.
I held out for the original plan to go to Chechnya. Another meeting was arranged. Another bureau guy jumped into a tirade about the appropriateness of their [the agency’s] declarations. He threw a bunch of threats at me about what would happen if I didn’t behave. I told him to shove his threats up his ass and suggested that he declare himself to the FSB and Azeris and go to Chechnya instead of me.
I’d started working with the FBI to fight terrorism, not bureaucracy. We’d spent all our time and energy fighting bureaucrats and their idiotic madness.
The operation was scrubbed.
The Return to Chechnya
When the war in Kosovo heated up in 1998, Collins decided to go and fight against the Serbs. Though he made it to the front lines with a KLA detachment, his Albanian sponsors would not allow him to stay and fight as a volunteer. Frustrated, he returned to the U.S.
In August 1999 the fighting in Chechnya started again. Just as he was feeling he might never fight jihad again, Collins contacted Robert Young Pelton, author of The World’s Most Dangerous Places, who was looking for a guide to Grozny, Chechnya. As the war flared again, Collins leaped at the chance. Two months later he found himself in Grozny, trying to prevent the devastated capital from falling to the Russians.
Before I knew it, tall, pitch black buildings loomed in the near distance. It was strange to approach the large, modern city in the middle of the night and not see a single light anywhere. The buildings that hadn’t been pounded to rubble stood like silent ghosts watching us. The streets were covered in debris—bricks and slabs of concrete from exploding buildings, piles of dirt and rubble kicked up from the endless bomb craters, blown-up vehicles, broken chairs in the street.
Our commander called us on the radio and told us to look for food. There wasn’t much left in the city, but by the end of the day we’d managed to fill up the trunk of our car with food, mostly canned goods. Despite being surrounded by the Russian army, the people in the city were fairly cheerful. But we also spent most of our time dodging the Russian jets that were constantly circling overhead.
We had to travel to one of the suburbs on the edge of Grozny. To get there we had to cover a few miles of open road. Playing dodge with Russian jets was one thing in the middle of the city, but out in the open we would be extremely vulnerable.
Another car was trying to run the gauntlet from the opposite direction. As it flew by we saw that it was full of civilians. Then I saw it, a shiny glint at first. The glint turned into a Su-24 jet traveling in the same direction as the car we’d passed. It looked as though the pilot hadn’t really noticed us; the jet was following the car full of civilians for target practice. We saw the puff of smoke as the Su-24 fired its rockets. The other car was way up ahead, and when the rockets impacted we couldn’t tell if they’d hit it or not. A cloud of dust started to rise from the explosions.
The car was stopped on the side of the road. All the windows were blown out, and there were holes in the car just about everywhere. Everyone inside was slumped over. The driver of the car was a man. There were two women in the front seat and four women crammed into the back. It looked like a man, his wife, their daughters, and Grandma. None of them moved.
I wondered how the Russians could do this to women and children. I guess it would take the same mentality as it would to fly an airplane into a building full of people, but these people didn’t matter to anyone. Their deaths would spur no outrage or aid packages. The Russians would call them terrorists, and the media would repeat this mantra, chapter, line, and verse. I started to get pissed off. **** the people who give the orders to bomb, I said to myself, and **** the pilots. **** the people who fail to report these crimes against humanity. **** the world.
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