Interesting article.LYING awake in a cold sweat after another night tossing and turning over the July 7 London bombings, Mohammed decided he had to talk to somebody.
Next morning, the young Muslim from a deeply religious family, walked into a police station in his Midlands town.
Mohammed, whose name the Mirror has changed to protect his identity, said: "I couldn't sleep because of it, I was turning all night, waking up in sweats and having nightmares. I kept thinking what if it was somebody in my family on a train or a bus.
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"I went to the police station and asked to speak to somebody from anti-terrorism. Half an hour later a couple of uniform officers saw me. I asked them if they were the antiterrorism and they said no and asked me what it was about.
"I told them that if these guys had been in Pakistan for 40 days or more I would probably know who they were. I told them I had come straight in because I couldn't sleep. I hadn't even brushed my teeth and still had my sandals on."
The uniform police were replaced by two officers from CID who then made way for two anti-terror detectives.
Mohammed added: "I had been there for about three hours when they left and two people came in and said they were from MI5.
"They told me that I was right, that these guys had been to Pakistan and trained in Kashmir. Then they took the police tapes and notes and destroyed them in front of me. They offered me food and drink and were basically sucking up to me.
"I told them I didn't want to work for them, just tell them about these guys and get it over with. So I did and I went home."
But MI5, tackling an unprecedented threat from home-grown terrorists after decades of Cold War spying, was determined to recruit Mohammed, whose story reveals the scale of the challenge the service faces.
He said: "A few days later they called me at home, I hadn't given them my numbers, and they asked again. Then they came round and talked to me. One of them said, 'You just need to step over the line, you're there already really'."
Mohammed agreed and began reporting back to the security service, accused this week of failing to prevent July 7 after having bombers Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shezhad Tanweer under surveillance in early 2004.
He was valuable because he already had contacts among the extremist community after his family forced him to study Islam in hardline centres. "My family sent me to these centres a few years before, basically to straighten me out because of my drinking and smoking and other bad behaviour.
They told the elders to rectify me and make me study my religion more, that is how I got into it. I changed my clothes and grew a beard - I had to as they wouldn't even let me wear jeans.
"I had to read the Koran all the time, they would just tell me, 'Keep reading, keep reading'. I was crying after the second day because it felt like a prison. It was weird, after a while I did care more about reading about my religion than anything else, but I was never into violence.
"Jihad is justified if somebody attacks my religion but those people in London had done nothing, nothing to deserve being killed."
MI5 gave Mohammed a mobile and when he wanted to meet officers, gave him directions and checked he was not being followed.
He said: "They would say, 'Get off at this stop, come out of the station, take the first left, first right, walk up the hill and wait there'. Then a van would pull up. I would be put in the back where you couldn't see anything, be driven into a garage, the doors close behind us, get out and go into a house and there would be a few men with computers and papers.
"They were really ordinary looking, you wouldn't think they were spies or anything. One of them was a bit chubby, it was not James Bond or anything."
After several months, Mohammed quit his job to spy for MI5 full time. It paid him thousands of pounds.
"I was paid straight into my bank account. I asked them what to say if the bank asked me where all the money was coming from. They said, 'Tell them you've sold a car'." But the money brought problems when Mohammed's deeply religious mother asked about it.
"My mum worried I was a drug dealer and kept asking me. Finally she asked me to swear on a relative's life that I wasn't working for the police. I couldn't lie to her because she is my elder so I had to tell her. She wanted to kick me out She was really angry.
"She said I had done wrong and that to atone for what I had done she would give the money to charity. It went to our home country to help sick people and orphans, things like that."
Mohammed was also troubled by the act of spying. He said: "We were talking about the bombings and those under surveillance asked me for my opinion and I said, 'I think it was a brilliant thing that happened, those brothers will surely go to heaven', it was a role play.
"But I always felt guilty about what I was doing because I was betraying my religion, even if the cause was right or wrong."
His greatest fear was not exposure but being arrested in a police raid on a radical centre.
"I was really scared one time in London because the speaker was saying some really dangerous things.
"MI5 had told me if I was arrested not to say anything to the police and they would get me out of there.
"But I had to take that on trust and the more I thought about it the more it worried me." After several months, MI5 sent him on a training course at a provincial town in South East England. But it was no Q-style briefing with all the gadgets.
"They asked me, 'Do you know how to tell how many people live in a house? It's easy. When you're in there make an excuse to go to the toilet and when you wash your hands count how many toothbrushes there are.
They told me what to make notes of, like whether people let themselves into a house or are let in. I made profiles for them.
"I had my own system so I wrote down their name, height, language, origin - stuff like that. They would show me pictures of people they were interested in and ask me if I knew them. They must have showed me about 500 pictures and I knew about 50 or 60 of them."
This was Mohammed's routine for months but it ended after he and MI5 feared he had been compromised.
AFTER a final pay-off, he and his handlers parted company and within hours the MI5 telephone numbers he had called were disconnected.
He returned to work but is still in touch with many extremists who remain unaware he spied on them.
Mohammed said: "I have to be very careful because some of the brothers would kill me without hesitating. They're from all over, Palestine, Syria - lots of them are from Somalia and they're over here.
"MI5 say they are looking at 1,500 people but, believe me, they have at least 5,000 on their books. Some study chemistry, engineering and physics at university. You don't have to be a genius to work out they have the potential to build a chemical bomb."
Mohammed insists that attacks by British terror cells are co-ordinated from abroad. "What you've got to realise is the order comes from Pakistan - it never comes from England.
"There are people waiting for the go-ahead to do what they want to do."
And he warned that even if MI5 had learned from Operation Crevice, which caught Bluewater bomb plotter Omar Khyam, so have the terrorists.
"I will tell you this, MI5 will not be able to stop all the plots and all the fanatics - there are just too many of them and they learn things quickly.
"Omar Khyam was caught because he stored the fertiliser and the company called the police. Well, these guys don't store things any more, so it will be much harder to catch them now."
I want to thank our very own grandpakhalif for doing his part in stomping out the terrorist threat.
