The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel (10 page)

Daood did what he always did when his back was against the wall: he offered the Major a deal. He hoped it would play as well in Pakistan as it would back in the US, if he ever were allowed home. Breaking into a mid-Atlantic accent, he revealed that he was actually only half Pakistani and that he also held an American passport, and was keen to help in the jihad against India. The Major seemed startled, but Daood pushed on, suggesting that he was their man. ‘Why not use a clean skin to do the reconnaissance for a spectacular attack on a great Indian commercial hub like Mumbai?’ He was even willing to legally change his name to make it sound more Western.

Over dinner, Daood used his father’s name and reputation to ingratiate himself and revealed that his brother Danyal was working for Yousuf Raza Gilani, a rising political star and former speaker of the Pakistan National Assembly. ‘Some people will be contacting you,’ the Major said, eventually allowing Daood and Pasha to return to Lahore. Soon after, a ‘Major Iqbal’ rang, directing Daood to an address in the Lahore Army Cantonment, on Airport Road. Major Iqbal was the same type as Major Ali and Daood had no doubt that he was also an ISI agent. The Major talked around the Mumbai idea, as intrigued by it as his colleague up on the border. But such an audacious plan made everyone nervous and the meeting ended without any firm commitment.

It was a month before the Major was in touch. Daood’s family connections had checked out and he had good news, offering to pay for Daood to return to the US and apply for a passport with an anglicized name. Daood chose David Coleman Headley, borrowing the last two parts from his American grandfather, who had died so tragically at the age of thirty-seven. He formalized the documents that month, telling his American relatives that he was tired of being stopped at immigration because of his Pakistani name. One, who was in the US military, became suspicious. ‘I had a really bad feeling and considered reporting him to my superiors.’ But he did not and Daood’s actions alerted none of the US authorities that might normally have been expected to challenge an application from someone with a criminal
record who had been investigated several times for supporting terrorism. This was an aberration or the authorities were a party to the move, as they had been to so many other things in Daood’s chequered career as a US government agent provocateur and super-grass.

On Daood’s return to Pakistan, Major Iqbal assigned an army officer to train the freshly minted ‘David Headley’ in a condensed version of the ISI’s two-year field course on surveillance and counter-intelligence. If he was to scout Mumbai, he would need to know how to record his findings, what to look out for and how to ensure that he was not being observed. Major Iqbal gave him what he described as ‘classified Indian files’ that he said had been obtained from within the Indian police and army and which ‘revealed their training and limitations’. The Major boasted they had a super-agent at work in New Delhi who was known as ‘Honey Bee’. The Major revealed that while he would guide Headley, the Mumbai operation was to be run by Lashkar.

Headley was in. Within days he received a message to meet his newly appointed Lashkar handler at the remote House of the Holy Warriors camp. He travelled on the hairpin road to Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-administered Kashmir, and walked up into the densely forested Chelabandi hills, 7,500 feet above sea level. The camp sat in a bowl-shaped plain and consisted of a large mosque, several hostels and a well-stocked munitions store. Recruits in khaki
shalwar kameez
could be seen exercising on three sandy parade grounds, Uhad, Tabook and Qadisiya (all of them named after legendary Islamic battles from the epoch of the Prophet). Sajid Mir, Lashkar’s deputy chief of foreign operations, greeted Headley and took him to his office, which was clinically clean, fiercely air-conditioned and filled with computers, satellite phones and maps. Camp comrades had nicknamed it the ‘Ice Box’. Mir’s brood of children spent so much time in there trying to avoid the summer heat that everyone referred to them as the ‘polar bear cubs’.

Mir told Headley they would call his plan Operation Bombay. He was to scout for targets that Lashkar commandos would then assault. He would need a cover story. Headley immediately came up with a suggestion from his drug-dealing days. He could use his old friend Tahawwur Rana, who had left the Pakistani army and now lived in
Chicago, where he had established a thriving immigration business helping South Asians migrate to America. In June 2006, the ISI paid for David Headley to fly back to the US to meet up with Rana. Without explaining the back-story, Headley asked if he could set up a branch of Rana’s immigration business in Mumbai. Friends and family were commodities in Headley’s mind, to be cashed in and exploited. ‘He could persuade just about anyone to do whatever he wanted,’ said one. Arranging the paperwork, Rana, who would later claim that he suspected nothing, went to the Indian consulate with Headley’s new passport and applied for a one-year business visa, while Portia, Headley’s estranged wife, applied for permanent residency in the US under a law for abused spouses. On her petition, she accused her husband of violence, and also of espousing hate crimes, attacking Jews and Hindus, and praising suicide bombers.

Her allegations were filed away, the FBI later insisting that privacy laws prevented the immigration department from reporting their concerns. However, by then the JTTF had interviewed Portia, Headley’s mother, and several other family members, as well as family friends who had tipped off the authorities, which either made for a grievous series of intelligence failings, or, as Serrill and Portia were becoming convinced, compelling grounds to believe that David/Daood was informing on Lashkar for the US intelligence community (and vice versa).

In the autumn of 2006, David Headley used £15,000 he had been given by Major Iqbal to open the Immigration Law Centre in Tardeo A/C Market, a commercial district close to Mumbai’s upmarket Willingdon Sports Club. He put adverts in local papers – ‘Guaranteed work visas to the US and Canada for skilled and unskilled Indians’ – and hired a secretary who staffed the office alone, wondering why Headley had no fax or international phone. She also thought it strange that he never asked her to make his travel arrangements. But then he
was
a foreigner.

In reality, Headley had another office his secretary knew nothing about: the Reliance cyber café near Churchgate railway station, where
he maintained a vigorous email exchange with Tahawwur Rana, Sajid Mir, Major Iqbal and Pasha, whose online pseudonym was Scorpion 6. Mir used the codename Wasi and two email addresses – [email protected] and [email protected] – while Major Iqbal, who addressed Headley as ‘My dear’, wrote from the email address [email protected]. Headley, who sometimes signed off ‘Dave Salafi’ and was [email protected], always found time to report back on the local talent. ‘Girls here are really hot,’ he wrote in one email to Rana. ‘Just the both of us should come here minus our girlfriends to have a good time.’

Now he needed to bed in. He joined a gym called Moksh (Salvation) close to his apartment, where minor Bollywood stars worked out, and he befriended a fitness trainer, Vilas Warek. They chatted about the movies and crashed Bollywood parties. Warek was impressed by Headley’s ability to pull women and they toured Bandra’s late-night bars, driving around on Warek’s motorbike. ‘We’re brothers from another mother,’ Warek bragged to the girls.

One night, he took Headley to Shivaji Mandir, a theatre and temple complex, to see a bodybuilding show. There, Warek introduced him to Rahul Bhatt, the son of Mahesh Bhatt, one of India’s most acclaimed film directors. Mahesh’s wife, a practising Muslim, had raised her son in that faith. Soon Headley, Warek and Bhatt were inseparable, the Indians calling their new friend ‘David Armani’ because of the clothes he wore. To keep things smooth, Headley referenced some of his American life: the bar in Philadelphia that his bohemian mother ran, the tragic story of his grandfather and how his American forefathers had built the first oil well in New York State and knew the Rockefellers. He also picked up the tab for their frequent meetings in the Taj, especially at Sea Lounge, where Faustine Martis supervised high tea. The Pakistani side of his family was never mentioned.

One thing that set Bhatt wondering was Headley’s encyclopaedic knowledge of weaponry. He gave a running commentary about ambushes and raids by the security forces throughout the world. He could describe the calibre and capacity of most weapons. But one time, when Bhatt called him Agent Headley as a joke, he exploded.
‘Stop that.’ He was touchy about the strangest things, Bhatt thought, and on more than one occasion a little wild. He told his friends he wanted to take them to see the Af-Pak border. Bhatt shook his head laughing: ‘I am too afraid,’ he said. ‘I’ll be murdered like Daniel Pearl.’ Headley laughed. ‘No one will touch you if I’m around. You should change your names.’ He looked at Bhatt and said: ‘Maybe you should become Mohammed Atta!’ Everyone knew the 9/11 conspirator. ‘There’s safety in the blindingly obvious,’ Headley told them, laughing in their faces.

When he was not with Warek or Bhatt, Headley often visited the Taj alone. In his mind it was already emerging as the number one target. Drinking with a well-connected local businessman, Sunil Patel, he got himself invited to a Bollywood party in the Crystal Room and bought a Mont Blanc pen from the hotel shop. He browsed in Nalanda’s. He loved the Taj and its lifestyle, and observed it minutely. On at least two occasions, he joined the Friday Tour, a paid walk-and-talk tour popular with tourists, which he also filmed, recording on one of those videos the hotel layout and its history. He read up on its founder, Jamsetji Tata, whose family, originally priests from Gujarat, had emigrated to the city, sending their boy to London in 1858 on a voyage of discovery.

Everything was research material. Headley taped the guide explaining how the scion of the Tata dynasty had returned from Europe with a plan to open cotton mills, building an industrial empire based on personal loyalty. Jamsetji Tata also purchased a rectangular block of reclaimed land overlooking the harbour at Apollo Bunder, envisaging a hotel that merged Mughal, Rajput and Oriental aesthetics backed up by Colonial standards.

In a hotel pamphlet, Headley underlined passages about the Taj’s design, how the industrialist Tata had hired a dynamic Indo-European team led by the great Victorian master builder of Bombay, Frederick Stevens, who had constructed the Royal Alfred Sailors’ Home (later the state police headquarters), as well as Victoria Terminus (later renamed Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus) and Churchgate station.

The pamphlet described how Stevens had created a U-shaped
structure out of hard-wearing grey basalt, turning in from the harbour, with spacious galleries running the length of the building, along each wing and from the second floor up to the roof: a great net to catch the evening breezes. Headley walked with the group down these galleries, videoing all the way, sketching the route afterwards, as visitors were told how Stevens had planned to lace these galleries together with Gujarati trellises and balustrades interpreted in an Edwardian style.

As Headley fathomed the complex layout, drawing detailed sketches of wherever he had walked, he also learned about the hotel’s history of innovation. He highlighted passages in guidebooks that explained how the positioning of the hotel back-to-front also enabled the greatest number of guests to have a sea view. Like Victoria Terminus, the Taj had cupolas on each corner and a grand central dome covering a cantilevered central staircase. The cellars contained a refrigeration plant, the ground and first floors would be shops and restaurants, while the bedrooms would be on the second to fifth floors, with a roof garden crowning the building. When Stevens died suddenly in 1900, his successor, William Chambers, added a Florentine Renaissance theme. Jamsetji splashed out 26 million rupees – the equivalent of £200m today – for thirty private apartments and 350 double and single rooms with electric lights, fans, bells and clocks, along with four mechanical passenger lifts imported from Germany. The hotel had its own power plant, a chemist’s shop and a Turkish bath. Adding to the city-state atmosphere, a post office was opened. Upping the technological ante, the residents were cooled by a carbon dioxide-powered refrigeration system that also provided ice for Bombay’s first licensed bar. With an English manager and a French head chef, the Taj was half finished in 1902 when Jamsetji embarked on a grand tour of Europe and the US, sending back Belgian crystal chandeliers and spun steel pillars from the manufacturers of the Eiffel Tower.

By 14 December 2006, all of Headley’s memory cards were full, his bag stuffed with tourist maps and booklets on the hotel and the city. He told his new friends he was returning to Philadelphia to spend Christmas with his mother, but instead caught a flight to Lahore. He went straight to Major Iqbal and handed over the
footage. A couple of days later, he travelled to the Ice Box in the Chelabandi hills, where he screened his Operation Bombay footage for Sajid Mir. But there were others in Lashkar whom Headley needed to impress. He was given a private audience with
chacha
Zaki, the military chief, whom he had not seen since failing the
mujahid
training camp. Military chief Zaki offered Headley milk and saffron as a gesture of respect, but maintained his distance. Mir reassured Headley afterwards that
chacha
took time to win over. ‘It is hard to sell the plot but we are trying,’ Mir said. ‘The most important thing is that you are in his sights.’ From now on Headley should be assured that Lashkar was seriously looking at how to attack all of the targets he was reconnoitring, including the city’s police headquarters, a tourist hangout called the Leopold Café and the Taj.

Back in Lahore, Headley stewed at home with Shazia, his Pakistani wife, who was eight months pregnant with their third child. He was no good at waiting, and when he received a call from Chand Bhai, an old acquaintance from his drug-dealing days, he raced over to see him.