The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel (9 page)

Daood also developed rich tastes, and when the family cash ran out he reflected on what he could do to stay afloat. He could speak the languages of two countries and travel freely to chaotic places Americans were precluded from visiting. In 1984 he contacted his best friend from college, Tahawwur Rana, an introverted A-grade student who was training to become a military doctor in the Pakistani army. Daood was coming back to Pakistan and asked the medic to accompany him on a road trip to the tribal areas, Rana using his military connections and his ID card to get them around a sensitive part of Pakistan – ignorant of the half-kilo of heroin Daood had purchased from local smugglers, concealing it in the boot.

Back from the Af-Pak frontier with his stash, Daood blew it in Lahore. Hitching up with a woman, he gave her a taste without understanding the purity of the gear. She overdosed, and the police busted him. Through his father’s connections he was extricated, and the case file was quietly disposed of. But from that point on Daood’s father became remote, urging his sons to ‘keep away’ from their half-brother.

Undeterred, Daood tried it all over again. He headed back to Peshawar, the gateway to the Khyber Pass, and became a regular
visitor, frequently abusing Rana and his jeep. He also decided to try his hand at the export business, smuggling the heroin to the US in his luggage and selling it through his Manhattan store, Fliks Video. Occasionally he would turn up in Philadelphia with a huge suitcase of VHS tapes with which to impress his American cousins. ‘He was charismatic and charming. But we had no idea what he was really up to,’ said one.

When customs officers caught up with him four years later at Frankfurt airport en route to Philadelphia with two kilograms of heroin in his case, Daood faced a lengthy prison term and his father disowned him. Handed over to the US authorities, and on his own now, he offered the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) a deal: his American co-conspirators. They were jailed for between eight and ten years, while the turncoat Daood started working as a paid DEA informant, with instructions to infiltrate the Pak-US heroin trafficking networks. He translated hours of telephone intercepts, while coaching agents on how to interrogate Pakistanis. He also refused to stick to the rules. One DEA agent complained that he disappeared while on business and set up meetings that were not monitored. But his product was so compelling, the information so accurate, that when he came back online he was forgiven.

Daood could talk himself out of anything, a former DEA agent recalled. Hardened drug investigators found themselves excusing his defects because he took them to places they could not reach. His American mother, Serrill, idolized her son from afar, and while she saw little of him face to face, she had a giant laminated photograph of him on her living room wall. Others on the American side of her family were not so sure. Daood was only ever interested in himself, they warned, arguing that his selfishness was born out of his lack of a sense of self: a young man with a grievance against his mother and alienated from his father, with several blurred identities, none of which properly fitted. ‘We would joke he had a Koran under one arm, and a bottle of Dom Pérignon under the other,’ said his Uncle William.

While the DEA was locked on to biting chunks out of the heroin trade on the eastern seaboard, their star informer, Daood Gilani, returned to Pakistan and began to hang out at a mosque known as
the Four Pillars, a vast seminary and prayer hall that occupied most of a historic crossroads in a frenetic part of Lahore. The Jamia Qadisiya was the realm of Lashkar-e-Toiba, the jihad organization that had made its name in Indian-administered Kashmir. From the mosque’s speakers came Lashkar’s message of liberating Kashmir from India. Banners strung outside the mosque announced ‘jihad’, a holy war in service of the Koran. In Pakistan, a country in free fall, without a reliable health service, emergency services or public education, the socially committed Lashkar was often the first to respond, especially after any kind of calamity. That made it attractive to many.

Daood, well versed in his father’s stories of Partition, was drawn to the anti-Indian crusade, and to the romantic idea of becoming one of Islam’s commandos. He also sensed a commercial opportunity: the possibility of trading up from drugs, with heroin on the decline, to procuring sensitive information about an entirely new threat that was beginning to worry his paymasters back in the US. When Daood got busted again, this time in New York in 1997, he tested this idea, coming up with a deal involving his proximity to radicals. A letter put before the court showed its effectiveness, as prosecutors conceded that while Daood might have supplied up to fifteen kilograms of heroin worth £947,000, he had also been ‘reliable and forthcoming’ with the agency about ‘a range of issues’. Sentenced to fifteen months in the low-security Fort Dix, New Jersey, while his co-conspirator received four years in a high-security jail, Daood was freed after only nine months.

In August 1999, he returned to Pakistan, his ticket paid for by the US government. It was one year after hundreds had been killed in simultaneous Al-Qaeda bomb attacks on American embassies in Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania, and Nairobi, in Kenya, and the reprisals from Washington saw seventy-five cruise missiles slamming into five Al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. He remained attached to the DEA, but American counter-terrorism outfits were also now interested in him, as Washington woke up to the forces of extremism operating from the Af-Pak border.

Back in Lahore, Daood acted as if he were plotting a textbook
infiltration. He bedded down, marrying Shazia Ahmed, a conservative Pakistani woman, and settled in an enclave beside the Lahore canal, the so-called lovers’ waterway, although his father, who was now Director General of Radio Pakistan, and his brother Danyal, who was sitting his Civil Service Exams, kept their distance. In late 2000, shortly after Al-Qaeda attacked the American destroyer USS
Cole
in Yemen, Daood donated 50,000 rupees (£600) to Lashkar’s jihad fund, buying himself entry to a private lecture given by Hafiz Saeed,
amir
of Lashkar’s parent organization, Jamaat-ud-Dawa. Saeed, a man who wore his beard Barbarossa style, bushy and hennaed red, was already on the US radar. After the talk, Daood asked the
amir
if he could enlist, but his request was ‘very politely declined’, he recalled. Half American and with white skin, Daood was treated with suspicion. He would have to work harder to gain acceptance.

He returned to the US and his other careers. He moved a new girlfriend, Portia Peter, a Canadian makeup artist, into his Upper West Side apartment, telling her nothing about the wife he had left in Pakistan. Until 9/11 happened, he seemed to her like a red-blooded American. But on that day Daood was glued to the TV and she recoiled when she caught him appearing ‘to gloat’, telling her in a fit of rage that America deserved to be attacked. His immersion in the world of jihad was showing through.

Horrified at his attitude at this moment of national crisis, Portia repeated Daood’s comments to a friend in a New York bar, who reported him to the police. The FBI questioned Portia. On 4 October, two Defense Department agents working for the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) quizzed Daood in front of his DEA handlers. ‘You think I’m an extremist,’ a defence official who reviewed the notes recalled Daood saying. ‘But you should check, as I’m working for the US government.’ He also played a game of chicken, claiming that he was related to the deputy director of Pakistan’s ISI spy agency, suspecting, correctly, that no one in the US would be able to quickly work out if that was true. By February 2002, five months after 9/11, Daood was once more in Pakistan, asked by the US government to redouble his efforts to get inside Lashkar, many
of whose cadres were now also orbiting around Al-Qaeda, including Daood’s new best friend and neighbour in Lahore, Pasha.

Pasha’s full name was Abdur Rehman Hashim; an ex-army officer in the 6th Baloch Rifles, he was handsome and battlefield savvy, and had resigned his commission after refusing an order to fight against Osama bin Laden in the Tora Bora Mountains, when the Pakistan military signed up to the Americans’ ‘war on terror’. Daood was transfixed by Pasha’s war stories, the former soldier revealing how he had joined forces with the Afghan Taliban. Under Pasha’s influence, Daood went from spending less than a month a year in Pakistan prior to 2001, to spending the better part of the year there.

He dressed in
shalwar kameez
(traditional dress). He told friends that he had renounced alcohol, TV and his mobile phone. He lodged at Lashkar’s headquarters in Muridke, a vast campus outside Lahore, even converting to the severe Ahl-e-Hadith sect that underpinned the outfit, a conservative Salafi strain of Sunni Islam, governed by the sayings and deeds of the Prophet. He also tried his hand at the arduous three-month paramilitary course, taking the bus into the mountains of Pakistan’s portion of Kashmir, to reach Lashkar’s secret training centre, the dramatically named
Bait-ul-Mujahideen
(the House of the Holy Warriors). It was under the control of Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, the outfit’s
amir
, co-founder and military commander, who was known by his students as
chacha
(uncle).

At forty-two, Daood was more than twice the age of most recruits. He failed the course and at the end of 2002 returned, humiliated, to New York. For the moment, he had nothing to trade with anyone and over the following months chafed against an American life, refusing to see anyone except his closest relatives. He had grown an unruly beard, as all
Hadeethis
were required to do, and spent much of his day praying, his hands crossed over his stomach in their severe and distinctive style. His mother Serrill and girlfriend Portia were alarmed by his transformation, with Serrill confiding her worries to a friend who ran a local coffee shop. ‘He is attending training camps in Pakistan and talking about how much he hates India,’ she said. Serrill’s friend reported Daood to the FBI.

What she did not know was that the FBI had already investigated him, as had the JTTF. The official view on Daood was that he might be an erratic source but he had massive potential, according to one of those who read his file. Accustomed to running agents deep under cover, they had higher tolerances than relatives and girlfriends. All deeply embedded sources were imperfect, hostile even, and hard to cajole, motivate and discipline. The nature of never belonging meant that their personalities were pulled out of shape, as were their lives, which were stretched between different cultures and commitments. The FBI’s training manual told agents to assume that deep-cover informers only ever served themselves. As one veteran FBI agent, who worked in the JTTF for two decades, put it: ‘The best a handler can hope for is that the source’s goals, at some point, coalesce with those of the outfit running him.’

Slowly Daood began to settle down, and his family put his outpourings to one side. After a few weeks he won Portia back, proposing to her in Central Park, flying her off to Jamaica, where they married in December 2002, with no mention of the two young children he had fathered in Pakistan with his first wife, Shazia.

For the next two and a half years, Daood flitted between the US and Pakistan, keeping his two lives separate but failing to get any real purchase on Lashkar. His personal life flared up again in August 2005 when Portia, who was frustrated and suspicious about her husband’s frequent trips to Pakistan, called up his father in Lahore, only to discover the secret family over there. Outraged and humiliated she confronted Daood in Fliks on 25 August, complaining to the police afterwards that he had turned violent, beating her. She also called the terror tip line, repeating everything he had told her about Pakistani training camps and Lashkar – which had been added to the US list of banned terrorist groups in 2003. The JTTF interviewed her three times but then she heard no more after Daood once again convinced the US authorities that everything he did was part of his covert life that was now well documented. He offered the Americans unique insights, not only into Lashkar, but the cadre within it who leant towards Al-Qaeda, choosing now to reveal his friendship
with Pasha, who ‘knew Osama bin Laden’. Six years into the hunt for the Al-Qaeda leader, Daood was classified as ‘significant’ in counter-terrorism circles, one of the only American passport holders who could claim, with any credibility, to be moving in the same circles as America’s Most Wanted.

In January 2006, after the United Nations Security Council added Lashkar-e-Toiba to a list of sanctioned organizations, freezing its leaders’ assets and instigating a travel ban and arms embargo, Daood decided to go out on a limb. He called up Pasha, suggesting an unauthorized road trip to meet contacts from his drug-dealing days, who ‘might be able to use those routes to smuggle weapons into India’. Surely this would open up Lashkar. But since 9/11 the landscape had drastically changed. West of Peshawar, the gateway to the Khyber Pass, the two men were arrested. These border areas were especially sensitive, as the West accused Pakistan of concealing Taliban refugees and Al-Qaeda’s leadership there. The Pakistan military had swamped the region with spies, agents and scouts, and foreign passport holders like Daood Gilani were banned from travelling there.

Pasha whipped out his military ID card, and after a night in the cells he was allowed to make one call. The ex-serviceman rang an old friend in the Khyber Rifles. Pasha and Daood were taken to an army camp, where an officer introduced himself as Major Ali. He saluted Pasha, the Lashkar cadre, and apologized for their treatment. Pasha whispered to Daood that ‘the Major was a spy’, an agent of the ISI, the intelligence agency run by the military that distributed funds and weapons to jihad factions fighting against India.

Dressed like a bank clerk, with a clipped moustache and dyed-black hair, the Major did not look like Daood’s vision of an ISI agent. Pasha explained that there were many different types of ISI men. Those on full-time deployment to the jihad mission became like their clients, often voluntarily submitting to conservative religious organizations too. The Major, on the other hand, was on short-term Lashkar duty, co-opted into Joint Intelligence North, which meant a
two- to three-year cycle dealing with jihad outfits, after which he would be moved elsewhere in the kingdom of spies.