Who Killed Daniel Pearl (27 page)

“Too much so, perhaps. It looks like a crude manipulation.”

Tariq shrugs his shoulders, like someone who has said all he has to say and leaves you to figure things out yourself. We've come back to Aurangzeb. The gates of the park are closed. It looks to me like the small crowd on the sidewalks is not as dense as it was a while ago. Besides the addicts, there are now, wandering around some brand new cars, a group of young aspiring starlets, maybe leaving Radio Pakistan, which is nearby, 100 meters away. He turns one last time towards me and offers his hand amicably. His gaze is distracted now, absent.

“Be careful. This is a sensitive matter. I know them. I know how the Mohajirs think. And I know they wouldn't like the idea that someone new is meddling in this—especially a foreigner. God keep you.”

I had forgotten this other factor in the Pakistani equation: the hostility that has existed since the birth of Pakistan between the native Punjabis and the ones they call here the Mohajirs—the millions of people who came from India in 1949, at the time of Partition. Could it be that this rivalry is a dimension of the Pearl affair? Is it conceivable, for example, that the Punjabi high command (contrary to what Tariq pretends to believe, 90% of the ISI's superior officers are Punjabis) has found an excellent means of destabilizing Musharraf (who is, as no one here forgets, the most eminent of Mohajirs and who, when the Pearl affair exploded, had just completed a radical purge whose aim, under the pretext of fighting the Islamists, was to rid the ISI of Punjabis)? And is this the real reason Tariq wanted to see us, and to talk to us?

But he's already out of the car. Now that I see him standing, he looks smaller than I thought. He leaves as he came, a little man with oversized shoulders who plunges into the night, leaving Abdul and me to some new theorizing.

Let's say that Omar is, as Tariq says, an ISI agent.

Let's say that's a possible explanation for his attitude during and after his trial.

Let's say that that's one of the reasons for this strangely docile attitude that makes Omar accept, basically, being the fall guy.

The real question then becomes who, exactly, in the services set him up, and with what end in mind.

Because it's either one or the other.

Either Musharraf has a hold on his country, he is informed, in real time, of the work of his services, and, in fact, Tariq is right: Musharraf knows, when he is in the United States, where Pearl has been detained; he knows, especially, that Pearl is already dead when he declares to the American press that he has every hope of seeing him liberated. On this point, why not? We can well imagine a forceful negotiator like the General-President—formerly of the ISI himself, let's not forget—keeping the card of a journalist's liberation up his sleeve, taking advantage of it to make things last, and showing it at what he judges the opportune moment. The second point, however, is not so simple, it is hard to see why a head of state nurturing a strategic alliance with the United States— F-16s notwithstanding—would add cynicism to a crime. It's hard to see why, knowing that Pearl is dead and the announcement of his execution is a matter of days or hours away, Musharraf would chose to offer one last lie that could only, in the end, add to his partner's anger.

Or, alternatively, Musharraf is in control of nothing. He is deceived by his own services. The man officially charged with keeping him abreast of developments in the affair (who, by the way, turns out to be none other than Brigadier Cheema, the man at the Ministry of the Interior who answered my questions regarding Omar) makes a point of providing him with erroneous information. This so-very-fragile head of state, this king without crown or territory, who has already escaped—no one in Pakistan can forget it—six assassination attempts and who had to cancel an August 2000 visit to Karachi because his own security said they could not protect him, knows, perhaps, where Pearl has been held. But he does not know of Pearl's possible murder, nor that the deed has actually been done. The very fact that he says he has good reason to believe that the American journalist will be liberated soon, the confidence with which he utters those words, the political risks he takes by saying them, all this, rather than prove his duplicity, tends to demonstrate his innocence. And the whole thing would amount to a gigantic maneuver on the part of the services, or, at least a faction of the services, seeking to ridicule, destabilize, and place in an awkward position a president whose Western alliances they contest and whose authority they seek to undermine by any means possible.

What better means to discredit Musharraf, in fact, than to let him say, “Pearl is alive” when they know that he no longer is?

What better way to mark the balance of power and to tell the world—starting with the Americans—that this man is a puppet and that the real power is in other hands, than to let him get tangled up in his own promises. Or, better still, to inflate them by feeding him, and the press, erroneus information—and, then, to pull the rug out from under him at the opportune time?

The services have their policy on Kashmir. They had a policy—perhaps they still do—on Afghanistan. In all probability, they have a policy for the Pearl affair, and we have witnessed a new stage in the power struggle between the State and the State-within-the-State that is the Pakistani services.

Ten days before the kidnapping, and not without courage, Musharraf made a long antiterrorist speech that half of Pakistan assumed was dictated by Colin Powell. Right after that, he had two thousand jihadists arrested, the majority from groups blacklisted by the United States. He closed the training camps in Pakistani Kashmir. He started cleaning up the services themselves by placing his old friend Ehsan ul-Haq, a man who is considered a moderate, representative of the “secular and kemalist” wing of the organisation, at their head. And there it is. The kidnapping, then the execution of Daniel Pearl is tit for tat. Omar Sheikh, the young Londoner who became a warrior of Allah, must have been exploited by the branch of the ISI hostile to Musharraf. And there's every reason to believe the message got through because in the following weeks, after a vague and comic promise not to dabble in terrorism, the police released half of the assassins they had previously arrested.

Who rules Pakistan?

The President, or the services?

That is the question the Pearl affair raises.

That is the question raised by an agent named Omar.

CHAPTER 5
WHEN THE KILLER CONFESSES

There's one place in the world where no one has the slightest doubt that Omar is an ISI agent—India.

Of course, I know there are many things to consider.

I know that India can derive great advantage from the idea that the murder of a prominent American journalist was commissioned by their sworn enemy, Pakistan.

I also know my own biases: I love this country so much! I feel, particularly after being in Pakistan, so happy here! I haven't been here in thirty years, and it takes me only an hour on Connaught, ten minutes at the Gandhi Memorial and five at the Chandni Chowk Bird Hospital to be flooded with a stream of memories that have been languishing in my mind and which I suddenly rediscover, with incredible precision: emotion, sensuality, a nostalgia of mind and sense. The jacket I wore, the woman I loved, her tight little chignon. The lights of the temple where we slept without permission. The money-changer/magician, that first evening on Connaught, who, by folding the bills in half as he was counting them, had robbed me of half my meager fortune—funny, how the love for a place is a love that never dies!

Anyway, I wanted from the start to have the Indian point of view on the case.

I meet with journalists, intellectuals, retired and active military men, scientists, heads of “think-tanks”—those American-model idea shops flourishing in the India of the new millennium.

Using what little influence my Bangladeshi past seems to give me here, I schedule meetings at the federal Ministry of the Interior; then at the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), India's equivalent of the ISI, with the few people assigned to follow not only the Pearl affair but also Omar.

Which is how I found myself in the heart of New Delhi in a mini-Pentagon—composed of a series of bunkerized buildings, with walls of sandbags and cement, a veritable fortress against the suicide bombings regularly threatened by Muslim fundamentalist—swarmed from morning until night by men and women in Western-style dress, who look more like the employees of any big bureaucracy than like spies.

“A book about Daniel Pearl?” asks Sudindrah Datta, deputy to the head of the RAW. He's around thirty, square-jawed and good-humored with the manner of a gym teacher, and is receiving me in his huge and bare office, which has no files, no furniture, just a table, a couch, a chair on which he has hung his windbreaker, and an old, wheezing air-conditioner. From next-door, the clacking of secretaries typing. “Yes, that's interesting. We know you are an old friend of our country. But first, tell me. It seems you've just been in Pakistan . . . How are those lunatics?”

A long day, then, spent in a universe so bizarre I never thought I'd have to deal with it except in novels.

A day spent poring over dusty documents produced on old-fashioned typewriters, seeking the overlooked detail that changes everything, the decisive clue, the lie that exposes another lie, the mystery that opens, like Russian dolls, into another even thicker mystery, the forgotten name, the word which in a flash reveals the country behind the lies and the crime.

And at the end of the day, three exceptional documents and several pieces of information—some of which had never before come out of these archives.

Document no. 1. The most exceptional and perhaps most fascinating, even if it is not the most directly tied to my investigation—in cramped typing, single-spaced on an old typewriter, in the nothing-butthe-facts language common to all the police forces of the world, a copy of the transcript of the interrogation of Masood Azhar, the future boss of the Jaish-i Mohammed and already at that time—summer 1994, after his arrest in Kashmir—a most-wanted terrorist.

No direct link, then, with the Pearl case. Not a word, for example, about his disciple Omar Sheikh. But a precise description of the relationships between the different groups that comprise the Pakistani Islamic movement during those years. A description, from within, of the series of schisms that endlessly divide it. The trips to Albania, Kenya, Zambia, Great Britain, taken by this relentless propagandist for a jihad that must set fire to the planet before submitting it to the law of Islam. The extraordinary freedom with which he moves around London, which, we discover with horror, is already the real bridgehead of terrorism in Europe. How he thinks he's too fat—“I am a too fatty person”—to go through complete military training. How he makes up for it by managing newspapers—
Sadai Mujahid,
for example—that spread jihadist propaganda all over the Pakistan. His campaign in favor of Islamabad's withdrawal from the international forces in Somalia. His faith in a Pakistan that would, via fire and sword, deserve its name of “Country of the Pure.” In short, an amazing intaglio portrait of this holy man—because Masood presents himself as a holy man, a religious person, a pious soul—who holds the Koran in one hand and a machine gun in the other. And then, reading on, as he recounts his difficulties in obtaining a visa for Bangladesh and India, comes the tale of the deception—how, with the help of the Pakistani government and in fact the ISI, he obtains a fraudulent Portugese passport in the name of Wali Adam Issa.

Omar is not cited by name. Still, I can't help thinking about the fact that Masood is his mentor. They were both freed together, as we recall, after the terrorist operation at the Kandahar airport. It has not been ruled out that Masood was among those who, with Omar, planned Pearl's kidnapping. And I can't help but consider that Omar's mentor, who is possibly one of the Pearl abduction planners, has strong enough ties to the Pakistani secret service to be given a fraudlent passport—one which, as the transcript clearly recounts, would fool even the most discerning Indian customs officials.

Document no. 2. The transcript of Omar's own interrogation, after the abductions of Rhys Partridge, Paul Rideout, Christopher Morston and Bela Nuss, the English and American tourists he kidnapped in New Delhi in 1994.

He's just back from Bosnia. He's just gone through weeks of military training in the Miran Shah camp. He's part of all those jihad troops on meager pay, born too late in a world that is too old, who have seen the wars in Bosnia and Afghanistan end before they could really participate, and who are desperately seeking another “great cause” to embrace. Palestine, whose sinful leaders, in the wake of Oslo, are making compromises with the Israeli Satan? Chechnya, where the Russian army is involved in its war of conquest, control and—some aren't afraid to say it—extermination? Maybe the Philippines, where the Abbu Sayyaf groups are marking out their territory? No. For him, as for many other Pakistanis of his generation, it will be Kashmir, the province Pakistan and India are fighting over, where Pakistani terrorist groups, supported by the secret service, have been engaged in terrorist guerrilla warfare for nearly forty years.

“There are things to do within India itself,” he was told by a man he calls in the transcript Maulana Abdullah, a Jihadist chieftain, member of the Harkat ul-Mujahideen, whom he met in the Afghan camps. “There's combat on the ground in Kashmir. There's a military battle against the occupying forces. But there's also work to be done behind the Indian army, in Delhi. You've got dual nationality, Pakistani and English. You can even give up your Pakistani passport and apply in London for a visa for India, which you'll get in a heartbeat. You're exactly the kind of man we need. We're waiting for you.” After which Omar finds himself, on 26 July 1994, at the Holiday Inn in New Delhi, the same city I knew so well—but twenty-five years before him, in the year of his birth, I realize. He finds himself in New Delhi with a clear mission: to kidnap foreigners, hold them, and make a deal to exchange their freedom for that of six leaders of the Harkat ul-Mujahideen, including Masood Azhar, languishing in Indian prisons.