Who Killed Daniel Pearl (29 page)

I see a note—but this one I'm not allowed to take with me—which apparently is based on the contents of an FBI report: 0300 94587772 . . . Omar's cell phone number . . . the tracing of all his calls between July and October 2001 on that line. And among the numbers called, the number of General Mehmood Ahmed, who, until right after September 11, was the general director of the ISI.

Talking to Mohan Menon, communications director of the RAW, I'm treated to an analysis of the series of messages claiming responsibility for the kidnapping of Pearl that were sent to the press. What is strange, Menon tells me, is not the sudden appearance of this “Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty,” which was said in the United States to be unknown to Pakistani authorities. It wasn't unknown at all! It had already claimed responsibility in October for the peculiar kidnapping of Joshua Weinstein, a.k.a. Martin Johnson, the Californian they accused, like Daniel Pearl, of being a CIA agent—and whom we saw in the photos with two hooded men on either side of him pointing an AK-47 at his head, and he, too, is holding a Pakistani paper showing the date. No. What's interesting is how the messages are written. You have three of them. The last awful one, sent on 1 February from an Internet address ([email protected]) unknown to police: “We have killed Mr. Danny now Mr. Bush can find his body in the graveyards of Karachi we have thrown him there”—because of which the police spent two crazy nights, punctuated with crackpot confessions and phone calls from pranksters, searching the two-hundred-plus cemeteries in the city. There's the message from the day before, 30 January, when Pearl is already dead or about to die, which allows twenty-four hours and not one more for the kidnapper's demands to be met—“U cannot fool us and find us,” it says, in a bizarre, incomprehensible English riddled with mistakes. You will never find us because “we are inside seas, oceans, hills, graveyards, everywhere; we give u one more day; if America will not meet our demands, we will kill Daniel; then, this cycle will continue and no American journalist could enter Pakistan; Allah is with us and will protect us.” And then there's the very first message, the day after the abduction, which is written in perfect English with impeccable spelling and addressed like the others—but through another e-mail address ([email protected])—to the international press: Daniel Pearl is being held in inhumane conditions, was its gist. But these conditions are merely the reflection of the fate inflicted on the Pakistanis being held in Cuba by the American army. Improve the lot of our people, give in to our demands, and Pearl's fate will automatically be humanized. The message went on to outline the demands (which we would see again, white letters on black background like a macabre signature, at the very end of the 3 minutes and 36 seconds of the video of the decapitation): the right for Pakistanis arrested after September 11 to have a lawyer; the return of the Afghan and Muslim prisoners held by the American army on the Cuban base in Guantanamo, to be tried in Karachi; the liberation of Abdoul Sala Zaeef, former Taliban ambassador in Islamabad; and finally the resumed delivery of the F-16 jet fighters blocked in 1998 as reprisal for Pakistani nuclear tests, which had become ever since one of the constant demands of the country's military. Since when, Menon asks, do terrorists demand ambassadors and airplanes? Who are these jihadists who talk like a press release from the Joint Chiefs of Staff? Where are the screams of hate for the infidels and the Zionist conspiracy that jihadist communiqués are normally riddled with?

And then this final piece of information. Or, to be more exact, this story: I am in the office of A. K. Doval who is now the head of the Domestic Intelligence Bureau but who was, nine years ago, at the time of the Indian Airlines plane hijacking, a member of the delegation which brought Masood Azhar, Mushtaq Zargar and Omar Sheikh to Kandahar for the exchange. “Here's the hijacked plane,” he tells me, pencil in hand. “Ours, coming from Delhi, landed here, at the other end. But theirs is exactly here, at the end of this runway in the deserted Kandahar airport. Here to the right you have the Taliban, who, when they realized we had brought commandos with us, disguised as nurses and social workers, were ready to move in, lined up two armoured vehicles, rocket launchers and a handful of sharpshooters all along the runway, aimed not at the hijackers but at us. On the other side of the runway, on the left, you have this little building where Erik de Mul is with the other UN people, seriously handicapped by the fact that they don't speak Urdu. Then here, just next to that, you have an officers' mess where we've set up with walkie-talkies to finish, in the place of the UN, the negotiations with the hijackers, who in any case only want to talk to us. It's cold. The tension is extreme. Nobody dares make a move. We're all expecting that, at any minute, either the hijackers or the Taliban will lose it. At one point, one of my sharpshooters gets a guy in a turban in his sights who's jumped out and is standing in the doorway of the plane, shouting, holding a hostage and a box-cutter—‘Do I shoot?' asks my guy. And then here, a little farther, you have a last building where there are three high-ranking officers of the ISI who also have walkie-talkies. And that's when three incredible things happen.”

“1. When the hijackers forget to turn off their receivers, we hear the voices of the ISI guys, telling them what to do, what to answer, how to handle the situation.

“2. When we finally reach an agreement and we bring Sheikh, Azhar and Zargar to the plane to proceed with the exchange, it's not the hijackers, it's the ISI guys who, as it were, on their own account, come to check their identities.

“3. And when the trade is finally made and the ISI officers take charge of the prisoners—here, you see these three little rectangles, those are their vehicles, which the Taliban lent them—I see the one who seems to be their leader kiss Omar Sheikh, call him by his first name and say, ‘So, back to Kandahar. I'm so happy to see you.'” Doval is looking at me, his eyes twinkling behind his round, intellectual's glasses: “Could you dream of any better proof of the collusion between Omar and the secret service?”

That's the Indian point of view.

I give it, I repeat, for what it is: the point of view of an enemy state who, involved in a total war with a hereditary adversary, can't be negligent on any front.

I don't exclude, may I stress, the possibility of having been manipulated by Doval and Datta on a particular point or perhaps a document, as I could have been by any Pakistani I spoke to. That's the game, I'm not unaware of it.

But, really, all this is too convergent not to make sense, finally.

Omar Sheikh, from Delhi's perspective, is an agent.

He has been for a long time: from his London School days, more or less.

He's one of those brilliant, competent young people that the Pakistani secret service spots when they're in college and tries to win over.

And, parenthetically, that's probably even the explanation of the mystery I bumped up against in Sarajevo and in London—it's the key to the trip to Bosnia, the strange trip that left no traces, which has puzzled me so much and for which I have dilligently but unsuccessfully tried to reconstruct an itinerary.

“Too ill to accompany them to Bosnia,” writes Omar on page 36 of his Indian diary . . . Too ill, yes, to follow the mission of the Convoy of Mercy to the end, after it leaves from England to bring supplies to Jablanica . . . Asad Khan's version, in other words. Omar, in this document, confirms the version of the Convoy's organizer! And the idea that occurs to me is the following: What if the whole Bosnian affair—trip, humanitarian aid, emotion felt from seeing the film
Destruction of a
Nation,
anger, the fact that nobody can say whether the guy went all the way to Mostar or stopped in Split, but everybody keeps saying, that he experienced the great turning point of his life with the martyrdom of Sarajevo—what if all of it were a fabrication, window-dressing after the fact, a way of inventing a plausible biography for someone who, for a long time, maybe since London and his admission to the London School of Economics, had been working for the ISI?

I don't claim that Omar
never
went to Bosnia.

I don't exclude the possibility that Saquib Qureshi, his friend from student days, was
also right
when he told me Omar could have made a second trip to the Balkans, without the Convoy of Mercy.

And I would get confirmation of that second trip long after my stay in India, reading an interview Omar gave in jail on 6 February 2003 to
Takbeer
, an Urdu Islamist weekly, in which he describes, as if they were scenes he'd
witnessed
, “Serb attacks” against Muslim villages, “women and children reduced to cinders,” a “child's burned hand on a pile of ashes,” “babies' legs in a heap,” “piles of corpses.”

I simply say that there is a Bosnian legend in Omar Sheikh's biography that serves to glorify—adding anger, thought, compassion—a much less honorable exploit of a very young man caught up in the destiny of a cop and a secret agent.

I say that this Bosnian affair is like his relationship to “Being Muslim” and like the way he tells Peter Gee, after the fact and in the face of contrary evidence, that he was a persecuted Muslim, victimized, the prey of little English boys' mundane racism—all packaging, a red herring, retroactive justification.

Bosnia is not, as I had first thought, a hole, an enigmatic blank spot, a section of his life that had fallen into oblivion and that everybody, starting with this investigator, had lost track of. Instead, it is a lie, a deliberate invention, a construction—as often with this kind of character, the production of a piece of biography that serves as a decoy and a false trail.

CHAPTER 6
IN THE DEMON'S LAIR

Omar, ISI agent.

The child from Deyne Court Gardens, the good student, Saquib's friend, the gifted individual with the brilliant future ahead of him, the pride of his family become a slave of the state, a dog of war for the Pakistani powers-that-be, a killer—Islamabad is where I would find the final confirmation of this spectacular turnaround.

We are in October 2002.

It's my third stay in the Pakistani capital.

I am busy trying, for the third time, to find the trace of this man that everybody here seems to want to forget.

Because the Indians are right, finally!

How could a felon, convicted of kidnapping and freed by another kidnapping, move around so freely on these vast avenues, crammed with military?

How does this man, who is supposed to have gone underground— because of what he is about to do as much as because of what he has done—move around so easily, without taking any precautions? How does he break all the rules—how to avoid being followed, taking safe routes, changing addresses—that are obligatory for shadowy characters, terrorists included?

It would be understandable in Karachi, where we all know that nobody has had anything or anyone under control for a long time.

It's all right in Lahore, where he lives in a beautiful house, gives a party in January to celebrate the birth of his baby, receives local dignitaries, is received by them, goes to the same clubs they do, moves in the same high society circles and is counted among local personalities—he's from Lahore, after all. You could say to those who have doubts that he's at home in Lahore, in his and his family's fiefdom.

But Islamabad!

The Potemkin village of those in power!

The center of gravity, the nerve-center of the state and its agencies!

How to explain that he is like a fish in water in Islamabad?

How can a supposedly hunted man matter-of-factly order a book on the Kandahar airplane hijacking from the “Mr. Books” bookstore, which everyone knows is just a stone's throw from ISI headquarters, on Khayaban i-Suharawardy Road?

Here's a man who has already spent five years in jail in India for a series of crimes of the same kind as the one he is preparing to commit. Here's a jihadist suspected of complicity in the attack on the Jammu-Kashmir assembly in Srinagar with a truck full of explosives, then in the 13 December grenade attack on the New Delhi Parliament, and then, again, in the 22 January operation—right before Pearl's kidnapping— against the American Cultural Centre in Calcutta. Here's a repeat offender whose extradition—we know this now—Washington had demanded just a few weeks earlier, in November, in connection with the 1994 kidnapping (one of the victims, Bela Nuss, fortuitously, was American), sending the ambassador Wendy Chamberlain to Islamabad in person on January 9, fourteen days before the abduction, to insist he be arrested. Here's a man who is not only one of the most dangerous, but also one of the most wanted on the planet. Who can believe that this man is able, without very solid support, that is to say without ties to the country's secret service, to move around the way he does, with total impunity?

I'm thinking about how arrogant he looks in the photos at the end of his trial.

I'm thinking again about his answer to the FBI agents who asked him in February if he had links to the ISI: “I will not discuss this subject. I don't want my family to be killed.” Whether he feels any remorse: “My only remorse is the child. I have a child who is two months old. So the idea that Pearl was about to become a father, too, that makes me feel a bit of remorse.” Another answer he gave, which I was told about in Washington, that was accompanied by a huge burst of laughter: “Did you say extradition? You really think I can be extradited? Come on, gentlemen, you're dreaming! Three, four years maximum, here in Pakistan! And then I'm out.” Almost the same words as in the 13 March
Newsweek
article.