Who Killed Daniel Pearl (35 page)

First observation. The freezing of suspect accounts, under pressure by the Americans following September 11, is seen in Dubai as a big joke. Too slow. Too forewarned. Too many problems of identification, if only because of the Arabic names, their English transcriptions, and homonyms. It's the classic story of the Americans sending notice to an English bank that says to freeze the account of Mr. Miller, or Miler, or Mailer, resident of London, we're not quite sure. What to do? Given that there are thousands of Mr. Mailers in London, and even more Mr. Millers, how do you find the right one? It's exactly the question which was raised here, in Dubai, when the FBI sent their lists of Mr. Mohammed or Mr. Mohammad, or Ahmed, or Maulana. Add to that the problem of pseudonyms. Add to that the Muslim charitable organizations, which deftly mix money from criminal activities with that of humanitarian aid. And then add the embarrassment of Western banks themselves which, before September 11, having no major reason to be suspicious, blithely and without knowing, took part in these dealings: Didn't Mohammed Atta, right up to the end, keep an open account here, in the emirate, at CitiBank? What about the pilot of the second plane, Marwan al-Shehhi, opening his main account at the HSBC branch here in July 1999, and using it right up to the very eve of the attack? And what about the fact that he and the others managed to open dozens of accounts in major American banks, 14 of them alone at Sun Trust Bank, often with false papers? So the record is disastrous. The terrorist organizations had more than enough time to re-deploy their funds and protect themselves. “Guess,” says Sultan handing me a report from a local think-tank, “how much money was left in the Harkat ul-Mujahideen account the day it was seized: 4,742 rupees, or $70! Or the account of Jaish e-Mohammed, immediately re-baptized al-Furqan, which therefore nobody thought to freeze: 900 rupees, $12! And in those of al-Rashid Trust—guardian, don't forget, of the assets of the Taliban as well as Lashkar e-Toiba: 2.7 million rupees, or $40,000—relative to the wealth of the Trust, another joke. Guess how much they seized from Ayman Al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian who, as you know, was one of al-Qaida's financiers: $252! The al-Qaida fortune, its war chest, reduced to $252, we must be dreaming!”

Second observation. Al-Qaida resources. Everyone acts as though al-Qaida and bin Laden were one and the same. Everyone, in the West as much as the average Arab on the street, seems to hang on to the idea of a terrorist organization financed out of the pockets of the Saudi billionaire and his family, propaganda to which he is not indifferent—the cliché of the family scion immolating his colossal fortune on the altar of Arab revenge is a powerful part of his legend. What better way to enhance his popularity than this idyllic image—drawn in part from the red millionaires of our past, romantic financiers of world revolution like Hammer and Feltrinelli—the cursed and rebel son, the ascetic heir who decides to bequeath his inheritance to the damned of the earth and to Allah? Unfortunately, it's false. Al-Qaida, I come to understand in Dubai, is no longer the virtuous self-sufficient, family-type enterprise it once was. It's a Mafia. A trust. It's a gigantic network of extortion extending worldwide, from which bin Laden himself, far from depleting his capital, continues to profit. It extends from the common racket of taxes on gambling, such as those the Macao mafia levies, to percentages taken on the Afghan drug trade, to the sophisticated, almost undetectable mechanisms of financial fraud based not on theft, but on the duplication of credit cards. These young financiers, not unlike Omar Sheikh, have become masters in the art of selling to the West the rope with which to hang itself—which is to say in this case, to turn the West's own arms, and often, its own vices, against itself. “You know the technique?” asks Sultan. “It consists of selling a stock that you don't have but that a bank will lend you for a commission, and that you buy back later at the market price when the time comes to return it to the bank. Suppose it's worth 100, but you have reason to believe it'll go down to 50. Suppose you know that an attack on the World Trade Center is going to happen, which will drive the market down. So you rent the stock and immediately sell it at the market price, which is still 100. When the attack comes and the stock takes a dive as expected, you buy back at 50 what you sold for 100 and pocket the difference. This is a technique American and English banks perfected, and here in Dubai we caught on quickly. We know a bank here that made this kind of transaction between the 8th and 10th of September on certain Dow Jones blue-chip stocks for accounts linked to bin Laden—I know the name of a bank that, by shorting 8000 shares of United Airlines on the 7th of September, then 1,200 shares of American Airlines on the morning of the 10th, allowed the attack to finance itself.” What bank is it? Sultan won't tell me. But the next day he gives me the translation of an interview with bin Laden published on 28 September, in
Ummat,
one of Karachi's Urdu dailies: “Al-Qaida is full of young, modern, and educated people who are aware of the cracks inside the Western financial system, and know how to exploit them. These faults and weaknesses are like a sliding noose strangling the system.” That says it all.

Third observation. Or rather a statement. That of Brahim Momenzadeh, a liberal Saudi attorney who receives me in his futuristic office facing the sea, on the top floor of a glass and black marble building, and who was described to me as an international specialist in sophisticated occult financial systems. “Islamism is a business,” he explains to me with a big smile. “I don't say that because it's my job, or because I see proof of it here in my office ten times a day, but because it's a fact. People hide behind Islamism. They use it like a screen saying: ‘Allah Akbar! Allah Akbar!' But we know that here. We see the deals and the movements behind the curtain. In one way or another, it all passes through our hands. We do the paper work. We write the contracts. And I can tell you that most of them couldn't care less about Allah. They enter Islamism because it's nothing other than a source of power and wealth, especially in Pakistan. It's true of the big ones, the chiefs who make fortunes with their benevolent associations which are just fronts. But take the young ones in the
madrasas
. They see the high rollers in their SUVs having five wives and sending their children to good schools, much better than the
madrasas.
They have your Pearl's killer, Omar Sheikh, right in front of their eyes. When he gets out of the Indian prisons and returns to Lahore, what do the neighbors see? He's very well-dressed. He has a Land Cruiser. He gets married and the city's big shots come to his wedding. They notice that Islamism is very good to him, that it is the sign of his success, a means of promotion. They know it's a good way to get protection from government agencies and the powerful. Believe me—very few people in Pakistan become Islamists out of conviction or fanaticism! They're just looking for a family, a Mafia, capable of protecting them from hard times. And Islamism is the best solution. It's as simple as that.” Is it really as simple as that? Can we skip over ideology and fanaticism so easily? I don't know. That is, in any case, the point of view of a Dubai businessman. That is the other face of the madness of these times, as perceived in the Arab financial capital. The young lions of radical Islam? The Golden Boys of jihad.

Fourth observation. Kamikaze money. In Sri Lanka I had met a repentant former member of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE, a movement grounded in the ideology of the suicide-attack. She told me about the intellectual mechanisms at work in this kind of enterprise. I also met in Ramallah a Palestinian father with ties to Hezbollah— therefore, and I hasten to make clear, not representative of the general mentality of Palestinian fathers—who told me how happy and proud he was to know that one of his sons was going to sacrifice himself for the anti-Jewish jihad: “It's an honor,” he explained, “but also a chance for all of us—doesn't it say in the Koran that a family who gives a martyr to Allah is automatically provided sixty places in heaven?” Here in Dubai, I gather more precise and detailed information. Here, thanks to Sultan and to others, I have the impression of entering of the financial underside of the self-sacrificial world.

The al-Qaida militant has a price. Between 2,500 and 5,000 rupees (5,000 and 8,000 if he's foreign, meaning, in fact, Arab). The grenade launcher has his: 150 rupees per grenade (bonus if the results are good). An attack on an Indian army officer in Kashmir has its own: between 10,000 and 30,000 rupees (bonuses varying with the rank of the target). And the kamikaze, too, has his price, decided ahead of time in an actual negotiation between himself, the organization, and his family, which assures the family of almost decent living standards: 5,000 and sometimes 10,000 rupees—but per year, and for life, and, when the contract is negotiated well, indexed for inflation and based on strong currencies.

There's the case I read somewhere of an Afghan refugee, a father living in the greater suburbs of Dubai, who received after the death of two of his children in Tora Bora in November 2001, the necessary funds to open a butcher shop. There's the case of a Yemeni drowning in debt who found himself one day, after the departure of his son for unknown parts, delivered from his predicament as if by magic wand, and able to return to Sanaa. There are agencies, not quite banks but more than simple money exchangers, where suicide-attack candidates come to fill out applications almost as naturally as for a loan. There are foundations—the Shuhda e-Islam Foundation, for example, created in 1995 by the Pakistani Jamaat e-Islami—whose
raison d'etre
is to assume responsibility for the killers' families. And then, most horrible of all, the
madrasas
where the future kamikazes are raised, or one should say trained, with the full consent of their families.

Martyrdom as a social program to assist needy families?

Suicide-attack as both social ladder and life insurance?

And then the last observation—and the most important because I'm going to pick up again the thread of my investigation, from a most unexpected angle. By searching the apartments, the hiding places and the cars abandoned by the hijackers of September 11, Sultan explains, the FBI had traced some of the money transfers that served as the financial basis of the operation as early as 18 September: roughly speaking, and corroborated by evidence, $500,000 to possibly $600,000—a considerable sum compared to the $20,000 or $30,000 that the first attack on the World Trade Center cost eight years earlier. More precisely, the investigators focused on one of these transfers, possibly the first, since it dates from August 2000, coming from a major bank in the Emirates and going to the first account opened in the United States by Mohammed Atta after his Hamburg period: $100,000 expedited by a mysterious character who had arrived two months earlier from Qatar with a Saudi passport and who called himself Mustafa Muhammad Ahmad. Even more precisely, the investigators following the $100,000, reconstituting its trail, made four discoveries:

1. In the month following its opening, Mohammed Atta's American bank account is the starting point for a series of smaller transfers— $10,000 dollars, sometimes less—to a dozen other accounts, most at the Sun Trust Bank in Florida, in the names of his accomplices.

2. Once credited to these accounts, the money was withdrawn in cash amounts of $100, $200, and $300 from ATMs. Abdulaziz Alomari for example, Mohammed Atta's companion on the American Airlines flight, was videotaped on the night of the 10th, a few hours before the operation withdrawing money from an ATM at a bank in Portland, Maine.

3. The next day, September 11, Atta, along with Marwan al-Shehhi and Waleed al-Shehri, two hijackers who were on the first plane from Boston, send back to Mustafa Ahmad, the originator of the initial transfer, $4,000, $5,400, and $5,200 respectively, a total of $14,600 dollars, corresponding to unused mission expenses scrupulously returned like all good bureaucrats to an organization's treasury.

4. Mustafa Ahmad, who hasn't budged from Dubai, receives these leftovers, transfers them to an account in a bank in Pakistan, and flies the same day, September 11, still using his Saudi passport, to Karachi, where he proceeds on the 13th to make six cash withdrawals emptying the account, before disappearing completely.

5. Mustafa Ahmad's real name isn't Mustafa Ahmad, but Shaykh Saiid, also known as Saeed Scheik, or Omar Saeed Sheikh—my Omar, in other words, the author of Daniel Pearl's kidnapping, and the villain of this story . . .

No need to say what effect this had on me. At first I don't believe it. I think: the polite and plump little Englishman, student of the London School of Economics with a passion for chess and arm wrestling, flower-lover at the Aitchinson School, good fellow at the Forest School, the moderate Muslim never objecting to Anglican payers at chapel, Omar, involved in September 11—it's impossible! It's absurd! Too much, too crazy, too perfect, to be true! The “Panther” and the “Force” were hard-pressed to imagine how their old partner could be mixed up with Daniel Pearl's assassination. Saquib Qureshi and the others couldn't believe their eyes and ears when they saw him on television in the role of executioner, their good friend, their brother. What would they say now if they heard this? What will they say when they read, if they read it, that a good friend—who opposed with them the fundamentalist take-over attempt of their school's “Bosnia Week” and whose single exterior sign of being Muslim was to arrive at a bar for an arm wrestling match bearing a carton of milk—was, not just at the controls, but at the cash-box of the greatest act of terrorism of all time?

I had to be certain.