Who Killed Daniel Pearl (36 page)

I turned toward the Emirate authorities: “What does Sheikh Abdullah bin Zaid al-Nahayan, the Minister of Information of the United Arab Emirates, have to say? What do the banking and finance authorities of the country have to say?”

I went back to New Delhi to question those who had already given me the interrogation transcripts and the prison diaries from 1994, to pose the question: “Can you see Omar in this role? Does he have what it takes? Above all, do you have any evidence that would confirm or deny the theory that Ahmad and Omar are one and the same?”

And finally I went to the States, to consult the archives of several major media sources (CNN, NBC,
The Washington Post, The Wall Street
Journal, The New York Times, Time Magazine, The Los Angeles Times,
Newsday
) and see the officials I thought closest to the case—Ann Korky at the Department of State, Bruce Schwartz at the Department of Justice, others.

From this new investigation, especially from my conversations in Washington, I gather subtle impressions that don't lead to any hard and fast conclusions—but they are troubling enough that I put them out, not in any particular order, but as they came.

1.September 11, it must be quickly pointed out, had other paymasters than “Mustafa Ahmad” (alias, or not, Omar Sheikh). There were other transfers, in addition to the mysterious $100,000 sent to Mohammed Atta in August 2000. There was Mamoun Darkazanli for example, a Syrian businessman who operates out of German banks, whose contribution to the operation—two transfers at least, on the 8th and 9th of September—was probably greater.

2. As to the identity of Mustafa Ahmad, there are other theories circulating besides the wild one about Omar. In the 3 October 2001
Newsday
John Riley and Tom Brune figure Mustafa Ahmad is the alias of a certain Shaykh Saiid, one of bin Laden's financial lieutenants (not in itself contradictory to the Omar hypothesis), but who they say was arrested at the time of the 1998 bombing of the American embassy in Tanzania, then quickly released by the Dar Es-Salaam police (and here the Omar theory no longer works, because in 1998 Omar was still in jail in India). The Associated Press in a 18 December dispatch says Mustafa Ahmad is in fact Sheikh Saiid, or Sa'd al-Sharif, or even Mustafa Ahmad al-Hisawi, or Al-Hawsawi, and he's a thirty-three-year-old Saudi brother-in-law and finance minister of bin Laden, who has been at his side since the Sudan years (and who is also known to have opened an account in Dubai for one Fayez Rashid Ahmed, alias Hassan al-Qadi Bannihammad, who was in the second plane, United Airlines 175).

3. The problem is all the more complex because there is another transfer of $100,000 that no one denies is linked to Omar but that nothing indicates is linked to September 11. We are at the beginning of August 2001, one year after the transfer to Mohammed Atta. In all probability the financing for the attack is already in place. Daniel Pearl's future killer writes to mafioso Aftab Ansari that he would like to see him give $100,000 dollars to a “noble cause.” Omar writes to Ansari again on the 19th to inform him (according to
The Times of India,
14 February 2002) that “the money has been sent.” To whom? For what purpose? Nobody knows. Nothing, again, indicates this transfer was connected to the attack on New York's Twin Towers. But, if the two are confused, if one thinks of the 2001 transfer when we're actually talking about the one in 2000 and transposes what is known of the former onto the later, if one doesn't see there are two transfers of $100,000, one could postulate: “Omar's $100,000? Yes, we know! The August 2001 transfer, of which nothing allows us to think there is a connection to al-Qaida,” and further conclude that Ahmad is Ahmad (first transfer) and Omar is Omar (second transfer) and that Ahmad is not Omar (clever demonstration—but is it the truth?). Again the trap of homonyms. But it doesn't stop with names. Because there also exist heteronymous transfers, financial quid pro quos, dollars which, like the Millers and their aliases, pass for other dollars. Masked money. Money as mask. In the world of shuffled identities it is money, of course, which provides the ultimate mask.

4. Meanwhile, the Omar hypothesis, according to which Ahmad is Omar, is one I discover has indeed circulated, was in print soon after the attack, and reprinted numerous times. Except that Omar at the time was not yet Omar, and his name meant nothing to anyone. So that in the CNN report shown on 6 October, the day of the attack on the Kashmir regional assembly, it is clearly stated that “Omar Saeed” and “Mustafa Mohammad Ahmad” are one and the same, and that this person would still be in prison were it not for the December 1999 Indian Airlines hijacking which freed him. Then two days later, also on CNN, the journalist Maria Ressa, reporting on another subject, describes Mustafa Ahmad as a young Pakistani twenty-eight years old, formerly of the London School of Economics, who was freed from prison in India in late 1999 as the result of an airline hijacking resembling those of September 11. Then an article appearing under the byline Praveen Swami in
The
Hindu
of New Delhi, reports on a communiqué from German intelligence attributing the $100,000 transfer to Ahmad Omar Sayed Sheikh, close associate of Masood Azhar, commander of Jaish e-Mohammed. This information will be repeated here and there until Danny's murder. For example, up until 10 February,
Time Magazine
and
The Associated Press
take seriously the idea that Daniel Pearl's killer was involved in financing September 11. Amazing hypothesis. Seen from Europe it seems incredible. But neither the State Department nor the Justice Department, nor the major media of Washington or New York seem to find it unreasonable or absurd.

5. Better still, in two major American newspapers I find confirmation of the sensational information that the Indians had given me, implicating the chief of Pakistani secret services, General Ahmad Mahmood, in the financing of the attack. The information, according to
The Times
of India
of 7 October and
The Daily Excelesior
of the 10th
,
was that “at the instigation of General Ahmad Mahmood” the enigmatic “Ahmad Umar Sheikh” had “transferred electronically to hijacker Mohammed Atta” the famous $100,000. And the very same day, 10 October 2001, the
Wall Street Journal
writes: “The American authorities confirm the fact that $100,000 was transferred to Mohammed Atta by Ahmad Umar Sheikh at the request of General Ahmad Mahmood.” The 18 May
Washington Post
goes further: “The morning of September 11, Goss and Graham (respective chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence committees) had breakfast with a certain Pakistani general, Mahmoud Ahmad, who a short time later was dismissed as head of Pakistani secret services; he had directed an organization that maintained ties with Osama bin Laden and the Taliban.” And then, even more incredible, I find in the 9 October
Dawn,
one of those small news items that pass through the censor's net without being denied or obfuscated: “The general director of the ISI, General Mahmoud Ahmad, was replaced after FBI investigators established a credible link between him and Omar Sheikh, one of three militants exchanged in the Indian Airlines hijacking in 1999.” And further: “Informed sources say that American intelligence agencies have proof that it was indeed on instructions from General Mahmoud that Sheikh transferred $100,000 to the account of Mohammed Atta.” The hypothesis, in other words, is no longer that Omar is the financier of September 11, but that Omar is operating on orders from the ISI. The hypothesis is no longer just that an Omar is linked to al-Qaida and a most spectacular terrorist operation, but that there is an Omar whose role is even greater than that—to facilitate a collusion between al-Qaida and the ISI, working together toward the destruction of the Twin Towers. For Indian agencies, the connection is not in doubt. In New Delhi I saw the results of decoding the telephone chip of Pearl's killer, showing, during the summer of 2000, at the time of the money transfer, repeated calls to General Mahmoud Ahmad. The FBI, of course, is more diplomatic, but I've spoken with people in Washington who confirm unofficially that the cell phone number decoded by RAW—0300 94587772—is Omar's, and that the list of calls made from it are the same as were shown to me in India. So, if Omar is proved to be the originator of the transfers it would be difficult to deny that it was done with the knowledge of the head of ISI.

6. We're left then with two distinct questions. And, in fact, three, which plunges us more than ever into the whirlpool of hypotheses and truths. There's the question of the link between Omar and the other Ahmad, of the ISI—established by the Indian Secret Service as almost certain, and not really astonishing to me: Hadn't I already established Omar as a man of the Pakistani services, and therefore Ahmad's agent? Then there's the question of the link, or more exactly, of the identity of Omar and the first Ahmad, originator of the September 2000 transfer— probable although not certain, but if confirmed, shedding a new light on the personality of Omar, agent of both the Pakistani ISI and Al Qaida. And lastly, the question we can no longer dodge, of the responsibility of the Pakistani secret service, or of one of the ISI's factions, in the attack on America and the destruction of the World Trade Center. Assuming that the answer to the first question is yes, and supposing as well that the answer to the second question is yes—how can we not think that the September 11 attack was desired and financed, at least in part, by secret agents of an officially “friendly” country, a member of the antiterrorist coalition, which offered logistical support and its intelligence services to the United States? These three questions, of course, are at the heart of my conversations in Washington. To the first, as I said, the American reply is yes: the proof from the cell phone, verified contact between Omar and the head of ISI—it's clear. To the second, it's more ambiguous: I'm told that two documents exist which may identify Ahmad; the indictment of Zakarias Moussaoui, of which I know nothing, and a video tape from a surveillance camera showing Mustafa Ahmad entering the Bank of Dubai at 1:15 on September 11, to recoup the funds transferred by Atta during the preceding days from a Western Union—no one has seen the video, but I think it confirms what the press still says as to the identity of Ahmad and Omar. And to the third question, finally, concerning the ultimate responsibility of Pakistan in the September 11 attack, it remains part of the great unspoken in the America of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld: If you accept that Ahmad and Omar are the same, and that Ahmad/Omar is the originator of the wire transfer, and you recognize the co-responsibility of the ISI in the attack, doesn't that call for a reexamination of the standing foreign policy which already positioned Iraq as the enemy and Pakistan as an ally? What remains essential for me is that I have a third reason to think (after Saud Memon, after Binori Town) that the murder of Daniel Pearl could have been, also, sponsored by al-Qaida.

Omar's staggering complexity.

The stunning obscurity of a person of double or triple depth.

Each time, we touch bottom . . .

. . . But at the bottom of each new depth, there is always a new trap door opening beneath our feet.

On the walls of the cave, behind the ultimate screen, always another screen that pulls us away, farther, into another spiral of this vertigo of Evil.

Unless, of course, this is the investigator's own vertigo, investigating vertigo. Unless he too is sucked into the hole, swallowed in this matrix, carried off on this nightmare ride—the intoxication of a mystery that ends by thinning out to nothing.

CHAPTER 4
AT THE HEART OF DARKNESS

I had all kinds of reasons to come to Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan.

I know this is where the Indian Airlines plane landed in 1999 when it was hijacked by Pakistani jihadists from Harkat ul-Mujahideen and its 155 passengers were exchanged for the release from prison of Omar, Masood Azhar, and Mushtaq Zargar.

I know that, once set free, Omar did not return immediately to Pakistan like his two comrades. Either he had some personal business here, or he wanted to pay tribute to the Taliban, whose mediation had facilitated negotiations with the hijackers and, consequently, his release, he stayed a few months in the country of the “students of religion.”

I know (since I read it in Delhi in his “prison diary”) that as early as 1993–1994, at the end of his stay in Bosnia, and while the mortal struggle between Massoud and his fundamentalist enemies was in preparation, Omar had already done two tours in training camps: one of them was near Miran Shah in the tribal zones of Pakistan; the other at Khalid bin Waleed inside Afghanistan.

And I'm mulling all this over when, as discreetly as possible, without informing the embassy—which would give my visit and the steps I plan to take a uselessly official connotation—and, without passing through Kabul, late in 2002, I land at the airport in Kandahar, the capital of the Taliban.

Of course, I have only one idea, an
idée fixe.
Omar. Omar more than ever. To confirm—or disprove—the ties between Omar Sheikh and Osama bin Laden. To find, or not, proof which, if it does exist, can exist only here, in the city that was once the capital of al-Qaida. To find out if I was dreaming in Dubai. To find out if I've let myself be taken in by a game of infinite theories, or if what I am really dealing with is one of those individuals with multiple faces—like Oswald, or like so many of the great spies of Cold War mythology—who invariably turn out to be different from who they seem and, when we think we have located them at the center of a great riddle, show up as part of another, even greater riddle, which clarifies the first . . . or makes it dissolve.