Who Killed Daniel Pearl (39 page)

“I've come to see you, Mr. Governor, because I'm interested in a man who was here at the end of the '80s.”

“Oh the '80s . . . that's a long time ago, the '80s,” he says, taking a handful of pistachios an aide has shelled, and stuffing them all in his mouth.

“Yes, but it's important . . . he's an enemy of Afghanistan. Remember our conversation last year when you said the Pakistanis were enemies of your country. Well, this man is Pakistani . . . ”

“Yes, I remember,” he grumbles, suspicious, then angry; but it's only a piece of pistachio stuck between two teeth—he glares at his aide-de-camp.

“I'm convinced, Mr. Governor, that this man who is today in prison in Pakistan underwent military training here in Afghanistan; and I'm certain he still has connections and support in the region.”

He looks happy now. He's managed to extricate the piece of pistachio and so he's happy, and he smiles at me. And I choose to interpret this as an invitation to proceed.

“The name of the camp is Khalid bin Waleed.”

“I remember,” he repeats, “I remember . . . ”

But he is slumped over his table now, eyes half closed. His voice is husky, a little thick. I'm afraid he's going to sleep. Even the pistachios, he takes sluggishly, a few at a time.

“It's important, Mr. Governor. Very important. The French government attaches the greatest importance to the—”

A miracle! The words
French government
have the effect, one wonders why, of waking him up. He starts, twists his hat on his head, and stares attentively at me as if seeing me for the first time.

“The money,” he says. “I hope you have the money!”

What money? What's he talking about? I won't find out. Because without waiting for an answer or even my question, he straightens up, barks an order to his aide-de-camp who again snaps to attention, takes me by the arm, and drags me to the giant stairway of the Palace where the motorcycle squadron waits, ready to go. But there, he changes his mind, barks a new order at his panicked escort, stumbles, turns red in the face, takes my arm again, and quick-steps back to his office where he stops in the middle of the room with a stupid look on his face as if he no longer knew why he had come. We are joined by a small, thin man with bright black eyes set in a face with the profile of an insect, who seems to be the only one who dares look the general straight in the eye.

“Amine is one of the heads of our police,” he says, pulling himself together and affecting an absurdly sonorous voice as if he were awarding a decoration. “Ask your questions. All your questions. Amine is here. He will answer you.”

And he goes to his chair, slumps down again, and grabs another handful of pistachios that his panting aide-de-camp has resumed shelling.

Amine asked me to give him two days.

He didn't promise anything. He said: “All that is long in the past; the Afghanistan of today is a new Afghanistan; we might have a chance, though—the Taliban was very organized, they recorded everything.”

On the morning of the second day, one of the governor's cars preceded by a full-dress motorcycle escort, stops in front of my
pension
and takes me to the other side of town in a grand display of sirens, flashing lights, the jack-booted cycle escort kicking cars in their way, to a complex of buildings surrounding a courtyard. I don't know if it's an annex of the Palace or a Kandahar police station.

Amine is there with two colleagues in a dining room where a copious breakfast has been prepared.

“I think we've got it,” he says. “Saeed Sheikh Omar. Born in London in 1973. Double nationality until 1994. Abandons his Pakistani nationality in January 1994. Is this him?”

He slides an old black-and-white photo, actually a photocopy of a photo, across the table to me, and immediately, despite his youth and his black turban, resembling those of the Ministry of Repression of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue, I recognize my man.

“Well then yes,” he resumes. “In that case, we have a few things. Drink up your tea. And come.”

Amine, his colleagues and I get into a new Toyota, which was a goodbye present, he tells me, from an American Special Forces officer. And we're off again, as always, with the jack-booted escort, toward Wazir Akbar Khan, the residential quarter of the city, near the Pakistan consulate. It's an isolated three-story house, modest and obviously empty, but guarded by armed soldiers as if it was the tomb of a
marabou
.

Inside, arranged on shelves like museum pieces: a flight manual with a newsprint cover; several Korans; Pakistani passports; video-cassettes; stacks of mimeographed pamphlets in Arabic and Urdu; photos of combatants, maybe Chechens; a map of American bases in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf; medicines; some cooking utensils. We are, I understand, in one of the al-Qaida houses discovered in November 2001, when nobody knew whether these houses were mines of information or decoys—if it's the latter, then the real secrets, the archival essentials, the names of bin Laden's operatives in the United States, had already been moved to Jalalabad by al-Qaida. And earlier, in January 2000 after Omar had been exchanged for the 155 passengers on the Indian Airlines flight, it was also one of the places foreign fighters were housed, and therefore it's possible Omar stayed here.

Amine, in other words, confirms for me his three stays in Afghanistan.

The first was in 1994. Probably in March. Maybe April. Omar spent, a few months before, a period at Miran Shah in the Pakistani tribal zones in a camp called—I had been missing the name—Salam Fassi Camp (this camp, contrary to what Mohammed Mehran told me, still exists since it seems, in January 2002, to have been a transit stop for Abu Zubaydah, bin Laden's deputy, as he fled Tora Bora on his way to Faisalabad). But his first real stay in Afghanistan is here, at camp Khalid bin Waleed, in Zhavar, which American bombardments, first in 1997, then in 2001, in this case, completely destroyed.

Instructor, really? Yes, really.

In a position to take his turn to run an
istakbalia
, a training session? Yes, quite probably.

Particularly because—and this is something I suspected and which Amine confirms—Khalid bin Waleed had the distinction of being oriented to the “intellectual” training of the combatants. The handling of Kalashnikovs, of course. The techniques of hand-to-hand combat, as well. The art of throat-slitting and remotely detonated explosions, yes. But also the art of camouflage and disguise. Of disinformation and information. Of intelligence and counter-intelligence. And, even more specifically, a section on the infiltration of militants, and eventually kamikazes, into “infidel” zones: life in the West, how to eat and dress, how to travel, how to outsmart police surveillance, remain a good Muslim, pray without raising suspicions—all questions to which Omar, given his biography, was supposed to provide more precise and reliable answers than anybody.

Anyway, he's there, in good health this time. For forty days he trains thirty or so young Pakistani recruits in the art of jihad. The student of statistics, the chess player, who said in London that he played the way Julius Caesar led his battles, has declared war without recourse on his former world. It's here, that he meets the man who will weigh heavily on the following episodes of his life—his mentor, his dark angel, the man who will send him to India to organize kidnappings of tourists, the man whom the irony of fate will send to prison soon after, and for whose liberation Omar takes his first hostages: Masood Azhar, who, on an inspection tour in the region's camps, with the flair of a gang boss that all jihad dignitaries have, spots Omar right away, the exceptional young recruit with a promising future.

In January 2000, after the hijacking and his exit from prison— Omar's second stay.

Omar is a celebrity. He was important enough that one of the Pakistani Islamist groups, with support from the secret services, put together a major, costly, internationally perilous, and spectacular media event to liberate him. The hijackers, as everybody in Kandahar knows, started with a much longer list of demands—they wanted the release of several dozen of their “imprisoned comrades.” They announced they wouldn't budge for less than “two hundred million dollars.” However, as the week progresses, they gradually renounce all their demands but one— the release of Omar, Masood Azhar, and Mushtaq Zargar. What privilege! What glory! And for the unknown jihadist, what proof of importance!

As soon as he arrives he is received by Mullah Omar himself, who naturally puts him in contact with the other foreigners stationed in the city, and through them, with bin Laden. With bin Laden they talk about Kashmir. The Pakistani tells the Saudi of the heroic struggle of the Kashmiri people against Indian occupation and asks for his help. The former student of the London School of Economics also explains how he sees the Koranic prohibition of “
riba
,” literally, “increase”—in other words, the prohibtion of the work of money, and of the new mechanisms of financial capitalism. “It's not so simple,” he expounds. “There are other readings just as orthodox, from
Surat
2, verse 275 . . . one can be a good Muslim and turn the methods of the infidels against themselves . . . ” The Saudi observes him. He is obviously impressed with this rare combination of faith and culture, of fanaticism and competence. And he certainly sees what he can get from a fervent jihadist and a matchless financier, expert in electronics and the internet as well as a connoisseur of the West and its workings.

He is wary, I imagine. Amine doesn't say this, but I imagine he must be. Yes, a man like bin Laden wouldn't, without a minimum of caution, receive a young man who had just spent six years in Indian prisons, and could have well been turned into an enemy agent. So they study his case, test him discreetly. Does he know Arabic but hides it? Does he know Indian? Persian? Does he make suspicious phone calls? Does he overdo it— classic error—in his official hatred of America and England? Are they in the presence of another Ali Mohammed, the young Egyptian who in the '90s infiltrated Arab terrorist groups for the CIA? But the tests must have been conclusive because the Englishman seems to have been adopted.

According to some, Omar joins Majlis al-shura, the political council of al-Qaida. Others say he is put in charge of relations with the major allies outside Afghanistan—the Iranian Hezbollah, the National Islamic Front of Sudan. What Amine knows, and which the Indian services confirmed to me, is that Omar finds himself entrusted with extremely precise tasks for putting in place the logistical groundwork for the organization.

For example, he designs, puts on line and secures the al-Qaida websites.

He contributes to the creation of a communications system that will allow an obscure sect, closed in on itself, backward, to open up to the world, to capture the voices of friends and enemies, to circulate its fatwahs as well as its coded messages.

And finally, eighteen months before September 11th, at the time the organization begins to plan the operations that will give it its global dimension, he is among those set to work on its finances and secure the means to match its ambitions. With others he negotiates to buy land where the training camps of Khalden, Derunta, Khost, Siddiqui and Jihad Wal are based. He helps perfect a sophisticated system to reinforce al-Qaida's control over the Afghan opium trade. He ensures ties with Saudi NGOs, like the Islamic Relief Agency, whose Dublin office, since the 1998 attacks on the American embassies in Tanzania and Sudan, is one of bin Laden's largest suppliers of funds. Later, I will even hear that, in this Kandahar house, a computer is installed, possibly for Omar, that will function as a mini-stock exchange providing continuous on-line connection to the markets of the world: London, Tokyo, New York, Frankfurt—already “selling short,” already perfecting the speculative techniques that in six months will be used to play the effects of September 11? Anyway, all the young trader
savoir-faire
of Omar in the service of an organization preparing total war against the American capitalist system!

“We are in the winter of 2000,” concludes Amine, “maybe spring. Bin Laden, as you know, lost Mamdouh Mahmoud Salim, his finance minister, who was killed in 1998. At that point it seems that Omar Sheikh takes his place. Or rather, we wonder if this recruitment wasn't decided earlier still—if the organization hadn't already spotted him during his years in prison in Delhi, and therefore whether getting him back wasn't the reason for the hijacking. What? Harkat? You say it was public knowledge that Harkat was behind the hijacking? Yes. But it's compatible. The Harkat is part of al-Qaida . . . The ISI? You're wondering if the ISI wasn't also involved in the operation? That I don't know. That's a little delicate. You understand that I prefer not to comment . . . ”

Amine won't say more. But I can see, as I listen to him, new perspectives opening up—I can see the pieces falling into place, confirming, and going well beyond, what I learned in Dubai: Omar liberated by al-Qaida and the ISI; Omar an agent, very early on, of al-Qaida
and
the ISI; Omar as link between
both
organizations.

And then finally 2001. September 2001. Omar has returned to Pakistan. For six months he's been living the high life in Lahore, all the while making great and noble speeches on the misery he rediscovers there, the beggars going through the garbage who break his heart, the selfishness of his peers, their flinty souls. He enjoys his growing prestige conferred by his experiences in Bosnia and Kashmir, his years of prison in India, and now, his Afghan season. He sees his old friends. He makes little visits to his old Aitchinson College professors who also see him as a celebrity, almost a hero: “Oh yes, that scar, the arm slightly withered . . . so it's true those Indian bastards shot him savagely the day they freed the hostages . . . Poor Omar! The brave Sheikh . . . ” Far from concealing his connections to the Taliban and al-Qaida, he boasts of it, glories in it. Overtaken by his old tendency toward mythomania, he invents extravagant fables. To some he tells how, during the battle of Taloqan he almost, and with his own bare hands, strangled the renegade Masood, traitor to Islam—shame on him. He tells others that he witnessed the famous scene (which in fact happened twenty years earlier) in which Mullah Omar, in the heart of another battle, rips out his own wounded eye. And I know this mythomania is one of the reasons for the growing chill between Omar and Masood Azhar: Omar, undoubtedly, thinks the time has come to emancipate himself from his mentor and to forge his own legend; Masood has had enough of hearing the yarns his disciple feeds to the young leaders of Jaish, his imaginary exploits and Indian tortures: “They made me drink my urine . . . eat my own shit . . . enough to put you off food for the rest of your life . . . ”