Who Killed Daniel Pearl (42 page)

“Mr. Mir?

“It's me.”

“I'm . . . ”

“I know . . . ”

“I'm here, right in front of the building, there must be some misunderstanding.”

“There's no misunderstanding.”

“Yes there is. We had an appointment at twelve sharp and—”

“Your embassy tells me you want me to set up a meeting with Gilani. Well, in that case, the appointment is off, I refuse categorically to see you. I have nothing to say to you.”

“I'm flabbergasted, the embassy couldn't have told you that—there was never any question of asking you for the least contact with Gilani!”

“Yes there was. That's exactly what your embassy said. I have nothing to say to you, don't try to contact me, that's it!”

The embassy—I immediately made sure—had obviously never spoken of a contact with Gilani.

Hamid Mir—I'm convinced, thinking it over now—spoke very loudly, to an audience, and with a brutality that can only be explained by the fact that he was not alone and wanted to convince the people around him of his determination.

Who? It doesn't matter. The fact, once again, is there. I prefer not to insist.

It's raining in Karachi. Under my window, I can hear the call of the ragman mixed with the
muezzin
's. Tomorrow is Christmas. I think of Pearl's last Christmas. I think of Mariane and this sad year's end she must be going through. Who told me she was leaving to spend the holidays in Cuba, with little Adam? It was probably her. It was her without a doubt. And me, here, following in their footsteps, at the tail end of this terrible comet, with all the bad signs accumulating.

Better, of course, not to give them more weight than they necessarily deserve.

And to avoid the trap that would consist, here as elsewhere, of giving meaning to things that have none, and to exaggerate the importance of an incident . . .

But at the same time, I can't help but be surprised that all this is happening this way, a spate of things, all in such a short time . . .

These doors that shut and then, on the contrary, open, but in a way that is even more suspect . . . These small provocations . . . This phony proposition for an interview . . . It's hard not to think that there's a thread that runs through all that, and that this thread is a message someone is trying to send me.

What message?

Without a doubt, that they've seen right through me.

That no one here is fooled any longer as to the real nature of my investigation, that also is without a doubt.

Well. We'll see. For the time being, I'm not dissatisfied with the progress I've made in the past year, it's true.

I began on the assumption that Omar was undoubtedly guilty, guilty and convicted, but without being able to completely exclude the possibility that he is too perfect a culprit, too little for a crime too great—and that focusing on his name could have the effect of throwing back into the shadows other names, names more important than his, more embarrassing. The Oswald syndrome, in a way, after the death of Kennedy. The eternal “it can't be him . . . there must be forces behind him that surpass him . . . ” described by Norman Mailer.

Today, at the end of 2002, at the point of the investigation where I find myself, I know that's not true and that Omar, far from being this small-time criminal, this figurehead, this underling, is a considerable culprit, a prince in the universe of Evil, an absolutely central character since he stands at the exact intersection of some of the darkest forces of our times. I know that this name, Omar Sheikh, far from being advanced in order to protect others from being pronounced, is an enormously important name, much more significant than I had imagined in my most audacious speculations, and whose effect is not to hide but to summon some of the most terrifying figures in the modern encyclopedia of death. I know that, with Omar, we are in the presence of an unprecedented criminal configuration, where the two mutually exclusive theories of the Oswald case are simultaneously true: it's him and not him . . . not him because it is him . . . considerable forces, indeed, but his own force at the same time, which is their condensed version. I say “Omar Sheikh,” and when I utter the words, I am naming the synthesis, in him, of the ISI and al-Qaida—that is the truth.

                    
PART FIVE
“OVER INTRUSIVE”

CHAPTER 1
A FELLOW OF NO
                           
COLLECTIVE IMPORTANCE

So the question is, why?

Yes, why al-Qaida? Why first, the ISI and now, al-Qaida? More precisely, why the ISI inside al-Qaida, or al-Qaida inside the ISI? Why are they intertwined—why did they combine forces to set a trap for a lone man?

Not that the combination is, in itself, anything surprising.

And one theory of this book is that this union is in the nature of things, in ordinary life and politics here. The thesis of this book, if one can call it a thesis, is that there exists an axis, a bond of flesh and, alas, of blood between these two forces that dominate Pakistan, and that no one can tell any longer which is in command of the other. My thesis—but do we even need to call it a thesis, when it's a fact that's obvious with every step, at every instant!—is that there exists, in the way they exchange their crimes and their powers, a reflexive relationship that often makes them merge into one, which is an essential feature of this country and what makes it so dangerous.

But a thesis is one thing; experience another.

It is one thing to know something patently obvious; it is quite another thing to put this obvious fact to a concrete test.

It is one thing to say, as I often have during this investigation, and as others have before me, that there's been an intentional confusion of roles, an incessant passing off of responsibility from one to another: You look for the ISI, you find al-Qaida; you look for al-Qaida, you run into the ISI; the bearded men are free-floating agents, and the agents are bearded men without beards or turbans; when you think about it, was the Hotel Akbar run by one or the other? The Brigadier Ijaz, the Shah Sahab of the Indian kidnapping cell, Saud Memon, Masood Azhar—are they the service's men, or bin Laden's? And Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was he really working for, and who abandoned him at the last moment? It's one thing to say all this, to see all these questions cropping up—but quite another to see the grand alliance, this pincer action in the actual case of an actual man. And most of all, we may well have a thousand examples of this consubstantiality. We may well try to remember everything of the Taliban's history and their manipulation by the intelligence services. We may well recall the case of Hamid Gul, head of the ISI at the time of the Soviet war who, no sooner fired and relieved of his duty to preserve secrecy, immediately offered his services to the jihadist cause, never missing an occasion in the past few years to proclaim his love for bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and the jihad. We may well consider the case of Mahmoud Ahmad, Director General of the ISI on September 11—did he approve the transfer of $100,000 to Mohammed Atta in the name of the ISI, of which he was still chief at the time, or in honor of the jihad, for whom he would become an official propagandist as soon as he resigns from his post? I can't say. We may well consider Ahmad again, hand in hand with the rector of Binori Town, leading the delegation of holy men on a last-chance visit to Afghanistan to tell Mullah Omar his only remaining means of avoiding war was to hand over bin Laden—and we may well know that, on that day, both in what he said and in the way he said it, he was more jihadist than the jihadists, and perhaps blew on the flames instead of putting them out. Intelligence agencies of the West may well know, as does Islamabad, that on 8 October 2001, the day after Musharraf's new Chief of Staff, Mohammed Aziz, took office, his first act was to meet with the leaders of all the jihadist groups of the “Army of Islam,” some of which, like the Jaish, were already on the Americans' blacklist of organizations linked to al-Qaida. We may well be aware of the personal role of Aziz— in principle a secular, military officer—in setting up the Harkat ul-Mujahideen in 1998. We may well have no doubt as to how things really are. It's nonetheless the first time the two organizations actually meet, combine their efforts, and concertedly mobilize all of their respective powers not in order to destroy a country (Afghanistan), or an empire (the United States), or even a symbol (the Assembly of Kashmir at Srinagar, or the Parliament of New Delhi), but a man (Daniel Pearl).

Of course there have been other cases of journalists kidnapped in Pakistan by ISI agents suspected of being backed up by al-Qaida: Husain Haqqani (of the
Indian Express
); Najam Sethi (of
The Friday Times
); Ghulam Hasnain (
Time
magazine). But none of them was executed.

On the eve of the American war in Afghanistan, there was the case of another lone man, Abdul Haq, who, having been sent to the interior of the country to negotiate the surrender of some Pashtun tribes, fell into a trap set by either the Pakistani intelligence services, bin Laden's foreign combatants, the Taliban, or all three—to this day, no one knows which. But it was, precisely, on the eve of a war. And there were military stakes involved in the liquidation of Haq.

There was also the example of Massoud, another man alone, abandoned by all, the elimination of whom, it is less and less in doubt, was the collective effort of the same ISI and al-Qaida. But Massoud was a military commander. He was alone, but he occupied an essential place on the board of the grand game at the time. He was weak, practically disarmed, but there was a considerable strategic interest in eliminating him and decapitating the Northern Alliance two days before September 11.

Daniel Pearl—he was nothing. To all outward appearances, he was neither what was at stake nor one of the targets. He was unarmed. Inoffensive. His vocation was neither that of martyr nor of hero. To quote the famous epigraph of Sartre's
La Nausée,
borrowed from Céline, Pearl was “a fellow of no collective importance, just an individual,” who had no obvious reason to see this colossal, two-fold machinery set in motion before him. And the more I turn it over in my mind, there is something that seems enigmatic to me in this massive conspiracy against an individual of no importance, who represents only himself.

Political philosophers have contemplated the mystery of this “counter-one”—the production of a victim, a slave, or, quite simply, an “other,” a mirror image of the despotic, dominating “One.”

The theory of the scapegoat tells us about the mimetic urge that fixates on the blind spot embodied by the sacrificial victim: an innocent, sometimes anybody—and, at the end of the sacrifice, the calculated miracle of the group reconciled and producing its own innocence.

My generation (that of the struggle against totalitarianism) has known in the U.S.S.R. and elsewhere the case of these other solitary men, belonging neither to a community nor a party, without a clearly articulated political agenda, forbidden to express themselves, and incapable of airing their alternative point of view regarding the subjugated and sometimes dismembered society. We knew of so many of these individuals who were chosen, so to speak, by chance, without consideration of any real danger they may have represented. We called them “dissidents,” but there was something almost inappropriate about this term and the way it suggested a split, even a subversion, that actually threatened the existing powers. And there was something especially disturbing about the spectacle of these immense, all-powerful, machines expending so much energy to silence adversaries that they had begun to exhibit and almost construct.

We knew (the same years, the same combats and, basically, the same pattern) the case of Cuba and its tropical Gulag. On one side, the “one man too many” (a saying of Solzhenitsyn's that Claude Lefort used in his commentary at the time)—a man condemned, thrown into prison, executed, for futile and often perfectly mysterious reasons. On the other, a politico-legal apparatus (the “granite ideology,” from Solzhenitsyn again) throwing its enormous power into motion, against all reason, despite inevitable international disapproval and the resultant discredit, despite, as well, the political uselessness, demonstrated a hundred times over, of this polarization around the case of a simple individual—in order to shore up this regime of proscription. In short, the whole of Cuba transformed into an immense inverted pyramid resting, with all its enormous weight, not on the base, but on the point: the tortured or paralyzed body, the suffocating soul, of a poet, a homosexual, a Catholic, a Cuban.

Could Daniel Pearl be the equivalent, without the literature and in the landscape of the new world, of a Solzhenitsyn, a Pliouchtch, a Valladares—these other men alone, these “beings apart” of Mallarmé, these victims at once absurd and necessary, whose cause inspired our youth and who were like the mirror image of the almighty tyrant?

Perhaps. I don't know. But we must admit, Pearl's is a decidedly strange situation.

All the more so because there's still something else.

In the course of telling this story, we have seen the protagonists emerge.

We've seen them introduced, one by one, as the investigation progressed, and then all together, in the organization chart of the crime.