Who Killed Daniel Pearl (44 page)

I know what they say: The assassins didn't discover that Danny was Jewish until the 30th, from an article by Kamran Khan in the
News
— that's the new element, then, his Jewishness, that they weren't aware of before. But it doesn't jibe. Knowing Danny, knowing, through all those who knew him, especially in Pakistan, that he made a point of honor of never dissimulating his Judaism, I cannot for an instant imagine that he didn't inform Omar of this during their initial meeting, at the Hotel Akbar. And isn't that what Omar himself declared to the police? Isn't it what Fazal and Bukhari also said, during their respective interrogations: “Omar called to tell us, there's a man here who's an American and a Jew . . . come quickly, we're going to kidnap him”?

I know what they say: It's the escape attempt that set everything off; when he tried, for the second time, to escape, his jailers lost patience and decided to put an end to this—that's the new element, that's where everything went haywire, right? Isn't it, according to the FBI people, the absolute rule in these cases: “never try to escape! Never, never ever!” I don't believe that either. First of all—as I said—these escape attempts are not confirmed, especially since the bullet in the knee hasn't been found by any of the coroners' teams that have examined the dismembered body. And, beyond that, because I can't imagine Bukhari, Lahori, Farooqi and the others reasoning like this. We are talking about, I repeat, the Karachi chiefs of important groups, the best of jihadism, serious people, militants, the Pakistani representatives of al-Qaida—who could imagine they would follow such a puerile line of reasoning? Who could convince us that they said to themselves, “as punishment, we'll kill him”? How could anyone suppose a murder of such importance, decided and committed by men of this caliber, could be decided on the reaction of an annoyed jailer?

It's also been attributed, I've heard it said myself, to the passing of time: it's just the time that elapsed . . . the lassitude . . . the impasse . . . here we have this guy on our hands, we don't know what to do with him any more, so let's kill him and cut him up into ten pieces and then put them all back together again, that will be the simplest thing to do . . . Right. Once again, anything is possible. Except that this scenario isn't plausible either. Don't forget, until otherwise informed, we have to assume these were Yemenis who killed him. But someone had to make the decision to send for them, these Yemenis. They had to be located, contacted, brought to Gulzar e-Hijri and, finally, ex-filtrated again. How could this have been done lightly? How could this succession of tasks have been the result of a fit of anger and impatience? Does one actually set in motion such forces and events, expend the necessary amount of energy, just like that, on a whim, by default, or out of sheer irritation?

No.

Anyway you look at it, you cannot avoid thinking that something else happened during those seven days of detention other than a wave of weariness, an aborted escape, or an article by so widely respected a journalist as Kamran Khan.

Better still: Since all of this is happening in seclusion, since they are all, captors and captive, living in total confinement, cut off from the world, since all they have to do for seven days is to talk and talk and talk, one can't help but wonder if this other thing was something that was said rather than something that happened, and that it's something Danny said that led his jailers to conclude that he could not walk out of Gulzar e-Hijri free.

Then what is it that was said? What could Pearl have said that would have prompted his captors to call for three professional murderers to come execute him? Since I can't imagine it had anything to do with small talk, life in Los Angeles, his profession, or even his general perception of Pakistan, the United States, or the world, and since I think as well that Pearl took advantage of that time to continue his work, and advance his research into the Islamist milieu—in short, to pump these political and human specimens, which bad fortune had put in his way, once more, I can think of only one solution.

At the same time that he got them to talk, they, in turn, made him talk.

When he asked them questions, he revealed himself, through his way of questioning.

He thought he would get the truth from them, but they, in a sense, and without his necessarily being aware of it, verified what he knew and thus debriefed him.

Or else, another aspect of the hypothesis, slightly different but equally credible: given his extraordinary professionalism, he attracted confidences, confessions, details—it's entirely possible that he succeeded beyond his expectations, and that his captors, without realizing it or at least without really wanting to, gave him sensitive information that, afterwards, they regretted having so blithely offered.

My feeling is that, during their conversations, during the long nights of collective solitude, in the heat of his exchanges, for example, with Fazal Karim, his guard, it became evident either that the prisoner of Gulzar e-Hijri already knew far too much, or else that he had succeeded in gleaning still more from his jailers—and that, in either case, there was no longer any question of letting him walk out of there, carrying his secrets.

Danny died of what he knew.

Danny, the man who knew too much.

I am convinced that his was a journalist's death—dead not only because of what he was, but because of what he was looking for, and perhaps finding, and planning to write about.

Isn't that, incidentally, what President Pervez Musharraf himself said when, the day after the murder, in an astounding, angry outburst, he exclaimed that Daniel Pearl had been “over intrusive”—too curious, sticking his nose in places he shouldn't have?

Didn't Musharraf give it away when, in a comment cited in the
Washington Post
(among others) on 23 February 2002, he dared to declare, “Perhaps Daniel Pearl was over inquisitive; a mediaperson should be aware of the dangers of getting into dangerous areas; unfortunately, he got over-involved in intelligence games.”

That's my hypothesis.

That's the conclusion I have come to.

So the question then becomes: Why? What had Pearl discovered, or what was he in the process of discovering, that condemned him to death? What is the stolen secret that, for his captors, was out of the question for him to walk away with?

The relationship between al-Qaida and the ISI, of course.

The tight web of relations between the two organizations, the two worlds.

This holy alliance that condemns and executes him—we can presume that, yes, he was on their trail, and that, precisely, was his fatal error.

But all of that is not saying much.

You don't execute a man because he evokes in a general way the ties between an intelligence agency and a terrorist organization.

You don't expend so much effort to kill him, you don't send an entire syndicate into action because he might develop some thesis about the underbelly of an important country.

The real question, obviously, is what, precisely, had he discovered in all this that was new and that would have caused difficulties for all of them?

This is where the reign of the uncertain begins.

This is where witnesses are rare and, if they exist, they are silent, or out to disinform.

So, like a detective following his hunches, I move forward now, sifting through clues and speculations, for the over-riding truth.

I have two hypotheses, in fact.

Two distinct hypotheses, in no way contradictory.

But first of all—a question of method—one last detour. Daniel Pearl's schedule in the weeks, the days, the hours preceding his kidnapping. Who he saw. What he read. The articles he wrote and those he was working on. This intrigue, in a word, woven with the threads of a life, where (as in a tapestry, is hidden the motive that secretly inspires it) lies, quite probably, the explanation for his death.

CHAPTER 3
IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF DANIEL PEARL

First, my sources:

The account of Pearl's fixer in Islamabad, Asif Farooqi, given during our meeting in his office at the Japanese press agency.

A conversation with Jamil Yusuf, former businessman now heading Karachi's Citizen-Police Liaison Committee.

That of another Pakistani, from Peshawar, who asked not to be identified but whose information I have good reason to believe is credible. Let's call him Abdullah, and let's say also that he's the kind of journalist who works under his own name for the Pakistani press and, anonymously, for visiting journalists—both bold things to do in Pakistan.

And the memorandum written 27 January, four days after the kidnapping, by Mariane Pearl and Asra Nomani, Danny's colleague and tenant of the house where the couple stayed in Karachi: This twenty-page memorandum, written in great urgency, before anyone knew the tragic outcome of the kidnapping, sheds the most light on Danny's movements and is obviously the most precise, the most precious source.

Daniel Pearl, I repeat, arrived in Pakistan for the first time in October, just before the beginning of the American air strikes in Afghanistan. He stayed there for two months. He wrote three or four major articles. He returned at the end of November to Bombay, which was his actual base. On 15 December he returned to Islamabad for what would be the final time.

He is alone this time.

Mariane, pregnant, stays in India for a few more days.

“It's sad,” says a Pakistani
Dawn
journalist Danny and Asif run into in the bar of a grand hotel in the embassy quarter. “It's almost Christmas and you'll be alone.” Danny smiles, ever faithful to his penchant for openness on the question. “Oh, Christmas—you know I'm not Christian, I'm Jewish. The Jews aren't that big on Christmas.”

With Steve LeVine, the
Journal's
central Asia correspondent visiting Pakistan, he starts an investigation on the risks of the transfer of nuclear know-how from Pakistan to Afghanistan and the Taliban. In particular, the two journalists are tracking an NGO supposedly engaged in humanitarian programs but which, in reality, serves as a cover for this kind of trafficking: the Ummah Tameer e-Nau, whose honorary president happens to be General Hamid Gul, a former head of the ISI. I've come across his name often over the past year. Pearl is also looking into a certain Dr. Bashiruddin Mahmood, a Pakistani scientist won over to the Islamist cause who, in August, had visited Osama bin Laden.

On the 23rd or the 24th, he starts a second investigation, without LeVine, into the illegal trafficking of electronic equipment between Afghanistan and Pakistan. He goes to Peshawar. He hangs around the vast Karkhano Market, where he finds imports from Afghanistan of almost everything the Taliban prohibits, but which he discovers, to his surprise, they now make a fat profit on by exporting: from a country of bearded men, Gillette razors; from the country where smoking is prohibited, Marlboro cigarettes; from the radically iconoclastic country where images are forbidden, all sorts of video cassettes, and the latest model Sony televisions. What hypocrisy! For the sarcastic journalist he knows how to be when the subject lends itself, a godsend.

The next day he starts a third investigation into the fundamentalist groups Musharraf has just outlawed, but which continue to operate in Kashmir, and, he thinks, also in Lahore and Karachi. For that investigation he goes to Bawahalpur where he plans to interview Masood Azhar, the head of Jaish and, I recall one final time, the friend, master, and tutor of Omar Sheikh. But Masood has been arrested again, along with other militants whose calls for the anti-American jihad have begun to clash with the image of Musharraf's grand antiterrorist alliance. So he has to settle for Masood's brother whom, incidentally, he suspects of involvement with the Air India hijackers of Kandahar. He also visits the Jaish offices which are supposed to have been shut down but which he notes continue to function rather openly, recruiting and organizing meetings. The visit is short and somewhat tense. He stays only thirty-six hours in Bawahalpur.

On the 27th, his article co-written with LeVine on nuclear secrets having appeared three days earlier, Danny is contacted by a shady individual who pretends to have read the piece and to have in his possession a case of fissionable material from a Ukrainian nuclear power plant, which he is ready to sell for $100,000. Danny smells a scam. In Karachi he contacts a staff member of a large Western embassy who is familiar with these things, who tells him not to follow up. But Danny is sufficiently intrigued to check his notes on the subject. It's strange, he tells Asif, how little impact our article has had. Maybe the timing, just before Christmas. Or the tone. Or maybe, let's be honest, we've got less than Seymour Hersh had in his 29 October
New Yorker
article, “The Risks to Pakistan's Nuclear Arsenal,” or than Douglas Frantz and David Rhode had in the 28 November
New York Times
article “Two Pakistanis Linked to Papers on Anthrax Weapons,” or than Molly Moore and Kamran Kahn in their 12 December
Washington Post
article, “Two Nuclear Experts Briefed Bin Laden, Pakistanis Say.” It bothers him not to have the goods, or to have less than
The Washington Post, The New York Times,
or
The New
Yorker.
It was even more annoying because for the final few days, Farooqi remembers, he was getting e-mails from his paper urging him to move, to get some information, to be more exclusive. The spirit of competition. The pressure of the information-market. He decides, without LeVine, to return to investigation number one.