Who Killed Daniel Pearl (46 page)

CHAPTER 4
THE ASSASSINS ARE AMONG US

Gilani.

Why this fixation on Pir Mubarak Shah Gilani?

Why him, Pir Mubarak Shah Gilani, rather than, say, Masood Azhar, or Ramzi bin al-Shibh, or even bin Laden who, during those weeks, was roaming between western Afghanistan, the tribal zones of Pakistan, and, perhaps, Karachi?

It's been said: Richard Reid.

It's been said—Pearl himself thought—that the “shoe bomber” on the Air France Paris to Miami flight was a disciple of Gilani; that it is he, Gilani, who may have given him the go-ahead for action; and that Pearl was interested in Gilani because he was investigating the case of Richard Reid.

Fine.

But was Richard Reid really worthy of so much attention? Would Pearl have searched so thoroughly, mobilized so many contacts and so much energy, taken such risks, if it was just a question of reconstructing the itinerary of a London car thief, even one who has gone through a conversion to terrorism?

Who is this man, who is this mysterious character that Pearl, on the last day of his stay in Pakistan, ignoring all the rules of security he knew better than anyone, wanted so much to interview, even if for just a few minutes?

Moinuddin Haider, Minister of the Interior, at the time of my November trip, pretended he had never heard of Gilani, nor his movement, the al-Fuqrah, literally, “The Poor,” or, better still, “The Impoverished.”

The Brigadier Javed Iqbal Cheema, his assistant, had developed a slightly different line, but one that didn't get me any further: “What is this business about going through fifteen intermediaries to get to Gilani? When we arrested Gilani, he told us, ‘OK, gentlemen, I am available, I am not underground; if there's a journalist who wants to see me, I'd be thrilled; but this Mr. Pearl never called me, he never telephoned.' Now I, Brigadier Javed Cheema, put the question to you: Why did Mr. Pearl never call Gilani?” And when I immediately said: “If it's that easy to interview Gilani, you're on! If Daniel Pearl's sole fault was that he didn't ask politely, I'm asking you now: could you set this up for me? with your help, could I meet Mr. Gilani?” Cheema became rather flustered and suddenly found all kinds of reasons to carefully sidestep the question.

We recall as well the episode of Hamid Mir, the official biographer and interviewer of bin Laden, and of his odd way of ignoring all polite conventions, especially by referring to a request I had never made as a pretext for canceling an appointment that he had actually confirmed.

I took up the investigation from there.

I began again, at the point where Pearl had left off.

Like him, I went to Chakala, near the Islamabad air base where the mysterious Gilani was supposed to have resided but where I found a house that was not only empty and closed but, according to the neighbors, had been sold to “a Kuwaiti” who planned on “doing some remodeling.”

I went to Chak Shazad where I saw his other house; the one Asif, Arif, and Danny had searched for in vain during their outing on the 9th—not as nice as the first one, a one-storey dwelling with walls of exposed bricks, windows protected by painted wood shutters, abandoned as well.

I also went to Lahore, to the old city, where Gilani's real, much nicer home, is located, surrounded by high walls and guarded like a fortress— as is the grand and prestigious
madrassa
of Jamia e-Namia, which has a dome engraved with the names of Gilani's first American disciples, converted in the early '80s, as described in Farah Stockman's article in the
Boston Globe
which had made such an impression on Pearl.

I met one of the disciples of the master, Wasim Yousouf, son of a Rawalpindi merchant, for whom belonging to al-Fuqrah is an honor, and who talked to me about it willingly.

And then, finally, I went to the United States, the source, as we shall see, of some of the trails that lead to Gilani and to his organization.

1. The first thing I realized is that Gilani is the head of a small group. A very small group, one that is little known. Nothing like the great jihadist organizations I've encountered, or that Pearl was investigating during the few days he spent in Peshawar. Nothing comparable to the Lashkar, Jaish e-Mohammed and other Harkat ul-Mujahideen that were, or at least aspired to be, mass organizations. In terms of goals or recruiting, nothing like these vast structures, these armies fighting for control of the people of the martyrs of Allah. A few hundred members. Maybe two hundred, with the core following concentrated solely in the city of Lahore where Gilani has his principle mission, his four wives, and the places where he teaches.

Outside this small following, the man expresses himself very little. He's a secretive person who claims to be a direct descendant of the Prophet and whose last interview, prior to Pearl's interest in him, dated from the early '90s. In short, this native of Kashmir, this forceful Islamist, who, in the rare photos of him that I've been able to find, appears to be a sort of giant, imposing, with a reddish beard, and a look of unbearable intensity, is the leader of a sect, with followers who change their names when they are admitted, as in all sects and in the training camps as well. (Richard Reid, for example, became Abdul Rauf—“Brother Abdul.”) And, as the head of the sect, he is a sort of guru whose functions bear little in common with others such as Nizamuddin Shamzai and Masood Azhar, the mass orators who preach the jihad in full view of the press, in popular assemblies that are often gigantic.

It's not surprising that the Pakistani newspapers, so prolix when it comes to other groups, seemed caught off guard the day after the kidnapping, when this group suddenly appeared. Not surprising either that Moinuddin Haider, Minister of the Interior, told me that before the Pearl affair, he had actually never heard of al-Fuqrah.

2. This small, obscure, and mysterious sect nonetheless has ties, as they all do, with the intelligence services. Perhaps not with Haider, but with the services most certainly. They may be unknown in the police files, that's possible—but ties to the country's “invisible power” is without a doubt.

Omar admitted as much when, after the Rangers came to arrest Gilani at his home in Rawalpindi, he said that the sect's chief—to whom he had a brief introduction when he took his first guerilla training—had rendered “unexplained services to Islam and to Pakistan” (
The News,
15 February 2002).

Khalid Khawaja, the former pilot for Bin Laden and ex-ISI officer who did not wish to see me, but told my fixer over the phone that we should “watch out for Gilani,” because the guru was sick of being “mixed up in this unfortunate Pearl affair all the time”—Khawaja, in declarations made right after the kidnapping, when he and Gilani happened to be under scrutiny of the FBI, confirmed Gilani's ties to the services, probably to protect himself and to protect his friend (
Dawn,
23 February 2002).

Same message from Vince Cannistraro, former counter-terrorism chief of the CIA now working in television, who immediately said, in the first feverish days of the search for Pearl, and, for once, without the usual cant: Gilani is “untouchable” because he counts “on the board of his organization” several “senior ISI officials” (
NewsMax.com
wires, 31 January 2002).

And as for Gilani himself, when the Rawalpindi police came looking for him, he did exactly what “Tariq” told me all the jihadists do when they are arrested: He immediately changed from his venerable master persona to that of the Mafioso who's been nabbed and he gave up the names of his contacts as well as a house secret or two, and declared that, during the '80s, he had informed the services of what he saw and heard during his then-frequent stays in the United States—in exchange for which, Pir Mubarak Shah Gilani, Daniel Pearl's last known contact, his last appointment before the kidnapping, the man he wanted to see and thought he would see when he arrived at the Village Garden, was out on the street after a few days, and would never be bothered again (
The News
, 31 January 2002).

3. Gilani's al-Fuqrah is also linked to Osama bin Laden, like most of these groups, though probably in a more intimate and organic way.

Gilani, of course, denies it. He denies it today, now that he is in the limelight. But Khawaja told CBS News reporter George Crile, whom he led to Gilani a few days after Pearl's death: “I am telling you, I am sure of one thing, Osama does not have even one of his followers as committed as Sheikh Mubarak Gilani” (
CBSNews.com
, 13 March 2002). And, in a Canadian TV film shot in Khartoum in 1993, we see (Mira L. Boland, “Sheikh Gilani's American disciples,”
The Weekly Standard,
18 March 2002) the boss of al-Fuqrah at the “grand summit of terrorism,” sponsored by the Sudanese strongman of the time, Hassan el-Turabi.

There are Afghan and Iranian mullahs. Delegates from George Habache's movement and Nayef Hawatmeh's. People from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, from the Lebanese Hezbollah. The aristocracy of world terrorism. And also, hand in hand with Gilani, a Saudi entrepreneur, little known at the time, veteran of the anti-Soviet jihad, Osama bin Laden.

Is it true, the journalist asks the Pakistani, that the two men recently arrested in relation to an investigation of plans to attack Indian targets in Toronto are your followers? And he responds, with an unbearable mixture of guile and insolence: one or two of them, yes . . . I admit that one or two of them studied at our school in Lahore, but they're the exception . . . because, “once people join our university, they become real good citizens; they stop smoking, they stop stealing, they stop living on welfare, that is what I teach them.”

Bin Laden, at the time, is beginning to weave his network. In Gilani, he has an ally, an antenna in New York, and perhaps more.

4. Why more? Are there different kinds of links to bin Laden? Of course. There is a major distinction to which very few European commentators pay enough attention. And that is the distinction between al-Qaida itself, which is a purely Arab, even Saudi organization, with several hundred members directly linked to bin Laden, responsible for his personal protection and constituting, in Afghanistan, with the backup of some Algerians, Moroccans, Palestinians, Egyptians and, especially, Yemenis, the famous “055 Brigade,” which was “lent” to the Taliban in 1997 for the capture of Mazar e-Sharif; and there is the International Islamic Front for the Jihad Against the United States and Israel, which is, as the name indicates, an international organization, a federation of related groups, tied, of course, to the emir, but kept at a distance from the hard core—a sort of a Comintern of jihadism with several tens of thousands of combatants gravitating around a Center that, modernity dictates, no longer has a territory.

Well, Gilani is not a member of the International Front. Nor is he, of course, a “direct adherent” of al-Qaida; but he has a distinct status in comparison with the heads of the other groups which means that he is not, like them, a member of the terrorist Comintern either. “Pir Mubarak Shah Gilani is a master,” al-Fuqrah member Wasim Yousouf told me. “Even Osama bows before Pir Mubarak Shah Gilani. Do you know that
Pir
, in Urdu, means ‘venerated master'?” A way of suggesting a tie of a different nature. A way of saying that Gilani enjoys a sort of an ideological, even political influence upon Osama.

The master of al-Qaida is a war lord. He is undoubtedly a good financier. But is he, by the same token, an ideologue? A spiritual master? Is he even a particularly enlightened reader of the Koran? Those who know him doubt it. All of those who worked on the founder of al-Qaida's discourse and on the evolution of his style over the years strongly sense that this master has had masters, some high-flying prompters, some ideological and political tutors, some more or less secret sources of inspiration that have helped him to become what he is.

We remember, for instance, this near-comic dialogue with his official interviewer, Hamid Mir, in November 2001: Mir, in reference to the Twin Towers attacks, asks him about the basis for a
fatwah
against American civilians and, in the heat of the discussion, asks him how, theologically, he resolves the thorny question of Americans who are Muslims but who nonetheless died in the attack; “I see you're trying to set a trap for me,” says a suddenly disconcerted Osama, who seems to be caught off-guard, “I shall consult my friends and give you my response tomorrow morning.”

We know that the Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, rector of the Binori Town mosque, is one of these “friends.”

We know that Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian fundamentalist who created the al-Kifah Center in Peshawar in the early '80s and who was considered, until his death in 1989, one of the re-inventors of an authentic, transnational jihad, was another of these secret mentors.

Well, perhaps Gilani is still another. Perhaps that's what the Canadian tape of the Sudanese summit says when it shows the chief of al-Qaida, so good, so modest, next to the master from Lahore. And perhaps that was one of Daniel Pearl's hypotheses as well.

5. What is al-Fuqrah's ideology? And what distinguishes it from the ideology that motivates other jihadist organizations?

I have had access to two documents: a little propaganda pamphlet, in Arabic, that gives the Gilanian vision of the holy war; and then a map of the world, distributed to the faithful, entitled “The United States of Islam,” outlining, colored in green, with a green flag planted squarely in the middle, the Muslim universe, from the Philippines to Xinjiang, from West Africa to Turkey and the Middle East.