Who Killed Daniel Pearl (48 page)

No one believes in the actual autonomy of al-Fuqrah and its front organizations. No one doubts that Gilani is the inspiration behind the American utopian communities of Islam as well as the assassins' sect. And no one doubts that the division of roles between them is in large part fictitious.

10. Which leads one to the simplest and also the most troubling question: Why doesn't the United States do anything? Why do the authorities tolerate the Muslims of America? And as for al-Fuqrah itself, the parent institution, of whom the State Department annual report,
Patterns of Global Terrorism,
said, “Its members have attacked several targets considered to be enemies of Islam, among them Muslims known as heretics, and Hindus,” why did it take the United States so long to outlaw the organization?

Perhaps because, the targets were “only” Muslims or Hindus . . .

Respect for the law and due process was also probably a reason, as well as the fact that in many cases, at Islamberg, for example, it was impossible to prove the least connection with any concrete terrorist plot or activity whatsoever . . .

But I wonder if there is not another, still deeper reason, one that would take us back to those times long ago and almost forgotten when the American government supported all the forces that, one way or another, opposed the enemy in its global struggle against world Communism—beginning, we recall, with the fundamentalist Muslim movements of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and, of course, Pakistan.

The era of Zbigniew Brezinski. The period of William Casey, CIA Director from 1981 to 1987 and responsible for the green light given the ISI to recruit, arm, and train tens of thousands of Arab fighters who would struggle to break up the “Empire of Evil” while simultaneously fighting for their faith . . . Following that, the era where America supported the FIS in Algeria, the Taliban in Kandahar and Kabul, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Wahabite tendencies in Arab countries, as well as the most hard-line Chechen groups . . . The time when, in Afghanistan, long before the Taliban, they played Gulbuddin Heykmatiar against Massoud, the religious fanatics against the democrats . . . The era when it seemed like a good idea to push the most radical Sunni groups throughout the world, to counter the Shiite revolution in Iran . . . And the era when, as a result, insane things happened within the United States, things that, retrospectively, make the head spin: Ramzi Yousef, the future mastermind of the attack against the World Trade Center, recruited by the CIA . . . the U.S. embassy at Khartoum issuing a visa to blind sheikh Omar Abdel Raman, already implicated in the assassination of Sadat . . . two international conferences at Oklahoma City (better than the “terrorist summit” of Khartoum), in 1988 and 1992, summits of radical Islam, where some of the architects of both Trade Tower attacks attended and were speakers . . . Azzam, the Palestinian
eminence grise
of bin Laden, authorized to open a recruiting office for his al-Kifah Center in the middle of New York . . . And Pir Mubarak Shah Gilani, linked to the Pakistani secret services and—who knows—perhaps to the American intelligence agencies as well.

Was Daniel Pearl investigating the American branches of al-Qaida? Is the key to the mystery of his death also in the closets or on the hard disks of the intelligence agencies of Washington? We're still waiting for a clear and public admission, by those responsible, of this extraordinary historical error in which the leaders of the free world welcomed to their breast and sometimes generated the Golem that we must now drive out from one end of the planet to the other. Perhaps that is what Daniel Pearl was waiting for—perhaps that's what he wanted to provoke.

CHAPTER 5
THE BOMB FOR BIN LADEN?

“There are newspapers in the West that say that you're in the process of acquiring chemical and nuclear weapons. Is there any truth to these reports?”

“Yes, I heard the speech by the American President Bush yesterday. He's trying to alarm the Europeans by telling them that I'm going to attack them with weapons of mass destruction. Well, I would like to state that yes, if America started using chemical or nuclear weapons against us, we would retaliate with chemical or nuclear weapons. We have the weapons for that. We have the means to be dissuasive.”

“And where did you get these weapons?”

“Let's go on to the next question . . . ”

The person speaking is Osama bin Laden.

It's his first interview after September 11 and the attack against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The man he's speaking to is Hamid Mir, the former managing editor of the Urdu newspaper in Islamabad, the man who so strangely canceled our meeting, claiming that I was trying to get to Gilani through him— and also the man who with Khawaja was one of Daniel Pearl's very first contacts in Islamabad.

So, is that the other key to the mystery?

The question that bin Laden evades in his interview with Mir—is that the very subject that Pearl was working on?

Did Pearl have part of the answer to the terrifying question of whether the emir of al-Qaida is bluffing, or whether he really does possess (and if so, how? where? thanks to whom?) weapons of mass destruction, able to topple, in his favor, the balance of power with the civilized world?

My hypothesis is yes.

I think, or rather I suppose, that Pearl was also on this track.

And that, if true, would be another possible explanation for his death.

The point of departure, the most solid clue I have, is, of course, the 24 December article he wrote with Steve LeVine and which he regretted had not had more impact.

What does this article say, exactly?

It reports how, I repeat, the authors came across one of those Pakistani NGOs that was supposedly developing aid projects in Afghanistan under the Taliban, called UTN, Ummah Tameer e-Nau, the “Reconstruction of Muslm Ummah.”

It recounts how the “honorary” president of UTN, responsible mainly for attracting Pakistani and Arab investors to the big agricultural development projects supposedly being launched in the Kandahar region, is none other than Hamid Gul—the former boss of the ISI, who has been retired for twelve years but has maintained, as one does, connections to his former profession.

It reveals furthermore that the operational boss of the organization is a certain Bashiruddin Mahmoud, 61, Islamist, disciple of Israr Ahmed, that other
uléma
from Lahore who is said to be, like Gilani, one of the more or less secret gurus of Pakistani fundamentalism and of bin Laden in particular. Mahmoud is, in addition, and this is an important point, a very famous scientist—in charge of the plutonium factory built, with the help of the Chinese, in Khusab, and head of the Pakistani Atomic Energy Commission until 1999 (at which time his political leanings, his vehement and public protests against his country's ratification of the nonproliferation treaty, started to worry American intelligence and caused him to be sent into retirement).

And finally the article reveals that the two men, Gul and Mahmoud, the General and the Scientist, got together in Kaboul in very strange circumstances at the end of August 2001—after Mahmoud had already, at the beginning of the month in Kandahar, met not only the Taliban leaders but also bin Laden in person . . .

So it is useless for Gul to deny—and Pearl and LeVine's article says as much—that he was ever informed of a meeting between Mahmoud and bin Laden.

It is useless for Mahmoud to claim: “No! My trips to Afghanistan, my meetings with this man or that man, have nothing to do with my old job and therefore nothing to do with Pakistan's nuclear secrets; I wanted to participate in the development of this poor country; finance windmills; think about the exploitation of the oil and gas reserves, its iron and coal mines; accompany my son who had a bank project in Kabul.”

It is useless for him to say to those who criticize him for meeting with the Emir of al-Qaida: “We are not talking about the same man; the man I met is a friend of humankind, good, generous, spending without limit to renovate schools, open orphanages, set up funds to help war widows— God save Osama.”

And, most of all, it is useless for the Pakistani government, under pressure from the “friendly” intelligence services and notably that of the Americans (who, incidentally, a few days before the article was published, seem to have managed to get the UTN's accounts blocked), to have arrested Mahmoud, interrogate him, keep him a few weeks in prison, then under house arrest—and, finally, liberate him.

The reality is there.

Bin Laden had contact with one of the fathers of the Pakistani bomb.

There had probably been—another item from the Pearl-LeVine article, contributed by an unnamed “former ISI colonel”—a first meeting the previous year.

And Afghanistan being what it is, and given the secret services' vigilant watch over the comings and goings of scientists involved in the nuclear network—and Mahmoud is not just any scientist! Pearl and LeVine insist—it is unthinkable that these trips to Afghanistan, these meetings with bin Laden, these conversations, would take place without the knowledge of Islamabad.

Pearl is right to regret that his article did not make more of a splash, because he and LeVine had a double scoop: The interaction between an atomic scientist and al-Qaida; and that such interaction had the blessing of the Pakistani state, which the West believes has put its most sensitive weapons under lock and key.

From this point I tried to find out a little more—as with the Gilani dossier, I tried, with my own means, to go a little further . . .

Mahmoud, for instance—the character of Mahmoud, concerning whom I quickly make two further discoveries. The first: Far from being an Islamist like any other lost in the swamp of the movement's innumerable sympathizers, he is an active militant in one of the most radical and, as we now know, most bloodthirsty groups of all those which populate the country—he is an activist in the Harkat ul-Mujahideen, which we understand had a central role in the abduction and execution of Pearl himself. The second: Far from being a matter of conscience with no effect on his scientific activity, Mahmoud's Islamism contaminates everything, infects even his scientific work and inspires him to hold a terrifying theory— of which those in the West who live in the cozy certainty that Pakistani may have flaws, but it has its arsenals locked up, should be aware—it inspires him to think that the Pakistani bomb is not Pakistani but Islamist and, therefore, belongs by right to the entire community of believers, to the
Oummah
.

Next, Abdul Qadir Kahn, Mahmoud's boss, and thus the genuine father of the bomb tested for the first time on 28 May 1998. Pearl and LeVine don't talk about him, but . . . He's a popular national celebrity. A new Jinnah. A star. He's the man credited with having restored the country's honor and pride by giving it the bomb. Songs have been composed about him. He is cheered on the streets of Karachi. His birth is sanctified in the mosques of Pakistan. And I've never been able to mention his name without seeing the face of the person I'm addressing, no matter of what background, origin or sensibility, light up as if I were talking about a saint or a hero. Well, the man is a member of the Lashkar e-Toiba. This scientific expert, this Pakistani Oppenheimer, this genius who in his lifetime has had the country's biggest nuclear laboratory named after him, is officially a member of a terrorist organization which constitutes, as does the Harkat, the innermost circle of al-Qaida. A believer in nuclear weapons and a fanatic. Holder of the true secrets of the bomb, and clearly linked to bin Laden. We don't have to scare ourselves thinking what would happen if, by chance, Musharraf were overthrown and replaced by a clique of religious fanatics. The clique is already there. The religious fanatics are in the arena. They have, because they invented them, the key, the access codes for the Pakistani silos, transmission systems and warheads.

Public opinion. More precisely, the opinion of the jihadist groups in the company of which I have been living, closely or at a distance, for nearly a year, and which I suddenly discover have not only an opinion on the jihad, a position on social questions, on the status of women, on the great debates around the interpretation of the Prophet's words—they also have, with equal certainty, a line, an orthodoxy, a conviction about nuclear issues. For example, at the Peshawar mosque, when I was there in November, a Lashkar e-Toiba preacher cautioned Musharraf against the crime of “selling off the country's nuclear heritage.” Another example: in the issue of
Zarb e-Momin
which my strange visitor in December had finally left on the table: an “editorial” where the emir of Jamaat e-Islami warns that “the whole nation” will rise up if they give in to the “American Zionists” and renounce the “Islamic bomb.” What a pretty sight, he thunders, to see the Muslims being treated like dogs, yet again! The Jews have the bomb; the Americans have the bomb; even the French have it; why should we be the only ones forbidden to have the bomb! And finally, two years ago in another newspaper of the movement, a declaration by the Mufti Mizamuddin Shamzai, rector of Binori Town whose “elevated spirituality” I no longer much believe in, but whose statements still come as a shock: the Koran orders Muslims to give themselves “a strong capacity for defense”; should our leaders be renouncing this, signing treacherous non-proliferation treaties that the Zionist enemy is imposing on them—it would be an act of “high treason,” a “non-Islamic” action, “a rebellion against the commandments of almighty Allah.” Is there another country in the world where the question of the bomb has the status of a great national cause? Another country where the day of the first nuclear test—28 May—has the unofficial status of a religious holiday and where people parade under banners adorned with the “Hatif,” the Pakistani nuclear missile? Is there a more nightmarish situation than when an atomic arsenal becomes an article of faith, in the heads of religious zealots? And yet that is Pakistan.