Who Killed Daniel Pearl (9 page)

And those questions that he asked us, recalls Judea, his mother and me, especially his mother, about our families and our roots. How are you Jewish, how am I? Obviously it fascinated him. And there was the way he would call from wherever he was in the world every time there was a bombing in Israel to ask about his grandmother Tova and his cousins in Tel-Aviv.

And Israeli? I asked then. I read in France that he was American but also Israeli, dual citizenship—the French sometimes call it
double
allégeance
—is there any truth to that? Judea hesitated. Well . . . I'm the one who has an Israeli passport, and naturally so does Ruth. So it depends how you look at it. From the Israeli point of view, because his mother and father are Israeli, he was too, automatically, in a certain way. But he never thought about it. Neither did we. The only trace of it was when he was three, and he was listed on Ruth's Israeli passport. But does that make you an Israeli?

And politically? I continued. What were his politics? Was he very critical of his country? Anti-American?

Judea laughed at that. Maybe I hadn't expressed myself correctly. Maybe I was wrong to say “anti-American.” Because for the first time in the three hours we have been talking, Judea bursts out laughing, yes, hearty laughter—and just as well, in fact, it makes me happy.

Anti-American, you said? Are you joking? Who told you such nonsense? You're not going to tell me that's why he's popular in France and Europe! On the contrary, he loved his country. He was proud to be an American citizen. He knew all the names and biographies of the presidents from when he was a little kid. Do you know why he wanted to call his son Adam? He found out right before he got kidnapped that it was going to be a boy, and he and Mariane decided to call him Adam. And it was because of John Quincy Adams, sixth president of the United States, a fervent abolitionist, who fought against slavery. It's true there was the ecumenical angle, OK. There was the idea that it was a name that could be said in all languages and all religions. But it was also a tribute to a great president who was also a great American. Danny, I assure you, was passionately American. Much more than I am, for instance. I'm still a damn Israeli immigrant.

And apart from that? Besides being proud to be American? About Israel? The Palestinians? What were his fundamental thoughts about Israel and the Palestinians?

Judea hesitates again. I realize—he realizes—that he doesn't really know much about it.

He loved the Jewish people, for sure. Deeply loved Israel. Was inwardly appalled when he witnessed the country being caricatured and stigmatized: He knew Israelis hate war, that they drag their feet when they have to do their stints in the reserves. He had cousins there and he knew they cried in their tanks when they went out on operations. But he also loved justice. He refused to have to choose between Israel and justice. And so, a partisan of two states—does that satisfy you?

The root of the problem, Judea continues to insist, is that Danny didn't have ideas, no positions or opinions, because he was a journalist before anything else. You couldn't expect him to get involved or be a militant for any cause. You couldn't hope that he would take sides for the Jews, or for the Palestinians—the Jews are right because . . . the Palestinians have a point because . . . The role of the journalist, he would say, isn't to give out prizes for virtue. The journalist's role is to ascertain the facts, period.

I try to get more out of Danny Gill, his childhood friend, who is ill at ease to be talking about his old friend, intimidated to be there at the parents' house, in the role of final witness. I can imagine him as a little boy, already overweight, dominated by his friend. I imagine them getting together in the evenings when they took their dogs for a walk. Who told me that the last e-mail from Pearl, the evening of the 23rd was to ask about his dog? Maybe Gill. His dog was sick, but now he's better. It's Pearl who's gone. His eyes get blurry; he wipes away a tear, an emotional boy's tear. I keep pushing, anyway. Maybe because I don't want to give up my idea of Danny as a true American democrat, I ask him, “The war in Iraq, for instance. I know it's always hard to make the dead talk, but you who knew him so well . . . what would he say if he were here?” And Gill, in front of Ruth and Judea who are listening, like me, without saying a word, confirms, “He'd be critical, of course. Completely critical. Judea is right when he says this idea that he was anti-American is bullshit. But this stupid war, he'd be against it, I guarantee it.”

There's the Jewish-American Danny, but he's open to the cultures of the world and to the culture, particularly, of the
other
. This Jew learns some Arabic, in London, at age 30—because of his Sephardic mother, born in Iraq? Certainly, but not only that. Also because of this desire for the other, this openness to the enigmatic otherness of his fellow human, near and far. This American rejects the fashionable theories about the collision of civilizations, the inevitable clash of cultures. He and Omar, his murderer, read Huntington, we will see, at the same time. But the killer subscribes to the idea, loves the death that he is promised—Danny resists, refuses the disaster that is foretold. If there's only one left, it will be me. If there is only one American and Jew left to believe that confrontation with Islam is not fatal, I will be that American and that Jew, and I will do everything in my power to avert the inevitable.

Conversation between Danny and Gill, after September 11, on the Koran: Doesn't the Koran preach hatred of infidels? Yes, of course, Danny answered. But not only that. You can't, you don't have the right, to pick out only the negative parts of a book like that. There is another Koran within the Koran, which is a message of mercy and peace.

And this beautiful scene, recounted by Robert Sam Anson in his pioneering report for
Vanity Fair
a few months after Danny's death: It's November 2001, just before the U.S. bombing of Kabul. There are more and more demonstrations throughout Pakistan. Danny is in Peshawar, caught up in a protest march where they're burning flags and effigies of Bush. Don't stay here, says Hamid Mir, the journalist who is with him. It's dangerous . . . No, Danny replies. I'm here, I want to understand, and I want to see in these people's eyes why they hate us. The anecdote may not be true. A colleague who knew him well told me that it didn't seem very authentic to him. But that would be a shame. Because it illustrates so well the curiosity he had, the thirst to know the other, this radical non-hatred— the best of Americans?

There's the Danny—I've read his articles—who even if he is proud of America, thinks that America and, in general the West, has an obligation to the world, owes the world something.

There is the diehard humanist who, in spite of everything he sees and has seen in his life, continues to want to believe that man is not a predator to other men, but a brother, a kindred spirit.

There is the journalist who through his reporting goes unflaggingly towards the forgotten of the world, pays his debt, our debt, the debt of the hordes of smug and overfed Westerners who couldn't care less about world poverty and don't consider themselves “their brothers' keepers.”

There is another debt, he's well aware. He's enough of a Jew to know that the problem is also those other hordes, the Muslims, who too often refuse to recognize their own debt towards a certain Book and the people who carried it. But he pays anyway. He pays in advance, in a way—without waiting and without assurance that he will be paid back. And that's admirable.

There's that face—there aren't that many—in which our era can see itself without shame.

Because in a certain way Daniel Pearl is still alive—because of the emotion his death has aroused, and also because of the values everyone can feel, indistinctly, he incarnated—he is this living antidote to all the modern stupidities about the war between civilizations and worlds.

Did they know what they were doing when they killed him?

Did they know what they were killing when they killed this journalist?

And is it for that reason that I became interested in him—is it for the same but inverted reason that I decided one day, and in fact immediately, to take on this investigation, to retrace his path, to write this book?

I don't know. It's always very difficult to trace the origin of a book. I'm in Kabul that morning. I have just arrived. It's the start of a “mission of reflection on the participation of France in the reconstruction of Afghanistan” that the French president and prime minister have entrusted me with, which kept me busy for part of the winter of 2002 and resulted in my
Rapport Afghan
. The previous evening when I was out after curfew, I'd had a small run-in with some members of the militia of Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, a neo-fundamentalist warlord and a former terrorist. And it was President Karzaï, who, that morning, gave me the news. We're in his office, with a few of his ministers. They bring him a piece of paper. He turns pale. And informs us, first in Persian for Mohammed Fahim and Yunous Qanouni, then in English for my benefit: We have received confirmation of the death—his throat was slit—of the American journalist Daniel Pearl.

Images, a little later. The shock of the video. Emotion. Compassion. Identification, naturally. Every journalist in the world must have identified, even briefly, with this man who suddenly resembled them like a brother. Their own death, the masked angel whose face they watch for in vain from one assignment to the next, and who is there suddenly in the devastated features of one of them. For me, the image, too, of a bright, personable American journalist I had bumped into during the summer of 1997 in Asmara, Eritrea, and who was trying, as I was, to make contact with John Garang, the Sudanese Christian fighting with the Khartoum Islamists. Was it really him? How can I remember? You don't know, do you, when you meet a journalist in Asmara who is trying on Panama hats in a store run by an Italian in the Piazza Centrale, that he's going to get his throat slit four years later, and that his image will pursue you for a year, probably longer? What I know is that for these reasons and others, for those which came to me immediately and for those I know now, because Pearl's story makes me afraid and prevents me from feeling fear, because of what it says about the horror of our times and equally about their share of greatness, because of what Pearl represented when he was alive and what he must continue to represent dead, because of the causes that were his and which remain essentially mine, because of all of that, his image is present now, and stays with me.

A kindred spirit. A brother. Dead and alive. A dead man that I must bring to life. And this pledge, this contract, first between him and me, then between me and myself: to contribute something. Usually you take out a contract on someone to kill him. Here it's the opposite: a contract out on Daniel Pearl, in order to resurrect him.

                     
PART TWO
OMAR

CHAPTER 1
IN THE EYE OF THE ASSASSIN

I'm back in Europe.

Five months have passed since Daniel Pearl's murder and my decision to write this book.

I'm going over my notes on his life—and at the same time reading and rereading
At Home In the World,
the collection of his articles published by the
Wall Street Journal.

And I confess that, the more time passes, the more I reflect on all this, the more I advance—if not in the investigation, then at least into the depth of Pearl's personality and the mystery of his assassination—the more I ask myself what could have led someone to designate such a man for a death so barbarous . . . and the more I am intrigued by the personality of his assassin.

Not that there was just one assassin, of course.

Not that one can say, “There, that's the assassin, the man who killed Daniel Pearl—the idea came from his mind, was carried out by his hand.”

In fact, the little I know so far, the little anyone knows, is that, on the contrary, it was a complex crime in which many are implicated. The little that has been established so far is that it took not one but several men to ensnare Pearl—to disarm his vigilance, lure him into the trap at the Village Garden restaurant, drive him to Gulzar e-Hijri, sequester, kill, and bury him. I've cited the Yemenis . . . and Bukhari, the man who dictated the words to say to the camera . . . Fazal Karim, the man who held his head while another cut his throat . . . Saud Memon, owner of the property . . . Lahori . . . there are even more whom I have yet to clearly identify—but patience, it will come. It's not a crime, it's a puzzle. It's not an organization, it's an army. And nothing could be more simplistic in the face of this puzzle, this army, than to take this one or that one and declare:
“He's the assassin.”

But, at the same time, there undoubtedly had to be one person to recruit these men, one mind, having conceived of the crime, to channel their energies and distribute their assignments, an architect for such a pyramid, a conductor for this sinister orchestra, a director for this murder committed in unison, an
emir
who, though not necessarily present at Pearl's Gulzar e-Hijri jail, nor, as we shall see, at the Village Garden rendezvous, designated the target, defined the strategy, pulled the strings, and recruited Bukhari, Fazal Karim, Lahori and the others.

That man's name is Omar.

His exact name is Omar Sheikh—given name Omar, family name Sheikh (and not, as the Pakistanis often say, Sheikh Omar, in the same way they say Mullah Omar, for the Taliban leader).