I leave Khawaja, with his knowing smiles, his bearded men, his wild hypotheses, his questions, in a state of even greater confusion than when I arrived.
CHAPTER 4 THE DOUBLE LIFE OF OMAR.
As has often been the case in this investigation, it's luck that sets me on the path to clarification.
I'm at my hotel.
I'm thinking about all Khawaja's disconcerting hypotheses.
Feeling lost, almost demoralised, I'm thinking of even going back to France and returning in a more official capacity that would allow me to go back to the authorities and ask them the questions I've been thinking about.
And then Abdul, who has taken beautifully to his new role as fixer, comes to my room without warning-meaning, in our old code, that he has some information so sensitive that we should avoid using even the phone line within the hotel.
"I don't have what you asked for," he begins mysteriously, with a triumphant look.
I had asked him to find a contact on the staff of Lashkar i-Janghvi which, at that time, wasn't yet on the Americans' blacklist of terrorist organizations.
"No, I don't have it. But I have something better. Someone who heard what we're looking for contacted me. He says everything that's being said about Omar Sheikh's arrest is bullshit, and that he knows the truth . . . "
I know what's being said. I know the official version, which had been distributed immediately to the press agencies and the embassies. Having arrested the source of the e-mails they had traced, they wrapped things up the day the police raided Omar's aunt's house in Karachi and his grandfather's home in Lahore. They forced Ismal, the grandfather, to call Omar and plead with him to surrender. One of the inspectors grabbed the phone from the old man. "You're done for, Omar, give yourself up," he said. And the good Omar gave himself up to spare his family danger.
"So how is that bullshit? How can the e-mails they traced be bullshit?"
"That's exactly what we're going to find out!" Abdul replies excitedly. "You have a date with this guy today, at 6, in the old city, near Aurangzeb Park, where the junkies hang out. It will bring back memories. Don't worry, he's safe. He comes through my friend X, who's one of the best journalists in town and has my complete trust."
I'm a bit hesitant.
I can't help thinking that this kind of encounter, in one of the most squalid parts of the city, is precisely the kind of thing I should avoid.
And I recall the virtual catalogue of advice, a Bible for any journalist arriving in Karachi and which Pearl, unfortunately, ultimately didn't take into account: never take a hotel room facing the street; never flag down a taxi in the street; never, ever speak of Islam, or of Pakistan's nuclear program; and especially and above all, never go to street markets, cinemas, crowded areas, or public places in general without taking precautions, without telling someone you trust where you are going and what time you should be back-and Aurangzeb! A neighborhood known for drugs and crime!
Nonetheless, the proposition is very tempting.
Abdul explains that, in any case, the man would never come to the big hotels in town, where we usually arrange meetings. He says we have a phone date with the man in an hour, and then I can request that the meeting take place in our car, and that under no circumstances should we get out of the vehicle. Finally, I accept.
So here we are, a little before 6, at the intersection of Aurangzeb Park and Jinnah Road, Abdul behind the wheel and me in the back seat, watching for a man whose only clue as to what to look for is, in itself, rather reassuring in its navete: He will be waiting under the billboard for Pepsi-Cola, and will be wearing, under his jacket, "a very elegant, embroidered, multicolored vest."
Around us, groups of shaggy-haired young people with puffy features have taken over the sidewalk, the pale blue imitation ceramic-style steps that climb to the gates of the park, and farther, inside the park, the wooden benches and the pathways.
From afar, you would take them for beggars, waiting for rich people coming from the nearby Sabri restaurant and giving them free food. You would also take them for members of some strange, black-magic sect, or a legion of the supine, bivouacked in the middle of the city.
But they're just addicts.
They are the Karachi contingent of a reserve army of drugs and crime.
God knows I've seen sanctuaries like this before!
I remember the part of Bombay around the Stiffles Hotel, thirty years ago, where every junkie in the city-of the country, even-seemed to congregate: Young drifters off to nowhere, fanatic users, hooked on needles, with dead eyes, ready to kill mother and father and, above all, themselves for a fix of bad coke cut with talcum powder and medicines, worth, at the time, the price of a can of beer-and yet, as I once had the misfortune to discover, such force left in those apparently wasted bodies when they confront you!
But this . . . This shady hellhole . . . The scorched esplanade turned into a dumping ground for syringes . . . These heaps of bodies, with faces at once patient and feverish, some of them huddled around a camping stove cooking a tin of Nihari, the beef marinated in thick, spicy sauce, the favorite dish in Karachi . . . These two men fighting over an old rope mat . . . That person lying on a slightly better looking rug, seemingly dead or at least dead to the world . . . These others, pressed against each other, nearly comatose, around the ruin of what might have been an ancient fountain, which is in the center of the esplanade . . . These stunted trees, covered with black soot, that border the gates and provide these poor people an imaginary shelter . . . Down to the dogs and cats (for it's the only place in Karachi where I've seen so many animals that no one will bother), the mongrels wandering between the rugs, bizarre, moaning, sort of floating along, looking for a piece of vegetable peel, a little bone- Karachis say they inhale so much of the smoke or the fumes that they end up drugged as well . . . No, I've never seen this!
"Sorry!" says the man we neither saw nor heard arrive, as he opens the front door with an air of authority.
"Sorry!" he repeats as he sits next to Abdul, pointing out a pair of dirty, rag-clad youngsters, probably foreigners, who have followed him, and whom he dismisses, through the window, as one would flick away flies-I barely have time, before the car drives off, to catch the delicate features and the pleading expression of one, a young girl.
"This was the only solution. It's one of the rare areas where the police don't venture," he says.
He turns half-way around. What strikes me is not his vest, but the too-large shoulder pads of his jacket. And then the bony face, black hair with a low forehead, the Nietzschian moustache, with fine, tight wrinkles around the eyes. He smiles, with a roguish air, and adds in a gravely voice: "Except me, of course."
For the man-I shall call him "Tariq"-tells us he is a policeman. He explains he has information about Omar's interrogation by police officers Athar Rashid and Faisal Noor in Karachi. And if he sought us out, it is because some people in the Sindh police are not happy about the way things transpired.
"First question," he begins, after a brief reminder of the conditions of our meeting and the precautions I should take so that he will not be identified: "Do you know when the Sheikh was arrested?" I know what everyone knows. I know what the European and Pakistani press printed.
"The 12th. According to the press, he was arrested on the 12th of February, just a few days after . . . "
He interrupts me with the teasing expression of someone who has set a trap into which you have just, obligingly, fallen.
"One sentence, two errors, Mr. Journalist! Omar was not arrested, he turned himself in. And he didn't turn himself in on the 12th but on the 5th, Tuesday, the 5th, in the evening."
The car turns down a road which could take us far from the park in the direction of Jinnah Road and the Jama Cloth Market. He gestures to Abdul to make a right. Since he's gotten in the car, he hasn't stopped stealing furtive glances right and left, punctuated by slight, jerky movements of his neck.
"Next question," he continues. "Do you know who Brigadier Ijaz Ejaz Shah is?"
I don't know who Brigadier Ijaz Ejaz Shah is.
"What? I thought you came from Lahore . . . "
I glance at Abdul in the rearview mirror to express my surprise that the man knows this. Abdul looks incredulous, lifts an eyebrow as if to say, still another mystery of Karachi . . .
"You've come from Lahore, but you don't know who Ijaz is? Think again," Tariq insists.
I think about it and remember the tall silhouette of a thin, bald man I met at the Liberty Lions Club in Lahore. He was introduced to me as the Minister of the Interior of Punjab, the strong man of the region, and I seem to recall his name was Ijaz.
"Brigadier Ijaz," he continues in a resonant voice, like a teacher instructing the class dunce, without turning round to face me, "is not just the Minister of the Interior of Punjab. He is also a close friend of Musharraf. More importantly, he's an ISI man, a very high-ranking agent, ex-chief of the agency's Air Force, in charge until only recently of relations with the Harkat ul-Mujahideen and the Harkat ul-Jihad al-Islami. Now, attention!"
He turns around and looks at me with a frankly hostile expression. I can't say if he's doing this for effect, or if he is suddenly seized by a genuine rush of contempt for an ignorant Westerner.
"He is the one the Sheikh turned himself in to on the evening of the 5th. The Sheikh knows him, of course, because the HUM and the HUJI are the two groups Ijaz is associated with and so he decides to give himself up to this old acquaintance."
Now I vaguely remember, as though in a fog, the Brigadier's reaction when the diplomat accompanying me had introduced me to him, his visible recoil, his smile turned glacial at the mention of my project, a "novel" about Daniel Pearl.
"Meaning . . . " I say to him, taken aback and not sure I understand.
The car turns and starts up a narrow, steep street, a dangerous back alley leading back to the park. Past a butcher's stall that smells of meat gone bad. Next to it, a bunch of skinny dogs are fighting over a pile of stinking fish viscera. With the overhead light on, Tariq reaches into his pocket and hands me a wrinkled piece of paper without actually letting go of it. Then he takes it back quickly. But I have time to see it is a carbon copy of a note, in English, on police letterhead, confirming the surrender of Omar on the 5th, to Brigadier Ijaz.
"This means that seven days go by between the moment when the Sheikh turns himself in to this high-ranking ISI official and the time, on the 12th, when he is handed over, by a special flight from Lahore to Karachi, to us, to the police. During those seven days, he is kept in secret in an ISI safe house, solely in the hands of ISI agents. The police know nothing about it. The FBI and the American Embassy know nothing about it. No one, do you hear me, no one knows, during those seven days, that the presumed organizer of Daniel Pearl's kidnapping is there in Lahore, in the hands of the Pakistani secret services."
The car pulls close to the wall to let pass some young people walking right down the middle of the street, weaving, as though they were drunk. I'm not sure I understand him.
"Meaning . . . ?"
"Meaning that things happened the way they always happen in this country. When a jihadist is arrested, he always has the name and the number of a brigadier he asks us to call and who always tells us, the cops: let him go."
"Except, this time-"
"You understand. In this case, the Sheikh didn't wait to be arrested. As soon as he saw that it was going badly, he decided to take things in his own hands and get in touch with his contact. The fact is, the Sheikh is one of the ISI's men. He has been for a long time. And all this is the story of an agent who plans an action, and sees things go wrong, and, when they go wrong, goes to report it: 'Chief, we've got a problem, what shall we do?'"
"And so, what do they do?"
"They spend seven days and seven nights, among people from the services, trying to come to an agreement. On what? On what to say and not to say to the police. On what is going to happen to him once he's turned himself in, and on the guarantees they can grant him. I won't tell them anything I know, he promises. I'll protect the ISI. I won't tell anyone about its role in the Pearl affair, or in the combat of jihadists in Kashmir. But you have to commit to protecting me from being extradited and, if I'm condemned, to getting me out of this situation as quickly as possible. For seven days they negotiate this. Seven days to put together a scenario. Seven days to find the best way for everyone to get out of the mess they've gotten themselves into."
I remember all the things I read about those days of fever and anxiety. I remember that, at the time, the authorities were still hoping to find Pearl alive and were racing against the clock, counting the hours and the minutes. Can't we imagine, I ask, that those seven days were used to give Omar the third degree? Weren't there people in the agencies who felt that the only thing that counted was to make him reveal, by any means necessary, where the journalist was being held? And moreover, isn't this what Omar told the court in Hyderabad in a 21 June declaration cited by the News that dovetails, as a matter of fact, with this story of disappearing for seven days but gives the opposite interpretation-he talks about a week of "harassment," of them "breathing down his neck," a week in which they had "fabricated evidence" against him?
Tariq shrugs his shoulders.
"On the contrary. Those seven days were seven days lost for the investigation. You're not a cop, but you can imagine. Seven days is the time it took for the people who killed him to hide the body, erase any clues, and disappear."
"And the accusations of harassment? The idea that the people he was dealing with brutalized him?"
"The risk, in situations like this, is always that the agent who has been burned panics and spills everything to the press. So, of course, the services conditioned him. They may even have threatened him. Musharraf talked to the father, who talked to the son, pleading with him to avoid any declarations harmful to Pakistani national interests. But look at his face when he came out of the safe house and was delivered to us. He was fine. He was smiling. He had the look of someone who had been given assurances. He didn't appear to be a man who had been raked over the coals for seven days. And, for that matter . . . "
He takes his time. Then, the sardonic smile of a brute. I hadn't noticed that half his front teeth were capped in silver, like the whores in Tashkent.
" . . . for that matter, we would have liked to have given him the third degree when we got him ourselves. We know how to do that sort of thing. But I'll give you another scoop-the order came down from the highest level not to do that. And one of their men was sent, unannounced, to keep an eye on our men during the entire interrogation. Result: the Sheikh said nothing. Nothing. And there was a moment, apparently, when he wanted to talk about what he did when he left the Indian prisons. But 'they' were immediately informed, and we got a phone call from someone in the President's cabinet telling us: 'Watch it! Stop everything! Keep him quiet and turn him over to the judge.'"
I sense that Tariq is telling the truth. And I add what he says to some bits of information I picked up in my research: A report on Pakistani channel PTV2 presented, in April, a thesis not far from his . . . The 13 March Newsweek article describing an Omar arrogant before the police who interrogated him-"sure," he declared, that he would not be extradited and that he wouldn't pass more than "three or four years" in Pakistani prisons . . . Another article citing his lawyers' protest of a procedural trick that prevented the reintroduction of the testimony of Hamid Ullah Memon, the superior police officer in charge of the arrest and responsible for the February deposition . . . Still another reporting the judge's complaint that the police interrogation was incomplete, lacking in depth, and when a mocking Omar said, "What do they mean by saying the interrogation is incomplete? They stopped interrogating me more than a fortnight ago. I am prepared to talk to them, but they are afraid of my talking."
I start again.
"Let's back up for a second. What 'went wrong,' as you put it? Why, in your perception of things, was Omar forced to turn himself in and set all this in motion?"
Tariq hesitates once again and looks outside for a long while. Perhaps he's not really sure himself.
"There are two theories. The first is that the team bungled things. The story about the e-mails for example. The inexperience of Naseem who was picked up almost immediately and who, of course, ratted on the boss. Or, even dumber, the fact that they continued for several days to make calls on the journalist's mobile phone, which were traced. Everything was planned, except for the novices' errors . . . "
I think of the obscenity of this mobile phone, continuing, like nails or hair, to live its own life after the death of its owner.
I think about Abdul Majid, the cell phone salesman I found on Bank Road, in Islamabad, who had sold Omar two of the six phones he had used during the operation. He also told me a story about the kidnappers- that they had been thrilled like kids to be using a triband mobile phone with an American number, from which they could play at threatening the investigators, their families, their children.
I think also of another story, strange and unexplained: a plane ticket for Pakistan Airlines flight PK 757, London to Islamabad, file number EEEFQH, was purchased in the name of Daniel Pearl on 8 February, eight days after his death, by someone who would have had to present his passport and a valid visa.
"Or else, the second hypothesis," Tariq continues. "We're not actually certain Pearl's execution was planned. When Sheikh says that he learned of it when he called 'Siddiqui' from Lahore on 5 February to give him the order to 'send the patient to the doctor' but was told 'too late! Dad is dead, we did the scan and the X-rays,' I'm not excluding the possibility that he was telling the truth. So maybe things went off the track there. Perhaps Pearl was executed against the instructions of Omar and the people behind the operation."
Tariq turns to face me again, and takes my arm, violently, with a feigned intensity which, I guess, is supposed to convey the sorrow we share, the sympathy.
"The piece of the puzzle I lack is who decided to contravene the instructions. The actual team themselves, who went off the deep end? Or other sponsors, interfering with the orders of the original backers? It often happens that way. You think you're alone in an action, but in fact, there are two of you. And the second one shows his hand while your back is turned. Sorry. I really don't know."
"All right," I say, removing my arm from his grasp. "But one last question, the very last. Why seven days before giving Omar back to your colleagues? Did they really need all that time to put together a scenario?"
"There are two things," he says, still turned towards me, with his sardonic Tashkent smile. "You're right to ask, because there are two different things. First, it's not an easy case. Imagine, once more, the panic of these people when they discover that these guys have lost it and executed the hostage. The panic in the services! The frenzied attempt to cover things over, disconnect the circuits, erase the traces that could lead to the higher-ups, convince the Sheikh to take the responsibility and not to finger too many people, save what they can and invent a whole story for the Americans. And then . . . "
I get the impression he's hesitating again. I try to catch Abdul's eye, to see if a bill won't fix things. But no. That's not it. There's the beginning of a fight, two guys, in the light of a doorway, with broken bottles. For a second, his cop reflex has resurfaced. Then he continues.
"Think about it . . . Five and seven equals twelve-the day Musharraf is to arrive in Washington. Add another two and it's on the 14th that Omar's first interrogation began. The same day Musharraf was received by Bush, the end of his trip to the United States."
"So what?"
"I don't know. You tell me. Musharraf is a President who's playing a difficult role in terms of diplomacy. He discusses, he negotiates. His primary request when he met with Bush, the delivery of F-16s, frozen because of our conflict with India, is, by the way, the same request that appears in the kidnappers' communiques. And yet, all through the negotiations, Musharraf says nothing. Above all, he doesn't want to worry the Americans. He even has the nerve to declare, in his press conference with Bush, that he is 'reasonably sure than Daniel Pearl is still alive' and that we're 'as near as possible to these culprits.' And when it's all over, when the negotiations are finished, when everyone realizes that the Americans won't give, when there's nothing left to negotiate, the truth explodes- Omar's name, his arrest, and the death of the American journalist. Don't you find that disconcerting?"
"Too much so, perhaps. It looks like a crude manipulation."
Tariq shrugs his shoulders, like someone who has said all he has to say and leaves you to figure things out yourself. We've come back to Aurangzeb. The gates of the park are closed. It looks to me like the small crowd on the sidewalks is not as dense as it was a while ago. Besides the addicts, there are now, wandering around some brand new cars, a group of young aspiring starlets, maybe leaving Radio Pakistan, which is nearby, 100 meters away. He turns one last time towards me and offers his hand amicably. His gaze is distracted now, absent.
"Be careful. This is a sensitive matter. I know them. I know how the Mohajirs think. And I know they wouldn't like the idea that someone new is meddling in this-especially a foreigner. God keep you."
I had forgotten this other factor in the Pakistani equation: the hostility that has existed since the birth of Pakistan between the native Punjabis and the ones they call here the Mohajirs-the millions of people who came from India in 1949, at the time of Partition. Could it be that this rivalry is a dimension of the Pearl affair? Is it conceivable, for example, that the Punjabi high command (contrary to what Tariq pretends to believe, 90% of the ISI's superior officers are Punjabis) has found an excellent means of destabilizing Musharraf (who is, as no one here forgets, the most eminent of Mohajirs and who, when the Pearl affair exploded, had just completed a radical purge whose aim, under the pretext of fighting the Islamists, was to rid the ISI of Punjabis)? And is this the real reason Tariq wanted to see us, and to talk to us?
But he's already out of the car. Now that I see him standing, he looks smaller than I thought. He leaves as he came, a little man with oversized shoulders who plunges into the night, leaving Abdul and me to some new theorizing.
Let's say that Omar is, as Tariq says, an ISI agent.
Let's say that's a possible explanation for his attitude during and after his trial.
Let's say that that's one of the reasons for this strangely docile attitude that makes Omar accept, basically, being the fall guy.
The real question then becomes who, exactly, in the services set him up, and with what end in mind.
Because it's either one or the other.
Either Musharraf has a hold on his country, he is informed, in real time, of the work of his services, and, in fact, Tariq is right: Musharraf knows, when he is in the United States, where Pearl has been detained; he knows, especially, that Pearl is already dead when he declares to the American press that he has every hope of seeing him liberated. On this point, why not? We can well imagine a forceful negotiator like the General-President-formerly of the ISI himself, let's not forget-keeping the card of a journalist's liberation up his sleeve, taking advantage of it to make things last, and showing it at what he judges the opportune moment. The second point, however, is not so simple, it is hard to see why a head of state nurturing a strategic alliance with the United States- F-16s notwithstanding-would add cynicism to a crime. It's hard to see why, knowing that Pearl is dead and the announcement of his execution is a matter of days or hours away, Musharraf would chose to offer one last lie that could only, in the end, add to his partner's anger.
Or, alternatively, Musharraf is in control of nothing. He is deceived by his own services. The man officially charged with keeping him abreast of developments in the affair (who, by the way, turns out to be none other than Brigadier Cheema, the man at the Ministry of the Interior who answered my questions regarding Omar) makes a point of providing him with erroneous information. This so-very-fragile head of state, this king without crown or territory, who has already escaped-no one in Pakistan can forget it-six assassination attempts and who had to cancel an August 2000 visit to Karachi because his own security said they could not protect him, knows, perhaps, where Pearl has been held. But he does not know of Pearl's possible murder, nor that the deed has actually been done. The very fact that he says he has good reason to believe that the American journalist will be liberated soon, the confidence with which he utters those words, the political risks he takes by saying them, all this, rather than prove his duplicity, tends to demonstrate his innocence. And the whole thing would amount to a gigantic maneuver on the part of the services, or, at least a faction of the services, seeking to ridicule, destabilize, and place in an awkward position a president whose Western alliances they contest and whose authority they seek to undermine by any means possible.
What better means to discredit Musharraf, in fact, than to let him say, "Pearl is alive" when they know that he no longer is?
What better way to mark the balance of power and to tell the world-starting with the Americans-that this man is a puppet and that the real power is in other hands, than to let him get tangled up in his own promises. Or, better still, to inflate them by feeding him, and the press, erroneus information-and, then, to pull the rug out from under him at the opportune time?
The services have their policy on Kashmir. They had a policy-perhaps they still do-on Afghanistan. In all probability, they have a policy for the Pearl affair, and we have witnessed a new stage in the power struggle between the State and the State-within-the-State that is the Pakistani services.
Ten days before the kidnapping, and not without courage, Musharraf made a long antiterrorist speech that half of Pakistan assumed was dictated by Colin Powell. Right after that, he had two thousand jihadists arrested, the majority from groups blacklisted by the United States. He closed the training camps in Pakistani Kashmir. He started cleaning up the services themselves by placing his old friend Ehsan ul-Haq, a man who is considered a moderate, representative of the "secular and kemalist" wing of the organisation, at their head. And there it is. The kidnapping, then the execution of Daniel Pearl is tit for tat. Omar Sheikh, the young Londoner who became a warrior of Allah, must have been exploited by the branch of the ISI hostile to Musharraf. And there's every reason to believe the message got through because in the following weeks, after a vague and comic promise not to dabble in terrorism, the police released half of the assassins they had previously arrested.