Who rules Pakistan?
The President, or the services?
That is the question the Pearl affair raises.
That is the question raised by an agent named Omar.
CHAPTER 5 WHEN THE KILLER CONFESSES.
There's one place in the world where no one has the slightest doubt that Omar is an ISI agent-India.
Of course, I know there are many things to consider.
I know that India can derive great advantage from the idea that the murder of a prominent American journalist was commissioned by their sworn enemy, Pakistan.
I also know my own biases: I love this country so much! I feel, particularly after being in Pakistan, so happy here! I haven't been here in thirty years, and it takes me only an hour on Connaught, ten minutes at the Gandhi Memorial and five at the Chandni Chowk Bird Hospital to be flooded with a stream of memories that have been languishing in my mind and which I suddenly rediscover, with incredible precision: emotion, sensuality, a nostalgia of mind and sense. The jacket I wore, the woman I loved, her tight little chignon. The lights of the temple where we slept without permission. The money-changer/magician, that first evening on Connaught, who, by folding the bills in half as he was counting them, had robbed me of half my meager fortune-funny, how the love for a place is a love that never dies!
Anyway, I wanted from the start to have the Indian point of view on the case.
I meet with journalists, intellectuals, retired and active military men, scientists, heads of "think-tanks"-those American-model idea shops flourishing in the India of the new millennium.
Using what little influence my Bangladeshi past seems to give me here, I schedule meetings at the federal Ministry of the Interior; then at the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), India's equivalent of the ISI, with the few people assigned to follow not only the Pearl affair but also Omar.
Which is how I found myself in the heart of New Delhi in a mini-Pentagon-composed of a series of bunkerized buildings, with walls of sandbags and cement, a veritable fortress against the suicide bombings regularly threatened by Muslim fundamentalist-swarmed from morning until night by men and women in Western-style dress, who look more like the employees of any big bureaucracy than like spies.
"A book about Daniel Pearl?" asks Sudindrah Datta, deputy to the head of the RAW. He's around thirty, square-jawed and good-humored with the manner of a gym teacher, and is receiving me in his huge and bare office, which has no files, no furniture, just a table, a couch, a chair on which he has hung his windbreaker, and an old, wheezing air-conditioner. From next-door, the clacking of secretaries typing. "Yes, that's interesting. We know you are an old friend of our country. But first, tell me. It seems you've just been in Pakistan . . . How are those lunatics?"
A long day, then, spent in a universe so bizarre I never thought I'd have to deal with it except in novels.
A day spent poring over dusty documents produced on old-fashioned typewriters, seeking the overlooked detail that changes everything, the decisive clue, the lie that exposes another lie, the mystery that opens, like Russian dolls, into another even thicker mystery, the forgotten name, the word which in a flash reveals the country behind the lies and the crime.
And at the end of the day, three exceptional documents and several pieces of information-some of which had never before come out of these archives.
Document no. 1. The most exceptional and perhaps most fascinating, even if it is not the most directly tied to my investigation-in cramped typing, single-spaced on an old typewriter, in the nothing-butthe-facts language common to all the police forces of the world, a copy of the transcript of the interrogation of Masood Azhar, the future boss of the Jaish-i Mohammed and already at that time-summer 1994, after his arrest in Kashmir-a most-wanted terrorist.
No direct link, then, with the Pearl case. Not a word, for example, about his disciple Omar Sheikh. But a precise description of the relationships between the different groups that comprise the Pakistani Islamic movement during those years. A description, from within, of the series of schisms that endlessly divide it. The trips to Albania, Kenya, Zambia, Great Britain, taken by this relentless propagandist for a jihad that must set fire to the planet before submitting it to the law of Islam. The extraordinary freedom with which he moves around London, which, we discover with horror, is already the real bridgehead of terrorism in Europe. How he thinks he's too fat-"I am a too fatty person"-to go through complete military training. How he makes up for it by managing newspapers-Sadai Mujahid, for example-that spread jihadist propaganda all over the Pakistan. His campaign in favor of Islamabad's withdrawal from the international forces in Somalia. His faith in a Pakistan that would, via fire and sword, deserve its name of "Country of the Pure." In short, an amazing intaglio portrait of this holy man-because Masood presents himself as a holy man, a religious person, a pious soul-who holds the Koran in one hand and a machine gun in the other. And then, reading on, as he recounts his difficulties in obtaining a visa for Bangladesh and India, comes the tale of the deception-how, with the help of the Pakistani government and in fact the ISI, he obtains a fraudulent Portugese passport in the name of Wali Adam Issa.
Omar is not cited by name. Still, I can't help thinking about the fact that Masood is his mentor. They were both freed together, as we recall, after the terrorist operation at the Kandahar airport. It has not been ruled out that Masood was among those who, with Omar, planned Pearl's kidnapping. And I can't help but consider that Omar's mentor, who is possibly one of the Pearl abduction planners, has strong enough ties to the Pakistani secret service to be given a fraudlent passport-one which, as the transcript clearly recounts, would fool even the most discerning Indian customs officials.
Document no. 2. The transcript of Omar's own interrogation, after the abductions of Rhys Partridge, Paul Rideout, Christopher Morston and Bela Nuss, the English and American tourists he kidnapped in New Delhi in 1994.
He's just back from Bosnia. He's just gone through weeks of military training in the Miran Shah camp. He's part of all those jihad troops on meager pay, born too late in a world that is too old, who have seen the wars in Bosnia and Afghanistan end before they could really participate, and who are desperately seeking another "great cause" to embrace. Palestine, whose sinful leaders, in the wake of Oslo, are making compromises with the Israeli Satan? Chechnya, where the Russian army is involved in its war of conquest, control and-some aren't afraid to say it-extermination? Maybe the Philippines, where the Abbu Sayyaf groups are marking out their territory? No. For him, as for many other Pakistanis of his generation, it will be Kashmir, the province Pakistan and India are fighting over, where Pakistani terrorist groups, supported by the secret service, have been engaged in terrorist guerrilla warfare for nearly forty years.
"There are things to do within India itself," he was told by a man he calls in the transcript Maulana Abdullah, a Jihadist chieftain, member of the Harkat ul-Mujahideen, whom he met in the Afghan camps. "There's combat on the ground in Kashmir. There's a military battle against the occupying forces. But there's also work to be done behind the Indian army, in Delhi. You've got dual nationality, Pakistani and English. You can even give up your Pakistani passport and apply in London for a visa for India, which you'll get in a heartbeat. You're exactly the kind of man we need. We're waiting for you." After which Omar finds himself, on 26 July 1994, at the Holiday Inn in New Delhi, the same city I knew so well-but twenty-five years before him, in the year of his birth, I realize. He finds himself in New Delhi with a clear mission: to kidnap foreigners, hold them, and make a deal to exchange their freedom for that of six leaders of the Harkat ul-Mujahideen, including Masood Azhar, languishing in Indian prisons.
So Omar recounts this story. He goes into detail on his series of kidnappings. You see him running around town like a rutting animal, hunting for victims. He describes a method, which is exactly the one he will put into use eight years later with Daniel Pearl: the strategy of making them trust you; setting up a house in a remote area of town, in Saharanpur; purchasing a camera; the chains; everything down to the snapshots he sends to the press and which I saw-gun against the temple, the day's newspaper as background. At least the script was well-rehearsed! Then, as his narrative continues, three elements emerge that indicate the entire operation would not have been feasible without the active support of the Pakistani embassy in Delhi.
The house. The fact that he buys the house. He gives the price, 130,000 rupees, and explains very clearly that he doesn't rent it, he buys it. Where did he get the money, the 130,000 rupees?
The weapons. The day Yusuf, his sidekick, finds him in a park, near Jama Masjid, with a plastic bag containing two handguns. The day, not long after, he brought an AK-47 and two grenades back to their hideout. Impossible, I'm told by my sources, and I think they're right, to bring an AK-47, grenades and handguns into India without diplomatic assistance.
And then, the most significant, this admission, on page fourteen of the transcript. He comes back to his military training stints in Afghanistan. He talks about the two times, in 1993 and 1994, he stayed in the Miran Shah and Khalid Bin Waleed camps. He explains in detail how he is trained to "handle pistols, revolvers, assault rifles, AK-47 machine guns, LPG and GPMG rocket launchers." He recounts his apprenticeship in those actual "techniques" of "organizing an ambush, handling grenades, mines, explosives. Living clandestinely, the art of shadowing someone, of moving around at night." And, in passing, he gives the names of his two instructors, two men to whom he owes everything because they taught him everything on these subjects: Subedar Saleem and Subedar Abdul Hafeez, who are, he specifies, former members of the SSG-otherwise known as the Special Services Group, the elite unit of the ISI!
Document no. 3. His diary. Not the police transcript anymore, but his personal diary, kept by Omar himself, at the beginning of his stay in Indian jails, in which he recounts in even more detail the series of kidnappings that have brought him to this point.
The Pakistanis, who know about this diary, regularly make it known that it can only be a fake, fabricated by the Indian police-who ever heard of a terrorist, in jail, starting a diary which is a chronicle of his life? Everything is possible, of course. I've seen enough dirty tricks in my life to know that everything is possible and that the Indians, just like the Algerians or the Israelis or any other secret service in the world, are capable of anything when it comes to disinformation. But in this case I don't believe it. First, you see everything in jails; anything is conceivable. Why not a killer keeping his own diary? Omar, furthermore, has never denied it. He read, as did everyone, excerpts published in the Indian press. He knows that the Pakistani papers also talked about "Omar's Diary" as an essential element of the case. And he never in the slightest denied its authenticity. And then I saw the text, finally. I went to the Records Room of the criminal court in New Delhi, in Patiala House, where I managed to get them to take the original fifty-page manuscript out of the archives, declassify it, and photocopy it for me. And, from the very first pages, I recognized the handwriting, only slightly more mature than that of his school homework. Which means that the theory of a fake diary can only stand up if it's leaning on another, and that supporting theory is itself not very convincing even though you regularly find Pakistani diehards propounding it: that Omar was an accomplice in its counterfeiting, because he has ties to India. Or, to be more exact, he was recruited by the Indians during his years in prison at Uttar Pradesh and then in Tihar Jail, and has since become their man. (Aren't there even sources-the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, of course-that came up with the idea that Omar was a CIA agent, used in the CIA's hunt for bin Laden?) The first thing that strikes you, in those fifty pages, is the writing itself. You actually have to say the writings. Good in the first pages, with round letters, nicely shaped and regular, with mistakes crossed out neatly. And then starting on page 13 or 14, the penmanship goes awry: it becomes smaller, less readable, slanted slightly towards the right when up until that point it had been vertical, with unfinished letters, Gs that look like Ys, Ds you mistake for Ls, the writing of a fifteen-year-old. And even younger in the last pages which are a chronology of his life before India, then very brief biographical sketches of his parents and the people he is close to, and finally some samples of his writing and his signature-obviously provided at the demand of prison authorities-which have been stapled to the rest. In those last ten pages, yes, I'm struck by the clumsiness, the scribbled, fly-speck aspect of the handwriting. Here, too, as in his photos, Omar is someone who can change age in front of your eyes. Here, too, a peculiar capacity for splitting in two, for being several people in one. The faces . . . The talent for changing his accent, almost his voice, according to circumstances . . . And now, writing that is so unsure of its identity . . . Despite my distrust of the so-called rules of the so-called science of handwriting analysis, how can I not in this instance let myself be tempted?
The second thing that amazes me is the language. The poverty of the language and the style. The childish nature of the narrative. And even, according to Lara Fielden and James Mitchell, English and American friends and fixers, to whom I showed this document, the numerous bizarre turns of phrase, not exactly improprieties but slightly off in a way unexpected from the pen of a former student of the Forest School and the London School of Economics. "Female partner" instead of "girlfriend" . . . "Member of the public" instead of "someone in the street" or "passerby" . . . "I clasped" instead of "I shook" his hand . . . "I espied" Siddiqui, instead of simply "I saw" or "I spotted" . . . And, in a passage about the "village" that he tells his victims he just inherited and which he invites them to come and visit, his weird way of saying that it is "on" instead of "in" his name . . . A sign that the text is deliberately flawed? A message- and if so, what is it, to whom is it addressed, and what does it say? Or is it a sign of pomposity, of preciousness, the linguistic equivalent of the arrogance I noted in his youthful photos?
Interesting, too, the extraordinary amateurishness of the little gang of kidnappers he forms with Amine, Sultan, Osman, Farooq, Salahuddin, Nasir and Siddiqui. The feverish hunt for victims. The clumsiness in approaching them. The slipups. The driver of the van, whom he notices, too late, doesn't pray with him and is therefore not as reliable as he had assumed. The incredible story of Akhmir, the Israeli giant who immediately falls into the trap, whom he brings back one night, at two in the morning, to the house in Ganda Nala where they plan to hold him. "You're crazy!" shouts the boss when he sees, through a chink in the curtains, this oversized guy, too strong, too threatening. "You're going to get us all killed! Take him back to his hotel!" The contradictory orders. The permanently make-shift atmosphere. Excursions, hand-in-hand, talking about what a good time they're having. The telephone numbers that are always wrong. The agencies, newspapers, and embassies whose addresses they realize- right at the moment they're supposed to be sending them the message claiming responsiblity for a job-they don't have. He goes himself to the Hindustan Times to deliver one letter. Catastrophe! The managing editor is out, it's his deputy who takes the letter, opens it in front of him and starts to read it, barely giving him time to gallop down the stairs two at a time. The photos . . . Hey, boss, what if we took photos of the hostages. Yeah, boss, you remember, like they did in Lebanon, with the newspaper in the background to show the date. OK, says the boss. We hadn't thought of it, but it is indeed a good idea, we'll buy a camera and take the photos. Fearsome killers. The heart of the contemporary terrorist machine. But also the Three Stooges.
And the boss himself, the only one without a name, whose mysterious shadow haunts the pages. Sometimes Omar calls him "Big Man." Other times "Shah Sahab," the name he'll give to Gilani eight years later in his e-mails to Pearl. In another police interrogation I also had access to, he also calls him "Shahjoi." In the paragraph Omar writes about him in the biographical sketches at the end of the text, he refers to him as "the chief of the mission" and calls him simply "Commander." And in the "Personality" section, he says that, although the Commander is "moody at times," he's "very good at controlling the people." He's the real boss of the group, in any case. The strategist. The man who decides the Israeli must be set free, that they need to concentrate on Americans, or, if there aren't any Americans, go for English or French. He's the man, too, who draws up the list of Kashmiri militants whose freedom will be demanded in exchange for the four hostages. The wily one who decides to add several unimportant names to the list of who they really want freed, to cover up their tracks. The treasurer. The one who decides whether or not to buy the house or the van, and who makes sure that the group, should things go wrong, has enough cash to beat a retreat. He's the man who, finally, has the contact with Islamabad and who keeps saying, about the money and everything else, "I'm calling Islamabad . . . I've called Islamabad . . . Islamabad agrees . . . the instructions from Islamabad are . . . " Omar points out, in fact, that it's in Islamabad, in July before his departure, that he meets this harsh, passionless character, the commander-who is using the name Zubair Shah and in the company of Maulana Abdullah-for the first time. Except Omar, still in his diary, says the man is rather "paternal" towards him.
So who is Shah Sahab, exactly? Why is he never named? And why is he the only one who feels the need to conceal his face when he goes to see the hostages? Omar says, "Shah Sahab veiled himself." The former hostage Rhys Partridge will remember the arrival of a character everybody called the Commander, with a kitsch watch on his wrist and "a tea towel on his head." For the Indians, the reason is obvious: the tone, the way he's constantly asserting his link to Islamabad, all this indicates a high-level agent-very probably General Zahir ul-Islam Abbasi who was, that year, the Pakistani military attache in India, and who, when he returned in 1996, had a hand in an attempted coup d'etat, was court-martialled and convicted, then freed in 2001, after which he became one of the star orators of the Harkat ul-Mujahideen, Harkat ul-jihad al-Islami, Lashkar e-Toiba and so on. For me, the situation isn't that simple and two details in the diary give me pause. The fact that on at least one occasion-the day of the aborted kidnapping of the Israeli giant-we see the "Big Man" spend the night in Ganda Nala, with Sultan, Nasim and Farooq: Would the military attache have done that? Would he have shared the discomfort of this shack? And more particularly the fact that twice-the day he visited the hostages and also the day they composed the letters to the press-Omar says he had to translate Shah Sahab's words into English: Would a diplomat have needed that? Wouldn't he have written the letters himself? On the whole, though, I think you have to go along with the Indians on the idea that Shah Sahab is an agent. And were I to doubt it, there's a little note, right at the end of the diary, in the "previous association" section of the biographical notes, that supports this: "SSG," says the note. Shah Sahab's "previous associations" are the Harkat ul-jihad al-Islami, and the Hizb e-Islami, but also, like Subedar Saleem and Subedar Abdul Hafeez, Omar's instructors from the Miran Shah camp, the SSG- the Special Services Group, the elite unit of the ISI.
The Indians also tell me that it was the station chief of the ISI who, under the cover of the Pakistani embassy in London, paid Omar's lawyer when he was arrested.
They give me the list showing how many times the various embassy attaches-and particularly the military attaches-came to visit him in prison.
"How's that?" I ask. "His friend Peter Gee told me it was the British consul who was taking care of Omar, and of Gee as well."
"There you are," Datta replies. "Omar was British, as you say. A subject of Her Majesty. Treated in the same way as the musician smuggling marijuana. Except that it really was the Pakistanis who came to visit him the most often, and here's proof, here's the visitors' register."
They also inform me that, six years later, in the spring of 2000, when the time came for him to return to Pakistan after his liberation in Kandahar, it was an ISI colonel who was waiting for him at the border to drive him to a safe-house where they debriefed him.
"Here's a man," Datta continues, "who owes his freedom to an exceptionally serious plane hijacking. Every newspaper in the region and even the world was full of photos of him, of Masood Azhar, and of the poor passenger who was horribly decapitated a few hours before their liberation. And, along the same lines, Masood Azhar, as soon as he was home, held meeting after meeting, founded his Jaish e-Mohammed, showed off at the Karachi press club, and traipsed around every town in Pakistan, surrounded by a veritable private army of turbaned men. And Omar Sheikh, instead of staying in Afghanistan, or fleeing to Yemen, Iraq or North Korea, instead of hiding, goes back to his house on Mohni Road in Lahore, gets married, has a child and gives press conferences, too. How do you explain that? How do you explain this insolent impunity without assuming an active complicity, from the beginning, with the Pakistani governments, the visible and the invisible one?"
I see a note-but this one I'm not allowed to take with me-which apparently is based on the contents of an FBI report: 0300 94587772 . . . Omar's cell phone number . . . the tracing of all his calls between July and October 2001 on that line. And among the numbers called, the number of General Mehmood Ahmed, who, until right after September 11, was the general director of the ISI.
Talking to Mohan Menon, communications director of the RAW, I'm treated to an analysis of the series of messages claiming responsibility for the kidnapping of Pearl that were sent to the press. What is strange, Menon tells me, is not the sudden appearance of this "Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty," which was said in the United States to be unknown to Pakistani authorities. It wasn't unknown at all! It had already claimed responsibility in October for the peculiar kidnapping of Joshua Weinstein, a.k.a. Martin Johnson, the Californian they accused, like Daniel Pearl, of being a CIA agent-and whom we saw in the photos with two hooded men on either side of him pointing an AK-47 at his head, and he, too, is holding a Pakistani paper showing the date. No. What's interesting is how the messages are written. You have three of them. The last awful one, sent on 1 February from an Internet address ([email protected]) unknown to police: "We have killed Mr. Danny now Mr. Bush can find his body in the graveyards of Karachi we have thrown him there"-because of which the police spent two crazy nights, punctuated with crackpot confessions and phone calls from pranksters, searching the two-hundred-plus cemeteries in the city. There's the message from the day before, 30 January, when Pearl is already dead or about to die, which allows twenty-four hours and not one more for the kidnapper's demands to be met-"U cannot fool us and find us," it says, in a bizarre, incomprehensible English riddled with mistakes. You will never find us because "we are inside seas, oceans, hills, graveyards, everywhere; we give u one more day; if America will not meet our demands, we will kill Daniel; then, this cycle will continue and no American journalist could enter Pakistan; Allah is with us and will protect us." And then there's the very first message, the day after the abduction, which is written in perfect English with impeccable spelling and addressed like the others-but through another e-mail address ([email protected])-to the international press: Daniel Pearl is being held in inhumane conditions, was its gist. But these conditions are merely the reflection of the fate inflicted on the Pakistanis being held in Cuba by the American army. Improve the lot of our people, give in to our demands, and Pearl's fate will automatically be humanized. The message went on to outline the demands (which we would see again, white letters on black background like a macabre signature, at the very end of the 3 minutes and 36 seconds of the video of the decapitation): the right for Pakistanis arrested after September 11 to have a lawyer; the return of the Afghan and Muslim prisoners held by the American army on the Cuban base in Guantanamo, to be tried in Karachi; the liberation of Abdoul Sala Zaeef, former Taliban ambassador in Islamabad; and finally the resumed delivery of the F-16 jet fighters blocked in 1998 as reprisal for Pakistani nuclear tests, which had become ever since one of the constant demands of the country's military. Since when, Menon asks, do terrorists demand ambassadors and airplanes? Who are these jihadists who talk like a press release from the Joint Chiefs of Staff? Where are the screams of hate for the infidels and the Zionist conspiracy that jihadist communiques are normally riddled with?
And then this final piece of information. Or, to be more exact, this story: I am in the office of A. K. Doval who is now the head of the Domestic Intelligence Bureau but who was, nine years ago, at the time of the Indian Airlines plane hijacking, a member of the delegation which brought Masood Azhar, Mushtaq Zargar and Omar Sheikh to Kandahar for the exchange. "Here's the hijacked plane," he tells me, pencil in hand. "Ours, coming from Delhi, landed here, at the other end. But theirs is exactly here, at the end of this runway in the deserted Kandahar airport. Here to the right you have the Taliban, who, when they realized we had brought commandos with us, disguised as nurses and social workers, were ready to move in, lined up two armoured vehicles, rocket launchers and a handful of sharpshooters all along the runway, aimed not at the hijackers but at us. On the other side of the runway, on the left, you have this little building where Erik de Mul is with the other UN people, seriously handicapped by the fact that they don't speak Urdu. Then here, just next to that, you have an officers' mess where we've set up with walkie-talkies to finish, in the place of the UN, the negotiations with the hijackers, who in any case only want to talk to us. It's cold. The tension is extreme. Nobody dares make a move. We're all expecting that, at any minute, either the hijackers or the Taliban will lose it. At one point, one of my sharpshooters gets a guy in a turban in his sights who's jumped out and is standing in the doorway of the plane, shouting, holding a hostage and a box-cutter-'Do I shoot?' asks my guy. And then here, a little farther, you have a last building where there are three high-ranking officers of the ISI who also have walkie-talkies. And that's when three incredible things happen."
"1. When the hijackers forget to turn off their receivers, we hear the voices of the ISI guys, telling them what to do, what to answer, how to handle the situation.
"2. When we finally reach an agreement and we bring Sheikh, Azhar and Zargar to the plane to proceed with the exchange, it's not the hijackers, it's the ISI guys who, as it were, on their own account, come to check their identities.
"3. And when the trade is finally made and the ISI officers take charge of the prisoners-here, you see these three little rectangles, those are their vehicles, which the Taliban lent them-I see the one who seems to be their leader kiss Omar Sheikh, call him by his first name and say, 'So, back to Kandahar. I'm so happy to see you.'" Doval is looking at me, his eyes twinkling behind his round, intellectual's glasses: "Could you dream of any better proof of the collusion between Omar and the secret service?"
That's the Indian point of view.
I give it, I repeat, for what it is: the point of view of an enemy state who, involved in a total war with a hereditary adversary, can't be negligent on any front.
I don't exclude, may I stress, the possibility of having been manipulated by Doval and Datta on a particular point or perhaps a document, as I could have been by any Pakistani I spoke to. That's the game, I'm not unaware of it.
But, really, all this is too convergent not to make sense, finally.
Omar Sheikh, from Delhi's perspective, is an agent.
He has been for a long time: from his London School days, more or less.
He's one of those brilliant, competent young people that the Pakistani secret service spots when they're in college and tries to win over.
And, parenthetically, that's probably even the explanation of the mystery I bumped up against in Sarajevo and in London-it's the key to the trip to Bosnia, the strange trip that left no traces, which has puzzled me so much and for which I have dilligently but unsuccessfully tried to reconstruct an itinerary.
"Too ill to accompany them to Bosnia," writes Omar on page 36 of his Indian diary . . . Too ill, yes, to follow the mission of the Convoy of Mercy to the end, after it leaves from England to bring supplies to Jablanica . . . Asad Khan's version, in other words. Omar, in this document, confirms the version of the Convoy's organizer! And the idea that occurs to me is the following: What if the whole Bosnian affair-trip, humanitarian aid, emotion felt from seeing the film Destruction of a Nation, anger, the fact that nobody can say whether the guy went all the way to Mostar or stopped in Split, but everybody keeps saying, that he experienced the great turning point of his life with the martyrdom of Sarajevo-what if all of it were a fabrication, window-dressing after the fact, a way of inventing a plausible biography for someone who, for a long time, maybe since London and his admission to the London School of Economics, had been working for the ISI?
I don't claim that Omar never went to Bosnia.
I don't exclude the possibility that Saquib Qureshi, his friend from student days, was also right when he told me Omar could have made a second trip to the Balkans, without the Convoy of Mercy.
And I would get confirmation of that second trip long after my stay in India, reading an interview Omar gave in jail on 6 February 2003 to Takbeer, an Urdu Islamist weekly, in which he describes, as if they were scenes he'd witnessed, "Serb attacks" against Muslim villages, "women and children reduced to cinders," a "child's burned hand on a pile of ashes," "babies' legs in a heap," "piles of corpses."
I simply say that there is a Bosnian legend in Omar Sheikh's biography that serves to glorify-adding anger, thought, compassion-a much less honorable exploit of a very young man caught up in the destiny of a cop and a secret agent.
I say that this Bosnian affair is like his relationship to "Being Muslim" and like the way he tells Peter Gee, after the fact and in the face of contrary evidence, that he was a persecuted Muslim, victimized, the prey of little English boys' mundane racism-all packaging, a red herring, retroactive justification.
Bosnia is not, as I had first thought, a hole, an enigmatic blank spot, a section of his life that had fallen into oblivion and that everybody, starting with this investigator, had lost track of. Instead, it is a lie, a deliberate invention, a construction-as often with this kind of character, the production of a piece of biography that serves as a decoy and a false trail.
CHAPTER 6 IN THE DEMON'S LAIR.
Omar, ISI agent.
The child from Deyne Court Gardens, the good student, Saquib's friend, the gifted individual with the brilliant future ahead of him, the pride of his family become a slave of the state, a dog of war for the Pakistani powers-that-be, a killer-Islamabad is where I would find the final confirmation of this spectacular turnaround.
We are in October 2002.
It's my third stay in the Pakistani capital.
I am busy trying, for the third time, to find the trace of this man that everybody here seems to want to forget.
Because the Indians are right, finally!
How could a felon, convicted of kidnapping and freed by another kidnapping, move around so freely on these vast avenues, crammed with military?
How does this man, who is supposed to have gone underground- because of what he is about to do as much as because of what he has done-move around so easily, without taking any precautions? How does he break all the rules-how to avoid being followed, taking safe routes, changing addresses-that are obligatory for shadowy characters, terrorists included?
It would be understandable in Karachi, where we all know that nobody has had anything or anyone under control for a long time.
It's all right in Lahore, where he lives in a beautiful house, gives a party in January to celebrate the birth of his baby, receives local dignitaries, is received by them, goes to the same clubs they do, moves in the same high society circles and is counted among local personalities-he's from Lahore, after all. You could say to those who have doubts that he's at home in Lahore, in his and his family's fiefdom.
But Islamabad!
The Potemkin village of those in power!
The center of gravity, the nerve-center of the state and its agencies!
How to explain that he is like a fish in water in Islamabad?
How can a supposedly hunted man matter-of-factly order a book on the Kandahar airplane hijacking from the "Mr. Books" bookstore, which everyone knows is just a stone's throw from ISI headquarters, on Khayaban i-Suharawardy Road?
Here's a man who has already spent five years in jail in India for a series of crimes of the same kind as the one he is preparing to commit. Here's a jihadist suspected of complicity in the attack on the Jammu-Kashmir assembly in Srinagar with a truck full of explosives, then in the 13 December grenade attack on the New Delhi Parliament, and then, again, in the 22 January operation-right before Pearl's kidnapping- against the American Cultural Centre in Calcutta. Here's a repeat offender whose extradition-we know this now-Washington had demanded just a few weeks earlier, in November, in connection with the 1994 kidnapping (one of the victims, Bela Nuss, fortuitously, was American), sending the ambassador Wendy Chamberlain to Islamabad in person on January 9, fourteen days before the abduction, to insist he be arrested. Here's a man who is not only one of the most dangerous, but also one of the most wanted on the planet. Who can believe that this man is able, without very solid support, that is to say without ties to the country's secret service, to move around the way he does, with total impunity?
I'm thinking about how arrogant he looks in the photos at the end of his trial.
I'm thinking again about his answer to the FBI agents who asked him in February if he had links to the ISI: "I will not discuss this subject. I don't want my family to be killed." Whether he feels any remorse: "My only remorse is the child. I have a child who is two months old. So the idea that Pearl was about to become a father, too, that makes me feel a bit of remorse." Another answer he gave, which I was told about in Washington, that was accompanied by a huge burst of laughter: "Did you say extradition? You really think I can be extradited? Come on, gentlemen, you're dreaming! Three, four years maximum, here in Pakistan! And then I'm out." Almost the same words as in the 13 March Newsweek article.
I'm reflecting on the article by Kamran Kahn, in the News, which had so much impact at the time, that evoked his ties to General Mohammad Aziz Khan, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee of the Armed Forces as of 8 October 2001. Was it true that he had gone with Musharraf and Aziz to the headquarters of the Lashkar e-Toiba, in Muridke, near Lahore, before Musharraf's visit to India in July? Is it true that he knew Aftab Ansari, the mafia man, and that their relationship had the blessing of the ISI?
I'm thinking about what is known of the personality of Mohammed Adeel, one of the three plotters of cell number two, the one that took care of writing and sending the e-mails: policeman in Karachi; former member of a counter-terrorist unit; former intelligence officer; directly tied, therefore, to the ISI.
I'm thinking about the remark Musharraf made to the U.S. ambassador who had just expressed to him the USA's wish to see Omar extradited: "I would prefer to hang him myself than to have to extradite him." Resentment? Anger? Hatred overcoming him, making him capable, with his own hands, etc.? No doubt. But it's hard not to hear as well in his exclamation the willingness to do anything, absolutely anything, to avoid a public trial and the possible exposure of the murky connections between Omar and the ISI.
I'm thinking about the story of the taxi driver who claims he drove Omar to the Hotel Akbar, and the account I got from him: he was stopped at a checkpoint in much the same way I was the evening I first arrived. Armed soldiers-this is in the middle of Musharraf's phase of pro-American anti-terrorist zeal-hustle the driver out of his taxi, push him up against a wall with his arms outstretched, and search him. But when it is Omar's turn to show his papers and be searched, a word seems to suffice, maybe a document he stuck under their noses-and the embarrassed soldiers let him go on: "No problem, welcome, you can go."
I'm thinking of Saquib again, the friend from London. It was a little story that at the time hadn't really struck me. But now, in the light of what I know . . . This story takes place in April 1996. Saquib has finished school. He has a job at a big bank-I think the HSBC-and he's been sent on business to Pakistan. And there he is one night at dinner, in Islamabad, at the home of a vice-admiral whose name he forgets, seated next to a brigadier who is known to belong to the ISI, who says to him: "You went to the London School? Bravo! Perhaps, then, you know Omar. Maybe you were in the same class." Not Omar Sheikh. Just Omar . . . As if there were only one, the one everybody knew in Islamabad, and who was, in any case, close to the brigadier . . .
And then finally I think, one last time, about his first meeting with Pearl, at the Hotel Akbar in Rawalpindi, 11 January, twelve days before the abduction. Well . . . What is this Hotel Akbar, exactly? What does it look like? Why in fact did he choose it? And why is it that no one, as far as I know, has asked these questions? How come no one has had the idea to take a closer look and to spend an hour, or why not a night, in the room where contact was made?
I go to the Hotel Akbar.
I leave Islamabad and its wealthy districts.
I take the Aga Khan Road with its beautiful opulent houses and its look, common to most of the avenues in this perfectly artificial city, of having come straight out of a de Chirico painting.
I pass the Super Market, which is lively and animated and where, among photo shops, perfume boutiques, an "Old Books Sell and Buy," and a Konica camera shop, the "Mr. Books" bookstore is located.
I get to Murree Road, the main avenue of Rawalpindi, which is clear and open at first, and then, as soon as you get into town, choked with traffic. The cars move at a snail's pace. Clusters of kids are hanging from the ladders that climb to the roofs of multicolored buses. The group taxis bursting with people still manage to suck in more passengers. A horse cart. Women in headscarves, not burqas, headscarves, uncovered smiling faces under the headscarves-I note that Rawalpindi is the only place that I see women's faces. The vast fabric shops. The jewellery district. The chemists district, where I suspect they also do the major drug deals. The signs for Habib Bank and for Honda and Suzuki shops. The beggars. The hovels. The side streets where you can sense the disease of the decaying neighborhoods. Just in front of the English Language Institute, the sign that identifies the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front. And then at the end of Muree Road, on the right, at the entrance to the old city, where the houses take on shades of ochre and the colonial style of all the old Indian cities, is the Liaquat Bagh, very green, with its flamboyantly colored flowers, and its spacious esplanade where they've been holding mass meetings since independence. And facing the Liaquat, set back, stuck between a boys' school and the Khawaja's Classic Hotel Executive-the windows, adorned with dark green balconies, of the Hotel Akbar.
At the door-it's a bizarre (and quite cruel) custom in midrange Pakistani hotels-a dwarf is greeting guests, his antics intended to cheer up weary travelers.
"Do you have any rooms?"