And with that, he signals to the old imam, who has been standing in a corner of the room during the entire interview without my noticing him. It's time to take me back.
On the way back I see a large trap door, half hidden by a bush, which I suppose leads to an underground passage.
I catch a glimpse of a room my guide identifies with pride as the madrasa's library: two sets of metal shelves going halfway up the wall, both half-empty.
I pass by an elaborately tiled prayer room, where two large portraits preside, no doubt of Allama Yusuf Binori and Maulana Mufti Mohammed, founders of the seminary.
In another room, I see a portrait of Juma Namangani, the former Red Army soldier who became the head of the "Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan," then commander-in-chief of the Arab battalion of al-Qaida before he was killed in the American bombing of Kunduz in November 2001.
Portraits in a madrasa?
In a place where the representation of a human face should be considered profanation?
But that's not the least of the surprises this strange visit had in store for me.
As earlier, with regard to the portrait of bin Laden, I'm dying to ask how these images could be considered compatible with the prohibition of representation.
But I prefer to remain silent.
I have only one pressing need, to get out of this place and go back to the Shiite riots in the street, the wailing flood of bloody and hysterical faithful whose threats seem almost reassuring when you are emerging from the house of the Devil.
Later that day, I ask the same questions to other people, elsewhere in the city. For example, the station chief of a Western intelligence agency, who fills me in on some of the missing pieces.
It was here in Binori Town, early in 2000, that Masood Azhar and the Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, the mosque's reigning holy man whom I was unable to meet, announced the foundation of the Jaish e-Mohammed. Here, in the presence of-and with the blessing of-the country's most respected ulemas, the organization that would furnish the elite battalions of al-Qaida was baptised.
A month later, in March, a quarrel broke out between Azhar and Fazlur Rahman Khalil, the man who had, while Azhar was in an Indian prison, risen in the hierarchy of Harkat ul-Mujahideen and usurped control of the organisation. As Jaish is a splinter group of the Harkat, to whom should the offices, the fleet of 4x4s, the arms and the safe-houses belong? The deep conflict inflamed the Islamist movement of Karachi. Once again, it was at Binori Town, under the authority of the same Nizamuddin Shamzai, that the appointed scholars gathered to arbitrate the question and to arrive at a harkam. They decided the Harkat should retain everything and pay financial compensation to the Jaish. Binori as a tribunal! Binori as the arbitration court for the internal conflicts of the al-Qaida conglomerate!
In October, when the Americans launched their political and military offensive, word circulated around Karachi of a possible inclusion of the Jaish on the American's list of terrorist groups. Once again, Nizamuddin Shamzai rose to the defense of the organization-from his base at Binori, he organized a new group, the Tehrik al-Furqan, of which he immediately assumed leadership, to replace the threatened group, taking over its financial assets, its bank accounts, its files and its activities. Binori-the linchpin of politico-financial trafficking . . . the spiritual head of one of the world's largest seminaries transformed into a front for an association of assassins.
After the fall of Kabul in November, bin Laden's defeated troops fled Afghanistan, and the survivors of Pakistani paramilitary groups tried to escape the crossfire of the Northern Alliance and the American bombers. Some of them (members of Harkat ul-Mujahideen and Harkat ul-Jihad al-Islam) retreated to Kashmir. Others (like the Lashkar e-Toba), headed for hideouts in the tribal zones of the North, at Gilgit and Baltistan. But the most radical, Lashkar i-Janghvi, Jaish, and a Harkat subgroup, the Harkat ul-Mujahideen al-Almi-Universal, found refuge in Karachi, and, in particular at Binori. Are they still there? Did I pass an hour in the sanctuary of bin Laden's lost soldiers? Is that what the portraits I saw meant?
The famous audiocassette of 12 November 2002-in which bin Laden spoke of the terrorist attacks in Djerba, Yemen, Kuwait, Bali, and Moscow, and called for new actions not only against U.S. President Bush, but also his European, Canadian, and Australian allies-originated at Binori, and was sent from there through Bangladesh to the Qatar television station of Al Jazeera. A recording studio in a mosque? Binori transformed into a logistics base for al-Qaida propaganda? Yes! This is the hypothesis of the American, British, and Indian intelligence services. They don't know what Bangladesh has to do with it, or to what degree ISI is involved in the operation. But they have no doubt whatsoever that the cassette was put together here, in the depths of the terrorist Vatican.
Finally, Osama bin Laden himself is said to have stayed at Binori on several occasions. The most-wanted terrorist on earth, global Public Enemy Number One, the man worth $25 million or more, this shadowy character who may or may not be alive, or who may survive only as a legend, is said to have stayed here in the center of Karachi right under the nose of the Pakistani police during 2002. A serious wound necessitated special medical treatment (and may explain his silence of the past several months). Binori as a hospital. Binori the sanctuary, inviolable by any authority, where Pakistani military doctors are said to have come with impunity to care for him. Other madrasas are said to have given him sanctuary as well. I heard the name Akora Khattak cited several times. A military hospital in Peshawar or Rawalpindi, where he went for treatment of kidney problems in the fall of 2001, just before September 11, has also come up (in Jane's Intelligence Digest of 20 September 2001, for example, and on CBS News on 28 January 2002). But the most reliable sources, the most well-informed observers, speak of Binori as the inner sanctum of all sanctuaries. (B. Raman South Asia Analysis Group: "Were are all the terrorist gone," 29 July 2002 and "Al Qaeda, will it or will it not," 30 August 2002).
Abdul, when I meet him again at the Sheraton bar, the only place in town a Muslim can get a beer or a sandwich during Ramadan, mocks me: "So, the house of the Devil was empty?"
And me, irritated and slightly pompous: "Normal, old friend; the Devil doesn't make appointments; he's at home everywhere, except in his own house; the Demon's laugh, as we all know, is like Minerva's owl-it screeches once you've left, but at the same time . . . "
Yes, at the same time, perhaps I saw nothing in Binori Town.
Perhaps, I still don't know what Omar came to do or to look for on the 18, 19, and 21 of January in Binori Town.
But I do know a little bit more about the mosque.
I know that this place of prayer and meditation where he spent one of his last nights is a headquarters for al-Qaida in the heart of Karachi.
I know, I feel, that what exists there is a kind of central reactor or machine room of the Organization-right in the middle of Pakistan, not far from the American consulate, a Taliban or post-Taliban enclave, to which the worst of Afghanistan, bin Ladenists included, have withdrawn.
What if, in reality, the trail of Omar Sheikh passed through Afghanistan?
Is it time, in order to move forward, to return to Afghanistan?
CHAPTER 3 JIHAD MONEY.
Stopover, Dubai.
I'm on my way to Afghanistan, but I stop in Dubai.
In the back of my mind, I'm hoping to pick up a trace of Saud Memon.
And, since I'm here, I hope to glean a little information on al-Qaida's finances, networks, trafficking, and how it functions.
We are still at the end of 2002.
It's the beginning of the debate on whether or not to go to war with Iraq.
I'm among those who, at the time, doubt the existence of the famous links between Saddam Hussein's regime and bin Laden's organization, America's justification for the war.
I'm among those who are-regardless of the regime's obviously criminal character-more cognizant of the rivalry between Hussein and bin Laden, and their competition for a supreme emirate, than the possibility of their alliance.
I haven't changed my mind either since my book Reflexions sur la Guerre, le Mal, et la Fin de l'Histoire, finished shortly after September 11, in which I described al-Qaida as an NGO of crime, a cold stateless monster, an organization of a radical new type, which didn't need the support of any major power to prosper, any Leviathan, let alone Iraq.
So I am in Dubai and determined to move on both fronts-that of the book and that of the general debate-in a city I know a little from the coincidence of previous investigations . . .
The first time was during the war in Bosnia-because some of the arms dealers who dared violate the embargo on arms destined for Izetbegovic's army were here. I went to Ankara, but also to Dubai, in 19931994, to investigate how one could circumvent the embargo.
Then, in 1998, returning from my stay with Commander Massoud in the Panshir-the chief of his secret services, General Fahim, had explained to me that all the support for the Taliban, all the violations of the UN resolutions that went in their favor, and all their logistics, are connected to the United Arab Emirates. And I had begun to consider two aviation companies, twenty kilometers away, Air Cess and Flying Dolphin, which were at the center of the affair and were based in Sharjah, the neighboring emirate. One furnished spare parts for Mullah Omar's remaining fighter planes, and the other supplied arms and sometimes, in conjunction with the Afghan national airline Ariana, "foreign volunteers."
And finally, my last visit to Dubai was in 2000, when I was reporting on forgotten wars, particularly on those in Africa. I was finishing my story on Angola, trying to trace missile and canon shipments to Unita, when, to my considerable surprise, I came across the same Air Cess and its nefarious boss, ex-KGB agent Victor Anatolievitch Bout. Cess's planes, used throughout the African wars-notably in the Angolan zones controlled by Jonas Savimbi-were key to the ongoing infernal exchange of arms for diamonds.
I am here, then, in one of the world capitals of dirty money, a nexus for the uncontrollable trafficking of some of the planet's most sinister contraband. But also, and these facts are not unrelated, it is the most open city in the Arab-Muslim world-the wildest and, in a certain way, the most free. Of course I know the limits of this freedom: I know the case of the French woman Touria Tiouli who was thrown in jail because she had the audacity, after being raped in October 2002, to complain publicly. Yet, at the same time I must admit that I never return here without a certain pleasure at finding again the madness and the artifices of Dubai-its lunar landscape, its flavor of a middle eastern Hong Kong or an Arab Las Vegas, its kitsch, its skyscrapers on the beach, its silly submarine restaurants, its steel and glass buildings, its islands shaped like palm trees, and its ice-blue Mexican sky.
I reactivate the old networks from my earlier investigations.
I make contact again with a staff member of the Civil Aviation Ministry, who once told me how some old Iliouchines, long banned from the transport of cargo or passengers, would land at night on the fringes of the airport to load mysterious cargoes unbeknownst to customs or the police.
I find my friend Sultan B., a manager at an Arab bank, who is second-to-none for guidance through the financial maze of offshore accounts, combined with hawala-the system of compensation and transfer based on word of honor, which is as old as commerce itself, and, by definition, leaves no trace, no matter how large the transaction.
And, if I find nothing on Memon, if in spite of everything I was told in Karachi about the master of the house of torment, he remains more than ever the invisible man of this affair, I still observe some things about the other aspect, al-Qaida and its finances-and the least of these, which will bring me quite unexpectedly back to the main subject of this book.
First observation. The freezing of suspect accounts, under pressure by the Americans following September 11, is seen in Dubai as a big joke. Too slow. Too forewarned. Too many problems of identification, if only because of the Arabic names, their English transcriptions, and homonyms. It's the classic story of the Americans sending notice to an English bank that says to freeze the account of Mr. Miller, or Miler, or Mailer, resident of London, we're not quite sure. What to do? Given that there are thousands of Mr. Mailers in London, and even more Mr. Millers, how do you find the right one? It's exactly the question which was raised here, in Dubai, when the FBI sent their lists of Mr. Mohammed or Mr. Mohammad, or Ahmed, or Maulana. Add to that the problem of pseudonyms. Add to that the Muslim charitable organizations, which deftly mix money from criminal activities with that of humanitarian aid. And then add the embarrassment of Western banks themselves which, before September 11, having no major reason to be suspicious, blithely and without knowing, took part in these dealings: Didn't Mohammed Atta, right up to the end, keep an open account here, in the emirate, at CitiBank? What about the pilot of the second plane, Marwan al-Shehhi, opening his main account at the HSBC branch here in July 1999, and using it right up to the very eve of the attack? And what about the fact that he and the others managed to open dozens of accounts in major American banks, 14 of them alone at Sun Trust Bank, often with false papers? So the record is disastrous. The terrorist organizations had more than enough time to re-deploy their funds and protect themselves. "Guess," says Sultan handing me a report from a local think-tank, "how much money was left in the Harkat ul-Mujahideen account the day it was seized: 4,742 rupees, or $70! Or the account of Jaish e-Mohammed, immediately re-baptized al-Furqan, which therefore nobody thought to freeze: 900 rupees, $12! And in those of al-Rashid Trust-guardian, don't forget, of the assets of the Taliban as well as Lashkar e-Toiba: 2.7 million rupees, or $40,000-relative to the wealth of the Trust, another joke. Guess how much they seized from Ayman Al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian who, as you know, was one of al-Qaida's financiers: $252! The al-Qaida fortune, its war chest, reduced to $252, we must be dreaming!"
Second observation. Al-Qaida resources. Everyone acts as though al-Qaida and bin Laden were one and the same. Everyone, in the West as much as the average Arab on the street, seems to hang on to the idea of a terrorist organization financed out of the pockets of the Saudi billionaire and his family, propaganda to which he is not indifferent-the cliche of the family scion immolating his colossal fortune on the altar of Arab revenge is a powerful part of his legend. What better way to enhance his popularity than this idyllic image-drawn in part from the red millionaires of our past, romantic financiers of world revolution like Hammer and Feltrinelli-the cursed and rebel son, the ascetic heir who decides to bequeath his inheritance to the damned of the earth and to Allah? Unfortunately, it's false. Al-Qaida, I come to understand in Dubai, is no longer the virtuous self-sufficient, family-type enterprise it once was. It's a Mafia. A trust. It's a gigantic network of extortion extending worldwide, from which bin Laden himself, far from depleting his capital, continues to profit. It extends from the common racket of taxes on gambling, such as those the Macao mafia levies, to percentages taken on the Afghan drug trade, to the sophisticated, almost undetectable mechanisms of financial fraud based not on theft, but on the duplication of credit cards. These young financiers, not unlike Omar Sheikh, have become masters in the art of selling to the West the rope with which to hang itself-which is to say in this case, to turn the West's own arms, and often, its own vices, against itself. "You know the technique?" asks Sultan. "It consists of selling a stock that you don't have but that a bank will lend you for a commission, and that you buy back later at the market price when the time comes to return it to the bank. Suppose it's worth 100, but you have reason to believe it'll go down to 50. Suppose you know that an attack on the World Trade Center is going to happen, which will drive the market down. So you rent the stock and immediately sell it at the market price, which is still 100. When the attack comes and the stock takes a dive as expected, you buy back at 50 what you sold for 100 and pocket the difference. This is a technique American and English banks perfected, and here in Dubai we caught on quickly. We know a bank here that made this kind of transaction between the 8th and 10th of September on certain Dow Jones blue-chip stocks for accounts linked to bin Laden-I know the name of a bank that, by shorting 8000 shares of United Airlines on the 7th of September, then 1,200 shares of American Airlines on the morning of the 10th, allowed the attack to finance itself." What bank is it? Sultan won't tell me. But the next day he gives me the translation of an interview with bin Laden published on 28 September, in Ummat, one of Karachi's Urdu dailies: "Al-Qaida is full of young, modern, and educated people who are aware of the cracks inside the Western financial system, and know how to exploit them. These faults and weaknesses are like a sliding noose strangling the system." That says it all.
Third observation. Or rather a statement. That of Brahim Momenzadeh, a liberal Saudi attorney who receives me in his futuristic office facing the sea, on the top floor of a glass and black marble building, and who was described to me as an international specialist in sophisticated occult financial systems. "Islamism is a business," he explains to me with a big smile. "I don't say that because it's my job, or because I see proof of it here in my office ten times a day, but because it's a fact. People hide behind Islamism. They use it like a screen saying: 'Allah Akbar! Allah Akbar!' But we know that here. We see the deals and the movements behind the curtain. In one way or another, it all passes through our hands. We do the paper work. We write the contracts. And I can tell you that most of them couldn't care less about Allah. They enter Islamism because it's nothing other than a source of power and wealth, especially in Pakistan. It's true of the big ones, the chiefs who make fortunes with their benevolent associations which are just fronts. But take the young ones in the madrasas. They see the high rollers in their SUVs having five wives and sending their children to good schools, much better than the madrasas. They have your Pearl's killer, Omar Sheikh, right in front of their eyes. When he gets out of the Indian prisons and returns to Lahore, what do the neighbors see? He's very well-dressed. He has a Land Cruiser. He gets married and the city's big shots come to his wedding. They notice that Islamism is very good to him, that it is the sign of his success, a means of promotion. They know it's a good way to get protection from government agencies and the powerful. Believe me-very few people in Pakistan become Islamists out of conviction or fanaticism! They're just looking for a family, a Mafia, capable of protecting them from hard times. And Islamism is the best solution. It's as simple as that." Is it really as simple as that? Can we skip over ideology and fanaticism so easily? I don't know. That is, in any case, the point of view of a Dubai businessman. That is the other face of the madness of these times, as perceived in the Arab financial capital. The young lions of radical Islam? The Golden Boys of jihad.
Fourth observation. Kamikaze money. In Sri Lanka I had met a repentant former member of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE, a movement grounded in the ideology of the suicide-attack. She told me about the intellectual mechanisms at work in this kind of enterprise. I also met in Ramallah a Palestinian father with ties to Hezbollah- therefore, and I hasten to make clear, not representative of the general mentality of Palestinian fathers-who told me how happy and proud he was to know that one of his sons was going to sacrifice himself for the anti-Jewish jihad: "It's an honor," he explained, "but also a chance for all of us-doesn't it say in the Koran that a family who gives a martyr to Allah is automatically provided sixty places in heaven?" Here in Dubai, I gather more precise and detailed information. Here, thanks to Sultan and to others, I have the impression of entering of the financial underside of the self-sacrificial world.
The al-Qaida militant has a price. Between 2,500 and 5,000 rupees (5,000 and 8,000 if he's foreign, meaning, in fact, Arab). The grenade launcher has his: 150 rupees per grenade (bonus if the results are good). An attack on an Indian army officer in Kashmir has its own: between 10,000 and 30,000 rupees (bonuses varying with the rank of the target). And the kamikaze, too, has his price, decided ahead of time in an actual negotiation between himself, the organization, and his family, which assures the family of almost decent living standards: 5,000 and sometimes 10,000 rupees-but per year, and for life, and, when the contract is negotiated well, indexed for inflation and based on strong currencies.
There's the case I read somewhere of an Afghan refugee, a father living in the greater suburbs of Dubai, who received after the death of two of his children in Tora Bora in November 2001, the necessary funds to open a butcher shop. There's the case of a Yemeni drowning in debt who found himself one day, after the departure of his son for unknown parts, delivered from his predicament as if by magic wand, and able to return to Sanaa. There are agencies, not quite banks but more than simple money exchangers, where suicide-attack candidates come to fill out applications almost as naturally as for a loan. There are foundations-the Shuhda e-Islam Foundation, for example, created in 1995 by the Pakistani Jamaat e-Islami-whose raison d'etre is to assume responsibility for the killers' families. And then, most horrible of all, the madrasas where the future kamikazes are raised, or one should say trained, with the full consent of their families.
Martyrdom as a social program to assist needy families?
Suicide-attack as both social ladder and life insurance?
And then the last observation-and the most important because I'm going to pick up again the thread of my investigation, from a most unexpected angle. By searching the apartments, the hiding places and the cars abandoned by the hijackers of September 11, Sultan explains, the FBI had traced some of the money transfers that served as the financial basis of the operation as early as 18 September: roughly speaking, and corroborated by evidence, $500,000 to possibly $600,000-a considerable sum compared to the $20,000 or $30,000 that the first attack on the World Trade Center cost eight years earlier. More precisely, the investigators focused on one of these transfers, possibly the first, since it dates from August 2000, coming from a major bank in the Emirates and going to the first account opened in the United States by Mohammed Atta after his Hamburg period: $100,000 expedited by a mysterious character who had arrived two months earlier from Qatar with a Saudi passport and who called himself Mustafa Muhammad Ahmad. Even more precisely, the investigators following the $100,000, reconstituting its trail, made four discoveries: 1. In the month following its opening, Mohammed Atta's American bank account is the starting point for a series of smaller transfers- $10,000 dollars, sometimes less-to a dozen other accounts, most at the Sun Trust Bank in Florida, in the names of his accomplices.
2. Once credited to these accounts, the money was withdrawn in cash amounts of $100, $200, and $300 from ATMs. Abdulaziz Alomari for example, Mohammed Atta's companion on the American Airlines flight, was videotaped on the night of the 10th, a few hours before the operation withdrawing money from an ATM at a bank in Portland, Maine.
3. The next day, September 11, Atta, along with Marwan al-Shehhi and Waleed al-Shehri, two hijackers who were on the first plane from Boston, send back to Mustafa Ahmad, the originator of the initial transfer, $4,000, $5,400, and $5,200 respectively, a total of $14,600 dollars, corresponding to unused mission expenses scrupulously returned like all good bureaucrats to an organization's treasury.
4. Mustafa Ahmad, who hasn't budged from Dubai, receives these leftovers, transfers them to an account in a bank in Pakistan, and flies the same day, September 11, still using his Saudi passport, to Karachi, where he proceeds on the 13th to make six cash withdrawals emptying the account, before disappearing completely.
5. Mustafa Ahmad's real name isn't Mustafa Ahmad, but Shaykh Saiid, also known as Saeed Scheik, or Omar Saeed Sheikh-my Omar, in other words, the author of Daniel Pearl's kidnapping, and the villain of this story . . .
No need to say what effect this had on me. At first I don't believe it. I think: the polite and plump little Englishman, student of the London School of Economics with a passion for chess and arm wrestling, flower-lover at the Aitchinson School, good fellow at the Forest School, the moderate Muslim never objecting to Anglican payers at chapel, Omar, involved in September 11-it's impossible! It's absurd! Too much, too crazy, too perfect, to be true! The "Panther" and the "Force" were hard-pressed to imagine how their old partner could be mixed up with Daniel Pearl's assassination. Saquib Qureshi and the others couldn't believe their eyes and ears when they saw him on television in the role of executioner, their good friend, their brother. What would they say now if they heard this? What will they say when they read, if they read it, that a good friend-who opposed with them the fundamentalist take-over attempt of their school's "Bosnia Week" and whose single exterior sign of being Muslim was to arrive at a bar for an arm wrestling match bearing a carton of milk-was, not just at the controls, but at the cash-box of the greatest act of terrorism of all time?
I had to be certain.
I turned toward the Emirate authorities: "What does Sheikh Abdullah bin Zaid al-Nahayan, the Minister of Information of the United Arab Emirates, have to say? What do the banking and finance authorities of the country have to say?"
I went back to New Delhi to question those who had already given me the interrogation transcripts and the prison diaries from 1994, to pose the question: "Can you see Omar in this role? Does he have what it takes? Above all, do you have any evidence that would confirm or deny the theory that Ahmad and Omar are one and the same?"
And finally I went to the States, to consult the archives of several major media sources (CNN, NBC, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Time Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, Newsday) and see the officials I thought closest to the case-Ann Korky at the Department of State, Bruce Schwartz at the Department of Justice, others.
From this new investigation, especially from my conversations in Washington, I gather subtle impressions that don't lead to any hard and fast conclusions-but they are troubling enough that I put them out, not in any particular order, but as they came.
1.September 11, it must be quickly pointed out, had other paymasters than "Mustafa Ahmad" (alias, or not, Omar Sheikh). There were other transfers, in addition to the mysterious $100,000 sent to Mohammed Atta in August 2000. There was Mamoun Darkazanli for example, a Syrian businessman who operates out of German banks, whose contribution to the operation-two transfers at least, on the 8th and 9th of September-was probably greater.
2. As to the identity of Mustafa Ahmad, there are other theories circulating besides the wild one about Omar. In the 3 October 2001 Newsday John Riley and Tom Brune figure Mustafa Ahmad is the alias of a certain Shaykh Saiid, one of bin Laden's financial lieutenants (not in itself contradictory to the Omar hypothesis), but who they say was arrested at the time of the 1998 bombing of the American embassy in Tanzania, then quickly released by the Dar Es-Salaam police (and here the Omar theory no longer works, because in 1998 Omar was still in jail in India). The Associated Press in a 18 December dispatch says Mustafa Ahmad is in fact Sheikh Saiid, or Sa'd al-Sharif, or even Mustafa Ahmad al-Hisawi, or Al-Hawsawi, and he's a thirty-three-year-old Saudi brother-in-law and finance minister of bin Laden, who has been at his side since the Sudan years (and who is also known to have opened an account in Dubai for one Fayez Rashid Ahmed, alias Hassan al-Qadi Bannihammad, who was in the second plane, United Airlines 175).
3. The problem is all the more complex because there is another transfer of $100,000 that no one denies is linked to Omar but that nothing indicates is linked to September 11. We are at the beginning of August 2001, one year after the transfer to Mohammed Atta. In all probability the financing for the attack is already in place. Daniel Pearl's future killer writes to mafioso Aftab Ansari that he would like to see him give $100,000 dollars to a "noble cause." Omar writes to Ansari again on the 19th to inform him (according to The Times of India, 14 February 2002) that "the money has been sent." To whom? For what purpose? Nobody knows. Nothing, again, indicates this transfer was connected to the attack on New York's Twin Towers. But, if the two are confused, if one thinks of the 2001 transfer when we're actually talking about the one in 2000 and transposes what is known of the former onto the later, if one doesn't see there are two transfers of $100,000, one could postulate: "Omar's $100,000? Yes, we know! The August 2001 transfer, of which nothing allows us to think there is a connection to al-Qaida," and further conclude that Ahmad is Ahmad (first transfer) and Omar is Omar (second transfer) and that Ahmad is not Omar (clever demonstration-but is it the truth?). Again the trap of homonyms. But it doesn't stop with names. Because there also exist heteronymous transfers, financial quid pro quos, dollars which, like the Millers and their aliases, pass for other dollars. Masked money. Money as mask. In the world of shuffled identities it is money, of course, which provides the ultimate mask.
4. Meanwhile, the Omar hypothesis, according to which Ahmad is Omar, is one I discover has indeed circulated, was in print soon after the attack, and reprinted numerous times. Except that Omar at the time was not yet Omar, and his name meant nothing to anyone. So that in the CNN report shown on 6 October, the day of the attack on the Kashmir regional assembly, it is clearly stated that "Omar Saeed" and "Mustafa Mohammad Ahmad" are one and the same, and that this person would still be in prison were it not for the December 1999 Indian Airlines hijacking which freed him. Then two days later, also on CNN, the journalist Maria Ressa, reporting on another subject, describes Mustafa Ahmad as a young Pakistani twenty-eight years old, formerly of the London School of Economics, who was freed from prison in India in late 1999 as the result of an airline hijacking resembling those of September 11. Then an article appearing under the byline Praveen Swami in The Hindu of New Delhi, reports on a communique from German intelligence attributing the $100,000 transfer to Ahmad Omar Sayed Sheikh, close associate of Masood Azhar, commander of Jaish e-Mohammed. This information will be repeated here and there until Danny's murder. For example, up until 10 February, Time Magazine and The Associated Press take seriously the idea that Daniel Pearl's killer was involved in financing September 11. Amazing hypothesis. Seen from Europe it seems incredible. But neither the State Department nor the Justice Department, nor the major media of Washington or New York seem to find it unreasonable or absurd.
5. Better still, in two major American newspapers I find confirmation of the sensational information that the Indians had given me, implicating the chief of Pakistani secret services, General Ahmad Mahmood, in the financing of the attack. The information, according to The Times of India of 7 October and The Daily Excelesior of the 10th, was that "at the instigation of General Ahmad Mahmood" the enigmatic "Ahmad Umar Sheikh" had "transferred electronically to hijacker Mohammed Atta" the famous $100,000. And the very same day, 10 October 2001, the Wall Street Journal writes: "The American authorities confirm the fact that $100,000 was transferred to Mohammed Atta by Ahmad Umar Sheikh at the request of General Ahmad Mahmood." The 18 May Washington Post goes further: "The morning of September 11, Goss and Graham (respective chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence committees) had breakfast with a certain Pakistani general, Mahmoud Ahmad, who a short time later was dismissed as head of Pakistani secret services; he had directed an organization that maintained ties with Osama bin Laden and the Taliban." And then, even more incredible, I find in the 9 October Dawn, one of those small news items that pass through the censor's net without being denied or obfuscated: "The general director of the ISI, General Mahmoud Ahmad, was replaced after FBI investigators established a credible link between him and Omar Sheikh, one of three militants exchanged in the Indian Airlines hijacking in 1999." And further: "Informed sources say that American intelligence agencies have proof that it was indeed on instructions from General Mahmoud that Sheikh transferred $100,000 to the account of Mohammed Atta." The hypothesis, in other words, is no longer that Omar is the financier of September 11, but that Omar is operating on orders from the ISI. The hypothesis is no longer just that an Omar is linked to al-Qaida and a most spectacular terrorist operation, but that there is an Omar whose role is even greater than that-to facilitate a collusion between al-Qaida and the ISI, working together toward the destruction of the Twin Towers. For Indian agencies, the connection is not in doubt. In New Delhi I saw the results of decoding the telephone chip of Pearl's killer, showing, during the summer of 2000, at the time of the money transfer, repeated calls to General Mahmoud Ahmad. The FBI, of course, is more diplomatic, but I've spoken with people in Washington who confirm unofficially that the cell phone number decoded by RAW-0300 94587772-is Omar's, and that the list of calls made from it are the same as were shown to me in India. So, if Omar is proved to be the originator of the transfers it would be difficult to deny that it was done with the knowledge of the head of ISI.
6. We're left then with two distinct questions. And, in fact, three, which plunges us more than ever into the whirlpool of hypotheses and truths. There's the question of the link between Omar and the other Ahmad, of the ISI-established by the Indian Secret Service as almost certain, and not really astonishing to me: Hadn't I already established Omar as a man of the Pakistani services, and therefore Ahmad's agent? Then there's the question of the link, or more exactly, of the identity of Omar and the first Ahmad, originator of the September 2000 transfer- probable although not certain, but if confirmed, shedding a new light on the personality of Omar, agent of both the Pakistani ISI and Al Qaida. And lastly, the question we can no longer dodge, of the responsibility of the Pakistani secret service, or of one of the ISI's factions, in the attack on America and the destruction of the World Trade Center. Assuming that the answer to the first question is yes, and supposing as well that the answer to the second question is yes-how can we not think that the September 11 attack was desired and financed, at least in part, by secret agents of an officially "friendly" country, a member of the antiterrorist coalition, which offered logistical support and its intelligence services to the United States? These three questions, of course, are at the heart of my conversations in Washington. To the first, as I said, the American reply is yes: the proof from the cell phone, verified contact between Omar and the head of ISI-it's clear. To the second, it's more ambiguous: I'm told that two documents exist which may identify Ahmad; the indictment of Zakarias Moussaoui, of which I know nothing, and a video tape from a surveillance camera showing Mustafa Ahmad entering the Bank of Dubai at 1:15 on September 11, to recoup the funds transferred by Atta during the preceding days from a Western Union-no one has seen the video, but I think it confirms what the press still says as to the identity of Ahmad and Omar. And to the third question, finally, concerning the ultimate responsibility of Pakistan in the September 11 attack, it remains part of the great unspoken in the America of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld: If you accept that Ahmad and Omar are the same, and that Ahmad/Omar is the originator of the wire transfer, and you recognize the co-responsibility of the ISI in the attack, doesn't that call for a reexamination of the standing foreign policy which already positioned Iraq as the enemy and Pakistan as an ally? What remains essential for me is that I have a third reason to think (after Saud Memon, after Binori Town) that the murder of Daniel Pearl could have been, also, sponsored by al-Qaida.
Omar's staggering complexity.
The stunning obscurity of a person of double or triple depth.
Each time, we touch bottom . . .
. . . But at the bottom of each new depth, there is always a new trap door opening beneath our feet.
On the walls of the cave, behind the ultimate screen, always another screen that pulls us away, farther, into another spiral of this vertigo of Evil.
Unless, of course, this is the investigator's own vertigo, investigating vertigo. Unless he too is sucked into the hole, swallowed in this matrix, carried off on this nightmare ride-the intoxication of a mystery that ends by thinning out to nothing.
CHAPTER 4 AT THE HEART OF DARKNESS.
I had all kinds of reasons to come to Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan.
I know this is where the Indian Airlines plane landed in 1999 when it was hijacked by Pakistani jihadists from Harkat ul-Mujahideen and its 155 passengers were exchanged for the release from prison of Omar, Masood Azhar, and Mushtaq Zargar.
I know that, once set free, Omar did not return immediately to Pakistan like his two comrades. Either he had some personal business here, or he wanted to pay tribute to the Taliban, whose mediation had facilitated negotiations with the hijackers and, consequently, his release, he stayed a few months in the country of the "students of religion."
I know (since I read it in Delhi in his "prison diary") that as early as 19931994, at the end of his stay in Bosnia, and while the mortal struggle between Massoud and his fundamentalist enemies was in preparation, Omar had already done two tours in training camps: one of them was near Miran Shah in the tribal zones of Pakistan; the other at Khalid bin Waleed inside Afghanistan.
And I'm mulling all this over when, as discreetly as possible, without informing the embassy-which would give my visit and the steps I plan to take a uselessly official connotation-and, without passing through Kabul, late in 2002, I land at the airport in Kandahar, the capital of the Taliban.
Of course, I have only one idea, an idee fixe. Omar. Omar more than ever. To confirm-or disprove-the ties between Omar Sheikh and Osama bin Laden. To find, or not, proof which, if it does exist, can exist only here, in the city that was once the capital of al-Qaida. To find out if I was dreaming in Dubai. To find out if I've let myself be taken in by a game of infinite theories, or if what I am really dealing with is one of those individuals with multiple faces-like Oswald, or like so many of the great spies of Cold War mythology-who invariably turn out to be different from who they seem and, when we think we have located them at the center of a great riddle, show up as part of another, even greater riddle, which clarifies the first . . . or makes it dissolve.
I spend the first day looking for lodgings that accept foreigners.
The next day, not really knowing where to begin, I roam around near the airport, now under American control, where I finally find someone who worked here ten years ago, at the time of the hijacking, and who confirms the overall picture outlined for me by A. K. Doval, the man from the Indian secret services.
Just in case, I pass by the hideous Hollywood-style villa, half candy-pink, half pistachio-green, that Mullah Omar had specially built and furnished on the outskirts of the city. Stucco and radar; kitschy turrets; rococo bedrooms and anti-aircraft installations; gigantic murals in the most pretentious styles, that mix visions of a future Afghanistan with freeways and dams, with bucolic scenes of life in paradise.
I wander around the Ad mosque, the ruined offices of the Ministry for the Repression of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue, the flourishing music stores, the little arena where the Taliban held wrestling matches and where, occasionally, the Taliban's supreme chief would come in person and, like a modern-day Nero, provided he was having a good day, would bring his personal body guards to fight in a match. (Legend has it he would even occasionally come on foot. Since no one knew his face, he could be there incognito.) But I'm having great difficulty finding any trace of the other Omar, my Omar, the one who really matters to me.
I go to see another religious official whose name and address were given to me in London, and he tells me about yet another Omar Sheikh, also Pakistani, but it is a different man with the same name.
I go to one of the madrasas where I've heard the Pakistani "brothers," who had come for the jihad, were welcomed-but no one there remembers him either.
I look up Mohammed Mehran, an intellectual I met on my Afghan mission a year ago, and one of the leading experts on Arab and Pakistani training camps-Omar's world when, as a young student barely out of the London School of Economics, he was here for a few months in 19931994. But although Mohammed is an inexhaustible source on the structure of the camps and the kind of training received there, spending hours answering my questions about how they function, he can scarcely shed any light on the particular case of Omar Sheikh.
Everywhere I go, I feel he has been-and yet I find no trace of him.