The Siege: The Attack on the Taj Mumbai

by Cathy Scott-Clark

  Down in the Tower lobby, a calm was returning as the diners and wedding guests dispersed. Moreno Alphonso, the Taj pianist, finished off ‘Always’. Six nights a week, this balding music teacher, whose father had played violin here in the thirties, manned the grand piano to the right of the main glass doors. ‘Al’ had worked at the hotel almost all his life; his earliest memories were of sitting with his brother on little wooden stools, their names inscribed under the seats, accompanying their father. He looked at his watch: 21.36. It was time for his mid-evening break. Al put down the lid and slipped out through an unmarked staff door.

  2

  Prince David

  When David Headley walked into the Taj for the first time in September 2006, he had been so impressed by its easy opulence, by the graceful staff and convivial regulars, that he wondered if he would be able to plot its demise. The grandeur reminded him of his own aristocratic antecedence, of his family’s great wealth and influence, stories he had learned on the lap of his mother.

  The chobedars hollered greetings as they threw back the doors, saluting as if they were posted especially for him. The citrus and talcum smell of frangipani in the Tower lobby, not to mention the view through the Sea Lounge’s windows that made the crowded Gateway of India look like a well-crafted diorama, almost convinced Headley that the hotel was something secular and precious that was worth saving.

  Headley found this city of insomniacs invigorating. He greedily ingested its history, how the archipelago of seven islands had been a gift to King Charles II as part of the dowry from his new wife, Catherine of Braganza, in 1661, although up until the nineteenth century it was predominantly inhabited by Koli fishermen. Then Parsi migrants like the Tatas built empires (and the Taj) out of the saline swamp, and transformed the city into the busiest seaport in Asia and the capital of the Bombay Presidency, one of the most prosperous and peaceful regions in British India. Headley was impressed by the Tatas’ determination. He loved the frenzy of Mumbai with its sharp-elbowed, entrepreneurial spirit. It was just the idea of India – the land of his paternal forefathers – he despised. And he used this hair’ s-breadth chink, between the city and the country, between the people and what he described as ‘their Hindu rulers’, to justify his covert project to bring death and mayhem.

  On his first visit, he could not afford to stay at the Taj, since his work had just begun and the budget was tight. But here, like most places where he had grafted, appearances were everything. He found himself a Grade-A address, a private rooming house in the upmarket Breach Candy neighbourhood four and a half miles away, bandying it about the Taj, where he became a fixture. Waiters, managers and guests saw him regularly quaffing a glass of Dom Pérignon in the Harbour Bar or entertaining someone he would introduce as ‘a client’ up in Faustine Martis’s Sea Lounge, telling his companions in his loud American voice about his ‘cool Breach Candy bachelor pad’.

  Headley was unmissable: six foot two, his blond hair scraped back in a ponytail, broad-shouldered like a prop and with a fair complexion, dressed in crumpled Armani jeans and shirt, a leather jacket hung over his shoulder. He carried himself like he might be dangerous, with a £10,000 Rolex Submariner poking out of his cuff. But he mingled easily and in the Starboard Bar, in the Taj lobby, and in the Aquarius, by the pool, Mumbaikers argued over who knew him best, and told stories about the women who fawned over him. David would listen to your troubles and high-five you. ‘Yeah, no problem,’ he’d say. ‘Whatever you want.’ David was cool. ‘I can help you.’ He was resourceful and generous. ‘Let me get that.’

  But anyone who knew him as David – an American entrepreneur from Philadelphia – only had half the story. To his sister Sherry and half-brothers Hamzah and Danyal, to his wives Portia, Shazia and Faiza, to his cousins Farid and Alex, his Uncle William, his best friend, Tahawwur Rana, and to Major Iqbal, a spy employed by the ISI, Pakistan’s pervasive Inter-Services Intelligence, he was Daood Saleem Gilani – an American of Pakistani descent.

  This mixed heritage and muddled ancestry that had got him to India in the first place, doing reconnaissance for a terrorist assault, was strikingly represented in his mismatched eyes: one blue and one brown.

  Daood’s father, Syed Saleem Gilani, was a renowned Pakistani radio broadcaster from a well-connected Lahori family. Serrill Headley, his mother, was an heiress and adventuress from Maryland. Her great-aunt had been an American philanthropist and maverick who funded women’s rights and even Albert Einstein’s research. But Ser-rill’s privileged childhood was struck by tragedy in 1952 when her father, a former college football star, died after being hit by a bullet while trying to break up a bar fight. Serrill’s mother and her four children made a fresh start in neighbouring Pennsylvania, buying a large farm in the Main Line, an affluent suburb of Philadelphia. But Serrill, who was thirteen when her father died, became uncontrollable. When she met Gilani, who was on secondment to Voice of America, she was a nineteen-year-old undergraduate at the University of Maryland and it had been like ‘two flints striking’. Gilani, cultured and sophisticated, was famed in Pakistan as a connoisseur of traditional ghazals and he wooed her with music. After Daood was born in 1960, in Washington DC, Serrill agreed to move to Pakistan, excited by the prospect of an adventure. But what had worked on the East Coast, in a Federal-era town house, fizzled out in the gated Abbas House in Lahore, Gilani’s ancestral home. In 1966 they divorced, and Serrill married an aged Afghan insurance executive, leaving Daood to be brought up by Gilani’s second wife, a well-connected Lahore heiress.

  Feeling rejected, Daood became as uncontrollable as his absent mother had once been. To straighten him out his father enrolled him at a cadet college in a small town in the western Punjab, popular with military families. Although Gilani was not an officer, he shared their milieu. He was a mohajir, a migrant from India, his family originating from Kapurthala in the Punjab, from where they had been forced out in the pogroms kickstarted by Partition. Its bloody spectre hung over the Gilani dinner table, while hostilities with India were also framed in the cadet college classroom and re-enacted on its parade ground.

  Like his American mother, Daood was reluctant to buckle down, and was constantly reminded of his foreignness by his Pakistani family, which was soon augmented by two new brothers, Danyal and Hamzah. At the first opportunity, when he was sixteen, Daood flew to the US to be reunited with his mother. Serrill had moved back to Philadelphia after her Afghan husband had died and bought a former speakeasy on Second Street near Chestnut, in what was then a rougher part of town, transforming the place into the Khyber Pass Pub, rigging a Pakistani shamiana (wedding tent) in the garden. She was, however, distracted by a new man, a reporter with the Philadelphia Inquirer, and left her long-lost son to the care of pub regulars, who tagged him ‘the Prince’. Daood, a conversative Muslim teenager living above a pub, struggled with his new life. His Uncle William, Serrill’s brother, recalled that he spent most of his time transfixed by Happy Days on the pub TV, waiting for his mother to come home. But eventually he embraced what America in the seventies had to offer. A local TV channel came down to make a programme about the pub and filmed Daood with his crewcut grown out and his hair to his shoulders, his long legs flapping in flares, Serrill resplendent in a full-length fur coat. Within two years he had moved to Manhattan, using family money to rent an upmarket apartment on the Upper West Side, opening a video store.

  Daood also developed rich tastes, and when the family cash ran out he reflected on what he could do to stay afloat. He could speak the languages of two countries and travel freely to chaotic places Americans were precluded from visiting. In 1984 he contacted his best friend from college, Tahawwur Rana, an introverted A-grade student who was training to become a military doctor in the Pakistani army. Daood was coming back to Pakistan and asked the medic to accompany him on a road trip to the tribal areas, Rana using his military connections and his ID card to get them around a sensitive part of Pakistan – ignorant of the half-kilo of heroin Daood ha
d purchased from local smugglers, concealing it in the boot.

  Back from the Af–Pak frontier with his stash, Daood blew it in Lahore. Hitching up with a woman, he gave her a taste without understanding the purity of the gear. She overdosed, and the police busted him. Through his father’s connections he was extricated, and the case file was quietly disposed of. But from that point on Daood’s father be came remote, urging his sons to ‘keep away’ from their half-brother.

  Undeterred, Daood tried it all over again. He headed back to Peshawar, the gateway to the Khyber Pass, and became a regular visitor, frequently abusing Rana and his jeep. He also decided to try his hand at the export business, smuggling the heroin to the US in his luggage and selling it through his Manhattan store, Fliks Video. Occasionally he would turn up in Philadelphia with a huge suitcase of VHS tapes with which to impress his American cousins. ‘He was charismatic and charming. But we had no idea what he was really up to,’ said one.

  When customs officers caught up with him four years later at Frankfurt airport en route to Philadelphia with two kilograms of heroin in his case, Daood faced a lengthy prison term and his father disowned him. Handed over to the US authorities, and on his own now, he offered the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) a deal: his American co-conspirators. They were jailed for between eight and ten years, while the turncoat Daood started working as a paid DEA informant, with instructions to infiltrate the Pak–US heroin trafficking networks. He translated hours of telephone intercepts, while coaching agents on how to interrogate Pakistanis. He also refused to stick to the rules. One DEA agent complained that he disappeared while on business and set up meetings that were not monitored. But his product was so compelling, the information so accurate, that when he came back online he was forgiven.

  Daood could talk himself out of anything, a former DEA agent recalled. Hardened drug investigators found themselves excusing his defects because he took them to places they could not reach. His American mother, Serrill, idolized her son from afar, and while she saw little of him face to face, she had a giant laminated photograph of him on her living room wall. Others on the American side of her family were not so sure. Daood was only ever interested in himself, they warned, arguing that his selfishness was born out of his lack of a sense of self: a young man with a grievance against his mother and alienated from his father, with several blurred identities, none of which properly fitted. ‘We would joke he had a Koran under one arm, and a bottle of Dom Pérignon under the other,’ said his Uncle William.

  While the DEA was locked on to biting chunks out of the heroin trade on the eastern seaboard, their star informer, Daood Gilani, returned to Pakistan and began to hang out at a mosque known as the Four Pillars, a vast seminary and prayer hall that occupied most of a historic crossroads in a frenetic part of Lahore. The Jamia Qadisiya was the realm of Lashkar-e-Toiba, the jihad organization that had made its name in Indian-administered Kashmir. From the mosque’s speakers came Lashkar’s message of liberating Kashmir from India. Banners strung outside the mosque announced ‘jihad’, a holy war in service of the Koran. In Pakistan, a country in free fall, without a reliable health service, emergency services or public education, the socially committed Lashkar was often the first to respond, especially after any kind of calamity. That made it attractive to many.

  Daood, well versed in his father’s stories of Partition, was drawn to the anti-Indian crusade, and to the romantic idea of becoming one of Islam’s commandos. He also sensed a commercial opportunity: the possibility of trading up from drugs, with heroin on the decline, to procuring sensitive information about an entirely new threat that was beginning to worry his paymasters back in the US. When Daood got busted again, this time in New York in 1997, he tested this idea, coming up with a deal involving his proximity to radicals. A letter put before the court showed its effectiveness, as prosecutors conceded that while Daood might have supplied up to fifteen kilograms of heroin worth £947,000, he had also been ‘reliable and forthcoming’ with the agency about ‘a range of issues’. Sentenced to fifteen months in the low-security Fort Dix, New Jersey, while his co-conspirator received four years in a high-security jail, Daood was freed after only nine months.

  In August 1999, he returned to Pakistan, his ticket paid for by the US government. It was one year after hundreds had been killed in simultaneous Al-Qaeda bomb attacks on American embassies in Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania, and Nairobi, in Kenya, and the reprisals from Washington saw seventy-five cruise missiles slamming into five Al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. He remained attached to the DEA, but American counter-terrorism outfits were also now interested in him, as Washington woke up to the forces of extremism operating from the Af–Pak border.

  Back in Lahore, Daood acted as if he were plotting a textbook infiltration. He bedded down, marrying Shazia Ahmed, a conservative Pakistani woman, and settled in an enclave beside the Lahore canal, the so-called lovers’ waterway, although his father, who was now Director General of Radio Pakistan, and his brother Danyal, who was sitting his Civil Service Exams, kept their distance. In late 2000, shortly after Al-Qaeda attacked the American destroyer USS Cole in Yemen, Daood donated 50,000 rupees (£600) to Lashkar’s jihad fund, buying himself entry to a private lecture given by Hafiz Saeed, amir of Lashkar’s parent organization, Jamaat-ud-Dawa. Saeed, a man who wore his beard Barbarossa style, bushy and hennaed red, was already on the US radar. After the talk, Daood asked the amir if he could enlist, but his request was ‘very politely declined’, he recalled. Half American and with white skin, Daood was treated with suspicion. He would have to work harder to gain acceptance.

  He returned to the US and his other careers. He moved a new girlfriend, Portia Peter, a Canadian makeup artist, into his Upper West Side apartment, telling her nothing about the wife he had left in Pakistan. Until 9/11 happened, he seemed to her like a red-blooded American. But on that day Daood was glued to the TV and she recoiled when she caught him appearing ‘to gloat’, telling her in a fit of rage that America deserved to be attacked. His immersion in the world of jihad was showing through.

  Horrified at his attitude at this moment of national crisis, Portia repeated Daood’s comments to a friend in a New York bar, who reported him to the police. The FBI questioned Portia. On 4 October, two Defense Department agents working for the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) quizzed Daood in front of his DEA handlers. ‘You think I’m an extremist,’ a defence official who reviewed the notes recalled Daood saying. ‘But you should check, as I’m working for the US government.’ He also played a game of chicken, claiming that he was related to the deputy director of Pakistan’s ISI spy agency, suspecting, correctly, that no one in the US would be able to quickly work out if that was true. By February 2002, five months after 9/11, Daood was once more in Pakistan, asked by the US government to redouble his efforts to get inside Lashkar, many of whose cadres were now also orbiting around Al-Qaeda, including Daood’s new best friend and neighbour in Lahore, Pasha.

  Pasha’s full name was Abdur Rehman Hashim; an ex-army officer in the 6th Baloch Rifles, he was handsome and battlefield savvy, and had resigned his commission after refusing an order to fight against Osama bin Laden in the Tora Bora Mountains, when the Pakistan military signed up to the Americans’ ‘war on terror’. Daood was transfixed by Pasha’s war stories, the former soldier revealing how he had joined forces with the Afghan Taliban. Under Pasha’s influence, Daood went from spending less than a month a year in Pakistan prior to 2001, to spending the better part of the year there.

  He dressed in shalwar kameez (traditional dress). He told friends that he had renounced alcohol, TV and his mobile phone. He lodged at Lashkar’s headquarters in Muridke, a vast campus outside Lahore, even converting to the severe Ahl-e-Hadith sect that underpinned the outfit, a conservative Salafi strain of Sunni Islam, governed by the sayings and deeds of the Prophet. He also tried his hand at the arduous three-month paramilitary course, taking the bus into the mountains of Pakistan’s portion of Kashmir, to
reach Lashkar’s secret training centre, the dramatically named Bait-ul-Mujahideen (the House of the Holy Warriors). It was under the control of Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, the outfit’s amir, co-founder and military commander, who was known by his students as chacha (uncle).

  At forty-two, Daood was more than twice the age of most recruits. He failed the course and at the end of 2002 returned, humiliated, to New York. For the moment, he had nothing to trade with anyone and over the following months chafed against an American life, refusing to see anyone except his closest relatives. He had grown an unruly beard, as all Hadeethis were required to do, and spent much of his day praying, his hands crossed over his stomach in their severe and distinctive style. His mother Serrill and girlfriend Portia were alarmed by his transformation, with Serrill confiding her worries to a friend who ran a local coffee shop. ‘He is attending training camps in Pakistan and talking about how much he hates India,’ she said. Serrill’s friend reported Daood to the FBI.

  What she did not know was that the FBI had already investigated him, as had the JTTF. The official view on Daood was that he might be an erratic source but he had massive potential, according to one of those who read his file. Accustomed to running agents deep under cover, they had higher tolerances than relatives and girlfriends. All deeply embedded sources were imperfect, hostile even, and hard to cajole, motivate and discipline. The nature of never belonging meant that their personalities were pulled out of shape, as were their lives, which were stretched between different cultures and commitments. The FBI’s training manual told agents to assume that deep-cover informers only ever served themselves. As one veteran FBI agent, who worked in the JTTF for two decades, put it: ‘The best a handler can hope for is that the source’s goals, at some point, coalesce with those of the outfit running him.’