The Siege

by Adrian Levy

  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.’

  Slowly Daood began to settle down, and his family put his outpourings to one side. After a few weeks he won Portia back, proposing to her in Central Park, flying her off to Jamaica, where they married in December 2002, with no mention of the two young children he had fathered in Pakistan with his first wife, Shazia.

  For the next two and a half years, Daood flitted between the US and Pakistan, keeping his two lives separate but failing to get any real purchase on Lashkar. His personal life flared up again in August 2005 when Portia, who was frustrated and suspicious about her husband’s frequent trips to Pakistan, called up his father in Lahore, only to discover the secret family over there. Outraged and humiliated she confronted Daood in Fliks on 25 August, complaining to the police afterwards that he had turned violent, beating her. She also called the terror tip line, repeating everything he had told her about Pakistani training camps and Lashkar – which had been added to the US list of banned terrorist groups in 2003. The JTTF interviewed her three times but then she heard no more after Daood once again convinced the US authorities that everything he did was part of his covert life that was now well documented. He offered the Americans unique insights, not only into Lashkar, but the cadre within it who leant towards Al-Qaeda, choosing now to reveal his friendship with Pasha, who ‘knew Osama bin Laden’. Six years into the hunt for the Al-Qaeda leader, Daood was classified as ‘significant’ in counter-terrorism circles, one of the only American passport holders who could claim, with any credibility, to be moving in the same circles as America’s Most Wanted.

  In January 2006, after the United Nations Security Council added Lashkar-e-Toiba to a list of sanctioned organizations, freezing its leaders’ assets and instigating a travel ban and arms embargo, Daood decided to go out on a limb. He called up Pasha, suggesting an unauthorized road trip to meet contacts from his drug-dealing days, who ‘might be able to use those routes to smuggle weapons into India’. Surely this would open up Lashkar. But since 9/11 the landscape had drastically changed. West of Peshawar, the gateway to the Khyber Pass, the two men were arrested. These border areas were especially sensitive, as the West accused Pakistan of concealing Taliban refugees and Al-Qaeda’s leadership there. The Pakistan military had swamped the region with spies, agents and scouts, and foreign passport holders like Daood Gilani were banned from travelling there.

  Pasha whipped out his military ID card, and after a night in the cells he was allowed to make one call. The ex-serviceman rang an old friend in the Khyber Rifles. Pasha and Daood were taken to an army camp, where an officer introduced himself as Major Ali. He saluted Pasha, the Lashkar cadre, and apologized for their treatment. Pasha whispered to Daood that ‘the Major was a spy’, an agent of the ISI, the intelligence agency run by the military that distributed funds and weapons to jihad factions fighting against India.

  Dressed like a bank clerk, with a clipped moustache and dyed-black hair, the Major did not look like Daood’s vision of an ISI agent. Pasha explained that there were many different types of ISI men. Those on full-time deployment to the jihad mission became like their clients, often voluntarily submitting to conservative religious organizations too. The Major, on the other hand, was on short-term Lashkar duty, co-opted into Joint Intelligence North, which meant a two- to three-year cycle dealing with jihad outfits, after which he would be moved elsewhere in the kingdom of spies.

  Daood did what he always did when his back was against the wall: he offered the Major a deal. He hoped it would play as well in Pakistan as it would back in the US, if he ever were allowed home. Breaking into a mid-Atlantic accent, he revealed that he was actually only half Pakistani and that he also held an American passport, and was keen to help in the jihad against India. The Major seemed startled, but Daood pushed on, suggesting that he was their man. ‘Why not use a clean skin to do the reconnaissance for a spectacular attack on a great Indian commercial hub like Mumbai?’ He was even willing to legally change his name to make it sound more Western.

  Over dinner, Daood used his father’s name and reputation to ingratiate himself and revealed that his brother Danyal was working for Yousuf Raza Gilani, a rising political star and former speaker of the Pakistan National Assembly. ‘Some people will be contacting you,’ the Major said, eventually allowing Daood and Pasha to return to Lahore. Soon after, a ‘Major Iqbal’ rang, directing Daood to an address in the Lahore Army Cantonment, on Airport Road. Major Iqbal was the same type as Major Ali and Daood had no doubt that he was also an ISI agent. The Major talked around the Mumbai idea, as intrigued by it as his colleague up on the border. But such an audacious plan made everyone nervous and the meeting ended without any firm commitment.

  It was a month before the Major was in touch. Daood’s family connections had checked out and he had good news, offering to pay for Daood to return to the US and apply for a passport with an anglicized name. Daood chose David Coleman Headley, borrowing the last two parts from his American grandfather, who had died so tragically at the age of thirty-seven. He formalized the documents that month, telling his American relatives that he was tired of being stopped at immigration because of his Pakistani name. One, who was in the US military, became suspiciou
s. ‘I had a really bad feeling and considered reporting him to my superiors.’ But he did not and Daood’s actions alerted none of the US authorities that might normally have been expected to challenge an application from someone with a criminal record who had been investigated several times for supporting terrorism. This was an aberration or the authorities were a party to the move, as they had been to so many other things in Daood’s chequered career as a US government agent provocateur and super-grass.

  On Daood’s return to Pakistan, Major Iqbal assigned an army officer to train the freshly minted ‘David Headley’ in a condensed version of the ISI’s two-year field course on surveillance and counter-intelligence. If he was to scout Mumbai, he would need to know how to record his findings, what to look out for and how to ensure that he was not being observed. Major Iqbal gave him what he described as ‘classified Indian files’ that he said had been obtained from within the Indian police and army and which ‘revealed their training and limitations’. The Major boasted they had a super-agent at work in New Delhi who was known as ‘Honey Bee’. The Major revealed that while he would guide Headley, the Mumbai operation was to be run by Lashkar.

  Headley was in. Within days he received a message to meet his newly appointed Lashkar handler at the remote House of the Holy Warriors camp. He travelled on the hairpin road to Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-administered Kashmir, and walked up into the densely forested Chelabandi hills, 7,500 feet above sea level. The camp sat in a bowl-shaped plain and consisted of a large mosque, several hostels and a well-stocked munitions store. Recruits in khaki shalwar kameez could be seen exercising on three sandy parade grounds, Uhad, Tabook and Qadisiya (all of them named after legendary Islamic battles from the epoch of the Prophet). Sajid Mir, Lashkar’s deputy chief of foreign operations, greeted Headley and took him to his office, which was clinically clean, fiercely air-conditioned and filled with computers, satellite phones and maps. Camp comrades had nicknamed it the ‘Ice Box’. Mir’s brood of children spent so much time in there trying to avoid the summer heat that everyone referred to them as the ‘polar bear cubs’.

  Mir told Headley they would call his plan Operation Bombay. He was to scout for targets that Lashkar commandos would then assault. He would need a cover story. Headley immediately came up with a suggestion from his drug-dealing days. He could use his old friend Tahawwur Rana, who had left the Pakistani army and now lived in Chicago, where he had established a thriving immigration business helping South Asians migrate to America. In June 2006, the ISI paid for David Headley to fly back to the US to meet up with Rana. Without explaining the back-story, Headley asked if he could set up a branch of Rana’s immigration business in Mumbai. Friends and family were commodities in Headley’s mind, to be cashed in and exploited. ‘He could persuade just about anyone to do whatever he wanted,’ said one. Arranging the paperwork, Rana, who would later claim that he suspected nothing, went to the Indian consulate with Headley’s new passport and applied for a one-year business visa, while Portia, Headley’s estranged wife, applied for permanent residency in the US under a law for abused spouses. On her petition, she accused her husband of violence, and also of espousing hate crimes, attacking Jews and Hindus, and praising suicide bombers.

  Her allegations were filed away, the FBI later insisting that privacy laws prevented the immigration department from reporting their concerns. However, by then the JTTF had interviewed Portia, Headley’s mother, and several other family members, as well as family friends who had tipped off the authorities, which either made for a grievous series of intelligence failings, or, as Serrill and Portia were becoming convinced, compelling grounds to believe that David/Daood was informing on Lashkar for the US intelligence community (and vice versa).

  In the autumn of 2006, David Headley used £15,000 he had been given by Major Iqbal to open the Immigration Law Centre in Tardeo A/C Market, a commercial district close to Mumbai’s upmarket Willingdon Sports Club. He put adverts in local papers – ‘Guaranteed work visas to the US and Canada for skilled and unskilled Indians’ – and hired a secretary who staffed the office alone, wondering why Headley had no fax or international phone. She also thought it strange that he never asked her to make his travel arrangements. But then he was a foreigner.

  In reality, Headley had another office his secretary knew nothing about: the Reliance cyber café near Churchgate railway station, where he maintained a vigorous email exchange with Tahawwur Rana, Sajid Mir, Major Iqbal and Pasha, whose online pseudonym was Scorpion 6. Mir used the codename Wasi and two email addresses – rare.layman@gmail.com and get.me.some.books@gmail.com – while Major Iqbal, who addressed Headley as ‘My dear’, wrote from the email address chaudherykhan@yahoo.com. Headley, who sometimes signed off ‘Dave Salafi’ and was ranger1david@yahoo.com, always found time to report back on the local talent. ‘Girls here are really hot,’ he wrote in one email to Rana. ‘Just the both of us should come here minus our girlfriends to have a good time.’

  Now he needed to bed in. He joined a gym called Moksh (Salvation) close to his apartment, where minor Bollywood stars worked out, and he befriended a fitness trainer, Vilas Warek. They chatted about the movies and crashed Bollywood parties. Warek was impressed by Headley’s ability to pull women and they toured Bandra’s late-night bars, driving around on Warek’s motorbike. ‘We’re brothers from another mother,’ Warek bragged to the girls.

  One night, he took Headley to Shivaji Mandir, a theatre and temple complex, to see a bodybuilding show. There, Warek introduced him to Rahul Bhatt, the son of Mahesh Bhatt, one of India’s most acclaimed film directors. Soon Headley, Warek and Bhatt were inseparable, the Indians calling their new friend ‘David Armani’ because of the clothes he wore. To keep things smooth, Headley referenced some of his American life: the bar in Philadelphia that his bohemian mother ran, the tragic story of his grandfather and how his American forefathers had built the first oil well in New York State and knew the Rockefellers. He also picked up the tab for their frequent meetings in the Taj, especially at Sea Lounge, where Faustine Martis supervised high tea. The Pakistani side of his family was never mentioned.

  One thing that set Bhatt wondering was Headley’s encyclopaedic knowledge of weaponry. He gave a running commentary about ambushes and raids by the security forces throughout the world. He could describe the calibre and capacity of most weapons. But one time, when Bhatt called him Agent Headley as a joke, he exploded. ‘Stop that.’ He was touchy about the strangest things, Bhatt thought, and on more than one occasion a little wild. He told his friends he wanted to take them to see the Af–Pak border. Bhatt shook his head laughing: ‘I am too afraid,’ he said. ‘I’ll be murdered like Daniel Pearl.’ Headley laughed. ‘No one will touch you if I’m around. You should change your names.’ He looked at Bhatt and said: ‘Maybe you should become Mohammed Atta!’ Everyone knew the 9/11 conspirator. ‘There’s safety in the blindingly obvious,’ Headley told them, laughing in their faces.

  When he was not with Warek or Bhatt, Headley often visited the Taj alone. In his mind it was already emerging as the number one target. Drinking with a well-connected local businessman, Sunil Patel, he got himself invited to a Bollywood party in the Crystal Room and bought a Mont Blanc pen from the hotel shop. He browsed in Nalanda’s. He loved the Taj and its lifestyle, and observed it minutely. On at least two occasions, he joined the Friday Tour, a paid walk-and-talk tour popular with tourists, which he also filmed, recording on one of those videos the hotel layout and its history. He read up on its founder, Jamsetji Tata, whose family, originally priests from Gujarat, had emigrated to the city, sending their boy to London in 1858 on a voyage of discovery.

  Everything was research material. Headley taped the guide explaining how the scion of the Tata dynasty had returned from Europe with a plan to open cotton mills, building an industrial empire based on personal loyalty. Jamsetji Tata also purchased a rectangular block of reclaimed land overlooking the harbour at Apollo Bunder, envisaging a hotel that merged Mugha
l, Rajput and Oriental aesthetics backed up by Colonial standards.

  In a hotel pamphlet, Headley underlined passages about the Taj’s design, how the industrialist Tata had hired a dynamic Indo-European team led by the great Victorian master builder of Bombay, Frederick Stevens, who had constructed the Royal Alfred Sailors’ Home (later the state police headquarters), as well as Victoria Terminus (later renamed Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus) and Churchgate station.

  The pamphlet described how Stevens had created a U-shaped structure out of hard-wearing grey basalt, turning in from the harbour, with spacious galleries running the length of the building, along each wing and from the second floor up to the roof: a great net to catch the evening breezes. Headley walked with the group down these galleries, videoing all the way, sketching the route afterwards, as visitors were told how Stevens had planned to lace these galleries together with Gujarati trellises and balustrades interpreted in an Edwardian style.

  As Headley fathomed the complex layout, drawing detailed sketches of wherever he had walked, he also learned about the hotel’s history of innovation. He highlighted passages in guidebooks that explained how the positioning of the hotel back-to-front also enabled the greatest number of guests to have a sea view. Like Victoria Terminus, the Taj had cupolas on each corner and a grand central dome covering a cantilevered central staircase. The cellars contained a refrigeration plant, the ground and first floors would be shops and restaurants, while the bedrooms would be on the second to fifth floors, with a roof garden crowning the building. When Stevens died suddenly in 1900, his successor, William Chambers, added a Florentine Renaissance theme. Jamsetji splashed out 26 million rupees – the equivalent of £200m today – for thirty private apartments and 350 double and single rooms with electric lights, fans, bells and clocks, along with four mechanical passenger lifts imported from Germany. The hotel had its own power plant, a chemist’s shop and a Turkish bath. Adding to the city-state atmosphere, a post office was opened. Upping the technological ante, the residents were cooled by a carbon dioxide-powered refrigeration system that also provided ice for Bombay’s first licensed bar. With an English manager and a French head chef, the Taj was half finished in 1902 when Jamsetji embarked on a grand tour of Europe and the US, sending back Belgian crystal chandeliers and spun steel pillars from the manufacturers of the Eiffel Tower.