The Siege

by Adrian Levy

  By 14 December 2006, all of Headley’s memory cards were full, his bag stuffed with tourist maps and booklets on the hotel and the city. He told his new friends he was returning to Philadelphia to spend Christmas with his mother, but instead caught a flight to Lahore. He went straight to Major Iqbal and handed over the footage. A couple of days later, he travelled to the Ice Box in the Chelabandi hills, where he screened his Operation Bombay footage for Sajid Mir. But there were others in Lashkar whom Headley needed to impress. He was given a private audience with chacha Zaki, the military chief, whom he had not seen since failing the mujahid training camp. Military chief Zaki offered Headley milk and saffron as a gesture of respect, but maintained his distance. Mir reassured Headley afterwards that chacha took time to win over. ‘It is hard to sell the plot but we are trying,’ Mir said. ‘The most important thing is that you are in his sights.’ From now on Headley should be assured that Lashkar was seriously looking at how to attack all of the targets he was reconnoitring, including the city’s police headquarters, a tourist hangout called the Leopold Café and the Taj.

  Back in Lahore, Headley stewed at home with Shazia, his Pakistani wife, who was eight months pregnant with their third child. He was no good at waiting, and when he received a call from Chand Bhai, an old acquaintance from his drug-dealing days, he raced over to see him.

  CB, as Headley called him, ran a bric-a-brac shop and poker den in Lahore’s Muslim Town, and he told Headley he had found someone he would like. A young Moroccan medical student, Western, liberated and voluptuous, Faiza Outalha had come to Pakistan to train as a doctor, but after a year she had had enough of human dissection. Well-educated and fluent in English, Arabic and French, Faiza had swapped her middle-class Moroccan upbringing, playing sports and piano, for what she now had concluded was ‘a Third World hell’. Doctors had diagnosed her as suffering from hypertension, and prescribed a course of injections that made her woozy and confused, drugs she feared were contaminated. Faiza wanted to go home, and filled her time smoking joints at CB’s place, which was ‘full of spiders, dust everywhere’. When Headley strode in, she was playing cards at the back of the shop.

  Staring up at him, with his broad shoulders, laconic, Western manner and captivating smile, Faiza instantly felt her luck was changing. ‘He was exchanging that look with me and a voice inside me told me, “He’s the one, I know I’m going to marry him”,’ she wrote in her diary.

  After tense months spent wooing Lashkar and pleasing the ISI, plus the stressful scouting trip to Mumbai, the beautiful, vivacious and irreverent Faiza was a tonic. Within a week they were ‘married’ and Headley had moved her into a rented apartment, some distance from his wife, whose existence he kept to himself. The new couple went for candlelit dinners overlooking Badshahi mosque and she whirled around the ancient lanes of Lahore on the back of his motorbike. When he asked her to wear a hijab, she agreed. ‘My Dave was this handsome man, with one brown, one blue eye, so cute, shy, intelligent, good-hearted,’ Faiza wrote. ‘Sometimes he was innocent, sometimes a baby. He used to say to me: “Honey, you know what, I have you in this world and the hereafter.” Like he found me in two worlds.’

  The honeymoon was cut short, however, when Headley suddenly announced that he had to go abroad. He’d received an email reminder from Major Iqbal that they expected him to complete his reconnaissance for Operation Bombay, regardless of chacha Zaki’s reservations: ‘hi, how are you no contact what is the progress on the projects please update me.’

  He flew out of Pakistan on 21 February 2007, leaving Faiza upset and suspicious. She rifled through Headley’s phone bills, ringing around, discovering the existence of the heavily pregnant Shazia, and her two children. Both women called Headley in Mumbai, distraught. Worried that his complicated love life might upset the operation, he put everything on hold while he flew back to Lahore. It took him five days to calm Shazia. His new wife, Faiza, who dismissively described her rival as ‘a covered creature’, referring to her conservative Islamic appearance, took longer.

  Headley returned to Mumbai on 20 March 2007. Faiza insisted on coming along, describing the trip as ‘our honeymoon’. Headley had a different view: ‘I was not interested in getting her to India. But she insisted.’ He mugged along, splashing out, booking a room at the Taj for the first time. At last he would be able to record all of the labyrinthine hotel’s nooks and crannies that were only open to guests, like the corridors of the exclusive fifth and sixth floors in the Palace. But the minute he walked into the lobby, he realized his mistake. Having once been the model of liberation, smoking charas, gambling and drinking, Faiza now refused to take off her hijab.

  Headley’s Taj drinking pals spotted him immediately and rushed over. What was their godless American buddy doing with a veiled Muslim woman? ‘Oh, she’s a client,’ he improvised and for the next few days, he used Faiza as an excuse to tour the Taj, taking hundreds of photographs of her, all the while wondering how he was going to get her back home. A few days into their trip, Shazia called, adding to the pressure: she had just given birth to a son.

  Headley booked Faiza a return ticket to Lahore, but she refused to go, fleeing instead to her parents in Morocco, with the growing feeling that all of Headley’s life was a lie. ‘He told me he worked in an immigration office but there was no evidence of any real business,’ she wrote in her diary. First, Headley had to settle Shazia, who had flounced off to Dubai to her maternal relatives. He met his new son, suggesting, without irony, that they name him Osama. Cousins in the US were alarmed when Headley announced the news at a family get-together in Philadelphia, describing the new addition to the clan as ‘my little terrorist’. Leaving the Faiza situation hanging, he returned to Pakistan and promised Lashkar’s Mir and the ISI’s Major Iqbal that he would complete the surveillance. Without it, the entire operation would be scrapped.

  In mid-June 2007, Headley returned from Mumbai with new surveillance material and there were some immediate responses. Everyone wanted to know the identity of an attractive young woman in many of the shots. Headley conceded he had married again. Lashkar’s concern was theosophical. ‘Sajid blackened Faiza’s face in the computer.’ The military commander, chacha Zaki, insisted on digital hijabs being placed over the faces of all photographed women. Major Iqbal’s concern was tradecraft. How did the new wife affect Headley’s cover? To make things simpler Headley decided on a code. In all future communications, he would refer to Shazia as M1 (Marriage 1) and Faiza as M2. No mention was made of the estranged third wife back in the US, Portia Gilani.

  In July 2007, unforeseen external events forced chacha Zaki to upgrade Headley and Operation Bombay. Millions of Pakistanis became transfixed by one of the country’s first significant live broadcast events, footage of a standoff between police and jihadis at the Lal Masjid or Red Mosque in central Islamabad. Its grey-haired maulvi (Islamic scholar) had become an outspoken critic of the military dictatorship of General Pervez Musharraf, criticizing him for assisting the West’s war against Al-Qaeda. The cleric’s students had also formed vigilante patrols that attacked video stores and hairdressers, accusing both of being un-Islamic or brothels.

  On 3 July, Headley and Zaki both watched live footage of government forces trading shots with jihadis outside the Red Mosque, kicking off a wild gun battle that left twenty dead. Five days later, Musharraf’s commandos raided, killing the maulvi and dozens of religious students, news that sent the Islamic Republic over the edge. Mourners and Al-Qaeda declared a holy war against the Pakistani establishment.

  Waves of suicide bombers, many of them children, were directed against the police and military. That December, the violence claimed the life of Benazir Bhutto, the former Prime Minister, who had returned from exile to canvass for impending elections. Headley was with Pasha, the diehard Lashkar man, when news came through of the attack and he ‘prayed Bhutto would die soon’. They were also together when Lashkar was assaulted, the state-backed jihad outfit dismissed by pro-Red Mosque radicals as �
�a tool of the army’. Within hours, government forces were deployed outside the Qadisiya mosque in Lahore, while ISI agents rode shotgun with amir Hafiz Saeed. Government gunmen guarded Lashkar’s secretive Muridke training complex, too, with plain-clothed agents, hair cropped, cradling machine guns, patrolling the faux Greek villas of the movement’s leaders.

  Under pressure from the jihadis, a sizeable faction inside Lashkar, Pasha included, argued that the outfit should dump its ISI paymasters, join forces with Al-Qaeda and shift its theatre of activity from fighting Indian forces in Kashmir to launching attacks against coalition forces in Afghanistan.

  Chacha Zaki called Headley to the House of the Holy Warriors and conceded that he ‘had serious problems in holding Lashkar together and convincing the outfit to fight for Kashmir’. He was also worried that if Lashkar spurned the military, it would lose its ISI shield and come under attack from all sides.

  Major Iqbal called Headley back to Lahore, admitting that the ISI ‘was under tremendous pressure’ to stop Lashkar falling apart. The outfit needed to pull something out of the hat, an operation that would bind everyone together. He told Headley that Zaki was now ‘compelled to consider a spectacular terrorist strike in India’ that would sate the desire of some factions to attack the enemies of Islam – Americans, Israelis and Europeans – as well as India. Operation Bombay was the perfect plan, he argued, targeting India and also the city’s international guests.

  By September 2007, Headley was back in Mumbai, surveying the Taj’s ‘entries and exit points’ and the jewellery shop, data that he was told was now being mounted in an operations room in the House of the Holy Warriors, where a huge schematic of the hotel and its environs had been prepared using Google Earth.

  Headley was now so busy he needed to simplify his life. Somehow he had talked M2 (Faiza) back to Lahore in August 2007, no doubt cutting a deal with her, just as he had done with everyone else. Delighted, Faiza wrote in her diary: ‘I’ve been with all his faces, and that is the most beautiful of it all, to know that this person didn’t have to act that much when he was with me.’ But when Headley visited her next, it was to ask for a divorce. She had not seen that coming. During the furious argument that followed, he punched her before returning to Shazia, whom he armed with a gun. ‘Could you believe that he thought I would go and kill that woman with his kids?’ Faiza wrote, dismayed. ‘These things made me cry, made me sad.’

  Faiza wanted revenge. She talked her way into the heavily fortified US embassy compound in Islamabad’s Diplomatic Zone, where she accused Headley of being a jihadi. ‘I have seen all of his personalities,’ she told the officials. ‘David, James, Daood or Dave.’ She knew about his life as a drug-dealer, and had come to love him despite this. But since their hasty wedding in February 2007, she suspected he was up to far worse.

  The embassy official asked her to meet a ‘regional security officer’, who arrived with ‘an inch-thick file’ about her husband. As she told them about Headley’s activities, they nodded as if they already knew. When he was around Lashkar, he acted as a devout Muslim who went by the name Daood and publicly lambasted the US for its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, she said. At home he was ‘Dave’ who watched Seinfeld and Jay Leno. His closest friend was Pasha, who was allied to Al-Qaeda, yet at home he listened to ‘the Boss’ and knew all the words to ‘Born to Run’. She was ‘scared and confused’.

  She was most worried about his frequent trips to Mumbai. Her husband was back and forth to that city, she said, even though at home he cursed India and its government. She had photos to prove it, including copies of all of those shot inside the Taj, in April and May 2007. She got them out. That was supposedly ‘our honeymoon’, she explained, but she had been introduced to his friends as a ‘business client’. Was he planning something over there? No response.

  The officials ended the meeting, and before she knew it she was outside, blinking in the bright sunshine. The US embassy later categorized the incident as a ‘domestic row’. Faiza wrote in her diary: ‘I told them, he’s either a terrorist, or he’s working for you. They pretty much told me to get lost.’

  A few days later, Headley turned up on the doorstep, furious. ‘Why did you go to the embassy?’ he demanded. She wrote in her diary: ‘How did he know?’

  Family, wives and friends were not the only ones ringing the bell about Lashkar. In 2007, President George W. Bush’s National Security Team at the White House had received a hand-delivered dossier. European investigators brought it to Washington DC, having discovered a worrying development. A new terror axis was emerging, the dossier warned, with Pakistan’s Lashkar identified as ‘wrestling with its old remit as a regional jihad outfit’. The file suggested that a section of veteran Lashkar members were starting to look further afield, to India and beyond, citing evidence gathered in the UK, France, Germany and Australia. Sajid Mir, Headley’s handler, had been trailed across Europe and the Gulf, where he worked as a recruiting sergeant and fundraiser, leaving behind Lashkar sleepers with whom he kept in touch using codewords. The UK was central to his plans, with England designated as ‘West 1’.

  In Washington, the dossier was politely rejected. The message that went back to British investigators was simple: ‘President Musharraf is our best bet in Pakistan. Lashkar remains his judgement call.’ US officials added that priorities were ‘disrupting Al Qaeda’, and ‘developing all intelligence and human assets that might lead to the capturing of Osama bin Laden’.

  In January 2008, Serrill Headley died in Philadelphia aged sixty-eight. Years of living life to the full, and five tempestuous marriages, had finally caught up with her. David Headley, who had always kept in touch with his mother by letter when he was abroad, was devastated. But there was no time to grieve; Operation Bombay was moving apace. Days after he had attended her funeral in Philadelphia, his cousins recalled that Headley flew back to Pakistan. There he was invited to a secret Lashkar conclave that met in a safe house in Barakahu, a notorious jihadi hangout on the eastern fringes of Islamabad. Sajid Mir welcomed him, introducing him to a face he vaguely knew from the House of the Holy Warriors, Abu Qahafa. Despite his preacher’s beard, Qahafa, the big-bellied number two to chacha Zaki, was known as ‘the Bull’ because of his strength. A Punjabi from Bahawalpur, he was a legendary field commander. He would be handling the military components of Operation Bombay. Qahafa had news to share. Lashkar had decided to resurrect an idea that it had been toying with since 2006: a seaborne assault on the city.

  His head befuddled by grief and excitement, Headley was ordered to return immediately to Mumbai to find a landing spot. ‘Sajid provided me with an old used Garmin GPS.’ Qahafa taught him how to use it and gave him 40,000 Pakistani rupees (£300) for expenses. Before leaving, Headley met up with Major Iqbal, who gave him a bundle of counterfeit Indian rupees, and a suggestion. ‘Honey Bee’, the ISI double agent who had provided the classified Indian training manuals, had come up with a potential landing area, in Badhwar Park, a fishing colony in South Mumbai, reporting that it was only patchily patrolled and was shielded from the road. He should check it out.

  Headley touched down in Mumbai in early April 2008 and on his first night boarded a tourist boat in front of the Taj, taking a round trip to the Elephanta Caves on the far side of the harbour. The quayside was brightly lit and crawling with tourists, security guards and police. No one took any notice of him as he photographed and took GPS readings.

  The following day he took another boat, this time leaving from Marine Drive at 8.30 p.m., forewarned by Qahafa the Bull that this might be the time the attackers would land. It was frantically busy. The next day he took a taxi down to Cuffe Parade, sticking to the coastline until he reached Badhwar Park. Chatting to a boatman, Headley persuaded him to take him out at 3 a.m. the next morning. They went almost three miles to sea. Before returning, Headley noted that the landing point was, as promised, dark and chaotic, sheltered from the main road. He returned the next day, spinning the fisherman a line about ‘coll
ege students [who] would contact him for a boat ride soon’.

  Headley flew back to Pakistan, driving five hours to the military cantonment of Rawalpindi to deliver the GPS coordinates for the landing site to Sajid Mir. When he arrived, he was shocked. Lashkar’s deputy head of foreign operations had undergone plastic surgery in Dubai, although to Headley’s eyes Mir still looked like Mir, ‘perhaps slightly Chinese’. If Mir was preparing to vanish, Operation Bombay was surely now a certainty.

  A CCTV photograph of David Headley in the immigration queue at Mumbai’s airport on 1 July 2008 revealed an exhausted-looking traveller, his pale blue polo shirt stretched and faded, a turquoise baseball cap covering a greasy ponytail. His carry-on bag hung heavy on his left shoulder and contained the cameras he would use on what Lashkar had advised him was his last surveillance mission.

  As well as scouting out the Taj, the Trident–Oberoi and CST, Headley began documenting a late addition to the target list: Chabad House. The Jewish welfare centre, which was located in a densely populated Colaba side street, was staffed by an American rabbi and reached out to Israelis who worked or holidayed in India, many of them fresh from military service. The suggestion to attack it had come from a team of sixteen Indians whom Lashkar had recruited in Mumbai to produce lists of potential targets. A disparate squad, in Muridke they were referred to as chohay (‘the Mice’).