They discussed the possibility of reusing his cover story from India: he would go to Denmark, and if there was a need for it, he could tell people that he was a lawyer or consultant and was working on plans to open a branch of an immigration business that helped Indians come to Denmark and get jobs.
It would scarcely be possible to send the terrorists to Denmark by boat as they had done in Mumbai, and likely it would also be very difficult to put a team of young Pakistani men trained to commit terrorist acts on a flight to Copenhagen without attracting a certain amount of attention.
But initially, the men weren’t Headley’s problem. Others could take care of that, Sajid Mir explained. Lashkar hadn’t ever carried out a mission of this sort in a Western country like Denmark, but they could certainly solve that.
Headley suggested at one point that they could publish some humiliating drawings of Jesus to level the playing field. If you do that, we’ll have to kill you, Mir explained, as he reminded Headley that “all Muslims also love and believe in Jesus.”
Headley had another plan, too. His very own plan. He would personally pay a visit to Flemming Rose and Kurt Westergaard and shoot them. That would be more manageable than planning a comprehensive attack in a country like Denmark, where weapons were difficult to come by, and where the authorities would be expected to discover their plans more easily than in India.
At their third meeting concerning Jyllands-Posten—in Headley’s Lahore house, shortly after the Mumbai attack—he suggested to Sajid Mir that such an operation could reasonably be carried out. Less dramatic, sure, but also more manageable and simple.
Sajid Mir may have been considerably younger than Headley, but when it came to terrorism planning, his experience was greater. And after the bang made by the operation in India, which was big and loud, he certainly wouldn’t be satisfied with a puny double murder in Europe.
He wanted Jyllands-Posten’s headquarters in Aarhus and the paper’s office in Copenhagen bombed and the employees shot. He wanted to see death and destruction in Denmark, and it could only be a good thing if some civilians were killed in the process.
“All Danes are responsible,” said Sajid Mir, who explained to Headley that he dreamed of “burning Denmark down.”
Headley sent an email to his Indian friends, Rahul Bhatt and Vilas Varak.
“Hey guys, so sorry to see what has happened in Mumbai. We should go over there and kick their ass. I should be coming there in a couple of months…. Stay safe, Dave.”
He sent the email from his “ranger1david” Hotmail account. That kept his cover story alive, should he later need to return to India and search for new targets.
In Pakistan, he tried to keep a low profile, but it was difficult. Headley had a burning desire to scream to the world that he was the brains behind the Mumbai attack. That was his work. As the days passed, with Headley still a free man, he simply couldn’t stop talking about Mumbai. The urge was too great.
He told some friends that the actual death toll was more than double the two hundred or so stated in the press. At no time did he directly reveal that he had participated in the planning of the attack, but nonetheless he couldn’t keep himself from showing off knowledge that only few had access to.
“Yes, they were only ten kids, guaranteed. I hear three of the kids were hafiz* and two were married, each with a daughter under three years old,” Headley told a group of old friends in Pakistan.
It was less than two weeks after the attack, and the personal details Headley knew about the men behind the Mumbai attack hadn’t appeared yet in the press. Nobody took notice of Headley’s privileged knowledge, though.
In an email to a friend, Headley wrote that he “suspected” that the ten young men had been “brainwashed” after, among other things, having seen the violent video clips from 1992, when the Babri mosque in northern India was smashed by about 150,000 angry Indians, who attacked it with nothing but their fists. About 2,000 were killed in the subsequent battles between Muslims and Hindus in several large cities. Those were some violent videos.
The men had probably also seen the video clips of the right-wing Indian nationalist Babu Bajrangi, who bragged that he “has cut open pregnant Muslim girls and on at least one occasion sewn their stomachs shut with a puppy inside. So I think the motive might have been something like this,” wrote Headley.
Again, he was unusually well-informed—he himself had seen these two video clips barely a year earlier at a meeting with the Lashkar leaders in Muzaffarabad. And it’s very likely that some of the ten young men took part in the same meeting. It was also in Muzaffarabad, Headley had been told, that the many murders in the coming attack were the “price” for the nearly seven-ton Daisy Cutter bombs that had been dropped time and time again over Afghanistan and killed more than 70,000 people in Kashmir in the last twenty years.
But even among the Pakistanis who thought the attack in India was reasonable, there was a certain worry about the many civilian killings. Soldiers and foreigners might be legitimate targets in the fight for freedom for Kashmir province but hardly small children.
Headley explained to his friend that Mumbai, technically, was a “retaliatory attack.” Regardless of whether or not war had been officially declared, it was raging all-out between the Muslim and Western worlds. And the attack in India could, therefore, easily be compared to the American atomic bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sure, it was brutal, he admitted. But it was necessary to stop the shedding of more Muslim blood.
“No matter how many civilians died in Mumbai, they are far less than Hiroshima. And if you condemn Hiroshima but can ‘live’ with it, then live with this too,” was Headley’s argument.
He was most angry, though, with the Indian special forces, who had previously also operated in Kashmir. He called them “Black pussy cat commandos” because of how they put an end to the attack in Mumbai, when they lowered themselves from a helicopter and shot the two men in Nariman House.
The special forces soldiers were also responsible for at least one hundred of the dead civilians, claimed Headley, as he praised the ten young men in Mumbai: “As you can see that more than 500 commandos had a hard time containing 10 kids. These pieces of shit have no stomach for a fight. All their valor is reserved for the girls in Kashmir.”
When he really got himself worked up, his hatred for Indians was unstoppable. It also encompassed the so-called Gurkha soldiers from Nepal, who helped defeat the terrorists in Mumbai. Some years before, Headley had seen a BBC documentary about some Gurkhas in a military training camp in Kashmir, who had hesitated when they were asked to twist the neck of a chicken. They ended up having to draw lots.
Headley concluded: “There will always be a huge difference in the morale and esprit de corps between a man fighting for a paycheck and a man fighting to achieve everlasting life in the company of the Prophets and Martyrs in Paradise. Of course the biggest reward—more than the rivers of milk and honey and wine and more than the Eternal Virgins—is the Good Pleasure of the Almighty. May we all achieve this. Ameen.”
When Pakistan decided to detain some suspects for a few days, it was reported in the Indian media that several Pakistanis from Lashkar had revealed that they were behind the attack. Here, too, Headley was able to threat his friends to his insider analysis:
“Nobody has ‘confessed’ to anything. I suspect the Indians orchestrated the whole thing. But if they didn’t and it was Pakistan, you can safely assume that this event was known to all agencies, all the way to the top,” wrote Headley, presumably making a hidden reference to his friends in the intelligence service, ISI.
He rejected wholeheartedly the notion that any captured Lashkar men would talk—or ‘sing,’ as Headley called it—about the men behind the attack.
“There is no need to ‘sing’ as the song (both lyrics and composition) would already be known to the relevant agency. So my prediction is that Pakistan will never turn over anyone to India, and the US—looking at the ‘larger pict
ure’—will not put too much pressure either. This thing will slowly just go away, till of course Bharat mata is embarrassed again,” wrote Headley.
The terrorism plans against Denmark were initially dubbed the “Mickey Mouse project.”
Sajid Mir didn’t really care for the name and the oblique reference to the cartoons, so he insisted on calling it the “northern project.” Headley accepted this but continued to use “Mickey Mouse project” or simply “MMP” in his own notes and emails and when he, in complete confidence, discussed the project with other Lashkar leaders.
Nine days after the attack in Mumbai, Headley packed a bag in Pakistan to travel to the United States. From there, he planned to continue on to Denmark.
A few hours before his departure, he compiled a to-do list of sorts based on the notes from his conversations with Sajid Mir. He didn’t dare travel with the list, either on paper or in electronic form, so instead he chose to write an email to himself without sending it, instead saving it as a draft with the title “Mickey Mouse”:
Route Design (train, bus, air)
Cross (Cover Authenticator)
Trade? Immigration?
Ad? (Lost Luggage)(Business)(Entry?)
Kings Square (French Embassy)
YMCA
Car Trip + Train Option (Nufoozur Rehman)(weekend?)
Residence for clients
Complete Area Coverage (P.S. e.t.c.)
Counter surveillance (magic eye)
NDC option
Lunch + Coffee spots
Security (armed)?
Foreman residence
Zoom
Entry and exit method in the house
Feasible plan
On return, procurement of machinery
Uniform
Mixed Fruit Dish
Cell phone and camera
Border Crossing
City Guide Map
Alternate Investment
Got Papers? (Clients)
Make Visiting Cards
In and of themselves, most of these items are innocuous, but together in the list they provide rare insight into the first steps of a terrorist attack like the one that struck Mumbai.
Many were either written in code or with abbreviations that were meaningful only to Headley. The “Mixed Fruit Dish” might initially sound like the dried fruits the men from Mumbai carried in their bags. But in Headley’s notes, the words were code for an attack with both handguns and explosives like hand grenades.
Headley’s “Alternative Investments” was code for exploring Aarhus in Denmark as an alternative target instead of Copenhagen. “Foreman’s residence” was code for Flemming Rose’s private residence, which Headley wanted to try to find. “P.S.” was short for “police station,” and with “Zoom” Headley was reminding himself to look out for rooftops and other places in Copenhagen where the police’s antiterrorism unit would be likely to place snipers during a terrorist attack.
“NDC option” was a notion to attack Jyllands-Posten in the same way Headley had previously discussed attacking the National Defence College in India. Namely, with a truck filled with explosives.
“YMCA” was code for Headley’s search for a cheap place to stay the night, where a group of foreign men wouldn’t draw attention.
Headley also weighed the possibility of having the would-be perpetrators carry Christian crosses. In the Siddhivinayak Temple in Mumbai, he had bought kalava string bracelets so the ten men would look like local Indians—and anything but Muslim men on their way to a suicide attack.
“Nufoozur” was apparently Arabic for “infiltration”; Headley added the surname “Rehman” just to muddy things up in the event the document was discovered.
As Headley prepared himself for the big trip, he thought about who he really was. And what he really represented. He took to the keyboard and wrote that “the Mujahideen will NEVER surrender,” and instead, they would “lie in ambush” to kill “by the bushel.”
He was good with words, and he got an absolute high as he wrote page after page of praise for the jihad movement and its holy right to smash all it saw as evil. A Middle Eastern proverb says that the fruits of patience are sweeter. Headley agreed.
“This is an enemy that won’t go away, isn’t impressed by superior forces or technology, always believes in Allah’s promise of Final Victory and the righteousness of his Cause. The Angels do descend to assist them in battle and spread their wings under their feet when they walk. Those who oppose them are destined for Hell and will never even smell the fragrance of Paradise, let alone enter it,” he wrote.
Was the battle between good and evil something that could be called terrorism? No, thought Headley. This was not terrorism, but a necessity on the way to achieving “holy justice,” both in heaven and on earth.
“A world wide mechanism needs to be developed in which Justice can be given to all. It is not a privilege but a right of every human being. The way an individual is accustomed to it through the court system in the USA and Europe. If not, then this nightmare is not ending. Death and mayhem will hurt American and European Broilers more than the already destitute and disenfranchised Muslims,” he wrote, echoing the threat that the Lashkar operative in the Pakistani control room had issued in the final hours of the Mumbai attack:
“The worst is yet to come…. This fight has just begun.”
* An association of illustrators in Denmark.
* A somewhat mistranscribed version of the Arabic phrase meaning “the messenger of Allah.” SAW stands for salla Allah alaihi wa sallam, which means, “may Allah’s peace and blessings be upon him.”
† Sherry Jones wrote The Jewel of Medina, which is about Aisha, one of Muhammad’s wives. Irshad Manji, who wrote The Trouble with Islam, is openly lesbian and was called “Osama bin Laden’s worst nightmare” by the New York Times.
* The Arabic term for a Muslim who has memorized the Qur’an.
6
THE PRINCE
Cadet College Hasan Abdal, just outside Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad
1974
The cadets gathered around him and listened to his many imprecations. He thundered on in Punjabi. The words just kept coming and coming. They sat in his chest and wanted out.
He could become very angry, and once he began to vent his frustrations, it was difficult for him to shut down again. It was far from the first time this had happened.
Everyone knew that if there was a fuss being made it was certain that Daood Gilani—as David Headley was called at that time—was nearby.
Many things caused Headley stand out as a fourteen-year-old. First, he was a full head taller than many of his friends. He was white. And he had those eyes. One blue, one dark brown. Some thought they looked freakish, others that they were cool. At any rate, all the cadets paid attention to him.
The flock surrounding Headley’s rage was composed of sons of the country’s elite: the best doctors, officers, high-ranking officials, and others with solid incomes and family trees they were all too happy to show off. A Pakistani air force chief, a defense minister, and several of the country’s richest businesspeople were among the school’s past students. Nothing less was expected of Headley’s friends.
The school was founded as Pakistan’s first military academy in 1954, and the strict, heavily-regimented routines in place at the school were designed to develop the cadets to their “full potential”—while wearing khaki military uniforms with black berets and polished shoes. They were to develop “punctuality, self-discipline, and true leadership,” so that they, too, might bring honor to Pakistan one day.
There wasn’t much group work or circle time to be had at Cadet College Hasan Abdal. Instead, there were clear, absolute rules. Sons were allowed visits from their parents only on Sundays, and only within a certain time period. The parents were at no time allowed to see the cadets’ quarters. All mail was liable to be inspected at any time. Apart from the few annual holidays, free time away from the school was only granted in th
e case of full siblings’ weddings.
The school had its own enormous mosque, which woke the students each morning with the call to the first prayer of the day. The day began with a Qur’an verse and then interpretation of the verse. It was expected that all students read the Qur’an regularly if they hadn’t already memorized it. In history class, the cadets studied the Battle of Karbala, which took place in present-day Iraq in the year 680, and they analyzed step by step how Hussein ibn Ali—grandson of the prophet Muhammad—defended against 30,000 soldiers with just 100 of his own.
If anybody had doubts about the military character of the academy, they had only to take a walk around the large green space closed off to the public behind a redbrick wall and a large black iron grid. Not far from the mosque but still in the academy area, there was a tank on display with a long gun barrel, a gift from the Pakistani military, while a real F-86 Sabre fighter plane was also exhibited, rising toward the heavens, not far from a large anti-aircraft gun from the Pakistani navy.
War? It was everywhere. If a young man, or perhaps his parents on his behalf, dreamed of a career in the Pakistani military, Cadet College Hasan Abdal was the obvious choice. Young women, naturally, were not admitted.
Among the cadets taking in Headley’s outburst was Tahawwur Hussein Rana. He had never heard so many Punjabi curse words pour out of a white man’s mouth. That was impressive, thought Rana.
Rana was born in the province of Punjab between the metropolises of Lahore and Multan, in the somewhat smaller city of Chichawatni, mostly known for being the home of Pakistan’s largest cattle market. He was as Pakistani as the day was long, with short dark hair and a calm, disappearingly quiet, careful voice.
The two young men were about the same age and lived in the military academy’s yellow wing—Liaqat Wing, it was called—but until that day, they hadn’t had much to do with each other.
The Mind of a Terrorist Page 8