The Mind of a Terrorist

by Kaare Sørensen

  The information was entered into the FBI’s enormous Guardian Threat Tracking System, which at the time was tracking more than 40,000 tips in connection with allegedly suspicious persons and activities.

  “No connection to terrorism” was the conclusion after a cursory investigation. With that, the FBI closed the case on David Headley for the third time.

  On August 31, 2005, Headley was arrested and jailed by the local police in New York for the attack on his wife a week earlier. He quickly got out, though, and charges were never pressed.

  A few years later, another woman came close to costing Headley everything.

  Her name was Faiza Outalha. She was originally from Morocco, but she was studying medicine at the university in Lahore, and it’s not difficult to see why Headley fell for her. Faiza had large, beautiful eyes and long, dark hair, and she was full of the same restless energy as Headley himself. The twenty-four-year-old woman didn’t put up with anything, complained loudly about unreasonable taxi fares, and always made sure she got her way.

  And when she met Headley, nearly twice her age, while visiting a mutual acquaintance, neither of them had any doubts. In late February 2007, the two got married in Pakistan.

  Faiza was warned in advance that Headley was already married and had children, but she accepted that as long as the other wife didn’t come to know about her.

  And Shazia didn’t. At least, not in the beginning. Headley kept the marriage with Faiza a secret from his first wife. All he did was contact Shazia’s uncle Saulat to get his appraisal of whether it was permitted within Islam to take an additional wife while keeping it a secret. The uncle apparently approved of this.

  Faiza’s temperament quickly caused problems for Headley in their hidden marriage. She insisted, for example, on going with him to Mumbai, where she had learned that her new husband worked at an immigration office.

  Headley hadn’t informed Faiza that his purpose in going to Mumbai was actually to plan a terrorist attack—nor did he intend to do so.

  To get out of this pinch, Headley arranged the next trip to Mumbai so that it would be the couple’s official honeymoon. The two had beautiful views of the sea while staying at the Taj Hotel and Oberoi-Trident, where Headley took plenty of notes for his plans for the attack. Both locations ended up on the list of targets, and their vacation photos from Mumbai were later used for further terrorism plans. Faiza’s face was covered with a black bar in several of the photos, according to proper Salafist tradition.

  But it all became a mess for Headley.

  In Pakistan, he had pressured the otherwise very Western-minded Faiza to wear a hijab. But on their honeymoon in India, he did everything he could to hide his Muslim background. And when the couple met some of his acquaintances, he explained that Faiza was one of his clients who wanted a work permit.

  Headley and Faiza had several violent clashes during their honeymoon. It got to the point where Headley tried to put his new wife on a flight home to Pakistan, but she refused.

  The new, secret marriage also resulted in a number of awkward situations in which Headley had to travel the world to get his cover stories to mesh.

  A simple example: On July 23, 2007, he flew from Lahore to New York with a layover in Europe. In New York he spent a day with a cousin. He then flew to Morocco and was with Faiza for a good week or so before flying Emirates Airlines on August 3 from Casablanca back to Lahore to be with Shazia and the children. He told Shazia that he had been on a business trip.

  In these circumstances, Headley had to be very focused not to slip up. He would send his emails to Shazia in Pakistan to haidergilani1@hotmail.com, while emails for Faiza went to faizagilani@ymail.com.

  Near the end of 2007, less than a year after they got married, his relationship with Faiza was on the verge of collapse. Headley had tried to break up with her in a letter. The two fought about the secrecy with Shazia, which led to regular fistfights in front of Headley’s house in Lahore in December 2007.

  Headley was arrested and put behind bars at the Race Course police station for eight days, until Shazia’s father bailed him out. It also helped that Major Iqbal pulled a few strings here and there. Headley got away once again without being charged for domestic violence.

  But Headley’s anguish only worsened. That same month, Faiza talked her way into the American embassy in Pakistan. She was angry and loudly let the agents from the Department of State’s security agency know that her husband, an American citizen, was a terrorist. He had stayed in Lashkar-e-Taiba training camps and sometimes spoke about suicide missions, she said. And he might be involved in some activities in Mumbai.

  Faiza also claimed that Headley was in the process of planning “jihad against the USA” and was involved with some “very important people.”

  Later, Faiza returned with new information, in the hopes that the Americans would arrest her husband and fly him to Guantánamo. She told them that Headley had received a “special mission,” apparently fabricating a story wherein he had been involved in a bombing attack on a train in India the previous year.

  “He is either a terrorist or he’s working for you,” Faiza apparently told the American authorities.

  It was clear, though, that Faiza was mixing facts with pure fiction, and the embassy staff didn’t find her particularly trustworthy. Even though it seems she showed the agents a picture of herself with Headley in front of the Taj Hotel.

  There was no proof of anything at all.

  The information about Headley and a possible attack in Mumbai was never passed on from the American embassy to Indian authorities. Later, the Americans did give India a weak warning about a possibly approaching attack, but it didn’t include the name David Headley.

  A few months before the Mumbai attack, Faiza went directly to Lashkar leader Hafiz Saeed—the Professor—and asked for help in saving their troubled marriage. Hafiz Saeed then paid a visit to Headley, who downplayed the matter and explained that he had been busy with his Lashkar duties and hadn’t had much time to take care of wife number two.

  It’s uncertain whether Hafiz Saeed’s involvement was the deciding factor. What is certain is that Faiza and Headley got back together again, and that they watched the terrorist attack in Mumbai together on Headley’s TV in their house in Lahore.

  But there’s no evidence Headley ever revealed his role to her, either.

  * * *

  The many TV images from the attack in Mumbai in late November 2008 got another of Serrill Headley’s friends wondering.

  She had previously heard Serrill talking about her son having fought in Pakistan for five or six years to free Kashmir, and now she put two and two together. On December 1, 2008, she called the local FBI office, which sent the tip on to Washington, DC.

  The FBI visited one of Headley’s cousins in Philadelphia on December 21, 2008. The cousin was the only family member they could immediately locate in the country, and he told them that Headley had lived in Pakistan for the last five years. The FBI would have to contact Headley there if they wanted anything from him.

  The FBI agents told the cousin that if he ever saw Headley, to ask him to stop by the American embassy. But Headley never contacted the American embassy in Islamabad, and without further investigation, the authorities filed the case away due to a lack of evidence.

  Meanwhile, Headley was in Chicago, planning his first trip to Denmark.

  It’s still something of a mystery exactly how David Headley managed to complete his terrorism training in the farthest reaches of Pakistan while flying in and out of the United States, Denmark, and other Western countries for years—all without being discovered. It’s particularly strange given his background as a known smuggler of narcotics and his having previously been convicted.

  Some of Headley’s old friends are convinced he was born under a lucky star, so to speak—the kind of person who would walks away from a bad traffic accident uninjured or leaves a party two minutes before the police shut it down. The kind of person who o
ught to play the lottery.

  Islam doesn’t allow room for such theories, though. In Islam, one’s destiny is said to be predetermined by Allah.

  There are also other possible answers to the mystery.

  Perhaps it was a question of pure coincidences—of incompetence in intelligence circles and database entries that weren’t put together correctly.

  Or perhaps the American authorities let Headley off time and time again because he convinced them that he was only gathering information for his old employer—the American narcotics authorities. Maybe the DEA believed above all else that he was still an agent for them. Or at least a friend they could trust. He was an American citizen, after all.

  Or perhaps the answer was Headley himself. He had a way of talking himself out of everything.

  10

  WHY THIS TALK OF DEATH?

  Pakistan

  January 2009

  Headley had once met a Jewish man in Philadelphia who was about to eat a ham sandwich. Headley remarked that the meat in his sandwich came from a pig, so the sandwich couldn’t be kosher.

  “That commandment came at a time when there was no refrigeration, in an area with really high temperatures, so pork spoiled very quickly,” replied the Jewish man. “Pigs were given filth to eat, but now these swine are corn-fed with living quarters cleaner than most third-world country folk’s homes—not to mention the highest standards of sanitation and refrigeration. Now it is completely healthy and fit for consumption.”

  The man continued munching on his sandwich.

  That encounter made a lasting impact on Headley, and he repeated it, as he remembered it, in a series of emails to a select group of former classmates from Pakistan.

  Were such religious requirements really something that would disappear with time? Would there one day be a situation where a computer or mobile phone could perform the five daily prayers, so performing them oneself wouldn’t be necessary? If a majority of the population one day suddenly decided to accept adultery, would it suddenly become acceptable from a religious standpoint? If politicians accepted homosexuals as being partners, would that be marriage in God’s eyes, too?

  Was everything really up for grabs?

  Headley wouldn’t accept that. That sort of watering down of the meaning of the religion led to the collapse of everything. For the same reason, Headley fought against any kind of contemporary interpretation of Islam.

  Headley considered himself a Salafist. He tried to live life as the prophet Muhammad and the two generations succeeding him did. These first generations were particularly pious, and their long beards, their clothes, and their ideals became Headley’s. When he wasn’t in India, the United States, or Denmark, he let his beard grow.

  He explained his beliefs as follows:

  “Rasulullah SAW is the messenger of God and everything coming from him is directly from the Almighty. After I accept that, I must accept, as the Quran says, ‘Take whatever he (Muhammad SAW) gives you and refrain from what he prohibits’ or ‘he who does not judge by what has been revealed to us is amongst the losers’ and so on and so forth. This ‘opinion’ makes me a Muslim.”

  Lashkar-e-Taiba was built upon precisely that idea when a group of men gathered in Pakistan in the mid-1980s. Some of them had fought the Russians in Afghanistan, some were religious scholars from Palestine, and others were disillusioned Pakistani engineers. One of them was Abdullah Azzam, one of Osama bin Laden’s ideological mentors. Another was “professor” Hafiz Saeed.

  The founders agreed that modern innovations in Islamic practice were a corruption. Islam had already answered everything, so rightly-led Muslims were obligated to say “No, thank you” to capitalism, communism, democracy, reforms, and all religions besides Islam. There was but one God, and he had already given man his set of rules in the form of the laws of Sharia.

  For Headley, religion was a question of bookkeeping. The books had to be balanced. Nobody could add and subtract as they pleased. Word for word meant word for word. No exceptions.

  That also meant that Headley had to distance himself from Islamic reformists, Islamic feminists, Islamic homosexuals, and Islamic democrats. All of that was irreconcilable with true Islam.

  “I must reject anything that contradicts the Holy Book,” Headley wrote. “Science can never prove the Qur’an or Hadith wrong…. Since I cannot accept the Creator as being the Author of confusion, I accept everything exactly as it is stated in the Book…. So anything that clashes with this Book must be rejected and not pursued further. This, as far as I know, has been the way the Qur’an and Islam have been understood by the people taught by the Prophet Saw and those closer to him in time.”

  The debates Headley had with his Pakistani friends sometimes lasted several days, involving men all over the globe in different time zones, and they resulted in numerous long emails with both religious and secular arguments for and against one idea or claim or another.

  In 2008 alone, the former classmates wrote more than four thousand emails to each other.

  Headley quickly wrote himself into a state of heated anger, calling his friends “godless,” “traitors,” and outright “cowards.” Though his emails often ended with the word “peace” or “God’s peace,” the sentences in them were filled with harsh words.

  “I have had enough. Good bye,” wrote one friend after yet another debate that lasted several days and had prompted a strong dose of unfriendly words from Headley.

  Headley quickly replied.

  “What’s the matter, man? I wasn’t trying to disrespect you. Please do not feel offended. Why are you taking this stuff personally?” And he apologized for the provocation in the previous post, concluding, “So please, no ‘good byes.’ Ok?”

  Headley promised to hold back the harsh words in exchange for a “free debate,” and on several occasions he explained that he was open to being corrected and learning from his mistakes. But he always required a direct reference to a holy text if he was to be put in his place; personal opinions were irrelevant. And despite the promise of an open mind, there are no examples of instances where he allowed himself to be convinced of a more moderate viewpoint. Quite the opposite.

  If anybody asserted that, “Islam is ever changing and evolving,” Headley would also require a reference to the Qur’an for that claim. He wrote of his Pakistani friends who had moved to the United States that their evolving views of Islam might make it easier to live in a country where the FBI could come knocking on their door at any time. “Holding and promoting their ‘New Islamic beliefs’ will get them much further in the countries they have made Hijrat* to and raise their families.”

  Headley rejected the whole idea that Islam needed a “reform,” despite discussions of issues brought up by Muslim scholars in the West, imams in Pakistan, and other learned people. The entire concept was a “well-funded and well-coordinated attack of our enemies,” Headley declared.

  He could easily see the genius in the strategy: if the “Crusaders” succeeded in destroying Islam from within, they wouldn’t have to bomb Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan to bits. That was well thought out.

  The Muhammad cartoons were a part of that cunning strategy, he thought. They were designed to break down the idea of Islam as being pure, instead putting it on par with all the other religions. For the enemies in the West, it was about trampling all over Islam and watering down their faith into nothingness.

  “They want to mainstream Islam to make it palatable and acceptable. They are now working harder on reforming Islam than on fighting Muslims,” Headley wrote.

  But as an Islamic soldier, he had to maintain that this “crusade” to reform Islam was doomed to fail. The reform would “never become anything.”

  “Islam will remain Pure and unadulterated till the Last Day. No new and ‘hidden’ meanings will be ‘discovered’ as the Prophet did that job very well,” Headley wrote.

  Few things could make him angrier than the idea of female imams in congregations with men. That was
for Headley an example of the total debasement of Islam in the modern world’s interpretation. He wrote numerous emails to his friends on the subject, in harsher and harsher tones. Headley suggested that Amina Wadud—a fifty-three-year-old woman and expert on Islam who had led Muslim prayer in the United States in 2005—should be immediately beheaded. He called her a “ho” and replied in a condescending, sarcastic tone when others asked him to rein in his language.

  She had five children with different partners. That wasn’t normal. Not even in America, Headley wrote. He shouldn’t have to be distracted by a “10”—a very attractive woman—while at Friday prayers, and it was for good reason that the Qur’an prescribed that women sit behind the men.

  “It’s an attempt to put 20th century Western values into Islamic clothing. I can just see people very soon talking about Gay Rights in Islam or justifying Abortion. If we constantly look to change or adjust our religion to the values of the day can you imagine what our religion will look like 200 years from now?” For Headley, the religion revealed by Allah was perfect from the start and intended to endure unchanged to the end of time. It wasn’t for petty humans to suggest refinements. “If it weren’t perfect and amendment-free then it wouldn’t be divine,” Headley argued.

  * * *

  Headley also found in the Qur’an his arguments for jihad, understood as armed struggle against oppressors.

  Suicide attacks, car bombs, and attacks against, say, train stations, airports, and police stations were all completely legitimate if they served a higher purpose.

  He wasn’t concerned about the labels “terrorism” or “terrorist.” They indicated that one was doing something wrong. But what he did wasn’t wrong. For Headley, there could be no definition of terrorism because any definition would be an indictment of the West.