The Mind of a Terrorist

by Kaare Sørensen

  When Moumou was released, he traveled to Denmark. His purpose for this trip is still unknown. But by all accounts, Moumou was free for only a short time: he was arrested during a large-scale police operation at a furniture warehouse in Ishoj, Denmark, a small municipality with a large immigrant population, after Moroccan authorities had issued an international arrest warrant. They demanded that he be extradited for judicial proceedings pertaining to his role in the bombing attack in Casablanca in 2003, which had cost several people their lives.

  Mohamed Moumou sat behind bars in Copenhagen for one month—before the Danish Ministry of Justice reached the conclusion that the Moroccans’ charges were so poorly supported by the evidence that he couldn’t be extradited. Moumou was instead released and sent home to Sweden.

  In May 2006, Moumou was wanted once again. The US State Department wanted him on the UN list of terrorists and people with close ties to al-Qaeda. That would, practically speaking, forbid him from traveling outside of Sweden, and all his assets could be frozen.

  “Cable 77969” was sent from the State Department to a number of American embassies in the Northern Hemisphere.

  In Oslo, the question was what the Norwegians’ reaction would be if the very controversial radical Islamist Mullah Krekar ended up on the terrorist list. The embassy in Norway replied that the government wouldn’t officially have anything to with his addition to the list, but apart from that, it was just fine. Shortly thereafter, Krekar was added to the list.

  The write-up also arrived, marked with the word “SECRET,” at the American embassy in Casablanca. What would happen if the Americans asked to have both Mohamed Moumou and Farid Lamrabet added to the list of potential terrorists? From Casablanca, intelligence officer Douglas Greene replied that the embassy “does not object to the proposed designations of Moroccan nationals Mohammed Moumou and Farid Lamrabet.”

  In a confidential reply sent to the State Department on the evening of Friday, May 26, 2006, the embassy said it didn’t expect any trouble from the local authorities and, on the contrary, expected that the Moroccan authorities “would support these designations.” This got Moumou added to the UN terrorist list a few months later. Farid didn’t end up on it, but he was added to a special observation list maintained by American authorities some months after.

  Mohamed Moumou, who was now a wanted terrorist, was never captured. Not in Sweden, nor in Denmark, nor in any other place. But there’s much that points to him having stayed in Copenhagen in May 2006 and having flown thereafter to Damascus in Syria, and from there, probably quickly on to Iraq. Here, he became second-in-command to terrorist leader Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi, in al-Qaeda’s feared Iraqi division, which was responsible for several suicide bombings in those years.

  It was also from his new base in Iraq that Moumou began recruiting volunteers for suicide bombings in Denmark. That is, until he was killed in a firefight against American forces in the Iraqi city of Mosul. Shortly thereafter, he was proclaimed a martyr.

  While Moumou was escaping to Iraq, Farid’s business was raided by Ekobrottsmyndigheten, the Swedish Economic Crime Authority, which in addition to evidence of tax fraud discovered a can of tear gas and two credit cards with fake magnetic stripes.

  Headley didn’t know the whole backstory when he left Derby in 2009 and traveled via Zürich to Stockholm to visit Farid. He knew only that Farid was a man he could trust.

  The two men met in Stockholm. Headley was like a giant to the short Farid, who had a long, black beard and slicked-back hair. The meeting was apparently very short. Farid knew he was under intense surveillance from Säpo, so he could only decline to participate in Headley’s operation.

  “I’m sorry, brother, but I cannot help you,” he told him.

  Pass the task along, was what Headley replied.

  A few days later, on a busy Friday, the last day of July, Headley boarded a train from Stockholm to Copenhagen.

  The central train station in Copenhagen was filled with people. A younger man was standing with his green backpack in a group that was soon to be boarding a train. A woman in a red sweater with a large briefcase was about to buy a ticket from a vending machine, with her daughter.

  And Headley stood with his camera, about to take new recordings and gather information for his terrorist attack. He filmed the busy train yard inside and outside with the built-in camera of his Sony Ericsson mobile phone and made sure that there were plenty of good shots of the main train station’s construction, with McDonald’s and other fast-food restaurants in the background.

  He went down through the popular Strøget pedestrian way and past the shops, stopping as he reached Kongens Nytorv, King’s New Square. He filmed some more here while speaking from behind the camera—as if he were just an ordinary American tourist adding commentary for his family back home in Chicago.

  “This is the famous concert hall, build in 1748, Kings Square … And Hotel d’Angleterre,” Headley said as he panned from the Royal Theatre across the grand square to the exclusive hotel, where the façade, with its large windows and fluttering Danish flag on top, became part of the film.

  The roofs of the hotel and the Royal Theatre were among the positions Headley expected the police’s snipers to occupy during the attack.

  Bus number 15 drove past Headley, who now stood not far from the entrance to the King’s New Square subway station.

  “Cars. Really busy. And besides the roads, bicycles,” Headley said as he aimed the camera so that Jyllands-Posten’s offices were clearly visible in the background.

  Headley noticed a yellow tourist bus parked on King’s New Square not far from Jyllands-Posten. That looked promising as far as the plans to drive a vehicle filled with explosives up to the building were concerned. It seemed possible, at any rate.

  The three-minute-long film ended with yet another sweeping motion across King’s New Square. “It’s full of ice in the winter, so people can ice-skate,” Headley said, almost laughing.

  At 12:45 p.m., Headley stood outside a hair salon on Store Kongensgade, which leads through King’s New Square right between the Hotel d’Angleterre and Jyllands-Posten, which Headley had observed in the video. The recordings showed the Danish Royal Life Guards on their way down the street.

  “Here are the guards from the palace. They are changing the guards or something,” said Headley, allowing the camera to follow the marching soldiers as they passed him.

  Headley followed the guards up Gothersgade to the nearby Life Guard Barracks at Rosenborg Castle. Here, he struck up a conversation with a captain by the fence that leads into the barracks. The captain told Headley that their weapons were always loaded with live ammunition.

  “Why are they loaded? There doesn’t seem to be any threat around here,” Headley said.

  “You never know,” the captain replied.

  Headley nodded. Inwardly, he was about to explode with laughter.

  In one of Headley’s scenarios, someone would throw a hand grenade into the midst of the soldiers, grab the dead ones’ weapons, and then, armed with them, storm Jyllands-Posten. This plan had a couple of elegant advantages. One, they got access to loaded weapons in the middle of Copenhagen; and two, it would send a clear signal to the Danes and the rest of the world that not even the queen’s personal guards can feel safe from global jihad.

  In Copenhagen, Headley also looked for places where he could buy weapons. He wasn’t successful, but that wasn’t an unsolvable problem anyway. There were enough weapons in Europe, Headley thought. He had a connection in Germany who would probably be able to procure weapons that could then be smuggled over the border. Headley himself had traveled across the border in January, and there had largely been no security. It would be easy.

  A few days later, with rain pouring down, Headley returned to film the Life Guard.

  “They march like this every day,” he said on the recordings.

  On another evening, he was at King’s New Square yet again.

  “This is the Fre
nch embassy,” he recorded himself saying as he walked up to the neighboring building, Jyllands-Posten’s offices, where he filmed through the windows to get further details.

  “Here you are,” he said coolly.

  The Jewish synagogue in Copenhagen lies well hidden behind a tall fence on a narrow street.

  Headley visited the synagogue on Krystalgade, observed it from outside, and took pictures as he—just to be safe—added it to the list of possible targets in Copenhagen.

  In the evening, he read the book How to Pray Like a Jew, a guide to Jewish traditions, as he considered how he could get close to Flemming Rose.

  Like the rest of Lashkar, Headley was still convinced that Rose was a Jew. This belief had gone viral on several Islamist websites, apparently after someone had found a photo of a smiling Rose with a large nose. A radical Islamist group claimed they could even prove that Rose was actually born in Ukraine and worked as an agent for Mossad. Even his name was suspicious to the conspiracy theorists. And a 2004 interview with the American historian Daniel Pipes, who was critical of Islam, was presented along with Rose’s translation of the presumably pro-Israeli Russian ex-president Boris Yeltsin’s memoir Against the Grain as definitive proof of Rose’s hidden Jewishness.

  As for Jyllands-Posten, the paper’s six-pointed logo was often compared to the Star of David—which in Islamist circles, of course, documented the paper’s Jewish affiliations.

  On the evening of Saturday, August 1, Headley sent an email to Rana in Chicago asking him to check a telephone book for Copenhagen to find the numbers and addresses of “any” editors for “the newspaper I plan to advertise with.” He also asked Rana to check the website of the Jyllands-Posten’s publisher.

  Headley knew they it wasn’t likely that they would find the editors’ private addresses, but he asked Rana to try anyway. Rana was unsuccessful.

  While Headley was in Copenhagen, Jyllands-Posten’s leadership was working on their final plans to move the paper’s offices from King’s New Square to its current building near City Hall Square, which previously housed the newspapers Politiken and Ekstra Bladet. The move would take place later in the summer.

  It’s not certain whether Headley knew the precise details of the planned move, but during his time in Denmark, he made at least one video recording at City Hall Square of the then-future offices.

  On a rented bicycle, Headley rode around Copenhagen searching for alternate targets. He ended up with thirteen videos, which he thought would be relevant to the plans for a successful attack.

  Headley packed his bag and left the hotel in Copenhagen.

  It was Wednesday, August 5, 2009, and his second trip to Denmark was coming to an end. He had been more alert now than on his first visit to the country in January. That time, his communication had been sparse, and he hadn’t written to any of his old classmates in Pakistan. This time he was more relaxed.

  He had sat inside the hotel by the front desk a few days earlier and written to Rana while it was raining outside. And he had also sent a number of emails to Pakistan. Everything was going well.

  “I am a little busy now, but would like to respond … if I may, later,” he wrote one evening to a friend, without revealing his stay in Denmark. With others, he continued the seemingly endless discussions about Islam.

  “If we sit down and count to see which religion rates #1 in the killing of innocents since its inception till today, Christianity would win with a huge margin. No other religion, Muslim, Jew, Hindu or Buddhist, can even come close,” Headley wrote from his keyboard in Copenhagen.

  From the hotel, Headley took his luggage down to Terminal 3 of Copenhagen Airport. He allowed himself a certain amount of freedom. On his first trip, he had traveled across Germany to avoid being noticed or added to some sort of list. He wasn’t worried about that this time. Nobody was watching him, he thought.

  He checked into Delta flight 69 to Atlanta. From there, he would fly to New York, and then home to his family and Rana in Chicago.

  Headley went through the security checkpoint, the duty-free area, and onward to gate C28, where the white Boeing 767 was ready to take off at 11:25 a.m.

  It was good-bye to Denmark for now.

  But Headley hadn’t bought just one ticket. He would be back again. In his inbox was an order confirmation for a return ticket to Copenhagen, just three months later.

  On October 29, at 6:15 p.m., he would once again leave the United States to arrive in Denmark after 8:10 a.m., local time.

  Then everything would be in place.

  15

  THE SUSPICION

  Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport Atlanta, Georgia

  Wednesday, August 5, 2009

  Headley was pulled aside. Delta 69 had landed not long before at the enormous Hartsfield-Jackson airport in Atlanta with Headley on board. After the ten-hour flight from Copenhagen, he was tired. It was a warm afternoon.

  The routine at customs was nothing new for him.

  As a former heroin smuggler, Headley was on the list of people who frequently got pulled to the side in airports. It had happened fairly regularly over the last twenty years: in 1993, 1996, 2001, 2002, and 2007. This time, he was taken to a small room, where his luggage and personal possessions were searched. The customs official took particular interest in the contents of Headley’s suitcase and wasted no time on small talk.

  “What were you doing in Copenhagen?”

  Headley explained that he had been in Denmark to set up the local office of an immigration business operating out of Chicago. He was working as the manager of the European branch, and he had been taking care of various steps preliminary to establishing the Danish branch.

  Yet among Headley’s entire possessions—his carry-on baggage, his suitcase, and his jacket—the officer couldn’t find a single document remotely suggesting that Headley was starting a business on the other side of the Atlantic. No draft rental agreements for the office, no paperwork describing the company, no receipts for purchases or the like, no clever slogans on stickers. Just some very nondescript business cards.

  The officer found Headley’s explanation suspicious and asked more questions about the trip, which Headley answered as best he could. But the story didn’t hold together.

  Yet Headley’s effects didn’t point to anything particularly criminal either, and with an American passport there wasn’t evidence enough for anything other than to welcome the man back to his homeland, close up his bags, and send him on his way through the airport.

  After his flight from Atlanta to Chicago, Headley wasn’t questioned any further by the authorities about the purpose of his trip to Denmark.

  He was probably aware that his activities were close to being found out that afternoon in the airport. Unusually for him, he hadn’t gotten all the details of his cover story straight. He may have thought things would go more smoothly the next time around. On his subsequent trip to Copenhagen, his suitcase would have all the right documents.

  What he didn’t know was it was too late already.

  When Headley had gone to Derby back in July of 2009, British intelligence agents were tracking his movements. His meeting with Bash and Simon had been monitored. All indications are that Farid was right when he told Headley in Stockholm that Säpo was hot on his heels.

  But it’s also clear that, during his first trip to Denmark earlier in the year, Headley had both arrived and departed without the police suspecting anything. In all tranquility, he was allowed to visit Jyllands-Posten in Copenhagen as well as in Viby. At no point during his two stays in Denmark were there plans to arrest him. If it were otherwise, the Copenhagen police would have been brought into the situation at some point. They weren’t.

  In the US, the FBI was now keeping close tabs on David Headley.

  When Headley landed in Atlanta, his visit with the customs officer was no coincidence. It had been planned by American authorities, who were then able to piece together a preliminary assessment of the situation:
Headley was planning an attack on Jyllands-Posten in Denmark.

  It wouldn’t have been the first attempt on the lives of the paper’s employees, but this one was more comprehensive and more professional in nature.

  In the US, wiretaps of Headley were now being monitored intensively at the highest levels. At nearly daily meetings between FBI director Robert Mueller and the attorney general, Eric Holder, Headley was a set agenda item during August and September 2009. Often they would meet with legal advisors and the president’s own counterterrorism advisor at the JCC—the command center at the Department of Justice, about a mile from the White House—to review the details of the top secret operation. Where is the situation today? What do we know? Should we intervene?

  The surveillance didn’t become any less intensive when the FBI realized that David Headley and Daood Gilani were one and the same—a man whom American authorities had previously sentenced to prison on two occasions for drug-related crimes. And a man who had previously been a DEA agent.

  After the September 11 attacks, a commission had concluded that American authorities had been sleeping on the job, so to speak. A group of Islamists with connections to al-Qaeda had entered the country and received pilot training—without ever being questioned or arrested. The government didn’t want to risk that sort of thing happening again.

  FBI agents in Chicago were now monitoring Headley around the clock, and they quickly discovered that he often was in contact with a man by the name of Tahawwur Rana, a Canadian citizen who wasn’t in their databases and didn’t have any prior conviction. What was his role?

  Rana was added to the wiretaps, and on several occasions both men were followed by FBI agents, who knew exactly when Headley stepped through the door of Rana’s office on West Devon Avenue and when he left it again. One day, he went into the office and stayed for thirty-five minutes. Another day, an hour and eight minutes. Then thirty-seven minutes. It was all thoroughly recorded.