The Mind of a Terrorist

by Kaare Sørensen

  The article’s conclusion was particularly disheartening:

  “The trouble-stricken Waziristan region has become the new battlefield for the Kashmiri militant groups which are increasingly joining forces with the pro-Taliban elements to fight the NATO troops from Afghanistan.”

  The front had moved. Everything was falling apart.

  In the following days, Headley stayed in close contact with Pasha, hoping to hear news about Kashmiri. Some of the conversations took place in the middle of the night while Headley’s family was sleeping in the adjacent room.

  Pasha advised Headley to get over the loss of Kashmiri quickly.

  “Let it go, my friend,” came his advice over the phone. “Sometimes a little loss occurs. A little bit.”

  But Headley didn’t want to let it go.

  “No, buddy, this is not a small loss, this is very gigantic…. This is a very gigantic loss.”

  “No, buddy,” Pasha was said, having now become tired of listening to Headley’s complaints.

  “Whenever any loss takes place, you get upset right away.”

  “This is not a small one.”

  “But this happens.”

  “I am concerned also that he worked very hard for all those projects, the farmhouse … that he wanted to establish … the one he mentioned to me and you as well,” Headley said.

  “He could not see the success of that project. We have not even started doing marketing for that…. The poor chap could not see that either, now that he has retired from the company after getting married.”

  In Chicago, Headley was having a hard time seeing any sort of future for his attacks. Without Kashmiri’s financial backing, the project had come to a grinding halt, so he was basically willing to sign up under any old flag. As long as it led to an attack in Denmark.

  “Main thing that I have an income…. Make some money. I don’t care that if I am working for Microsoft or I am working for General Electric or Philips, I don’t care. As long as I am making money, I don’t give a shit,” Headley said, explaining that, “The main thing is the business must go on.”

  But Headley had a hard time seeing as a solution that they would once again turn to Lashkar only to wait an eternity, like snails, for an attack.

  “When somebody takes a risk, then he can get success, too. However, they do not even want to take any risk either and, above all, want to get famed as well,” Pasha said of Lashkar.

  Perhaps everything would be just the same with them, Headley suggested: Lashkar was about to be broken.

  “Based on all these circumstances, it looks like within six or eight months … the bankruptcy is evident. My assessment is that within six to twelve months all companies will be descended.”

  “Well, when one company goes down, one new company arises. These things will keep on going,” he said.

  Headley was distraught, though. Lashkar was on the brink of dissolving, Kashmiri was dead, and his contact network in Europe was uncertain. Indeed, maybe it didn’t exist at all.

  Headley had stopped taking the oblong white Lipitor pills he would have otherwise used for his high cholesterol. Now instead, he was running in the streets of Chicago to vent his frustration and get his body where it needed to be. And to collect his thoughts. His pulse would reach 160 when he ran. He could maintain an average pulse of 148 for about half an hour.

  Headley began considering more seriously the possibility of moving on to his own plan B.

  “This life is temporary anyway, whether we go out in savage splendour or whether we go out in an Old Folks’ Home in Florida. And I am not the one saying the Mujahideen will win, God Almighty is,” Headley confided to an acquaintance.

  He also became paranoid. Sajid Mir had offered Headley a trip to Pakistan where he could relax with another training stay with Lashkar. That would be a good opportunity to get away from everything for three months. But it got Headley to thinking: maybe Sajid Mir was out to kill him, and the stay with Lashkar was just a pretext to lure him to Pakistan. Sajid Mir wanted to eliminate a man who knew everything about Lashkar’s inner structure. Wouldn’t he himself have considered that possibility, if he were Sajid? Headley knew too much.

  Meanwhile, in the United States, Headley had a very pressing problem. He had tried to get Shazia and the childrens’ residence status approved, but that would require a meeting with the immigration authorities. And he feared the authorities might have discovered that, besides Shazia, he was also married to Faiza, and he would be convicted of bigamy.

  “I hope they don’t put me in jail, while doing all this,” Headley said to Rana.

  “That is very much possible,” his friend replied.

  A third problem was that Headley’s cousin had also run into difficulties with the authorities. This cousin had bought Headley’s chain of video stores in New York and Philadelphia, but the scams that had become an integral part of the business’s operations had become a bit too obvious. On several occasions and apparently without reason, customers were billed up to $305 in false charges on their credit cards, and the authorities had also discovered that many of the DVDs in the stores were pirated copies. The business had to close, and the cousin was charged with organized fraud. Now Headley feared that the investigation into that case would sooner or later find their way to him.

  He called US Cellular and presented himself as Adeem Kunwar Aziz—the name of the deceased Pakistani who was registered as the owner of both his mobile phone and the Chicago apartment. “Adeem Aziz” explained to the phone company that he would like a new number.

  “I have given my phone number to too many people,” he explained and requested that the new number be hidden when he called others and that he no longer wished to be listed in phone books or search engines on the Internet.

  Headley did everything he could to ensure that nobody found a way to him. He did, however, make sure that Pasha got the new number.

  He used it two days later:

  “Buddy, the reports that are coming in…. By the grace of God, he is doing well!”

  “Inshallah…. You mean the Doctor?”

  “Yes, yes!” Pasha nearly yelled from Pakistan.

  It was September 21, eight days after Pasha had first told Headley of Kashmiri’s death.

  Now he had been resurrected.

  “If this is true, I will say a hundred prayers, a hundred prayers! And also keep the fast!”

  “I don’t know … but the matter over there has complicated. It is confirmed. Yesterday I had two … I received two confirmations yesterday, that he is all right.”

  “Yes!”

  Headley called it “a great blessing.”

  Later, Pasha explained that he it was “absolutely confirmed” that Kashmiri was unharmed.

  Swear on it, Headley demanded.

  “I swear: I am telling the truth,” Pasha said.

  “So, then, I will be able to meet him upon returning?”

  “Absolutely, right, and he—just today—was asking about you.”

  Headley called Rana.

  “If I give you good news, what reward will you give me?”

  “Whatever you want, sir.”

  “Pir Sahib is alive,” Headley said.

  “Which Sahib?” Rana asked.

  “Our Pir Sahib!” Headley blurted out.

  “Wow! Great! Great!” said Rana, finally understanding the miraculous contents of the message.

  Headley was happy. With the message of Kashmiri’s resurrection and possible new contacts in Europe, the plans for an attack in Denmark suddenly became very relevant. Not plan B, mind you, but a proper attack. Soon, he’d return to Pakistan, show them his video recordings and notes—and finish the planning together with Ilyas Kashmiri.

  Hidden somewhere in the mountains in South Waziristan, Kashmiri confirmed in mid-October that he was, indeed, alive. He made it known in an interview that he certainly understood the Americans’ attempt to kill him.

  “They are right in their pursuit. They know the
ir enemy well. They know what I am really up to.”

  17

  SACRIFICE EVERYTHING

  Copenhagen

  Friday, October 2, 2009

  Barack Obama was just twenty-six years old when he visited Denmark for the first time. Back then, he was an adventure-hungry young man from Hawaii with a backpack and on his own for a few weeks in Europe. In summer 1988, he ended up in Copenhagen and met random youths in the city.

  Now, Denmark was closing its airspace and the greater part of Copenhagen as President Obama landed at Copenhagen Airport early one Friday morning in October 2009. The American president stepped out of Air Force One in a sharp suit and red tie, and with a clear mission for his short visit: to secure the Olympic Games for Chicago in 2016.

  Barack Obama had sent his wife, Michelle, his friend Oprah Winfrey, and his personal advisor Valerie Jarrett in advance to do some boosting for Chicago. But they hadn’t succeeded in convincing the members of the International Olympic Committee, which was gathered in the Bella Center at Amager, to designate Chicago rather than Madrid, Tokyo, or Rio de Janeiro. So, at the last moment, the president decided that he himself would fly to Copenhagen.

  At the Bella Center, Obama told the Olympic committee that as a young man, he had had a hard time finding a place where he felt that he really belonged.

  “And then I came to Chicago. And on those Chicago streets, I worked alongside men and women who were black and white; Latino and Asian; people of every class and nationality and religion. I came to discover that Chicago is that most American of American cities, but one where citizens from more than a hundred-thirty nations inhabit a rich tapestry of distinctive neighborhoods,” Obama said.

  He called Chicago the city that glorifies the diversity of its citizens. And he had lived there for nearly twenty-five years. He thought he knew his city pretty well.

  Later, Obama met with Queen Margrethe and Prince Henrik, and in the prime minister’s office there was laughter and friendly handshakes with Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen in front of the press, while Obama, in a moment of seriousness, thanked Denmark for its contributions in the war in Afghanistan.

  “Denmark and the US are close friends, long-term allies. We share values, we share interests, and the bonds are not only strong between our two governments but between our two peoples,” Obama said.

  On local TV stations in Chicago, clips of the president in Denmark were shown again and again in the early morning hours as the city’s residents crossed their fingers and hoped the president’s appearance in Copenhagen could secure an Olympic future for the city.

  But somewhere in that large, multicultural city, there was a man who found the way the president had embraced the Danes degrading and filthy. And the way Obama left Denmark again after barely five hours, and then Chicago was rejected as an Olympic city in the very first round, while Obama was still on Air Force One headed back to the US—that only made the humiliation greater. Headley was full of anger.

  “Your president was on a visit there today,” Headley said the next day, during a drive with Rana in the BMW.

  “Oprah had also gone?” Rana replied.

  “We left … we left your place disgracefully,” Headley said.

  “I have said this.”

  Headley had tickets for a flight to Philadelphia later that day. From there, he would travel on to Pakistan to meet Pasha, Sajid Mir, and Ilyas Kashmiri, who had yet to see the latest videos from Copenhagen. And at the end of the month, Headley would return to Denmark again and make the final preparations for the attack.

  During the trip, Rana and Headley also discussed a covert system that would let them send confidential emails to each other while Headley was away.

  The method would be one they had used before: they’d create a free email account with Gmail. This time, they’d name it liaqatwing—after the wing they shared at the military academy in Pakistan—with the number 11: liaqatwing11@gmail.com.

  “After two or three times—when I will ask you, obviously—you will create it, because you are in America,” Headley explained. “The person who is in America will create it. But you will change the number eleven. We will create a formula every time. For example, multiply eleven by two and then minus two. Like this: Multiply by two minus … this is twenty-two minus two. This will be the email ID. And the third will be forty minus two, thirty-eight.”

  Rana was confused by Headley’s somewhat unclear demonstration of his own code.

  “Minus two?”

  “It will not.”

  “But minus two?”

  “What?” Headley asked.

  “First multiply by two, then we will multiply by three. It is eleven. First it was multiplied by one, so it remained eleven?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, rather it is nine,” Rana said, about ready to give up on the calculations.

  “No. We are saying two. First multiply by two, and then minus two,” Headley replied, now himself having a hard time following along.

  “But you multiplied eleven by two to get twenty-two?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then multiply eleven by three, and subtract two. The remainder is thirty-one?”

  “This is all right.”

  “Then multiply by four and result is forty-four. Minus two and the remainder is forty-two?”

  “Well, eleven. Multiply two and then minus two. Right? Then multiply three and then minus three. Later multiply four and then minus four,” Headley finished.

  “It is minus two all the times,” Rana corrected him.

  “What? This is all right. Right. It is two.”

  The email would also have a password, and Headley decided there wasn’t any reason to complicate things any further. They were running behind on their agenda for the day, so Headley chose one of the various derogatory expressions he often used to refer to President Obama: Coconut. Dark on the outside, but white on the inside.

  Later that day, Headley left for O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, about a twenty-minute drive from his secret apartment. It was a cool Saturday.

  He had packed his clothes in a plastic bag and placed the bag in his suitcase along with the items his colleagues in Pakistan were expecting: a small SanDisk memory stick with thirteen short video clips of, among other things, Copenhagen Central Station and both day and evening recordings of Jyllands-Posten’s office in Kongens Nytorv.

  Headley had also brought a copy of the Jyllands-Posten front page from August 1, 2009, showing Denmark’s former prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen wearing a tight blue tie under the headline: “Anders Fogh Demands Increased Solidarity in NATO.”

  That front page was from Fogh’s first day as the secretary general of NATO. Headley had gotten his copy during his most recent visit to Denmark, and for him it was further proof that Jyllands-Posten was glorifying the man who as prime minister had refused to apologize for the Muhammad cartoons.

  Headley checked into his flight to Philadelphia—the first stop on the way to Pakistan—and went through the security checkpoint and into the airport.

  Meanwhile, he was being monitored by the FBI’s JTTF agents in Chicago.

  Special Agent Lorenzo Benedict was responsible for Headley, and the day before, he had delivered sixty-five dense pages of information about the case. Pages that all presented arguments as to why it was time for the FBI to intervene.

  “The evidence gathered to date by the government’s investigation establishes probable cause to believe that Headley participated with others in a conspiracy to commit terrorist acts involving murder, kidnapping, and maiming outside the United States, including in Denmark,” Benedict wrote.

  Arlander Keys, a judge for the federal court in Chicago, had stamped the document and approved the FBI’s intervention, including raids and arrests, should they be necessary.

  An agreement had been reached at the highest levels that this case was not to be let go. If Headley left the United States and suspected there was an investigation, it wa
s reasonable to believe that he might never return. Nobody wanted to take that risk.

  When Headley was about to board the plane to Philadelphia, a few agents stepped toward him and asked him to follow them.

  He didn’t resist.

  The arrest took place so peacefully that only a few people in the line even noticed that the FBI had just detained one of their fellow passengers.

  Headley was driven from the airport to an FBI office in downtown Chicago under intense police protection. There, he was placed in a simple room with video surveillance that had white walls, a small table, a few chairs, and a group of FBI agents.

  Special Agent Douglas Seccombe, who after the September 11 attacks had participated in the investigation of the wreckage from United Airlines flight 93 in a field in Pennsylvania, was tasked with investigating Headley’s property, as the head of the FBI’s evidence department.

  Apart from the clothing in the plastic bag, the front page of the newspaper, and the video clips, he found Headley’s copy of How to Pray Like a Jew, which Headley had apparently thought might come in handy when he was to visit Denmark again in August. Among his things, there was also a map of the Inner City in Copenhagen.

  Additionally, Seccombe found a series of handwritten notes that Headley had scribbled on some sheets of paper with a letterhead from a hotel in Europe. These turned out to be his notes after the first meeting with Ilyas Kashmiri’s contacts in England and Sweden.

  Finally, the FBI found a small, yellow, lined notebook filled with Headley’s notes. In it could be found, among other things, a multipage list of more than forty telephone numbers for all of Headley’s closest contacts and friends: Major Iqbal, Pasha, Rahul Bhatt, Vilas Varak. And a number, 313-417-6233, for Wasi, the cover name for Sajid Mir.

  Altogether, the FBI had so much evidence in wiretaps, emails, documents, and objects that it would take a good bit of work to go through all of it.

  “You’d better be careful, because we know a lot more than you think we know,” one of the agents said to Headley in the interrogation area.