“There’s a resentment in the whole world. He should not have done that. That’s a very bad idea,” Rana said, apparently unaware that Kurt Westergaard was not the only artist.
“Why is it a bad idea?”
“In Islam, you shouldn’t make a picture of the Prophet. Shouldn’t do that.”
“Would you ever support the company that sponsored those?”
“No, no, no. I wouldn’t have my ties with anybody, something like that.”
“Okay, well, the company that published those, the newspaper was the Jyllands-Posten.”
“Jyllands …?”
“The Jyllands-Posten.”
The FBI agents were trying to lure Rana into a trap. If he was familiar with the drawings, didn’t care for them, and wouldn’t support a business that printed them—why had he personally answered an email from a salesperson from Jyllands-Posten regarding advertising prices that Headley had inquired about during his visit to Denmark earlier that year? Why would he even consider running an ad in Jyllands-Posten?
Rana thought a bit about the question. “Okay, first of all, can you help me to … Is this in Denmark, this newspaper?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Okay, okay … You know those Scandinavian countries are like a block to me,” Rana said, who perhaps had smelled a rat by that point. At any rate, he denied having noticed the coincidence between Headley’s visit to Denmark and the newspaper that was behind the cartoons.
In another life, perhaps Headley had become friends with Patrick Fitzgerald.
Both were born on the East Coast in the 1960s, they played sports in their youth and were good at it (Fitzgerald played rugby; Headley played cricket), and both were extremely focused in their efforts.
But their lives had each gone in their own direction.
Headley was convicted for purchasing heroin in New York in the 1990s—Fitzgerald, as a state prosecutor in New York in the 1990s, contributed to convictions in such cases. Headley was involved with some of the world’s most dangerous terrorists and glorified Osama bin Laden—Fitzgerald put terrorists behind bars and was at one point part of a secret group that traveled around the world to find evidence against Osama bin Laden.
While Headley planned a terrorist attack on Denmark, Fitzgerald had governor Rod Blagojevich arrested for attempting to sell Barack Obama’s seat in the Senate to the highest bidder.
The two men crossed paths now. As a state attorney for northern Illinois, the case registered as number 09CR83 was officially Patrick Fitzgerald’s responsibility, and in these October days in 2009, he often stopped in at the white interrogation space to check on the status of David Coleman Headley’s questioning.
On October 23, Headley was once more transferred from his cell on the eleventh floor of the Metropolitan Correctional Center—the federal prison located in central Chicago—to the FBI’s interrogation space.
But that day—after twenty days of questioning—Fitzgerald had come with an ultimatum for him: If you want to have any hopes of an agreement, you’re going to tell us everything. And you’ll do it now.
“You cannot refuse to talk about anybody,” Fitzgerald said, clearly referring to Rana.
“Okay. Let me fill in some of the gaps,” Headley said, having signed an agreement a few days earlier that he could tell them the whole truth without risking a stricter sentence. He now revealed that he had closer ties to Ilyas Kashmiri than he had first admitted to. In fact, he had visited Kashmiri several times and received money from him. And he had sworn allegiance to al-Qaeda.
Headley spoke of his knowledge of the assassination of Ameer Faisal Alavi, a two-star general and leader of the Pakistani special forces who was shot and killed by three men in Islamabad on November 19, 2008—exactly one week before the Mumbai attack. And Headley revealed that he had secret notes from his stays in the training camps hidden in the house in Pakistan. In that same house, there was also a GPS he had taken with him on his trips to Mumbai. The FBI might be able to find some evidence on it.
Headley received a piece of paper and a ballpoint pen.
Think hard and write down the names of all the targets you’ve heard discussed in connection with your terrorist activities, the agents said.
Headley didn’t think for long.
The hotels in Mumbai, Jyllands-Posten’s offices in Denmark, a nuclear power plant in India, Jewish chabad houses in four Indian cities, and India’s national defense academy. Headley readily jotted down the locations, and when he set the pen down shortly after, the agents counted thirty-four potential targets in all.
“Do you want to make any more corrections?” they asked Headley.
“No,” he replied.
Shortly thereafter, the agents followed up with a series of focused questions about Rana to pressure Headley. And he changed his story. Yes, Rana did know about his activities. He might not have known all the details and all the attacks, but he was an accomplice; he had helped with the terrorism plans.
All the other participants were at large and in Pakistan, Headley said. There wasn’t anybody else to arrest in the United States.
With those words, the prosecution had yet another man to bring a case against. Headley had done it again; it had become a pattern for him to turn in his accomplices. But it seems nonetheless that he had scruples about ratting out his best friend.
“I acknowledge that I made a fool of him. He should be released. The poor fellow is stuck in this thing for no reason. It was my fault,” Headley later said.
Come late October 2009, all the documents in the case were still confidential, and there were still no journalists who could explain why a man had suddenly been arrested in O’Hare International Airport on October 3 or what sort of basis there was for the raids in Chicago and Kinsman.
But with Headley’s latest revelations, the FBI gave up on their efforts to lure other terrorists out of hiding. That is, additional details of the case were now shared with other entities, including the Danish intelligence agency, which up to that point had played a lesser role in the investigation.
In Denmark, the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (Politiets Efterretningstjeneste, or PET) began a broad inquiry. Had Headley found any Danish contacts or like-minded folk during his two trips to Denmark? PET also sent a number of agents to the United States to follow the investigation from close up. With FBI support, the Danish agents questioned Headley in Chicago. They took their findings back to the investigation in Copenhagen.
PET and the Ministry of Justice also briefed the prime minister’s office on the case. Lars Lokke Rasmussen reacted angrily when he learned of the plans to behead Danes in Copenhagen. It was cowardly, he thought.
Late in the afternoon of Friday, October 23, 2009, the first in a series of so-called talking points, and then a draft of a press release, were sent from the Ministry of Justice to the prime minister’s office, and thus on to Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen. All the emails were sent with the words “SECRET SECRET”—marked in all capitals several times, with a “high” priority.
On Monday, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was also briefed, while the Ministry of Defense likely received the news on Tuesday, October 27. That same day, the judge in Chicago approved publication of the indictment.
“Two Chicago men have been arrested on federal charges for their alleged roles in conspiracies to provide material support and/or to commit terrorist acts against overseas targets, including facilities and employees of a Danish newspaper,” read a press release sent out by the American authorities that day.
Not long after, PET sent out a press release with the headline: “FBI og PET afdækker terrorplaner mod Danmark” (“The FBI and PET uncover terrorism plans against Denmark”).
The Jyllands-Posten leadership received a special briefing about the case.
The leading media outlets in the United States and Denmark ran the story as a feature soon after, and in the Danish government the coverage was followed intently. What would the revelatio
n mean for the security situation?
The same day, PET’s Terrorism Analysis Center (Center for Terroranalyse, or CTA) published a new analysis of the terrorist threat against Denmark. Even though it was noted in the evaluation that “the risk of becoming a victim of a terrorist attack in Denmark or in other countries is still very limited,” it was also possible that “terrorist attacks can occur without any visible intelligence-related indications. Without warning, in other words.”
David Headley wasn’t a crazy man acting on his own, the CTA believed. Quite the contrary, he was the expression of something new in the global terrorism picture.
“The experience from recent years in Denmark and other European countries shows that the majority of militant extremists are young men, born and raised in the West. They’ve often gone through a process of radicalization, where the Internet, established extremist ideologists, and charismatic people, in combination with friends and personal networks along with travel to foreign countries have all played a significant role.”
Even though neither the FBI nor PET revealed that day that Headley was the brain behind the Mumbai attack—that detail was initially kept secret—CTA drew a direct comparison between the attack in Mumbai and the current threat against Denmark:
“Simple attacks against unprotected or lightly protected symbolic and political targets, including individuals, is an established type of attack for terrorists without a comprehensive support system. That sort of attack can be carried out with few resources, along with limited planning and training. Terrorist groups constantly seek to learn from earlier attacks while developing new, surprising, and thereby difficult-to-predict kinds of attacks, as seen in connection with the terrorist attack in Mumbai in November 2008.”
In Folketinget, the Danish parliament, all parties strongly condemned the terrorism plans, which were called “shocking” and “absurd.”
“This shows that there are powers on this planet that have values that are completely different from ours. It’s a very serious issue. Denmark is among the countries that are in focus here, but I don’t intend to reshape my life. If we change our lifestyles because of this, then we’ll have given in to those who wish to stomp all over our values,” said Lars Løkke Rasmussen.
The Social-Democrat opposition leader, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, felt one could not repeat too often that “They must not succeed in making us nervous or in any other way challenge our freedom and democracy.” Among Headley’s old classmates in Pakistan, there was considerable worry. One of them—a high-ranking official in the Pakistani education ministry—wrote on a closed forum for their circle of friends:
“This is extremely sad for all of us. We tried to drill sense into them and obviously failed. Terrorism in all its manifest forms is absolutely abhorrent and to be condemned in every possible way. Half my time is now spent worrying about security, for my children, for the schools, and for the universities. We are building walls, hiring security guards, and taking steps to protect ourselves from these maniacs who are trying to destroy us from within. Money that could be used for scholarships, equipment, etc. is going to buy barbed wire. Damn these people who have brought this misery on us.”
At a hastily called press conference in the Søborg headquarters, PET’s leader, Jakob Scharf, said that the terrorism issue was “very serious.”
He explained that the unveiling of Headley occurred after “close cooperation” between PET and the FBI, and that PET had put into place “a long series of investigative measures”—though neither PET nor other Danish authorities were named a single time in the eight-page-long press release from the American authorities. Instead, the Americans had chosen to praise the local police in Chicago. In the press release, it stated that—after having exposed Headley—information was “shared” with “our partners in foreign countries.”
In Søborg, Jakob Scharf continued: “There is every reason to direct special thanks to the American federal police, the FBI. Without their very great efforts—especially on the part of the FBI’s team in Chicago—we would hardly have gotten as far as we have now in our endeavors to thwart the planned terrorist attacks in Denmark.”
Scharf repeated this message later in English to a TV station in New York: “We are very grateful,” he said.
Several times in the course of the thirty-minute press conference in Søborg, Jakob Scharf emphasized that the attack against Denmark had not been “imminent.”
“It’s important to emphasize that the risk of becoming a victim of a terrorist attack in Denmark is still very small. This case, however, shows that Denmark is facing a serious terrorist threat, and that’s something we all have to take into consideration,” Scharf said.
He repeated several times at the press conference that the terrorist threat for that specific attack had been “minimized” by the arrests of Headley and Rana. But it was a delicate subject. Because despite the arrests, the long series of investigative measures, and the heightened security in several locations in Denmark, there was still one detail that had made the American and Danish governments deeply concerned.
A detail that was best expressed in one simple sentence, which first disappeared from a draft of the press release a few days before a communications worker for PET pressed “send” on the email to the Danish press. “It is, however, currently not possible to say whether or not the terrorist attack has been successfully thwarted.”
Headley’s video recordings and plans for an attack in Denmark were still out there.
18
FROM STOCKHOLM
Järfälla, near Stockholm
Late in the evening of December 23, 2010
Most of Sweden had already gone to bed. For a small few, it was time to wrap those final Christmas gifts or prepare tomorrow evening’s Christmas ham.
In a fifth-floor apartment on Frihetsvägen in the city of Järfälla, half an hour by car from Stockholm, two men sat over cups of tea and quiet music, addressing entirely different challenges.
Forty-four-year-old Mounir Dhahri, a Tunisian citizen with permanent resident status in Sweden, went once again through the plans he and his friend, thirty-seven-year-old Sahbi Zalouti, had been discussing. They would drive to Denmark, attack Jyllands-Posten, and kill as many as they could.
It would be an attack just like what Headley had wanted.
It would happen soon, Mounir Dhahri explained. Very soon, certainly before the new year. There was a week, at most, to get all the details sorted out.
The attack was sanctioned from an Islamic point of view, so there was nothing to worry about in that regard. As long as they didn’t kill women, they were in their full rights to kill all the employees at Jyllands-Posten’s offices in Copenhagen, Dhahri explained.
“You may kill as many of the people you find as you can. I hope there’s only one survivor left,” Dhahri said.
One witness who could later tell the world what happened.
He compared the plans for an attack in Copenhagen with the Chechens’ attack in the Dubrovka theater in Moscow in 2002, where 129 hostages were killed during the Russian special forces’ violent attempt to put an end to the attack. An operation that lasted several days. Even though that attack was genius, the Copenhagen attack would be put together differently.
We aren’t like the Chechens, Dhahri said. “They prolonged the release of a number of people, you see, and drew the whole thing out.”
The Chechens had given the commandos plenty of time to mobilize and come up with a plan to storm the theater. In accordance with Headley’s plans, Mounir Dhahri would not give his enemies time.
“We’ll do it the way we must. Even when we’re on our way out, you must kill the people you come across. We don’t have a demand that would make it possible for them to buy time. We just need to be careful of snipers—that’s what’s most important.”
Zalouti, who, like Dhahri, was of Tunisian background but who now held Swedish citizenship, asked inquisitive questions about the operation.
&nbs
p; “And then what?”
“You get rid of them as you like. All the ones you find before you must die, except the women,” Dhahri answered.
These kinds of discussions were nothing new for the men in the apartment. They had had many such discussions in the last days, the last week. They tested each other, experimented with ideas, and convinced each other once again that as long as there were people in Denmark who were killed, the mission was valid and good.
The men also made plans for what they would do if they couldn’t force their way into the newspaper. They could try attacking a completely ordinary house in Copenhagen.
“We aren’t guaranteed to get into the newspaper. We might break into a villa—one of those villas where there are lots of people,” Dhahri said.
“Far from people, far from the police. After all, people are celebrating Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve in their homes,” Dhahri said.
Zalouti was curious about the details of the plan again. If he saw women in the house, should he kill them?
“My God, don’t kill them. You break in, masked, and you go your way when the operation is complete. But if we can go for the newspaper, that would be best.”
The two men in Järfälla had never been in direct contact with David Headley. But they knew his name, his story; they had read about him on the Internet; they had visited the same areas with militants in Pakistan; they had at least one common contact in the Middle East; and their plan, as it were, had been thought out by Headley.
The men from Sweden, too, dreamed of chopping off the heads of journalists and random Danes in the building on Kongens Nytorv in Copenhagen.
And the cell in Sweden had two advantages: they had weapons. And they could get into Denmark without problems. They lived just a few hours away by car and could take their car to Copenhagen without being stopped and asked to show their passports.
Dhahri and Headley were similar in many ways, not only because they were middle-aged and enjoyed women and brand-name clothes. Like Headley, Dhahri had a complicated past with Islam. He, too, was a former apostate who had since found his way back to the true faith.
The Mind of a Terrorist Page 23