by Otto Penzler
Cullison couldn’t get past the Compaq’s encryption scheme, but on the IBM’s hard drive he found a treasure trove of Al Qaeda materials—at least 1,750 files, recording four years’ worth of terrorist doings.
Fearing lives might be at stake, the Journal turned over the material to the Defense Department and the CIA for review. The spooks did their screening, and the first Journal report about the documents from the IBM machine appeared December 31. But the Compaq laptop was much harder to crack, and it wasn’t until January 16 that the Journal was able to publish the results. For Danny, it was worth the wait. On the hard drive was the itinerary of a target-scouting expedition by a terrorist referred to as “brother Abdul Ra’uff.” It matched to a T the pre-9/11 travels of Richard C. Reid.
There was more good news the same day, with the arrival of an e-mail from Bashir, using an address that showed Sheikh’s sense of humor: [email protected]—Urdu for “no rascality.”
He reported that he’d forwarded Danny’s articles to Gilani and apologized for not having contacted him sooner. “I was preoccupied with looking after my wife who has been ill,” Sheikh said. “[She] is back from the hospital and the whole experience was a real eye-opener. Poor people who fall ill here and have to go to hospital have a really miserable and harassing time. Please pray for her health.”
Having tugged at Danny’s heartstrings with a phony story about his wife, Sheikh set the hook deeper three days later with an e-mail saying that Gilani was looking forward to a get-together. However, he was currently in Karachi and wouldn’t be returning for “a number of days.” Bashir gave Danny a choice: Wait for Gilani’s return, or send e-mail questions, which he’d relay to Gilani’s secretary. “If Karachi is your program,” Sheikh said, “you are welcome to meet him there.”
Danny chose the Karachi meeting, as Sheikh—who understood reporters—must have known he would. Before catching the Pakistan International Airlines flight south, Danny e-mailed him his plans, along with something that Sheikh didn’t know: On January 24, he and Mariane would be leaving Dubai and from there transiting to Bombay.
Friends had been urging Danny to take a break, and though another tour of Pakistan was planned, it wouldn’t be for an indefinite while. If Danny was going to get Gilani, he had to get him now.
There was another story he wanted to try to cram in: a piece on Karachi underworld boss Dawood Ibrahim, an Indian-born Muslim terrorist who enjoyed the patronage and protection of the ISI. In mid-January, while waiting for Bashir’s next missive, Danny called Ikram Sehgal for leads.
“I hadn’t heard from him in weeks,” Sehgal recalls, sipping tea in his cluttered office. “I think Danny got more and more confident. This was the biggest thing that hit him. He was suddenly having access and chasing down an area where he had no expertise.” He stirs the heat from his cup. “I mean, Danny just didn’t have it.
“He asked if I had any contacts with the local Mafia. I said, ‘Danny, the Mafia head here doesn’t function the way you think Mafias do. This is not something out of The Godfather. I know the direction you’re going in. Don’t do this! Forget it! If you want to know something, come over and we’ll talk, not on the telephone.’“
Sehgal’s phone rings, as it has constantly since March 17, when militants attacked a church in Islamabad, killing U.S. embassy employee Barbara Green and her 17-year-old daughter, Kristen Wormsley. Sehgal is now providing protection for every Christian church in the country gratis.
“I found him a little naive,” Sehgal goes on. “I would tell him, ‘Danny, stick by the rules. Anybody you want to meet, meet him in a public place. Don’t get into cars. Anyone could pick you up.’ He would always say, ‘Yes, you’re right, Ikram, I ought to do that.’ But you always had the feeling that what he was saying was perfunctory.”
Bashir checked in again on Sunday, January 20, saying that Gilani would be available that coming Tuesday or Wednesday. Sheikh said he’d forward the phone number of a Gilani mureed (follower), who would escort him to the meeting.
“It is sad that you are leaving Pakistan so soon,” Sheikh wrote. “I hope you have enjoyed your stay.”
The next day, Danny and Mariane learned that their baby would be a boy. They decided to call him Adam, a name that resonates with both Muslim and Jew.
Wednesday, January 23, was going to be busy for Danny. Asra was hosting a farewell dinner party for him that night; he wanted to check out a cyber cafe to see if it was where a message was sent to Richard Reid instructing him to board the next Paris-Miami flight; he had an appointment to see Randall Bennett, the U.S. consulate’s regional security officer, at 2:30, and another to see Jamil Yusuf, head of Karachi’s Citizens Police Liaison Committee, at 5:45. And then there was Gilani. Bashir by now had told him that Imtiaz Siddiqi was the mureed who’d lead him to Gilani. But Danny had yet to hear from him. Nor did he know that Siddiqi’s real name was Mansur Hasnain and that he’d been one of the Indian Airlines hijackers who’d freed Sheikh in 1999.
Danny phoned his fixer in Islamabad.
“Give me a quick reply,” he said. “Is it safe to see Gilani?”
Asif assured him it was; Gilani was a public figure.
Danny set off on his rounds. Mariane, who was to have come along, wasn’t feeling well and stayed at Asra’s.
He had a good session with Bennett at the consulate, but the cyber cafe was a bust; it didn’t have the technology to trace who’d sent the e-mail to Reid. On the way to Yusuf’s office, Danny called the Dow Jones bureau to ask the resident correspondent, Saaed Azhari, to set up a final appointment for him the next morning. Azhari, who couldn’t fathom why Danny chanced taking cabs everywhere, rather than using a hired car and regular driver, like other correspondents, said there was something Danny ought to know: Ghulam Hasnain, the Karachi Time stringer, had gone missing the day before. Guessing was, the ISI had picked him up because of an expose he had written on Dawood Ibrahim for a Pakistani monthly.
Danny seemed unworried, and a few minutes later he was at the Citizens Police Liaison Committee building, talking to Yusuf, a former businessman who’d become a renowned crime-fighter.
On the afternoon I catch up to him, Yusuf—who played a key role in catching Danny’s killers—is bemoaning his trouble in getting warrants for cyber searches. “Judges do not understand Yahoo is not a human being,” he says, shaking his head. He then describes his last meeting with a reporter of whom he was very fond.
“He asked me about Gilani, and I said, ‘I never heard of him. I don’t think a lot of people have heard of him in this country.’ Then he told me about this Richard Reid thing. I joked with him: I said, ‘Danny, do something else. The guy is caught. He is with the FBI. Why waste time?’
“[When] he was sitting here, he got two phone calls. He said, Yes, he was coming there at seven o’clock, somewhere close by. I did not know what was happening. He did not tell me who he was going to meet ….
“I advised him, ‘You cannot go and meet strangers.’ It’s just like me going into New York and trying to meet the Mafia, then complaining to the world I got abducted. You don’t do those things.
“He was a very docile person, quiet, humble. Not a person who would go out and take risks in reporting. That is what surprised me …. [How] he came and sat here for an hour and then went to that stupid appointment of his without telling us.”
Yusuf looks out the window down to where the security car he has had to hire to trail him is waiting.
“Kidnapping a journalist is the easiest thing you can do,” he says. “They are hungry for information …. Anybody could do it.”
Danny’s caller was the mureed he knew as Siddiqi, saying to meet him at the Village Garden Restaurant, next to the Metropole Hotel, a mile or so away. In the cab on the way over, Danny phoned Mariane, telling her where he was going and to start the party without him. He’d be back around eight.
The hour came and went without any sign of Danny, but initially his absence wasn’t cause for concern.
Pakistanis are famously sociable—Gilani may have insisted on serving dinner, and the talk may have run on, as interviews with Muslim militants tended to. But midnight passed with no word from Danny, who also wasn’t answering his cell phone.
Now truly worried, Asra phoned Danny’s boss, foreign editor John Bussey, at the Journal’s headquarters in South Brunswick, New Jersey, where it was late afternoon. Bussey told her that he’d alert the State Department.
Asra phoned Khawaja, thinking he would know whether Danny actually had a meeting. But Khawaja said he’d never heard of any meeting with Gilani.
The police arrived shortly thereafter, and Asra phoned Khawaja again, this time with an officer on the line. He asked that Khawaja put them in touch with Gilani as soon as possible. Then Asra read off Bashir and Siddiqi’s cell phone numbers. Khawaja didn’t recognize either of them.
By the time the flight to Dubai left the next afternoon, the story of Danny Pearl’s disappearance was moving over the wires. No one was using the word “kidnapping” yet, but that was the suspicion. It was confirmed early Sunday morning, local time, by e-mails to The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and two Pakistani news organizations. Attached were four photographs of Danny in captivity, one showing a 9-millimeter pistol pointed at his head and a message in English and Urdu announcing the capture of “CIA officer Daniel Pearl who was posing as a journalist for The Wall Street Journal.”
The note demanded that the U.S. hand over F-16 aircraft, whose delivery to Pakistan had been frozen by 1990 nuclear sanctions; that Pakistanis detained for questioning by the FBI over the 9/11 attacks be given access to lawyers and allowed to see their families; that Pakistani nationals held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, be returned to their homeland to stand trial; and that the Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan, now held in Afghanistan, be returned to Pakistan.
Of Danny, the note said, “Unfortunately, he is at present being kept in very inhuman circumstances quite similar in fact to the way that Pakistanis and nationals of other sovereign countries are being kept in Cuba by the American Army. If the Americans keep our countrymen in better conditions we will better the conditions of Mr. Pearl and the other Americans that we capture.”
Sent on the account of [email protected], the message was signed, “The National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty.”
Police had never heard of the group, but the name sounded a gong at the Islamabad bureau of the BBC, which in late October had received a package from the National Youth Movement for the Sovereignty of Pakistan. Inside were an unplayable videocassette and a computer printout announcing the capture of an alleged CIA operative, “one Joshua Weinstein, alias Martin Johnson, an American national and a resident of California.” Also enclosed was a photograph of a male Caucasian in his thirties. Flanked by two robed and hooded men aiming AK-47s at his head, he was holding up a Pakistani newspaper showing the date of his abduction—just as Danny would months later.
U.S. embassy officials said at the time that no one named Joshua Weinstein or Martin Johnson had either come to Pakistan or been reported missing, and that the letter was a hoax. When local police agencies and other Western embassies said the same, the BBC let it drop. But the release of the virtually identical Pearl materials got the BBC checking again with American diplomats. Was the first “kidnapping” truly a hoax? Why so many similarities between the October episode and Pearl’s abduction? The response was a studied silence.
Police, meanwhile, were focusing their suspicions on Harkat ul-Mujahedeen, the terrorist group that had hijacked the airliner to free Sheikh and Azhar. With a number of its members killed by U.S. air strikes, Harkat ul-Mujahedeen had the motive, as well as the MO, its predecessor group, Harkat ul-Ansar, being thought responsible for the kidnapping and presumed murder of a group of backpackers in India in 1995.
Trouble was, this didn’t have the feel of a jihadi operation. Where were the allahu ahkbars in the note? The riffs about Palestine and infidels and Western demons? There wasn’t even a mention of “Zionist conspiracy.” Instead, the demands read like an ACLU press release. The English was too good, too. Usage, spelling, and grammar were virtually perfect, and the few errors seemed deliberate, as if the writer was trying to hide his education. Jihadis didn’t have to feign lack of schooling; most were illiterate.
One investigator, inspired, typed “foreign,” “kidnapper,” and “suspect” onto Google.com and clicked search. The first listing that popped up was “Omar Saeed Sheikh.” No one believed it; couldn’t be that easy.
Within days, the elite Criminal Investigation Division determined the true identity of Arif and raided his house—where they found relatives in the midst of a Muslim prayer service for the dead. Arif had been killed fighting the Americans in Afghanistan, they claimed. No one believed that either, and a nationwide manhunt got under way.
The Journal, meanwhile, was moving on several fronts. Managing editor Paul Steiger issued a statement that Danny was not now nor ever had been an employee of any agency of the U.S. government, and the CIA broke long-standing policy to say the same. Foreign editor Bussey and correspondent Steve LeVine flew in to shepherd Mariane, whose Buddhist group was chanting a mantra for Danny. A media strategy was devised. Mariane made herself available for interviews, but only to outlets that had Pakistan reach, such as CNN and the BBC. Questions about what story Danny was working on were deflected, lest the truth cause him harm. Finally, a confidential appeal was made to major U.S. media organizations to not disclose that Danny’s parents were Israeli. All agreed.
But on January 30, Danny’s Jewishness leaked. In a story in The News, Kamran Khan, the paper’s chief investigative reporter, wrote that “some Pakistani security officials—not familiar with the worth of solid investigative reporting in the international media—are privately searching for answers as to why a Jewish American reporter was exceeding ‘his limits’ to investigate [a] Pakistani religious group.”
“An India-based Jewish reporter serving a largely Jewish media organization should have known the hazards of exposing himself to radical Islamic groups, particularly those who recently got crushed under American military might,” Khan quoted “a senior Pakistani official” as saying.
Having let the religious cat out of the bag, Khan—who doubles as a special correspondent for The Washington Post—revealed Danny’s relationship with Asra Nomani, whom he claimed—falsely—Danny had imported from India to be “his full-time assistant.”
“Officials are also guessing, rather loudly, as to why Pearl decided to bring in an Indian journalist,” Khan wrote. “They [are] also intrigued as to why an American newspaper reporter based in [Bombay] would also establish a full-time residence in Karachi by renting a residence.”
Khan’s revelations stunned colleagues. But there was no wondering about the source of his information: He was well-known for his contacts at the highest levels of the ISI.
The same morning Khan’s story appeared, the kidnappers released a second note, changing Danny’s supposed spying affiliation from the CIA to the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service.
The language that followed differed radically from the first note:
U cannot fool us and find us. We are inside seas, oceans, hills, grave yards, every where.
We give u 1 more day if America will not meet our demands we will kill Daniel. Then this cycle will continue and no American journalist could enter Pakistan.
Allah is with us and will protect us.
We had given our demands and if u will not then “we” will act and the Amrikans will get teir part what they deserve. Don’t think this will be the end, it is the beginning and it is a real war on Amrikans. Amrikans will get the taste of death and destructions what we had got in Afg and Pak. Inshallah
This did not sound like Sheikh—and it wasn’t. A note later found on his computer read, “We have investigated and found that Daniel Pearl does not work for the CIA. Therefore, we are releasing him uncondition
ally.”
Having lured Danny, Sheikh had ceased calling the shots; Danny’s fate was now in the hands of more murderous others.
Investigators, however, were still concentrating on Gilani, who turned himself in on January 30, protesting his innocence and ticking off the names of more than a dozen senior and retired officials who would vouch for his services to state security.
After interrogating Khawaja—who backed Gilani’s story—police began having second thoughts. Ul-Fuqra had never been involved with violence in Pakistan and indeed had become so inactive of late the State Department had dropped it from the terrorist list. Someone had set Gilani up. But who?
In Karachi, a newly arrived contingent of FBI men were tracing the source of the kidnappers’ e-mails, while Yusuf’s Citizens Police Liaison Committee was manually sorting the connections among 23,500 telephone calls. The effort paid off, with the identification of Fahad Naseem, an employee of a cyber café, as the sender of the e-mails and the linking of his phone calls to two other conspirators.
The police moved just after dark, heading off in unmarked vans to grab Fahad. If Pakistani interrogation methods had their usual brutal efficacy, Fahad would quickly lead them to the second kidnapper, who—likewise persuaded—would lead them to the third, who would rapidly decide that giving up the boss was in his best interest. When they got him, they’d have Danny. It all had to be pulled off by morning prayers at the mosque. After that, everyone in town would know.
Stops one, two, and three yielded the desired results. But they were stymied at four. They had the ringleader’s name, his phone number, his uncle’s Karachi address—before sunup, they even had his uncle, cousin, and aunt in custody. The aunt placed a call to his cell phone, begging him to surrender. Then the lead officer came on the line. “The game’s up, Sheikh,” he said. The answer was a click.