ProPublica: Pakistan’s Terror Connections

Terror Group Recruits From Pakistan’s ‘Best and Brightest’

2013-04-04T12:08:44-05:00

Imagine a terrorist group that recruits tens of thousands of young men from the same neighborhoods and social networks as the Pakistani military. A group whose well-educated recruits defy the idea that poverty and ignorance breed extremism. A group whose fighters include relatives of a politician, a senior Army officer and a director of Pakistan's Atomic Energy Commission.

That is the disconcerting reality of Lashkar-e-Taiba, one of the world's most dangerous militant organizations, according to a study released today by the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y. The report helps explain why Pakistan has resisted international pressure to crack down on Lashkar after it killed 166 people in Mumbai — six U.S. citizens included — and came close to sparking conflict between nuclear-armed Pakistan and India.

The findings, which draw on 917 biographies of Lashkar fighters killed in combat, illuminate "Lashkar's integration into Pakistani society, how embedded they are," said co-author Don Rassler, the director of a research program at the center that studies primary source materials. "They have become an institution."

The three-day slaughter in 2008 drew global attention because it targeted Westerners as well as Indians and implicated Pakistan's spy agency. The Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) continues to protect the masterminds, according to Western and Indian counterterror officials. U.S. prosecutors indicted an ISI major in the deaths of the Americans: He allegedly provided funds, training and direction and served as the handler of David Coleman Headley, an U.S. reconnaissance operative now serving 35 years in a federal prison.

The 56-page West Point report is titled "The Fighters of Lashkar-e-Taiba: Recruitment, Training, Deployment and Death." Though it refrains from policy suggestions, there are implications for U.S. counterterror strategy. Lashkar's popularity and clout defy conventional approaches to fighting extremism, said co-author Christine Fair, a Pakistan expert at Georgetown University.

"When you have an organization that enjoys such a degree of open support, there are no options for U.S. policy other than counterintelligence, law enforcement and counter-terrorism targeting," Fair said in an interview.

Lashkar was founded in 1989 by Hafiz Saeed, its spiritual chief today, and other ideologues. The ISI deployed Lashkar as a proxy force against India, especially in the disputed Kashmir region. Although banned by Pakistan in 2002, the group still functions unmolested, the ISI provides funds, military training and arms, and ISI officers serve as handlers for Lashkar chiefs, according to Western and Indian investigations. The U.S. officially declared Laskhar a terror group in 2001.

The West Point researchers said they used "massive amounts of material that the group produces about itself" to analyze the trajectories of Lashkar fighters who were killed between 1989 and 2008. The researchers translated from Urdu the 917 biographies that appeared in four extremist publications, including one written by mothers of fallen militants.

Recruits often become holy warriors with the help of their families, which admire Lashkar's military exploits in India and Afghanistan and its nationalism and social service activities at home, the study says. Unlike other terrorist groups, Lashkar does not attack the Pakistani state.

The group's vast training camps have churned out fighters at an alarming rate. The study gives an estimate of between 100,000 and 300,000 total trainees. By comparison, a U.S. counterterror official told ProPublica he has seen figures as high as 200,000, though he put the number in the tens of thousands.

Most recruits examined in the study joined at about age 17 and died at about 21, generally in India or Afghanistan. Their backgrounds contradict "a lingering belief in the policy community that Islamist terrorists are the product of low or no education or are produced in Pakistan's madrassas," the report says.

In fact, the fighters had higher levels of secular education compared to the generally low average for Pakistani men, the report says. Relatively few studied at religious schools known as madrasas. They joined Lashkar — which spews anti-Western, anti-Semitic and anti-Indian rhetoric — because they wanted more meaningful lives, admired its anticorruption image and felt an obligation to help fellow Muslims, the study says.

"These are some of Pakistan's best and brightest and they are not being used in the labor market, they are being deployed in the militant market," Fair said. "It's a myth that poverty and madrasas create terrorism, and that we can buy our way out of it with U.S. aid."

Lashkar's publications downplay its longtime links to the security forces, the authors said. But connections emerge nonetheless. Lashkar recruits aggressively in the districts of the Punjab region that produce the bulk of Pakistan's officer corps — "a dynamic that raises a number of questions about potentially overlapping social networks between the army and (Lashkar)," the report says.

"It looks like based on what we have as if there's a considerable degree of overlap," Fair said. "The military and Lashkar are competing for guys with the same skill set."

At least 18 fallen fighters had immediate family members who served in Pakistan's armed forces. Although most recruits were working or lower middle-class, some "had connections to elite Pakistani institutions and Pakistani religious leaders and politicians." The study cites Abdul Qasim Muhammad Asghar, son of the president of the Pakistan Muslim Leagueʹs labor wing in Islamabad and Rawalpindi.

Another case stands out: a fighter known by the nom de guerre of Abdul Razzaq Abu Abdullah. His 2003 obituary by his mother describes his maternal uncle as "a director of Pakistan's Atomic Energy Commission."

Abdul, one of four brothers from the town of Chak Deenpur Sharif in Punjab province, showed interest in holy war as a teenager. His uncle tried to discourage him and found him a post in the military, the biography states. But the young man finally joined Lashkar and died in combat in Indian Kashmir at age 20, the report says.

The authors did not substantiate the account or identify the Pakistani official at the atomic energy commission. But the allusion evokes persistent fears that Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is vulnerable to Islamic terrorists. Pakistani nuclear officials have had contacts with al Qaida in the past.

The CIA has had particular concerns about Lashkar in this regard, according to veteran counterterror officer Charles Faddis. Between 2006 and his retirement in 2008, Faddis led a CIA unit dedicated to preventing terrorists from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. Lashkar's influence with the Pakistani security establishment and its reach into the Pakistani diaspora were worrisome, Faddis said.

"They were the kind of group that concerned us," Faddis said. "They operated in Pakistan with a lot more ease than al Qaida. They had the ability to make connections with military officers, well-educated people abroad, scientists. The Pakistani government was extremely reluctant to confront them.

"All of this added up to a bad situation," he said.

Lashkar's impunity is reflected in the continued defiance and power of Saeed, the spiritual chief. Although India charged him for Mumbai and the State Department offered a $10 million reward for his arrest, Pakistani authorities have done nothing except to provide him police security, U.S. and Indian officials say.

Saeed denies involvement in Lashkar's military wing, a claim disputed by the study. In a "surprising number" of cases, Rassler said, trainees who were deployed on combat operations went to Saeed to seek his personal approval.

"In their own publications, they are saying he plays an operational role," Rassler said.

Lashkar has not carried out a major attack since Mumbai, devoting more energy instead to political activism. But the group continues to engage in terrorist activity outside Pakistan and has cranked up its anti-American rhetoric, Fair said.

Lashkar is among the militant groups that use the tribal areas of Pakistan as a base for attacks on U.S. troops in neighboring Afghanistan, according to U.S. counterterror officials. Nonetheless, Fair said U.S. forces have not targeted Lashkar fighters in Pakistan with missile strikes out of concern that this would anger Pakistan, whose help is needed in Afghanistan. Instead, there are discussions of taking more aggressive action against Lashkar in other countries.

“We are essentially being held hostage by the war in Afghanistan,” she said.

Four Disturbing Questions About the Mumbai Terror Attack

2013-02-22T09:46:22-05:00

Analysis by Sebastian Rotella, ProPublica

The 35-year prison sentence imposed on David Coleman Headley, a terrorist scout and Pakistani spy convicted in the 2008 Mumbai attacks, has closed the U.S. chapter of a case with explosive international implications.

But justice remains elusive. Neither the U.S. nor Pakistani governments have fully answered critical questions about the case — including why most of the accused masterminds remain at large in Pakistan despite evidence implicating them.

Headley, 52, pleaded guilty to doing surveillance for the three-day terrorist rampage in Mumbai that killed six Americans and 160 others. His sentencing last month in Chicago made the Pakistani-American businessman the highest-ranking conspirator to be punished. Last year, India executed the surviving gunman of the attack squad sent by Pakistan's Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group.

The investigation of Headley revealed evidence that Pakistani security forces played a direct role in terrorism against the West. His testimony at the trial of an accomplice gave an unprecedented look inside operations of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), Lashkar and al-Qaida. Yet the U.S. and Pakistan have been relentlessly secretive about Headley, who had worked as an informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

What follows is an analysis of four major questions about the Mumbai plot that includes new information and material ProPublica has not yet published in the three years we have spent examining the attack and its aftermath.

Sources include court files, investigative documents and interviews with witnesses, victims, experts and others in the United States, Europe, India and Pakistan, as well as law enforcement and intelligence officials whom we agreed not to identify because they were not cleared to speak publicly about the case.

Q. Why doesn't Pakistan capture Sajid Mir?

A. U.S. prosecutors indicted Mir, a Lashkar chief and the accused lead planner of the Mumbai plot. But despite overwhelming evidence — notably phone intercepts that recorded Mir directing the slaughter — Pakistani authorities have not pursued him.

Some investigators believe he is or was an ISI officer. Others think he merely works with the ISI and has powerful protectors. Nonetheless, his trajectory confirms a former French operative's comment that he is "untouchable in Pakistan."

Information recently obtained by ProPublica reveals that Pakistani authorities questioned and released Mir after the Mumbai attacks in late November 2008. Mir spent three days in a Karachi command post overseeing the attacks by phone, then returned to a Lashkar compound of residences, offices and training areas in Muzaffarabad, according to a captured Indian militant who assisted at the command post.

On Dec. 1, a team from Pakistan's Federal Investigative Agency (FIA) showed up at the compound known as Beit-ul-Muhajadeen. The investigators arrested Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, the group's military chief, and a few others. But they did not arrest Mir, another mastermind named Abu Qahafa or the Indian militant, 31-year-old Syed Zabiuddin. The three militants slipped out a back gate, according to Zabuiddin's confession after his arrest last summer.

In mid-December, FIA investigators questioned Mir and Qahafa in Islamabad. But the two Lashkar chiefs "were let off two days later," Zabiuddin told Indian investigators. It is not clear why the Pakistani investigators released Mir, the most-wanted accused mastermind, while keeping other suspects in custody.

In the months after Mumbai, Mir worked on new plots against India and sent Headley to do reconnaissance for an attack on a Danish newspaper that had published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. In spite of his wanted status, Mir was so sure of his clout that he visited Lakhvi at least twice at the Adiala jail in Rawalpindi.

Headley told Indian and U.S. interrogators about a jailhouse visit by Mir in early 2009. Zabiuddin has revealed a second visit. He said that in September 2009 he accompanied Mir to the jail, where the Lashkar defendants are housed together in comfortable quarters, according to Indian counterterror officials. The militants ate sweets while Lakhvi told them "he had struck a deal with the government and as such no further arrests ought to be made," Zabiuddin later told investigators.

Mir survived Headley's arrest in Chicago in late 2009. Headley told FBI agents all about his Lashkar handler and even helped in a failed bid to lure Mir out of Pakistan. In 2010, Mir began another bold plot: a plan to attack the Nashik Police Academy about 120 miles east of Mumbai, Indian counterterror officials said. Mir cultivated at least two operatives, one of whom was arrested in Nashik that October, according to the Indian counterterror officials.

"I believed [Mir] was constantly making efforts to station (Lashkar) cadres to target Nashik Police Academy," Zabiuddin said.

In November 2010, a two-part ProPublica series put Mir on the front page of The Washington Post. Weeks later, he again consulted the Indian militant about the Nashik plot, according to Indian counterterror officials. Mir asked if he thought a Pakistani named Hafiz Usman could function undercover in India effectively enough to strike the police academy, the counterterror officials said.

Today, investigators say Mir remains operational and that his whereabouts are known to Pakistani security. They say his alliance with the ISI and his determination to kill Indians, Americans, Europeans, Jews and other Westerners make him a threat.

Q. What was the full extent of the role of Pakistani intelligence in Mumbai?

A. The case marks the first time U.S. prosecutors have charged a serving Pakistani intelligence officer in a terrorist attack.

Given the delicate U.S.-Pakistan relationship, the Justice Department and FBI did not reach the decision lightly. They were convinced that the ISI officer, known only as Major Iqbal, plotted in tandem with Mir. Pakistani officials deny that Major Iqbal is an ISI officer. But there is compelling evidence that Iqbal was Headley's ISI handler, that he provided direction, funding and training for the Mumbai attacks and that he helped launch the Denmark plot.

U.S. investigators have a good idea of who and where Iqbal is. He has rotated to a new ISI assignment, according to U.S. and Indian counterterror officials.

Zabiuddin's account offers further corroboration of Headley's story. Zabiuddin gave investigators the first look inside the operation's control room, according to Indian counterterror officials, and he linked the location to the ISI.

Lashkar militants set up the command post in a house in the Malir neighborhood of Karachi, according to Zabiuddin. Indian counterterror officials have obtained the GPS coordinates of the site. The house usually functioned as offices for a fishing business; the Indian saw life vests and fishing nets on the premises. The fishing business, a front, was run by the chief of Lashkar's air and sea operations, a militant named Yaqoob. An ISI officer named Major Sameer Ali worked with Yaqoob in the front company, according to Zabiuddin's account.

This echoes Headley's description of Yaqoob and ISI officers using fishing vessels for operations, including sea deployment of the 10-man Mumbai squad.

Headley identified Major Ali as a colleague of Major Iqbal and fellow liaison to Lashkar. On the afternoon of Nov. 26, 2008, Zabiuddin said he saw Major Ali arrive in a Toyota HiLux at the Lashkar command post just a few hours before the attackers landed ashore in Mumbai. Major Ali met with Lakhvi, the Lashkar military chief, at the safe house for half an hour, according to Zabiuddin.

The ISI reassured militants they could rest easy after the attack, Zabiuddin told investigators. In January 2009, he said a high-ranking Lashkar boss named Muzzammil took him to a factory in Muzaffarabad, where they met with an ISI officer named Colonel Hamza and his personal assistant, Subeder Abdul Sabir.

"Both of us came out with assurances from Col. Hamza on my protection from arrest," Zabiuddin told Indian investigators.

U.S. and Indian investigators believe Col. Hamza is a spymaster whom Headley also met and identified as "Lt. Col. Hamza," Major Iqbal's commanding officer.

Indian leaders accuse the ISI leadership of direct involvement in Mumbai. In all, Headley and others implicated a brigadier, two colonels, at least three majors, a Pakistani Navy frogman and noncommissioned officers. Headley described an almost symbiotic bond between Lashkar and ISI chiefs, though he also said he did not think the ISI director knew about the plot.

Q. What risk does Lashkar-e-Taiba pose in the future?

A. Pakistani authorities insist they have cracked down on Lashkar. They have prosecuted suspects for Mumbai, shut down militant outposts and prevented major new attacks against India and the West.

Yet the crackdown has been a strange dance. It gives the sense of a deal negotiated in the shadows. The power of the ISI and of Lashkar, which is a military, political, social and religious force in Pakistan, has ensured impunity.

In contrast to al-Qaida trainers dodging U.S. drone strikes in remote secret compounds, Lashkar camps are large, well-appointed and well-known. Mountain training complexes have churned out thousands of fighters over the years. The group's air and sea wings display its ambitions. Zabiuddin said Lashkar stockpiled hundreds of cartons of paragliding kits and trained with the paragliders, which the militants "envisaged using in an attack," an Indian counterterror official said.

There were clearly tensions between elements of the Pakistani government and Lashkar after the Mumbai attacks. The FIA, a relatively small agency with the daunting task of investigating terrorism in Pakistan, showed aplomb in arresting Lakhvi and several others at their headquarters. Soon afterward, the Pakistani Army fired shells and rockets at the Bait-ul-Mujahadeen complex, wounding a Lashkar fighter and drawing retaliatory fire, according to the account of Zabiuddin. He said the Army occupied the complex for three months.

The crackdown only came, however, after Lashkar had been given advance warning and removed equipment from harm's way, the Indian militant told investigators. Zabiuddin described a methodical reaction: Lashkar operatives leased 10 or 12 acres and brought in excavation gear owned by the militant group to build a replacement complex near Dolai. The new facility was up and running by July 2009, Zabiuddin said. Training and plotting shifted to this and other venues, according to Western and Indian counterterror officials.

FIA investigators have told U.S. agents they do not plan to arrest other plotters, according to U.S. counterterror officials. A trial of Lakhvi and fellow defendants in Pakistan drags on, plagued by procedural delays and disputes with India.

Lakhvi's custody arrangements are a topic of derision among Western and Indian counterterror officials. Headley told interrogators an anecdote: After Lakhvi's arrest, FBI agents asked to question him for their investigation into the six American deaths. The ISI refused, telling the FBI instead to submit questions. ISI officers then sat down with Lakhvi and "came up with answers" for the FBI, according to Headley's account.

Lakhvi's three wives visit him in custody. One wife had a child in 2010, according to Zabiuddin's statement. In addition, imprisonment does not prevent Lakhvi from calling shots as Lashkar military commander. As ProPublica reported, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of Pakistan's armed forces and a former ISI director, rebuffed a face-to-face appeal from a senior U.S. official in 2011 to prevent new attacks by confiscating the Lakhvi's cellular phone.

By phone and in person, Lakhvi oversees operations in Afghanistan, where his militants fight U.S. troops alongside other Islamic groups. Lashkar fights on traditional fronts too: attacking India in the contested Kashmir region and directing proxy Indian terrorist groups.

Upcoming elections in Pakistan may shape the group's future. Lashkar has a huge treasury: a mix of donations and tens of millions of dollars allegedly provided by the ISI. The group owns companies, schools, hospitals and charities and could develop a more overt political role, comparable to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hafiz Saeed, Lashkar's spiritual leader, has raised his profile. He gave a rare interview to The New York Times this month in which he denied involvement in terrorism. Although the U.S. has issued a $10 million reward for Saeed's capture, Pakistani police guarded the compound where he gave the interview.

As U.S.-led military forces pull out of Afghanistan, combat-hardened Lashkar militants could push for attacks on India and the West, some experts warn.

"There are multiple potential pathways for the group," said Stephen Tankel, an American University professor who's written a book about Lashkar. "Depending on how things play out in Afghanistan as well as with the India-Pakistan peace process we could see an uptick in internal tension in the group. If so, that could mean trouble for Pakistan, for the region and possibly for the West as well."

Q. Why didn't U.S. authorities stop Headley sooner?

A. ProPublica has explored in detail the repeated warnings about Headley to the FBI and the missed opportunities to stop him between 2001 and 2009.

Reacting to ProPublica's reports, in late 2010 the Director of National Intelligence ordered a multiagency review of Headley's contacts with the U.S. government. The conclusions were kept secret. In addition, Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., chairman of a House appropriations subcommittee, responded to ProPublica articles by submitting a long list of questions to the FBI and DEA about Headley's work as an informant and six FBI inquiries into his extremist activity. Wolf has declined to disclose the responses.

The secrecy makes it hard to assess the government's failure to detect the threat from Headley. But the FBI's tepid approach contrasts with other cases, according to lawyer Charles Swift, who defended Headley's accomplice in Chicago and specializes in terrorism cases.

"What has struck me is the FBI's doggedness in tracking anyone who has potential information," Swift said. "I have clients who the FBI has flown across the country to interview at airports. I have had clients stopped for four hours of questioning by the Joint Terrorism Task Force at airports. It's unthinkable they didn't do more regarding Headley."

Federal agents opened six inquiries about Headley between 2001 and 2008, but only questioned him once. That interview took place in a DEA office three weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks because of a report that he praised the al-Qaida strike and wanted to fight jihad in Pakistan.

Headley's defense was partly true: that he was a DEA informant and had been gathering intelligence on Islamic extremists. Yet strangely, his DEA handlers did not write a report about the FBI inquiry or look into a claim Headley made that he was related to a Pakistani spymaster. DEA officials insist that they did not know that Headley was already an active militant in Lashkar.

There also is no convincing explanation of why a federal court abruptly ended Headley's probation for a drug conviction three years early, or why the DEA deactivated him soon after he signed a one-year informant contract in September 2001. The official silence and contradictions reinforce suspicions that he kept working as a U.S. informant in some capacity while he trained with terrorists in Pakistan.

Official explanations are incomplete about other inquiries into Headley. Why didn't FBI agents interview Headley in 2005 after his wife had him arrested for domestic abuse and accused him of being a Lashkar militant? Interviews with her and a DEA handler indicated that he was at least a potentially valuable intelligence source. What explains Headley's contact with the DEA soon after that inquiry? According to a DEA timeline prepared in response to a ProPublica request, in February of 2006 "the DEA received an impromptu phone call from Headley. The call lasted between five and 10 minutes and was social in nature. Operational and investigative matters were not discussed."

According to the DEA, this was the agency's last contact with Headley until his arrest for the Mumbai attacks. The timing of his social call to the DEA is perplexing. In early 2006, Headley was doing surveillance in Mumbai, changing his name to perfect his cover, and becoming a spy for the ISI.

The next warning was the closest U.S. agencies came to discovering the Mumbai plot. In meetings in late 2007 and 2008, another of Headley's wives went to the U.S. embassy in Pakistan and accused him of being a spy and terrorist. Embassies get many "walk-ins" who make wild accusations. The wife later admitted to an investigator that she was emotional and mixed lies with the truth. Still, she told U.S. agents about Headley's Lashkar activity, his suspicious travel to India and her belief he was involved in attacks.

She said she showed U.S. agents photos of her with Headley at the Taj Mahal Hotel, his main target. She phoned an agent several times with more information, according to her account. She said the agents had a file on Headley and knew about his Lashkar training. Yet officials say Headley was not interviewed or monitored. The key unanswered question: Did U.S. agents learn at this time of the three similar previous warnings that bolstered the wife's credibility?

The final inquiry into Headley also remains murky.

Days after the Mumbai attacks, an associate of Headley's mother alerted FBI agents in Philadelphia about her suspicions that Headley was involved with Pakistani militants. It is disconcerting that Headley's cousin in Philadelphia succeeded in lying to FBI agents, claiming Headley was in Pakistan and then calling him at home in Chicago to warn him. It is surprising that the FBI did not locate Headley, who weeks later left the country and did extensive terrorist surveillance in Denmark and India, returning to the scene of the crime.

Lashkar was now an urgent threat. Agents learned about the previous FBI inquiries, which connected Headley to Lashkar and Mumbai. But U.S. authorities did not warn Indian law enforcement or issue a travel alert for him. It took another seven months and a tip from British intelligence to open the investigation that resulted in his capture.

"It is a puzzling question," said Patrick Blegen, Swift's co-counsel in the Chicago case. "It could be explained by ineptitude. Or it could be that the federal agencies had some comfort with him, they didn't think he was a threat because he had been an informant in the past."

Top Indian officials allege that Headley was a double agent for the U.S. government at the time of the Mumbai plot. After extensive reporting, ProPublica has found no proof for that allegation. As U.S. officials insist, Headley may have simply slipped through the cracks of the counterterror system. Until more is revealed, however, legitimate suspicions will persist.

"Headley proved that for all our changes in security, we are not much safer," Swift said. "It was too easy. When the real big bad terrorist showed up, no one saw him."

Judge Gives American 35 Years for Plotting Deadly Mumbai Terror Attack

2013-01-24T16:44:05-05:00

by Sebastian Rotella

Jan. 24: This story has been updated and expanded with more information on David Coleman Headley and his sentencing hearing.

CHICAGO — A federal judge in Chicago on Thursday imposed a 35-year prison sentence on David Coleman Headley for his role in the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks that killed 166 people, including six Americans, and for a foiled plot in Denmark.

Headley, a 52-year-old businessman and former U.S. drug informant, avoided the death penalty by confessing that he did surveillance for both plots and by cooperating extensively with investigators after his arrest in October 2009.

Headley revealed startling evidence that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), played a central role with the Lashkar-i-Taiba militant group in the attacks. His testimony enabled U.S. prosecutors to indict Lashkar masterminds and a major in the ISI, Pakistan's spy agency, on charges that include aiding the murder of U.S. citizens in India.

As a result of Headley's cooperation, former U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald of Chicago — who is now in private practice — took the unusual step Thursday of appearing in the courtroom to ask the judge for a sentence of 30 to 35 years rather than life under a plea arrangement.

Fitzgerald, a veteran counterterror prosecutor, interviewed Headley in person after his arrest and negotiated the plea bargain. Fitzgerald praised the speed and thoroughness of Headley's cooperation, noting that Headley kept talking even after being told he faced the death penalty.

Nonetheless, U.S. District Court Judge Harry Leinenweber made his distaste for Headley clear. In addition to citing the horrific nature of the three-day slaughter in Mumbai, the judge pointed out that Headley previously received two generous plea bargains when he was charged with heroin trafficking in the 1980 and 1990s.

He said Headley had been spared the death penalty by the plea deal and from extradition to Denmark and India, where the lone survivor of the 10-man Mumbai attack squad was hanged last year.

"I don't have any faith in Mr. Headley when he says he's a changed person committed to the American way of life," Leinenweber said. "I hope the sentence I impose will keep him under lock and key for the rest of his natural life."

Headley must serve at least 85 percent of the sentence, which means he will not be released until he is in his late 70s at the earliest. Still, the government's treatment of Headley has stirred criticism from victims of Mumbai, from the Indian public and from lawyers for an accomplice, Tahawwur Rana, who was sentenced to 14 years last week.

Those sentiments were summed up in a vivid, emotional statement in the courtroom by Linda Ragsdale, an American victim of the Mumbai attacks. Ragsdale spoke just a few feet from the tall, balding Headley, who wore a gray sweat suit and listened impassively.

Ragsdale suffered severe gunshot wounds when gunmen burst into the Oberoi Hotel in Mumbai as she was dining, unleashing a fusillade with AK47s and grenades.

Ragsdale wept as she described hiding under a table with a 58-year-old father and his 13-year-old daughter, Alan and Naomi Scherr of Virginia, and seeing them both die. She read a statement to the judge from Kia Scherr, the wife and mother of the victims.

"It would be an appalling dishonor if he only gets 35 years," Kia Scherr said in the statement. "It would not do justice for this crime."

Ragsdale told the court that the attack left her with a 3-foot-long scar and physical pain that is sometimes unbearable. While she and the others suffered in Mumbai, Headley watched the attack on TV at his home in Pakistan, she said. In fact, testimony revealed that as Headley watched, he received congratulatory messages from fellow plotters and his wife in Chicago. (Headley's wife has not been charged.)

"I know what a bullet can do to every part of a human body," Ragsdale said. "I know the sound of life leaving a 13-year-old child … We faced all this while you faced a TV screen."

Headley, the wealthy son of a Pakistani father and American mother, did not make a statement. Western and Indian investigators consider him a uniquely skilled and dangerous terrorist because he received training and direction from the ISI spy agency as well as Lashkar and al Qaeda.

He used his charm, language skills and American passport to conduct meticulous undercover reconnaissance, posing as an immigration consultant, in India, Denmark and elsewhere. Investigators say the Mumbai attacks were successful because of his scouting combined with the funding, planning and expertise provided by the ISI in pulling off one of the most devastating and sophisticated plots since 9/11.

Pakistan has denied any link to the attacks.

Lashkar and the ISI followed up Mumbai by launching Headley on a plot to attack a Danish newspaper that had published cartoons of the prophet Mohamed. The sponsorship of the plot then shifted to al Qaeda. Headley was arrested as he prepared a third surveillance trip to Denmark.

Headley's handlers have been identified as a Major Iqbal of the ISI and Sajid Mir, a veteran Lashkar chief who is accused of being the project manager of the Mumbai plot. Iqbal remains an officer in the Pakistani security forces, and Mir remains in Pakistan protected by the ISI, according to U.S. and Indian counterterror officials.

Asked Thursday whether Pakistan has made any effort to arrest the accused masterminds, Gary S. Shapiro, acting U.S. attorney in the Northern District of Illinois, said: "I have no idea."

A U.S. counterterror official, who is familiar with the case and who requested anonymity, said this week that he knew the answer to the question.

"No one is looking for them in Pakistan," the U.S. counterterror official said.

U.S. prosecutors defended the sentence. They said recruiting witnesses like Headley is a key to prosecutions of complex international conspiracies.

Shapiro said the word "despicable" did not begin to describe the Mumbai attacks, but he added: "We need witnesses. The only way you get witnesses in this world is to threaten them with prosecution and then offer them an incentive to cooperate."

Although tracking down the Pakistani masterminds seems hopeless, Shapiro said, he noted cases in which once-invincible Colombian and Mexican drug lords have been brought to justice.

Headley's sentencing did not answer questions that have dogged the U.S. government, particularly why the FBI and other agencies did not respond more aggressively to six warnings from Headley's wives and associates about his terrorist activities between 2001 and 2008.

Many Indian officials — and some Western ones — think the Mumbai attacks could have been averted if Headley had been questioned, arrested or placed under surveillance as the result of one of the brief FBI inquiries that were opened after those warnings.

Moreover, the FBI, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies have not fully explained the extent of Headley's work as a DEA informant, especially in 2001 when he began gathering intelligence on Islamic extremists as well as drug traffickers.

The DEA says he was deactivated as an informant in early 2002 as he began training with Lashkar. Other U.S. agencies say he remained a DEA informant in some capacity until at least 2005. And Indian officials allege that he remained a U.S. agent later than that.

Finally, authorities have not explained why it took almost a year to arrest Headley after the Mumbai attacks. Days after, an associate of Headley's mother came forward to tell FBI agents in Philadelphia she believed he was involved with Lashkar, the group behind the assault.

The FBI has admitted that agents then discovered that Headley had been the subject of repeated previous allegations of terrorism involvement. Nonetheless, agents failed to find Headley in Chicago, and he returned to India and Europe for new terrorist reconnaissance.

It took the FBI until July of 2009, when British intelligence detected him meeting with al Qaeda operatives, to locate Headley and begin surveillance, according to U.S. officials.

"It is baffling to me that he was not interviewed sooner, especially post-Mumbai," said Charles Swift, a lawyer for Rana who specializes in terror cases.

Headley's lawyers had asked for a sentence of less than 30 to 35 years, asserting that their client's "unprecedented" cooperation had "saved lives" and averted attacks around the world and that he had expressed remorse. They cited a sealed memorandum outlining Headley's intelligence cooperation, much of which remains classified.

The American Behind India’s 9/11—And How U.S. Botched Chances to Stop Him

2013-01-24T14:17:41-05:00

by Sebastian Rotella

Jan. 24 Update: A federal judge today sentenced American David Coleman Headley's to 35 years in prison for his role in organizing scouting missions for the 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai that killed 160 people. Read our extensive coverage of Headley and his role as a U.S. drug informant and operative of the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-i-Taiba below.

This story was co-published with PBS FRONTLINE, which will air a film version today. Check local listings. It was originally published on Nov. 22, 2011.

Prologue: Justice Denied

During a meeting overseas last summer, a senior U.S. official and Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the chief of Pakistan’s armed forces, discussed a threat that has strained the troubled U.S.-Pakistani relationship since the 2008 Mumbai attacks: the Lashkar-i-Taiba militant group.

The senior U.S. official expressed concern that Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, a terrorist chief arrested for the brutal attacks in India, was still directing Lashkar operations while in custody, according to a U.S. government memo viewed by ProPublica. Gen. Kayani responded that Pakistan’s spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), had told prison authorities to better control Lakhvi’s access to the outside world, the memo says. But Kayani rejected a U.S. request that authorities take away the cell phone Lakhvi was using in jail, according to the memo to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the National Security Council.

The meeting was emblematic of the lack of progress three years after Lashkar and the ISI allegedly teamed up to kill 166 people in Mumbai, the most sophisticated and spectacular terror strike since the September 11 attacks. The U.S. government filed unprecedented charges against an ISI officer in the deaths of six Americans. Yet, Pakistani authorities have not arrested him or other accused masterminds. The failure to crack down on the jailed Lakhvi, whose trial has stalled, raises fears of new attacks on India and the West, counterterror officials say.

“Lakhvi is still the military chief of Lashkar,” a U.S. counterterror official said in an interview. “He is in custody but has not been replaced. And he still has access and ability to be the military chief. Don’t assume a Western view of what custody is.”

In the United States, stubborn questions persist about the case’s star witness, David Coleman Headley, a confessed Lashkar operative and ISI spy. The Pakistani-American’s testimony at a trial in Chicago this year revealed the ISI’s role in the Mumbai attacks and a plot against Denmark. It was the strongest public evidence to date of ISI complicity in terrorism.

But the trial shed little light on Headley’s past as a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration informant and the failure of U.S. agencies to pursue repeated warnings over seven years that could have stopped his lethal odyssey sooner — and perhaps prevented the Mumbai attack.

U.S. officials say Headley simply slipped through the cracks. If that is true, his story is a trail of bureaucratic dysfunction. But if his ties to the U.S. government were more extensive than disclosed — as widely believed in India — an operative may have gone rogue with tragic results. Both scenarios reveal the kind of breakdowns that the government has spent billions to correct since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Obama administration has not discussed results of an internal review of the case conducted last year, or disclosed whether any officials have been held accountable.

During an interview in Delhi, former Indian Home Secretary G.K. Pillai asserted that U.S. authorities know more about Headley than they have publicly stated. Several senior Indian security officials said they believe that U.S. warnings provided to India before the Mumbai attacks came partly from knowledge of Headley’s activities. They believe he remained a U.S. operative.

“David Coleman Headley, in my opinion, was a double agent,” said Pillai, who served in the top security post until this past summer. “He was working for both the U.S. and for Lashkar and the ISI.”

The CIA, FBI and DEA deny such allegations.

File photos of Mumbai's Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in November, 2004 (bottom) and on November 26, 2008 (top) as fire engulfs the top floor after a shootout with terrorists. (AFP PHOTO / PAL PILLAI (top) | AFP PHOTO/Getty Images/SEBASTIAN D'SOUZA (bottom))

An investigation by ProPublica and FRONTLINE during the past year did not find proof that Headley was working as a U.S. agent at the time of the attacks. But it did reveal new contradictions between the official version of events, Headley’s sworn testimony and detailed accounts of officials and others involved in the case. The reporting also turned up previously undisclosed opportunities for U.S. agencies to identify Headley as a terrorist threat, and new details about already-reported warnings.

U.S. and foreign officials say his role as an informant or ex-informant helped him elude detection as he was training in Pakistani terror camps and traveling back and forth to Mumbai to scout targets. And three counterterror sources say U.S. agencies learned enough about him to glean fragments of intelligence that contributed to the warnings to India about a developing plot against Mumbai.

In contrast, some U.S. officials say spotting a threat is harder than it seems. Glimmers of advance knowledge are part of the landscape of terrorism. In cases such as the Sept. 11 attacks and the 2004 Madrid train bombings, security forces had detected some of the suspects but not their plots.

“I just have to dispel some of these notions,” said Philip Mudd, a former top national security official at the FBI. “We look at a grain of sand and say … 'why couldn’t you put together the whole conspiracy when you saw that grain of sand?' Well, you got to reverse it. Every day coming into a threat brief, you’re not looking at a grain of sand and building a beach. You’re looking at a beach and trying to find a grain of sand.”

New information about the case comes partly from the DEA. After months of silence, DEA officials recently granted an interview with a ProPublica reporter and went over a timeline based on records about their former informant. The DEA officials said Headley’s relationship with the anti-drug agency was more limited than has been widely described.

The DEA officially deactivated Headley as a confidential source on March 27, 2002, according to a senior DEA official. That was weeks after he began training in Lashkar terror camps in Pakistan and six years before the Mumbai attacks. The senior official denied assertions that Headley had worked for the DEA in Pakistan while he trained with Lashkar in 2002 and beyond.

“The DEA did not send David Coleman Headley to Pakistan for the purpose of collecting post-9/11 information on terrorism or drugs,” the senior DEA official said.

The denial adds another version to a murky story. Officials at other U.S. agencies say Headley remained a DEA operative in some capacity until as late as 2005. Headley has testified that he did not stop working for the DEA until September 2002, when he had done two stints in the Lashkar camps.

Some U.S. officials and others involved say the government ended Headley’s probation for a drug conviction three years early in November 2001 to shift him from anti-drug work to gathering intelligence in Pakistan. They say the DEA discussed him with other agencies as a potential asset because of his links to Pakistan — including a supposed high-ranking relative in the ISI.

A senior European counterterror official who has investigated Headley in recent years thinks the American became an intelligence operative focused on terrorism.

“I don’t feel we got the whole story about Headley as an informant from the Americans,” the official said. “I think he was a drug informant and also some other kind of an informant.”

The transition from registered law enforcement source to secret counterterrorism operative would help explain the contradictory versions. But the duration and nature of intelligence work by Headley, if it was done, remain unknown.

Federal prosecutors and investigators declined to be interviewed on the record for this story. Pakistani officials, who also refused to be interviewed, have said they have cracked down on Lashkar and have denied that the ISI was involved in the Mumbai attacks.

Nonetheless, ProPublica and FRONTLINE talked to U.S. and foreign counterterror officials and other well-informed sources while reporting in the United States, India, Pakistan and Europe. A number of those officials and sources requested anonymity for their security or because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the sensitive case.

Headley was a wildly elusive figure who juggled allegiances with militant groups and security agencies, manipulating and betraying wives, friends and allies. He played a crucial role in an attack that had resounding international repercussions. And his unprecedented confessions opened a door into the secret world of terrorism and counterterrorism in South Asia — and closer to home.

Chapter 1: "The Prince"

[link to this chapter]

David Coleman Headley is not his original name.

The 51-year-old was born Daood Gilani in Washington, D.C. His father, Syed Saleem Gilani, was a renowned Pakistani broadcaster. His mother, Serrill Headley, was a free spirit from a wealthy Philadelphia family. They moved to Pakistan when he was a baby, but the parents divorced and Serrill returned alone.

David Headley, born Daood Gilani, with his mother, Serrill Headley. (PBS FRONTLINE)

Headley grew up in an environment of Pakistani nationalism and Islamic conservatism. During a war with India in 1971, a stray bomb hit his elementary school in Karachi, killing two people. The incident stoked his hatred of India, according to his later accounts.

Headley attended the Hasan Abdal Cadet College, where he met his friend Tahawwur Rana. During testimony at Rana’s trial this year in Chicago, Headley said he was proud of studying at the elite military school, though he did not graduate. He described Rana as a “very good” student and himself as “very bad.”

Rana’s wife recalled an anecdote about Headley’s approach to morning prayers.

“Dave, he knocks on all the doors of students and he says, 'Get up, get up, it’s time for prayer,’ ” Samraz Rana said in an interview. “And then when everybody gets up, he went to his room and went to sleep, you know. So he was laughing, he was like that.”

Headley clashed with his Pakistani stepmother. At 17, he returned Philadelphia to live with his mother. She owned the Khyber Pass, a trendy club that featured tarot readings and jazz and folk music. Her son helped manage the bar. He was tall and smooth and had a striking characteristic: One eye was brown, the other blue.

The Khyber Pass club (PBS FRONTLINE).

Employees nicknamed him “The Prince.”

“I think he was in culture shock,” said Djuna Wojton, a friend of his mother. “He spoke like with almost a British accent. And he was very well-mannered and very proper and polite.”

Headley enrolled at Valley Forge Military Academy & College but did not last long there. He studied at a community college and slid into heroin addiction. His first encounter with the law happened during a visit to Pakistan when he was 24. He used his friend Rana, then a Pakistani army medical student, as an unwitting shield.

The two drove to the tribal areas, where Headley bought half a kilogram of heroin and smuggled it back to Lahore, according to the DEA and Headley’s testimony. He thought Rana’s military ID card would prevent a police search if they were stopped, according to his testimony.

Days later, police in Lahore arrested Headley for drug possession, according to his testimony and U.S. officials. He somehow beat the charges.

In 1988, police caught him at the Frankfurt, Germany, airport en route to Philadelphia with two kilos of heroin hidden in a suitcase. The DEA took over, and he made a deal on the spot. His partners in Philadelphia got eight and 10 years in prison. He got four years.

It would become a pattern, said former CIA officer Marc Sageman, a respected terrorism expert who was a consultant for Rana’s defense.

“He just turns around immediately and betrays everybody when it’s convenient for him,” said Sageman.

Struggling with addiction, Headley spent six months in prison for a probation violation in 1995. He moved to New York, where he bought and operated video stores. Despite his criminal record, he managed to avoid prosecution a year later when police on Long Island arrested him for allegedly assaulting and threatening the former boyfriend of his new Canadian girlfriend, according to Nassau County authorities.

Chapter 2: Informant and Militant

[link to this chapter]

Headley overcame his addiction but not his taste for drug money.

In early 1997, the DEA arrested him in a sting at a Manhattan hotel. He signed up as a confidential DEA informant and was out on bail by August. In January 1998, the DEA sent Headley to Pakistan to dispel suspicions among traffickers about his absence. He used his wealthy father’s house in Lahore to meet with suppliers, and gathered useful intelligence during his first and only DEA-funded mission in Pakistan, the senior DEA official said.

“This was the only trip at the DEA’s behest,” the senior official said.

During his first 16 months as an informant, Headley infiltrated Pakistani heroin trafficking networks, generating five arrests and the seizure of 2½ kilos of heroin, the DEA says.

There were warning signs, however. He broke the rules by trying to set up dealers with jailhouse phone calls that were not monitored by agents, according to court records. He angled for leverage with his handlers, according to a close associate from that period.

“The DEA agents liked him,” the associate said. “He would brag about it. He was manipulating them. He said he had them in his pocket.”

One defendant was acquitted on grounds of entrapment, a rare finding in a drug case. Ikram Haq was a mentally impaired Pakistani immigrant. His lawyer, Sam Schmidt, convinced the jury that Headley conned his client into a heroin deal.

“My impression of him was a person who was in many ways a sociopath,” Schmidt said, “that he would be able to say anything that he thought would work to his benefit.”

Headley served another eight months in prison. He became a more devout Muslim behind bars, according to his associate. Soon after his release in 1999, probation officials permitted him to travel to Pakistan for a few weeks for an arranged marriage. His new wife remained in his family hometown of Lahore.

Headley returned to New York and resumed work for the DEA in early 2000. That April, he went undercover in an operation against Pakistani traffickers that resulted in the seizure of a kilo of heroin, according to the senior DEA official.

At the same time, Headley immersed himself in the ideology of Lashkar-i-Taiba. He took trips to Pakistan without permission of the U.S. authorities. And in the winter of 2000, he met Hafiz Saeed, the spiritual leader of Lashkar.

Saeed had built his group into a proxy army of the Pakistani security forces, which cultivated militant groups in the struggle against India. Lashkar was an ally of al Qaeda, but it was not illegal in Pakistan or the United States at the time.

Saeed made a statement that was Headley’s epiphany: “One second spent in jihad is superior to 100 years of worship and prayer.”

Hafiz Saeed, the spiritual leader of Lashkar. (Photo by Arif Ali/AFP/Getty Images)

In New York, Headley recruited for Lashkar, prayed intensely and studied Arabic, according to his associate and other sources. Headley talked about getting ready for jihad overseas. He prepared to sell his stores, underwent laser eye surgery and took horseback riding lessons, which he said would be useful for mountain training camps.

“He was living on the Upper West Side,” the associate said, “sleeping on the floor, eating rice and beans, acting really weird. He started collecting money for Lashkar, saying how great it was.”

Headley later testified that he told his DEA handler about his views about the disputed territory of Kashmir, Lashkar’s main battleground. But the senior DEA official insisted that agents did not know about his travel to Pakistan or notice his radicalization.

On Sept. 6, 2001, Headley signed up to work another year as a DEA informant, according to the senior DEA official.

Chapter 3: Mission in Pakistan?

[link to this chapter]

On Sept. 12, Headley’s DEA handler called him.

Agents were canvassing sources for information on the al Qaeda attacks of the day before. Headley angrily said he was an American and would have told the agent if he knew anything, according to the senior DEA official.

U.S. Navy Photo, Preston Keres

Headley began collecting counterterror intelligence, according to his testimony and the senior DEA official. He worked sources in Pakistan by phone, getting numbers for drug traffickers and Islamic extremists, according to his testimony and U.S. officials. He visited a mosque in Queens at the direction of the DEA, according to his testimony and officials.

But there was a dark side. A former girlfriend of Headley’s told a bartender named Terry O’Donnell that he wanted to go to Pakistan to fight alongside Islamic militants, according to law enforcement officials. She said he had praised the Sept. 11 attacks, recalled O’Donnell, now a New York firefighter.

“And then she went on and said he was happy to see it happen,” O’Donnell said in interview. “And he got off on watching the news over and over again.”

O’Donnell contacted an FBI-led task force that was investigating 9/11 — and an avalanche of tips. Residents of the traumatized city were reporting everything from people who spoke Arabic to neighbors who put out the garbage at odd hours. Investigators interviewed Headley’s mother and the girlfriend, who described his ideological support for militants in Kashmir, according to officials.

Terry O’Donnell reported Headley to law enforcement only weeks after 9/11. (PBS FRONTLINE)

It would be the only warning about Headley that resulted in an interrogation. On Oct. 4, two Defense Department agents working for the task force questioned him in front of his DEA handlers at the drug agency’s office, according to the senior DEA official.

Headley denied the accusations and cited his counterterror work, according to U.S. officials. He told the agents he had a distant Pakistani relative who was an Army general and the deputy director of the ISI, that nation’s powerful intelligence service, according to U.S. and Indian officials.

Today, U.S. intelligence believes the relative may have been Gen. Faiz Gilani, the ISI’s deputy director at the time, according to a U.S. counterterror official. The suspected family connection has not been confirmed, the counterterror official said. But it was a portentous detail.

The investigators cleared Headley. Although their informant had been interviewed by the FBI task force, the DEA handlers did not write a report, the senior DEA official said. In addition, he said the DEA has no record that agents looked into Headley’s claim about the ISI relative to determine whether it had intelligence value or, conversely, might show he was a liar.

Six weeks later, another unusual thing happened. A federal judge ended Headley’s probation three years early so he could travel to Pakistan. A transcript and accounts of participants show the hearing was rushed. Headley’s lawyer told the judge he had “just been handed all sorts of material.” A supervisory probation officer, Luis Caso, apologized because he had not had time to dress appropriately for court.

“Having a probation terminated early is rarely done. It's usually reserved for someone who’s very ill,” Caso said in an interview. “It was a last-minute thing.”

The government was in a hurry, said Caso, who is now retired.

“From what I remember, it's basically he was a very good cooperator at that time, working with the DEA, and he was going to do more of the same but overseas in Pakistan,” he said. “It was shortly after 9/11 occurred, and at that time, all the federal law enforcement agencies were doing their very best to investigate the terrorist activity, and whoever they had under their control for information purposes they had utilized to the maximum.”

Headley’s lawyer has a similar recollection. Howard Leader said prosecutors called him a few days earlier to tell him the hearing would take place.

“The fact that this was coming from the government, that was, frankly, highly unusual,” Leader said. “It's the only occasion I can recall it ever happening.”

Leader said he believed the DEA had made the request and that Headley would continue working for the agency in Pakistan.

“My recollection is, basically, it's a twofold mission,” Leader said. “There would be drug-related work specifically. But also, in light of the then-very-recent events on September the 11^th, I think that he was going to go back to Pakistan with a view towards meeting with or gathering whatever information he could that might be useful to the U.S. government regarding certain extremist elements there.”

An excited Headley told friends and family that he was leaving on a mission. He explained that “the FBI and DEA had joined forces” and he would work for them in Pakistan, according to his close associate.

The DEA gives a far different account. The senior DEA official said Headley told his handlers he wanted to return to Pakistan for family reasons. The senior official said the DEA agreed to support ending his probation because of his past cooperation. The DEA provided a letter to the judge describing his work on drugs and counterterrorism, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the case.

The DEA then deactivated him as a law enforcement informant, a process that became official on March 27 of the next year, according to the senior DEA official. Headley was paid a total of $3,925 while an informant, the senior official said. DEA agents did not work with him again after the hearing, the senior official said.

The transcript of the Nov. 16, 2001, hearing does not resolve the disputed versions. The prosecutor apparently did not know about Headley’s extremism, unauthorized travel or the task force interview weeks before; he called him an “outstanding supervisee” with “no problems.” The judge said probation was being ended “for the purposes of him returning” to Pakistan, and mentioned Headley’s “continuing cooperation.”

In the frenzied aftermath of Sept. 11, U.S. intelligence agencies were scrambling to recruit spies. With his language skills, Pakistani connections and undercover talents, Headley had potential. A U.S. law enforcement official familiar with the case said he doubts the government ended the probation early just to reward Headley, and even let him leave the country, because he suddenly decided to stop being an informant.

“It’s preposterous,” the official said. “It defies any sort of logic at all. U.S. attorneys are not in the business of granting presents for people. In the post-9/11 environment, there was a big push for intelligence assets.”

A number of DEA informants moved to counterterror work during that period. Some were passed to the FBI or CIA, and a few were run jointly by the DEA with other agencies, according to former U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials.

In fact, a counterterror source said the DEA had discussions with the FBI and other agencies in late 2001 about which agency could best use Headley. The discussions cited his allusion to a relative in the ISI as a potential benefit, the counterterror source said.

During his testimony this year, Headley said nothing about deciding to end his service as an informant before going to Pakistan. Asked when he stopped working for the DEA, he testified: “The following year, in September. … It was the time that I had signed up for.”

The world of informants is hazy, according to law enforcement veterans. Agents at the DEA, FBI and other agencies sometimes use unofficial “hip-pocket” sources, the veteran officials said. Ex-informants sometimes surface and provide intelligence. Or they try to use past relationships with the government to justify their behavior when they get in trouble.

Officials at other agencies say Headley remained a DEA operative in some capacity as late as 2005. The senior DEA official denied that, citing the agency’s detailed records on informants. He said he had no information on whether Headley shifted to intelligence work for another agency but would not rule out that possibility.

The CIA and FBI deny that Headley worked for them. Today, nobody wants any part of him.

Chapter 4: The Path to Holy War

[link to this chapter]

By February 2002, Headley was training in Lashkar’s mountain camps. He did a three-week introductory course on ideology and jihad.

The U.S. and Pakistan had outlawed Lashkar. But the ISI continued to fund, train and direct the group, which refrained from attacking Pakistan. The group’s global networks and storefront offices in Pakistan made it easier to join than al Qaeda. Lashkar camps churned out thousands of militants, some of whom went on to lead al Qaeda plots in the West.

That summer, Headley returned to New York and proposed to his Canadian-born girlfriend with a diamond ring in Central Park. Photos show he had bulked up and grown a long beard. His sharp profile and receding, slicked-back hair gave him a hawk-like look.

David Headley (PBS FRONTLINE)

In June, Headley visited his mother in Oxford, Pa., a small town about 50 miles from Philadelphia where she then ran a day-care center. She had become stout, favored colorful dresses and wore her hair short and dyed blonde. She was a regular customer at the Morning Glories café and spent many afternoons talking to co-owner Phyllis Keith.

One day, Headley's mother said she was concerned because he was training in militant camps in Pakistan. She told Keith he was increasingly fanatical and had described meeting teen-age trainees who had later died, according to U.S. officials.

“It was kind of like mother to mother: 'I’m really worried about my son,'” Keith recalled.

Keith had seen Headley once at the café. On a catering visit to his mother’s home, she noticed his car parked behind the house as if he were hiding it. Keith called the FBI in Philadelphia and told them about the mother’s account of Headley’s involvement with militants in Pakistan. The conversation lasted about five minutes, she said.

Headley later told an associate that an FBI agent had gone to his mother’s house and asked about him. But the FBI says there was no such visit. An agent in Philadelphia did basic record checks and closed the case, a law enforcement official said. The official did not know whether the agent was aware of the interview of Headley in New York the year before. Headley’s links to the DEA probably caused the FBI to see him as less of a threat, officials say.

Headley did his second Lashkar training stint in August. When he was not at the camps, he lived with his Pakistani wife in Lahore. By then, two of their four children had been born.

On Dec. 11, 2002, Headley returned to New York to marry his fiancée there. At the airport, border inspectors sent him to the secondary inspection area for questioning. It was not the first time. After his heroin smuggling arrest in 1988, border agencies placed him on a “drug lookout” list and stopped him at airports in 1993, 1996 and 2001 for questioning and luggage searches, according to U.S. officials.

This time, however, inspectors were on alert for potentially suspicious travel patterns to Pakistan and other hubs of terrorism. They found nothing amiss. Headley was not on a watch list, and the inspectors did not know about the allegations by O’Donnell and Keith, according to U.S. officials.

Days later, Headley married the Canadian woman at a resort in Jamaica. He did advanced Lashkar training in Pakistan in April, August and December. He wanted to fight in Kashmir, but the bosses had other ideas.

Sajid Mir, one of the Lashkar-i-Taiba masterminds behind the Mumbai attacks. (PBS FRONTLINE)

Headley was cultivated by Sajid Mir, a chief in charge of foreign recruits. Mir was about 30, a rising star. He was waging global jihad at a time when many Western authorities mistakenly saw Lashkar as a threat limited to India.

“My impression was that he was an authority and a power in his own right,” said Charles Wardle, a former Lashkar operative from New Zealand. “He could pretty much do whatever he wanted.”

Wardle, now 28, is one of Mir’s few known recruits who is not dead or in prison. He was an angry drifter who arrived at Lashkar headquarters in the heady days of the fall of 2001. He hung out with American, French and British trainees whom Mir later deployed to procure equipment and scout targets in the United States and to carry out a bomb plot in Australia that was foiled in 2003.

The recruits included a Korean-American and a French-Caribbean convert: Mir was looking for operatives with unlikely profiles suited to espionage-style work.

Mir didn’t let Wardle take paramilitary training because he had just converted to Islam. But Mir gave him travel cash and kept in touch as Wardle traveled to Saudi Arabia, where Lashkar militants helped him make his way to Iraq in time for the outbreak of the war.

Wardle narrowly survived combat alongside militants in the north.

In the summer of 2003, Mir sent Wardle from Pakistan to Dubai, a hub of Lashkar activity, for training in the use of explosives and espionage techniques. Mir visited him in Dubai.

Mir gave “the impression … that I would be returning to my country,” Wardle said. “I can only guess, but explosives training, I guess he would have had a target in mind.”

Charles Wardle, a New Zealander recruited to Lashkar by Sajid Mir. (PBS FRONTLINE)

Before training could begin, however, Dubai police arrested and deported Wardle in a round-up of Islamic extremists. Mir was also detained in Dubai at some point but used Lashkar connections to get out of it, according to investigative documents.

Mir did not seem fazed by the incident or, in 2007, by his conviction in absentia in France on terror charges. Pakistan did nothing in response to the verdict or an Interpol warrant from Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière, who led the French investigation. Bruguière is convinced that Mir was in the military or ISI.

“When you send an Interpol warrant and a country ignores it, it tends to confirm my theory that he was extremely powerful, that he was protected at high levels,” Bruguière said in an interview. “And the fact that no one has done anything about him, even today, confirms it once again.”

Other investigators believe Mir was close to the security forces but not an officer.

“There are a lot of questions about Sajid Mir,” Sageman said. “Is he really an ISI person who is within Lashkar-i-Taiba? Or is he a Lashkar-i-Taiba person who was trained by the military in the background? It doesn’t matter because, in a sense, Lashkar-i-Taiba was a proxy of the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate.”

Chapter 5: Narrow Escapes

[link to this chapter]

Mir told Headley he wanted to use him for missions in India.

The American suggested he could perfect his cover by changing his name to hide his Pakistani ancestry and using a Chicago immigration consulting firm owned by Rana, his boyhood friend. Mir loved both ideas.

In the summer of 2005, Headley saw his Canadian wife in New York. He had applied for a green card for her, even though his marriage to his Pakistani wife was known to U.S. immigration, officials say.

The Canadian was furious. He had gone for months without communicating with her from Pakistan. She had called Headley’s father in Lahore, and he told her about the Pakistani wife and children, according to Headley’s associate and U.S. officials. The father said Headley claimed to be working for the U.S. government but was spending time in the Lashkar camps, the associate said.

On Aug. 25, Headley and his wife argued at his video store, and he allegedly hit her. Police arrested him on charges of assault. The wife also called a terror tip line. Headley had told her a lot over the years, even calling and emailing from the training camps. She knew more about Lashkar, a relatively obscure group, than most Westerners, officials say.

Agents from the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force interviewed her three times. She told them about his extremist activities, overseas training and acquisition of equipment for the terror group. She said he had told her periodically that he was working as a U.S. informant in Pakistan, according to officials and the close associate.

An FBI agent called Headley’s former DEA handler, according to the senior DEA official. The FBI agent said the wife had claimed, curiously enough, that the drug agent had obtained night-vision goggles for Headley, according to the senior DEA official.

The DEA agent denied that assertion, the senior official said. The drug agent said Headley was no longer his informant and that the agent had not known Headley to threaten the United States, according to the senior official. The FBI agent said he felt the wife “had an ax to grind” because of the other wife in Pakistan, the senior DEA official said.

The FBI knew about the previous allegations in New York and Philadelphia, according to U.S. law enforcement officials. Yet, the agents did not question Headley as a suspect or even as a potential source of intelligence, officials say.

“Why close a case when you have a guy going to Pakistan to train?” said a U.S. law enforcement official who believes Headley was still an informant. “He could have been training with al Qaeda, too. We keep cases open for years on people.”

A senior law enforcement official said Headley’s past with the drug agency influenced the FBI’s decision that he was not a threat. The report went into the FBI’s Guardian Lead system, which was created to improve the tracking of leads in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Headley soon found out about his wife’s tip, but it didn’t affect his activities, officials say. He went to Philadelphia and initiated the legal name change from Daood Gilani to David Coleman Headley, adopting his mother’s family name. Pennsylvania officials did a required check for a criminal record but apparently did not find his two federal drug convictions, according to state documents and officials.

As for his wife’s assault charges, there were several hearings before the prosecution was dropped, officials say.

In January 2006, Headley took another big step: He was recruited by an ISI officer named Major Iqbal. U.S. counterterror officials believe Iqbal was in Directorate S, the wing of the spy agency that works with militant groups.

Headley and Iqbal met at a safe house with a colonel who was Iqbal’s commanding officer. It has not been revealed whether Headley mentioned his relative in the ISI.

“I told him that I was being sent to India and that I had applied for a name change and would be getting that in the near future,” Headley testified . “I was planning to leave for the United States at that time. So he told me to leave and call him after I returned.”

On Feb. 7, Headley had a familiar experience at JFK International. Border inspectors sent him to the secondary inspection area for questioning because his travel had caught their attention. He told them he had been visiting family and described himself as an owner of a video store, officials say.

The ex-convict had a lot to hide: The three FBI inquiries. His upcoming mission. His recruitment by the ISI. The pending name change.

But the inspectors, once again, didn’t have access to databases where leads were stored, officials say. Nor was his name on a watch list. Headley eluded detection again.

At about this time, Headley called his former DEA handler for a brief social conversation, according to the senior DEA official. The official said this was the DEA’s only documented contact with Headley between November 2001 and his arrest in 2009.

Armed with his new name, Headley became a Pakistani spy.
Noncommissioned officers trained him in espionage techniques during dozens of sessions at a safe house and on the streets of Lahore. Now he had two handlers: Mir and Major Iqbal. They ran him in tandem but always met with him separately to maintain deniability.

U.S. investigators have corroborated Headley’s contacts with Mir, Major Iqbal and other ISI officers through emails, phone intercepts, witness accounts and other evidence.

“I’m trying to think of another case where we saw somebody who was an international jihadist direct against foreign targets that would involve the killing of Americans and who was also so deeply involved … with [a] foreign security service,” said Mudd, the former FBI official. “I can’t remember another case like that.”

In June 2006, another warning made its way into the government. Headley’s estranged Canadian wife filed a petition for permanent residency with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services under a law for abused spouses, according to U.S. officials.

In addition to accusing him of abuse, the petition recounted Headley’s radicalization, travel and militant training, his hatred for Jews and Hindus and his praise for suicide bombers. It mentioned his claims of working for the U.S. government and the 2005 FBI inquiry, according to officials and the close associate.

The green card was granted. The petition “raised concerns” at the immigration service, a U.S. official said. But privacy laws governing immigration issues are even stricter for cases of abused spouses, the official said. As a result, the immigration service did not advise law enforcement about the disturbing portrait of a potential terrorist, the U.S. official said.

Chapter 6: Target Mumbai

[link to this chapter]

Headley spent most of the next two years in Mumbai developing a blueprint for terror.

Funded by $25,000 from Major Iqbal, he opened an office of Rana’s firm as a front. Like many Pakistanis, Headley had a conflicted relationship with India, according to an Indian counterterror official familiar with his questioning by Indian investigators in Chicago last year.

“He told us: ‘I like everything about India,’” the official said. “'I like the food, the people. But I don’t like India.'”

The Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, rebuilt after the 2008 attacks. (PBS FRONTLINE)

Headley had fun in the city he was planning to devastate. He joined an upscale gym, befriending a Bollywood actor who introduced him to the elite party scene. He hung out in the Colaba area of south Mumbai, where he tried to romance a 25-year-old who owned a café, according to Indian investigators. He stayed at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, the prime target designated by his handlers. It was a landmark on the waterfront by the Gateway to India monument. He charmed employees, praising the opulent architecture, going on in-house tours and shooting hours of video.

In 2007, things got more complicated on the domestic front. Headley met a young Moroccan in Lahore and soon married her. Faiza Outalha was a medical student and Western in outlook, but Headley had her dress in traditional Muslim style. This created a problem when she insisted on accompanying him to Mumbai, because he was posing as a non-Muslim American. A stay at the Taj ended in a tearful spat, and he sent her back to Lahore.

Mir and Major Iqbal later scolded Headley about endangering his cover, according to investigators. Headley soon broke up with Outalha. In December 2007, she got into an altercation outside Headley’s house with his servant. She filed assault charges against Headley, who spent eight days in jail in Lahore. Major Iqbal intervened to free him, according to an Indian investigative report.

Faiza Outalha (PBS FRONTLINE)

Outalha did something more drastic. She reported him to the U.S. embassy in Islamabad. During interviews in December, January and April, she met with agents of the State Department’s security bureau and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Outalha described his involvement with Lashkar and visits to India, saying he was on a secret mission. She told them she had stayed at the Taj hotel with him. She called him a drug dealer, terrorist and spy, according to officials.

In a later account to an investigator, Outalha admitted that she had mixed the truth with false and emotional accusations. But she said the agents had an inch-thick file about Headley on the table when she talked to them. When she mentioned his training at Lashkar camps, the Americans told her they already knew about that, according to her account.

As with past tips, U.S. officials say her warnings were not specific enough and that angry spouses often make bogus allegations. But officials have not clarified a key point: whether the embassy officials learned about the previous FBI inquiries, which would have reinforced her credibility. The prior cases, combined with her allegations, could have led investigators directly to Headley’s reconnaissance work.

The State Department security agent communicated the wife’s warning in an information package to the CIA, FBI and DEA, according to U.S. officials. It’s not clear whether anyone did anything further. The DEA senior official says he has not seen any record that his agency was informed.

Headley learned about Outalha’s tip to the embassy, but it did not have much of an impact on him, according to testimony and U.S. officials.

In the 10 months before the attacks in November 2008, the FBI and CIA issued half a dozen increasingly urgent and specific warnings to Indian counterparts, according to Indian and U.S. officials. The U.S. agencies warned that Lashkar was plotting to attack Mumbai, that Westerners and foreigners would be targeted and that the Taj hotel was a target. As a result, the Taj beefed up its security defenses in September.

U.S. officials have not disclosed the sources of the warnings. Indian security chiefs are convinced the information came partly from Headley. They think he was still a U.S. informant.

“You would call him a double agent,” said former Home Secretary Pillai. “If they went deep into the records, I think they would find there was enough evidence to show that he was involved in some planning or an attack in India. And I think at some level in the United States, some agencies decided that can be kept under wraps because he’s doing something for [them].”

A senior Indian counterterror official admitted that Indian agencies must share the blame because they failed to respond effectively to the U.S. warnings. He and other Indian security officials praised U.S. cooperation on aspects of the case. But he said he is suspicious.

“I think he was a U.S. agent,” the official said. “Maybe this information came from him. Maybe he was telling them part of what he knew but not all of it. … It’s good to develop informants like that and infiltrate organizations. That is what intelligence agencies are supposed to do. But they could have taken us into confidence and told us about him.”

In response, U.S. counterterror officials insist that Headley was not a double agent and that they did not have prior knowledge of his involvement in the plot.

“I know where those warnings came from,” a U.S. official said, “and they didn’t come from Headley.”

On the other hand, three counterterror sources described a different scenario to ProPublica. The sources said they do not think Headley was a double agent at the time of the attacks. But they said U.S. officials learned enough about his activities to become concerned, monitor him intermittently and pick up fragments of intelligence that contributed to the warnings to India. Investigators did not realize he was a central figure in the plot until later, the sources said.

If that scenario is true, it remains a tightly guarded secret.

Headley, meanwhile, wrapped up his mission. The targets were chosen by Major Iqbal, an officer in a military that has received billions of dollars from the United States. Iqbal wanted to ensure that Americans and Jews would die.

Responding to dissent in Lashkar and defections to al Qaeda and other groups, the ISI and Lashkar designed the attack to fortify the group’s global image, according to Headley and other sources. There are also suspicions that hard-line ISI officers and militants wanted to torpedo attempts at rapprochement between India and Pakistan.

The dimensions and duration of the plot, which could have caused a war, make it hard to believe high-ranking ISI officials were not aware of it, U.S. counterterror experts say.

“The way the ISI is structured and the way things function in that part of the world, this is not a couple of guys,” said Charles Faddis, a former CIA counterterror chief who worked in South Asia. “This is not a couple of junior or mid-level individuals who have the capacity to put together this level of an operation and escape detection. That’s just not credible. So whether that translates to a decision by ISI formally as an institution from the top down or not, I can’t say. … But it’s going to have to be sanctioned at a pretty senior level.”

The final targets were the Taj hotel, the Leopold Café, the Chabad House Jewish community center, the CST train station and the Oberoi-Trident Hotel. The Oberoi had not been on Headley’s reconnaissance list, but he scouted it anyway.

“I was in the area, and I was going to watch a movie in a nearby theater, and I had about an hour left,” he testified. “So I went there, and I just made the video.”

Thirty-three people died at the Oberoi because of his whim. They included Naomi Scherr, a 13-year-old from Virginia who was shot in the head as she ate dinner with her father, who also died.

Chapter 7: “Congrats On Your Graduation”

[link to this chapter]

On the night of Nov. 26, 2008, Headley was at home in Lahore when Mir sent him a text message. It said: “Turn on your television.”

The siege of Mumbai lasted three excruciating days. The 10-man attack team arrived by sea, landing at a fishermen’s slum chosen by Headley for its strategic location. The young gunmen had never been to India. They were guided by Headley’s videos and written reports, his provision of GPS coordinates and his work with a Pakistani Navy frogman on the maritime approach.

Mir and other Lashkar bosses directed the slaughter by phone from a command post in Karachi. Their calls were intercepted by Indian intelligence and have been subsequently broadcast in international television reports.

Security footage of the Mumbai attackers (PBS FRONTLINE)

Headley watched the coverage with his Moroccan wife; they had reconciled weeks earlier. He got a celebratory email from his Pakistani wife, whom he had moved with their children to Chicago in September. The wife knew about his reconnaissance and praised him in an email using coded language, according to court testimony.

“Congrats on your graduation,” the wife wrote on Nov. 28, according to court documents. “Graduation ceremony is really great. Watched the movie the whole day.”

Headley was already thinking about his next mission.

In October, Major Iqbal and Mir had visited him at home, the first time he had seen his ISI and Lashkar handlers together, according to Headley’s testimony. They wanted to take their holy war to Europe. They assigned him to scout the Jyllands-Posten newspaper of Denmark, a terrorist target because it had published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

Headley visited his family in Chicago over the Christmas holiday. He learned that yet another tipster had gone to the FBI, according to his testimony. It was a female friend of his mother, who had died earlier in the year. Apparently motivated by news of the Mumbai attacks, the woman contacted the Wilmington, Del., FBI office, which passed the lead to the Philadelphia field office.

Interviewed on Dec. 1, the tipster said Headley’s mother had told her years earlier that her son was fighting alongside militants in Pakistan. The tipster said she believed he was still involved in militant activity. FBI agents reviewed records and found “most or all” of the warnings dating back to 2001, according to a senior U.S. law enforcement official.

On Dec. 21, agents interviewed Farid Gilani, Headley’s cousin in Philadelphia. He deceived them by saying Headley was in Pakistan, according to testimony. The cousin called Headley in Chicago to alert him, according to testimony. In an email to a militant in Pakistan, Headley speculated that the FBI’s interest was related to the allegations months earlier at the U.S. embassy by his Moroccan wife, whom he called “M2.”

“So I think that it is OK, just routine, because of what M2 said before," Headley wrote on Dec. 24.

Lashkar had just pulled off a terror spectacular, killing six Americans. Headley was an American. Half a dozen leads over seven years painted a picture connecting him to Lashkar and the Taj hotel.

Yet, the FBI did not go find him in Chicago. Agents put the inquiry on hold because they thought he was out of the country, officials say.

“It is surprising that after Mumbai the FBI didn’t pick up on him,” a senior U.S. counterterror official said. “You would have thought they would have scrubbed records for anyone in the U.S. with Lashkar connections and tried to work him as a source or investigative lead.”

Headley went to Copenhagen, Denmark, in mid-January of 2009. There was no high life this time. He stayed at the Hotel Nebo, a discreet establishment behind the central train station on a strip frequented by prostitutes and drug addicts.

Copenhagen, Denmark. (PBS FRONTLINE)

But his approach was the same. He did video surveillance, assessed target areas and took notes. He looked into renting an apartment as a safe house for an attack team. Using Rana’s firm as a cover again, he talked to a young Danish woman about a possible job as a secretary, according to European counter-terror officials and interviews in Denmark.

On Jan. 20, he went to the newspaper offices in historic King’s Square.

“I looked up, and a gentleman, a businessman, walked through the door,” recalled Gitte Johansen, who was the receptionist in the street-level lobby. “He looked as if he was, you know, he had a certain goal … as if he had a meeting, for instance. So I let him through the second door. … He was tall, light-tanned, business suit and tie, very friendly and very serious but in a friendly way, explaining to me that he was in Denmark because of his business. He had moved from U.S. to Denmark, and he wanted to buy space in our newspaper for advertisement.”

Headley met with an advertising representative in the lobby for about 15 minutes. He drove to the city of Aarhus, cased the newspaper building there and met with another advertising representative, according to investigators and newspaper employees.

Headley returned to Pakistan and met with his handlers. In March, they decided to put the plot on hold. Responding to foreign pressure, Pakistani authorities had arrested Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi — Lashkar’s military leader — and a few other suspects.

Headley had grown disenchanted with Lashkar. He shifted to al Qaeda with the help of a friend named Abderrehman Syed, a former Army major who had left Lashkar.

“He said they were conducting the ISI’s jihad and we should conduct God’s jihad,” Headley testified.

Ilyas Kashmiri (File photo by Saeed Khan/AFP/Getty Images)

Despite his declarations, Syed retained contact with an ISI colonel who had been his handler, according to investigative documents. Syed, in turn, became Headley’s latest handler. He introduced him to Ilyas Kashmiri, a notorious Pakistani terror chief, who took over sponsorship of the Denmark plot, according to Headley’s testimony and other evidence.

Kashmiri was enthusiastic. He gave Headley the names of militants in Britain and Sweden who could help with funds and weapons and possibly take part in an attack. Kashmiri said the gunmen should storm the newspaper, Mumbai-style, then put on a media spectacle.

He wanted them to behead hostages and throw the heads out of windows into King’s Square.

Chapter 8: The Downfall

[link to this chapter]

Back in Chicago that summer, Headley prepared for his second reconnaissance trip to Denmark.

He communicated with two al Qaeda operatives in Britain referred to him by Kashmiri. Once again, Headley strayed into a law enforcement net. This time, though, he didn’t slip out.

In July, British intelligence learned about his impending visit and notified the FBI. On July 23, the FBI passed a lead to U.S. Customs and Border Protection for assistance: A man named David, possibly an American, a suspected associate of Lashkar and al Qaeda, would soon fly to Manchester via Chicago and Frankfurt, according to U.S. officials.

Border agency analysts began sifting through hundreds of possible candidates on passenger lists. The next day, another detail surfaced: The suspect would fly Lufthansa. An analyst quickly zeroed in and identified Headley because of his past travel and stops at secondary inspection. The FBI’s Chicago field office took charge of the investigation and coordinated with European counterparts.

Headley’s meeting in the English town of Derby on July 26 did not go well. The militants, known as Simon and Bash, didn’t want to participate in the attack and couldn’t supply weapons. They gave him about $15,000 to finance the plot, according to his testimony and other evidence.

Headley continued to Stockholm to see a veteran militant named Farid. The reception was worse. An agitated Farid told Headley to leave him alone because Swedish police had him under tight surveillance, according to European counterterror officials. The officials say Farid declared: “Sorry, brother, I can’t help you.”

A discouraged Headley took a train to Copenhagen on July 31. Danish intelligence was waiting for him. Danish agents shadowed his every step. They monitored his calls and his visits to seedy neighborhoods to talk to drug dealers about acquiring guns. When he rented a bicycle, they followed on bikes, according to a senior European counterterror official.

“He rode up and down the street past an army barracks, filming with a video camera,” the European official said. “That raised eyebrows.”

Headley returned via Atlanta on Aug. 5. He was on a watch list now. Airport inspectors questioned him, then let him go so the FBI could continue surveillance. Investigators soon came to suspect he had been involved in the Mumbai attacks. They dug into his past, debriefing his former DEA handler and reviewing records of prior inquiries, officials say.

The two-month surveillance operation drew high-level interest, according to Mudd, the former top FBI national security official.

“I remember hearing about the case and it immediately boiling up to the top of our morning threat briefings,” Mudd said. “We sat down every morning with the director of the FBI and with the attorney general to talk about what’s happening in the United States. … And all of a sudden you have … an [al Qaeda-] affiliated organization, Laskhar-i-Taiba, that had a presence in the heartland of the United States and not only a presence but a man who’d been involved in a murder of 160-something people.”

On Oct. 9, the FBI arrested Headley at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. He was bound for Pakistan with his Denmark videos in his luggage. He had planned to meet with his terror bosses and return to Denmark. He had been talking about an attack he could do himself, perhaps assassinating an editor, according to officials and testimony.

Headley during a post-arrest interview. (PBS FRONTLINE)

Headley’s former DEA handler came to Chicago for the arrest. The drug agent’s presence sent an unspoken message: time to cooperate. FBI agents read Headley his rights, and he started talking. He kept talking for 15 days.

His interrogation and later trial testimony provided unprecedented evidence on Lashkar, the ISI, al Qaeda, plots, targets, leaders, methods. Supervised by agents, he communicated with people overseas in attempts to lure Mir out of Pakistan and set a trap for a militant in Germany, according to testimony.

None of it worked. So Headley turned on Rana, his old friend. He revealed that Rana had helped him use his immigration firm as cover during the Mumbai and Denmark plots. He testified against Rana at the Chicago trial, which ended with a conviction on two of three counts of material support of terrorism.

Headley agreed to a plea bargain that spared him from the death penalty and extradition to India, Denmark or Pakistan. He now faces a maximum sentence of life in prison. According to investigators, he has steadfastly protected one person: his Pakistani wife, Shazia.

“His condition when he spoke to us was that he accepted no questions about Shazia,” said the Indian counterterror official familiar with the Indian interrogation of Headley. “He said: ‘She is the only one who has given me four children. Despite my philandering, she has been faithful. She has been loyal to me. She is a devoted Muslim. I admire her.’”

Epilogue: Questions And Contradictions

[link to this chapter]

The epilogue has been like the prologue: a trail of impunity and mystery.

In addition to Major Iqbal, Mir and two other accused Lashkar masterminds were indicted this year by U.S. federal prosecutors. Despite abundant evidence, Pakistan has not arrested or charged them — or half a dozen other top suspects, officials say.

The targeting of the West in Mumbai and Denmark has raised fears that Lashkar could become a more formidable threat than a diminished al Qaeda.

“Now we wonder if they think about the political ramifications of an attack on the U.S. or the West,” a U.S. counterterror official said. “The presumption has been that they did, or that ISI did and controlled their targeting with this mindset. Is it really a constraint now? Do they really worry about a crackdown if they do another attack on the West? What would be going too far for them?”

Pakistan’s Federal Investigative Agency, the equivalent of the FBI, is in charge of the investigation. But in reality, no one in Pakistan is trying to arrest Major Iqbal, Sajid Mir or the others, U.S. and Indian officials say.

Pakistani officials deny that Major Iqbal was an ISI officer. That only makes it harder to understand why he has not been arrested. It raises questions about the potential knowledge and involvement of ISI chiefs.

The director of the ISI during the period in which the Mumbai plot developed, Gen. Nadeem Taj, stepped down two months before the 2008 attacks as the result of pressure from foreign governments concerned that he was soft on militants, according to Western officials. Taj previously was the top military officer in the garrison city of Abbottabad during the period that Osama bin Laden established himself in hiding there, officials say.

“We, as a government, want to say that the Pakistanis are in our corner,” said Faddis, the former CIA counterterror chief. “Obviously, it’s way more complicated than that. And there are a whole bunch of folks in Pakistan and in the ISI who are not at all on the same sheet of music with us here. So even when they have cooperated with us over the years, it is often basically because they’ve been forced to. …Then we have a number of individuals within ISI who are very sympathetic to the folks that we are targeting.”

The official U.S. version of the case presents contradictions as well.

In response to ProPublica stories last year detailing the 2005 tip about Headley, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence led a multiagency review of Headley’s contacts with the U.S. government. But the DNI has declined to discuss the findings or any consequences. During the review process, agencies pointed fingers at each other, according to knowledgeable officials.

Although the litany of warnings about Headley paints a grim picture, officials at the FBI and other agencies assert that the allegations lacked specificity. They say Lashkar was not seen as a major threat before Mumbai. They cite the sheer volume of terror-related leads, especially after the Sept. 11 attacks. And they say some problems in tracking threats revealed by the case have been corrected as systems have improved.

A security camera photo of Headley in Mumbai's airport on July 2008. (PBS FRONTLINE)

But the questions linger. And the man at the center of the labyrinth is fittingly contradictory and enigmatic.

Headley slid among personas and cultures with ease, not completely at home in any of them. He spouted hateful anti-Semitic and anti-Indian rhetoric but loved the films of the Coen brothers and Bollywood. He veered from caring and generous to cold and treacherous. He washed out of military schools and clashed with authority figures, yet saw himself as a warrior and hoped his son would become a special forces commando.

Investigators and experts suggest a variety of motivations driving him: ideology, money, women, glory and, above all, an appetite for adrenalin.

“The pattern is risk-taking,” said Sageman. “He wants to live for the moment. He is not above taking crazy risks. … He just likes the adventure. He loves the game.”

–

Contributing: Sabrina Shankman and David Montero for PBS FRONTLINE.

Related Features:

Interactive timeline: Headley's Lethal Odyssey
More Coverage: Pakistan’s Terror Connections
PBS FRONTLINE series page
FRONTLINE: Could This Man’s Warnings Have Prevented the Mumbai Attacks?
FRONTLINE:: Slideshow: An American’s Path to the Mumbai Attacks

Watch the FRONTLINE movie:

Support for Mumbai Terror Group Lands Chicagoan 14-Year Prison Term

2013-01-17T17:00:02-05:00

by Sebastian Rotella

Update (1/17): This story has been updated and expanded to reflect results of Tahawwur Rana's sentencing hearing.

CHICAGO — A federal judge Thursday sentenced a Chicago immigration consultant to 14 years in prison for his role in supporting the Pakistani terrorist group that worked with Pakistan's intelligence service to carry out the 2008 Mumbai attacks and plot a follow-up strike in Denmark.

Prosecutors had requested a 30-year sentence for Tahawwur Rana, 52, whom a jury convicted in 2011 on two counts of material support of terrorism of the Lashkar-i-Taiba militant group and of a plot to attack a Danish newspaper that published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

Rana had been acquitted on charges of serving as an accomplice in the Mumbai attacks, which killed 166 people, including six Americans. His 2011 trial, however, revealed strong evidence that Pakistan's spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), played a direct role in an operation that was designed to kill Americans and other Westerners. Pakistan receives billions of dollars in U.S. aid.

Rana's relatively minor role in the case grew out of his long friendship with the star prosecution witness: the enigmatic David Coleman Headley, who used a cover as a representative of Rana's immigration firm to do reconnaissance in India and Denmark. Headley, a Pakistani-American businessman and former drug informant, avoided the death penalty by pleading guilty to participating in those plots as an operative of Lashkar, the ISI and al Qaeda. He is scheduled to be sentenced next week.

At Thursday's sentencing, U.S. District Judge Harry Leinenweber cited a key finding by the jury in Rana's trial. Despite Rana's awareness that Headley was involved with Lashkar and the ISI as early as 2005, the judge said the jury had accepted Rana's argument that he was not aware of the Mumbai plot and that his support of Lashkar did not play a role in that 2008 massacre.

The judge rejected a prosecution request for a "terrorism enhancement" of the sentence on the grounds that the foiled 2009 plot was intended to influence the Danish government. Instead, Leinenweber found that the target was limited to the Jyllands-Posten, a private newspaper, and was meant to intimidate journalists.

On the other hand, Judge Leinenweber chose a punishment that was higher than the minimum 11 years in prison under federal sentencing guidelines. He underscored the seriousness of the crime, recalling that the terrorist masterminds wanted a team of gunmen to storm the newspaper building in downtown Copenhagen, decapitate hostages and throw the heads out of the windows to provoke public horror and a frantic police response. The judge also said Rana's awareness of Headley's involvement in the Mumbai massacre left no doubt as to the murderous potential.

A mindset that would contemplate such a slaughter "is something that I just frankly don't understand," Leinenweber said. "This is about as serious as you can get. It only would have been more serious if it was carried out ... Something I have to take into consideration is to protect the public from future crimes of this defendant."

Leinenweber also added five years of post-prison supervision to Rana's sentence.

The bespectacled Rana, who wore an orange prison uniform, did not make a statement in court. He has aged considerably since his arrest in October 2009. His hair and beard have turned gray, and he suffered a heart attack and other health problems in Chicago's Metropolitan Correctional Center. As an accused terrorist, he was held for 13 months in a harsh solitary confinement regime usually designated for problem inmates, according to his lawyer, Patrick Blegen.

Arguing for leniency, Blegen described Rana as a loving father of three with no criminal record and a background as a medical doctor in Pakistan and a businessman in Canada and the United States. Although he said Rana accepts blame for his crime, he called his client another victim of Headley, whose globe-trotting odyssey as a drug dealer, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration informant, terrorist and Pakistani spy was full of deception and manipulation.

Rana and Headley's friendship began when they attended military school in Pakistan. Rana later helped Headley overcome his heroin addiction, Blegen said, and put up his house as bond when Headley was arrested on heroin smuggling charges. Rana's attorneys have criticized the plea bargain that allowed Headley, a frontline operative who had access to Pakistani terror chiefs and spymasters, to testify against his old friend.

"It's impossible to talk about Rana without talking about Headley," Blegen said. "He got sucked into this by Headley. There was no suggestion he was looking to do jihadist things on his own. He was someone who succumbed to the advances of Headley."

In contrast, Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel J. Collins cited intercepts of conversations in which Rana praised the mastermind of the Mumbai plot and said the gunmen who carried out the massacre deserved Pakistan's highest military honor. Rana's willingness to join the Denmark plot reveals his true personality, Collins told the judge.

"He knew they had blood on their hands," Collins said. "And it didn't give him pause for an instant. That speaks volumes about who he is."

There was little discussion during the sentencing hearing about the most explosive aspect of the case: the revelation of the ISI's active role in terrorism against the West. One difficulty that prosecutors faced was that Rana had contact with Headley's ISI handler and an al Qaeda operative, but not with Lashkar figures other than Headley. The sentence and jury verdict reinforce the defense's assertion that, during the three years he prepared the Mumbai attacks, Headley kept Rana largely in the dark and duped him into thinking they were working mainly with the ISI on espionage in India.

Rana helped Headley conduct undercover terrorist reconnaissance by allowing him to work as an overseas representative of his immigration consulting firm. Rana enabled Headley to open an office in Mumbai, use business cards, obtain visas and otherwise maintain a cover.

The two friends were arrested in Chicago in October 2009 as Headley prepared for a third visit to Denmark to conduct surveillance for an attack on the Jyllands-Posten. In trial testimony that gave an unprecedented look into the terrorist underworld in Pakistan, Headley described how he was recruited, trained, funded and directed by Lashkar and the ISI to do two years of surveillance on luxury hotels, a Jewish center and other targets in Mumbai.

Federal prosecutors used Headley's account and corroborating evidence to file charges against a suspected mastermind of the Mumbai attacks known only as Major Iqbal, Headley's alleged ISI handler — the first time the U.S. government has charged a serving Pakistani intelligence officer with terrorism. Major Iqbal is charged with the murders of six U.S. citizens who died in Mumbai. Pakistan has refused repeated U.S. requests to arrest him.

Prosecutors also charged three Lashkar bosses who directed the three-day rampage by 10 gunmen in Mumbai from a control room in Pakistan. Pakistani authorities arrested one of those militant bosses and a few other suspects, but their trial in Pakistan has stalled. The failure to judge them and capture other top figures has intensified accusations that Pakistan protects Lashkar, which Western and Indian counterterror agencies regard as a proxy of the ISI.

Major Iqbal remains a serving officer in the ISI, and accused masterminds, including Sajid Mir, whose voice was caught on telephone intercepts as he directed the slaughter in Mumbai, continue to run the terrorist group, according to Western and Indian counterterror officials.

U.S. Government Pressures Pakistan on Mumbai Terror Group

2012-08-31T12:02:01-05:00

by Sebastian Rotella

The Obama administration's decision to designate the leadership of Pakistan's Lashkar-e-Taiba group as terrorists this week sends a pointed, if largely symbolic, message to a Pakistani government that remains unable or unwilling to crack down on the extremist organization.

On Thursday, the Treasury Department issued an order against eight Lashkar leaders that prohibits Americans from doing business with them and freezes any of their assets under U.S. jurisdiction. The suspects targeted include Sajid Mir, who was indicted by U.S. prosecutors last year for allegedly working with Pakistan's spy agency to direct the 2008 terror attacks on Mumbai that killed 166 people, including six Americans.

ProPublica has reported extensively on the attacks and the ties between Lashkar and Pakistani intelligence. The other Laskhar chiefs named Thursday by Treasury are accused of running finances, propaganda and military operations against U.S. forces in Afghanistan, where Lashkar cooperates with the Taliban and al Qaeda.

"Today's action against LET (Lashkar-e-Taiba) is Treasury's most comprehensive to date against this group and includes individuals participating in all aspects of Lashkar's operations,” David S. Cohen, the undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, said in a statement. "Attacking LET's facilitation networks is particularly important, since charitable donations LET raises in Pakistan — its primary revenue source — are used to fuel LET's military operations.”

The financial impact on Lashkar will be less than devastating, however. Although donations are a significant source of income, the militant group is also a longtime recipient of funds, arms, training and protection from Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), according to Western and Indian counterterror officials and evidence in court cases.

And as the Treasury statement makes clear, Lashkar still operates with impunity — 10 years after Pakistan outlawed it and almost four years after systematic targeting of Americans and other Westerners in the Mumbai attack revealed that the group poses a formidable threat to the West.

The U.S. designation "is a way of avoiding biting the bullet, which is compelling Pakistan to act on this issue in a responsible way," said Praveen Swami, an editor at The Hindu newspaper in India and renowned national security analyst, in an interview. "Granted, there are no easy solutions. But what is being done to persuade the Pakistani government that if they don't do anything about it there will be a result?”

A spokesman at the Pakistani embassy did not respond to a request for comment.

The sanctions will have the political effect of exposing the Lashkar leaders and disrupting their activities, said Treasury spokesman John Sullivan.

Certainly, the designation contradicts the repeated claims by the Pakistani government that it has cracked down on Lashkar.

Based on intelligence and evidence culled from U.S. counterterror agencies, the Treasury statement describes a sophisticated and brazen militant group that operates air and naval wings, raises funds and recruits fighters across Pakistan and overseas, and even pays for favorable media coverage.

The most embarrassing allegations for Pakistan focus on Mir. He has been a target of Western and Indian law enforcement for more than a decade and technically been a fugitive even before late 2008, when Indian phone wiretaps broadcast worldwide caught him directing the slaughter by 10 gunmen in Mumbai from a command post in Karachi.

The U.S. government indicted Mir, two other chiefs and an ISI major last year. In 2007, a French court convicted Mir in absentia on charges of leading American, British, French and Australian recruits in a bomb plot and weapons procurement.

Yet, law enforcement officials complain that Mir, allegedly a close associate of the ISI, engages in open extremist activity from his home in Lahore. And the Treasury statement reinforces those allegations. As of 2010, the statement says, Mir was responsible for the security of Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, a Lashkar military chief jailed in early 2009 for the Mumbai attacks. It was one of the few significant arrests in the case, but the Pakistani trial of Lakhvi and six others appears stalled.

The Treasury statement indicates that Mir has worked with Lakhvi while he is in custody. The allegation reinforces the account of Mir's former prize operative David Coleman Headley, a confessed American agent of Lashkar and the ISI who pleaded guilty in Chicago federal court to a central reconnaissance role in the Mumbai plot and a follow-up plot against Denmark.

Headley told interrogators after his arrest in late 2009 that Mir had visited the jailed Lakhvi, a sign that Mir enjoys high-level protection, according to an interrogation report by India's National Investigation Agency as well as ProPublica interviews with U.S. and Indian counterterror officials. The comfortable conditions of Lakhvi's custody have enabled him to run Lashkar operations through cell phone calls and meetings, according to those investigators and a high-level U.S. report viewed by ProPublica.

Over the years, the Pakistani security forces have periodically placed Lashkar leaders in custody, usually short-term house arrest. Because of the close alliance between Lashkar and the ISI, Lashkar militants often provide additional security for those chiefs, escorting them to court, vetting visitors and coordinating with jailers, according to U.S and Indian counterterror officials.

"Lakhvi is in a loose environment in which he is allowed to make phone calls,” an Indian counterterror official said. "If this allegation about Sajid Mir is true, that means there is some kind of access in which he is allowed to have responsibility for the protection of Lakhvi. It is security coordinating between the government apparatus and the Lashkar apparatus.”

As of last year, Mir also continued to recruit militants, lead Lashkar external operations and direct terror plots, the Treasury statement says.

Another Lashkar leader designated this week allegedly has direct ties to extremist activity in the United States. Talha Saeed, the son of Lashkar spiritual leader Hafiz Saeed, has overseen the group's media operations on the Internet, radio programs and a magazine as well as relations with the press, according to Treasury. In April, the State Department offered a $10 million reward for the capture of the elder Saeed, who holds defiant mass rallies in Pakistan.

"[Talha] Saeed founded an LET front group, which he planned to use to pay journalists to write favorable stories on behalf of LET as of early 2009,” the statement says.

The younger Saeed also figured prominently in a recent terrorism case in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. A Pakistani immigrant named Jubair Ahmad pleaded guilty in April to material support of terrorism for training in Lashkar camps and working with Saeed from the United States to prepare propaganda videos.

In response to foreign pressure, Lashkar has engaged in subterfuge to shield its activities, according to U.S. authorities. The Treasury Department accused a veteran Lashkar spokesman named Abdullah Muntazir of faking a defection from Lashkar in order to enhance his credibility and secretly engage in propaganda.

"Muntazir has been an LET media official since at least 1999,” the Treasury statement says. "As of 2011, Muntazir was still an LET media official, despite presenting himself to the media as an independent scholar on militancy issues, including those relating to LET.”

Unlike al Qaeda and the Taliban, Lashkar has preserved an alliance with the Pakistani government because it largely refrains from terror activity in Pakistan.

The U.S. terrorist designation may not have a resounding impact, but it is a necessary step in a long-term U.S. campaign against a terror organization with worrisome clout, said Stephen Tankel, a professor at American University who is considered one of the top experts on the militant organization.

"This is part of an ongoing strategy,” Tankel said. "It is intended to make Lashkar's domestic and international operating environment just a bit more difficult and to put additional pressure on Pakistan to take serious action. And in the event there was a shift in Pakistan's calculus and it chose to launch a real crackdown on Lashkar, these steps could aid that action.”

Militant Reaffirms Role of Pakistan in Mumbai Attacks

2012-08-09T06:00:52-05:00

by Sebastian Rotella

This story was co-published with Foreign Policy.

7:00 p.m.: This story has been updated.

Last year, Indian and U.S. investigators came upon a rare promising lead in an internationally sensitive case: the 2008 attacks on Mumbai that killed 166 people and implicated Pakistan's spy agency in terrorism.

Despite Interpol warrants and diplomatic pressure, Pakistan had refused to hand over accused plotters, including an officer of the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) and chiefs of the Lashkar-i-Taiba militant group. But investigators learned that a wanted suspect had traveled from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia.

The suspect, Zabiuddin Ansari, an Indian militant, was a potential investigative gold mine. During the Mumbai attacks, intercepts recorded him talking to the gunmen from the Pakistani command post where Lashkar chiefs directed the slaughter by phone, Indian and U.S. counterterror officials say.

Ansari made the mistake of using an email address in Saudi Arabia that was known to those hunting him, officials say. Investigators tracked him and alerted Saudi police, who arrested him in May 2011. Diplomatic wrangling ensued. Finally, DNA evidence from India and pressure from Washington resulted in Ansari's deportation to New Delhi in June, officials say.

Now, after weeks of interrogation, Ansari's statements to Indian police have reinforced evidence of the ISI's role in a terror plot that targeted Americans at the same time Pakistan was receiving billions of dollars in U.S. aid, officials have told ProPublica. Previous disclosures in U.S. and Indian courts about the spy agency's links to the Mumbai attacks, which killed six Americans, contributed to a dramatic decline in U.S.-Pakistani relations over the past two and a half years.

On Nov. 26, 2008, attackers opened fire at locations across the city, many frequented by foreigners. The targets were the Taj Mahal and Oberoi Trident hotels, the popular Leopold Cafe, a train station and a Jewish center. Some gunmen took hostages and held off Indian forces for nearly three days.

Ansari has admitted to being in the Pakistani command post and assisting the telephone handlers who oversaw the rampage in India, according to Indian and U.S. counterterror officials. His statements give investigators the first account of an insider at the Karachi command post.

"It's important that he was in the room," said Stephen Tankel, a professor at American University and author of "Storming the World Stage: The Story of Lashkar-e-Taiba." "He can speak to who else was in the room. And from India's perspective, the most important issue is the involvement of ISI officers in the plot and whether Ansari can confirm that."

Ansari's emergence has generated intrigue and confusion that are typical of the labyrinthine Mumbai case. His arrival from Riyadh on June 21 caused a flurry of media coverage in India. Headlines described him as a "key handler" and "mastermind" of the plot. A prosecutor referred to Ansari as a "prime key conspirator" during a court hearing last month, according to media reports.

Nonetheless, Indian and U.S. counterterror officials with knowledge of the case have told ProPublica that Ansari is not a senior figure. The reality is less spectacular and more complex. His significance rests largely on knowledge gained as a trusted Indian member of Lashkar, which has worked closely with the ISI in a self-described holy war against India, according to officials and experts.

"He was one of the more important Indians in the organization," Tankel said. "They have taken an important figure off the battlefield, but by no means an irreplaceable one."

Hours before the Mumbai attack began, Ansari saw Major Samir Ali of the ISI meet with the terrorist plotters at the Lashkar safe house where the command post was located, according to his statement as described by officials. Ansari also said that an ISI officer known as Colonel Hamza helped him travel to Saudi Arabia to recruit fellow Indian Muslims and move funds for Lashkar, officials say.

Major Ali and Colonel Hamza had been previously identified by a star witness: David Coleman Headley, a Pakistani-American who pleaded guilty to doing reconnaissance for the Mumbai attacks and for a plot in Denmark. Headley testified that the officers helped train him and direct his activity as an ISI agent along with his handler, known only as Major Iqbal.

During a federal trial in Chicago last year, Headley spent five days on the stand giving a detailed look into the notorious Pakistani spy agency. Headley testified that he worked simultaneously for Lashkar and the ISI, which he said helped plan, fund and execute the Mumbai attacks with the explicit goal of killing Americans, Jews and other Westerners as well as Indians.

Prosecutors backed his testimony with emails, videos, phone intercepts, credit card charges and witness accounts. Nonetheless, Pakistani officials dismiss Headley, a former DEA informant, as an unreliable witness who entered into a plea bargain to escape the death penalty.

Based largely on Headley's testimony, U.S. prosecutors charged Major Iqbal with the murders of the Americans in Mumbai — an unprecedented indictment of a serving ISI officer. Pakistan has not arrested him or even acknowledged his existence.

The U.S. Justice Department also charged the three Lashkar chiefs who were allegedly the telephone handlers in the command post. Pakistani authorities arrested one, Abu al-Qama, but the other two, Sajid Mir and Abu Qahafa, still operate openly in Pakistan, according to Western and Indian investigators.

A spokeswoman for the FBI, a major player in the global investigation, declined comment for this article because of pending court cases in India and Pakistan. U.S. and Indian counterterror officials spoke on condition of anonymity. Pakistani and Saudi officials did not respond to requests for comment.

'An Office Boy'

Although Ansari was in the command post, his voice appears in only four of the 1,600 telephone conversations with the gunmen, officials say. In three of those calls intercepted by Indian intelligence, officials said, Ansari does little more than answer the phone. Officials say he told Indian interrogators that the main telephone handlers were the three chiefs whose voices dominate the calls: Mir, Qahafa and al-Qama.

Before the Mumbai attacks, Ansari worked as an aide to a Lashkar militant who set up websites, officials said.

"He's described himself as an office boy, and that's pretty much what he was," said a counterterror official who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case.

Others say Ansari was better-connected and better-placed than that. An Indian counterterror official described him as "an important assistant."

Ansari, 30, grew up in a modest home in Maharashtra state, where Mumbai is, studied to be an electrician and became radicalized as a result of anti-Muslim violence in India in 2002, according to a profile by Praveen Swami in The Hindu newspaper.

In 2005, Ansari and other extremists were in a two-vehicle convoy carrying a cache of assault rifles and explosives when Indian police intercepted them in Aurangabad, U.S. and Indian officials say. Ansari narrowly escaped the encounter. He fled to Pakistan, joined Lashkar and underwent training, according to the article and officials.

In the summer of 2008, as preparations for the strike on Mumbai gathered momentum, Lashkar trainers enlisted Ansari to give Hindi lessons to 10 fighters training in a paramilitary camp.

To conceal Pakistani involvement, the plan called for the attack squad to pose as Indians, complete with fraudulent identity cards and a statement claiming allegiance to an Indian extremist group. But Ansari soon told his chiefs that he did not think the rural, uneducated youths could learn more than a smattering of the Hindi language, officials said.

As a result, Ansari spent about an hour a day for five days teaching phrases to several trainees who were designated to speak to the Indian media during the Mumbai siege. In the fall, he moved with the trainees and the Lashkar chiefs to Karachi, where he taught his pupils phrases for taking taxis in Mumbai and did other support tasks, officials said.

Ansari did not know the specifics of the operation ahead of time but picked up details as the target date approached. He has told interrogators that he learned shortly beforehand that he would assist the handlers in the command post, officials said.

Ansari has pinpointed the location of the safe house in Karachi. He described a no-frills command center equipped with a satellite phone, hand-held phones, laptops, broadband Internet and at least one television. He said Major Ali of the ISI met with the Lashkar plotters at the command post during the day on Nov. 26, officials said. The attack squad landed that evening in Mumbai.

'Just the Trailer'

The investigation had already indicated that Major Ali worked closely with Major Iqbal, Headley's ISI handler and a central planner of the attacks, according to U.S. court testimony and counterterror officials.

Ansari's revelations caused Indian leaders to repeat their charges that, in the words last month of then-Home Minister P.D. Chidambaram, Pakistani "state actors" were behind the most spectacular terrorist strike since the 9/11 attacks.

"It is no longer possible to deny that though the incident happened in Mumbai, there was a control room in Pakistan before and during the incident," Chidambaram told reporters in India, according to news reports. "Without state support, the control room could not have been established."

Ansari's starring moment came late on the first night of the mayhem, which was televised worldwide. Telephone intercepts reveal that he spoke to an attacker holed up in the Oberoi Trident Hotel, reading him a statement with Hindi phrases to be relayed to the Indian media.

"Tell them this is just the trailer," Ansari instructed the gunman, according to a transcript of the conversation. "The real movie is yet to come."

In addition to the three telephone handlers, Ansari confirmed the presence in the command post of suspects including a top figure known as Muzzammil, the chief of a Lashkar subgroup that does anti-India operations. Ansari told police that Hafiz Saeed, Lashkar's spiritual leader, was not in the command post, but did give his blessing to the attack squad before they departed by sea, officials said.

In April, the U.S. State Department sent a message to Pakistan by announcing a $10 million reward for the capture of Saeed and Hafiz Abdul Rehman Makki, a longtime chief of Lashkar's international wing.

Pakistan has not moved against Saeed, who still holds public rallies. But in early 2009, Pakistani authorities reacted to international outrage by arresting seven suspects, notably Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, the military chief of Lashkar, and al-Qama, the accused telephone handler.

Their trial has slogged on for three years, longer than a typical Pakistani trial. There have been repeated procedural delays and five changes of judges. Critics say it has become a farce. The Chicago trial resulted in the conviction last year of Tahawwur Rana, an accomplice of Headley, on charges of material support of terrorism. An Indian court convicted the lone surviving Mumbai gunman in 2010.

Pakistan has shown little interest in pursuing the case. Last year, a senior U.S. official asked the chief of Pakistani armed forces to confiscate a cellphone that Lakhvi, the Lashkar military leader, was using to issue orders from custody, according to counterterror officials and a U.S. government memo viewed by ProPublica. The armed forces chief rejected the request, according to the memo.

Investigators say the accused fugitive plotters have high-level protection in Pakistan. Headley testified that, soon after his arrest in Chicago, he worked with FBI agents in an attempt to lure Mir, whom Western and Indian investigators see as the chief architect of the Mumbai attacks, to a third country where an arrest might be possible.

Lashkar militants feel safe in Saudi Arabia because of a history of financial and ideological support from powerful Saudi extremists. The Mumbai investigation — and a ProPublica interview with a former recruit from New Zealand — showed that Makki and other Lashkar figures have operated comfortably in Saudi Arabia for years.

"Historically, if you were an [Indian] Lashkar militant in Saudi Arabia on a Pakistani passport and you were picked up for extremist activities, you were not sent to India," Tankel said.

"Is it imaginable that people from the (Lashkar) high echelons might have gone to Saudi after the Mumbai attacks? Yes. Will they still go now? Possibly. Saudi Arabia is not suddenly a no-go area, but it's not as hospitable an environment either."

U.S. Role in Capture

Ansari's motives for going to Saudi Arabia were a mix of operational and practical, officials said. Like many South Asian migrants, he went to find a job because he was not making enough money in Pakistan, officials said. He also had plans to recruit Indian Muslims, officials said. Lashkar relies more on Indian operatives because law enforcement scrutiny and international political pressure after Mumbai have made direct attacks using Pakistanis more difficult, Tankel said.

Ansari traveled on a genuine Pakistani passport with a false identity that, according to his testimony, he received along with funding and instructions from Colonel Hamza of the ISI, the officer identified by Headley, officials said. Ansari first went to Saudi Arabia in 2010 to visit a sister living there, then returned early last year. He sent small amounts of money to militants in India, officials said.

But Ansari did not know that investigators had already identified an email address he had been using, according to the Indian counterterror official. U.S. and Indian investigators detected his email traffic in Saudi Arabia and tracked him down, officials said.

"He was caught with the help of the Americans," the Indian counterterror official said. "He was recruiting and fundraising among Indian workers in Saudi Arabia."

Saudi police arrested Ansari in May of last year. But Ansari insisted he was Pakistani, and Pakistani diplomats backed his story, officials said. The arrest remained a secret as bickering continued.

"The Pakistanis at a high level tried to bring out evidence that he was in reality Pakistani," the Indian official said. "They created a family history and everything. But we had a DNA sample and other evidence."

The Indian official and others said Washington weighed in as well. Tankel suggested that U.S. officials made the case to Saudi counterparts that Lashkar was growing closer to al Qaeda, which Riyadh sees as an urgent security threat. But Tankel added that the state of relations between Lashkar and al Qaeda remains a hotly debated issue because the groups have been alternately allies and competitors.

After 14 months of discussions, the U.S. pressure was instrumental in the rare decision by the Saudis to turn over a Lashkar militant to India, officials said.

"This is a significant event," Tankel said.

Nonetheless, it is not clear if Saudi authorities would pursue Pakistani members of Lashkar. And while the arrest of Ansari has bolstered the case against the accused masterminds, counterterror officials say, the fugitives remain out of reach in Pakistan.

Update: Pakistan's embassy in Washington issued the following statement Thursday in response to questions about Ansari's arrest in Saudi Arabia and his subsequent deportation more than a year later:

"No discussions ever took place between the U.S. and Pakistan on the issue. Mr. Ansari was obviously traveling on a fake Pakistani passport as he is an Indian national. Pakistan has requested India to share information on him and has also offered to hold a joint investigation."

The statement does not address the allegations that Pakistan backed Ansari's assertion that he was Pakistani, the reasons for14 months of diplomatic discussions, or why Indian authorities had to submit a DNA sample proving Ansari was Indian before he could be deported. Nadeem Hotiana, the embassy press attache, said he did not have further information on the case.

$10 Million Bounty for Alleged Mumbai Plotter Ups Pressure on Pakistan

2012-04-03T13:22:14-05:00

by Sebastian Rotella

The U.S. government yesterday offered a $10 million reward for information leading to the arrest of Hafeez Saeed, the spiritual chief of Pakistan's Lashkar-i-Taiba militant group and an alleged mastermind of the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. A yearlong investigation by ProPublica and PBS' Frontline explored the role of American David Coleman Headley in planning the three-day raid by gunmen of Lashkar-i-Taiba supported by Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI.

As we reported, Headley revealed that Saeed helped plan the Mumbai attacks. He credited Saeed for inspiring him to jihad and, after his arrest, told interrogators about Saeed's ties to Pakistani intelligence. "He is very close to ISI," Headley said of Saeed. "He is well protected." (For more, see our complete coverage.) The U.S. State Department also offered a reward for Hafiz Abdul Rahman Makki, another senior Lashkar boss.

The announcements show how much U.S-Pakistani relations have deteriorated as the Obama administration has taken a harder line with Islamabad. When Headley was indicted in late 2009 for conducting reconnaissance for the attacks that killed 166 people, U.S. authorities tried to avoid diplomatic tensions by refraining from publicly identifying Lashkar masterminds involved in the deaths of six Americans and other Westerners as well as Indians in Mumbai.

Last year, U.S. prosecutors indicted midlevel Lashkar chief Sajid Mir, an ISI officer named Major Iqbal and two other accused plotters. Prosecutors detailed the ISI's central role in the attacks during a federal trial in Chicago of an accomplice of Headley. The case, along with the discovery of Osama bin Laden in a military garrison town, raised alarming questions about the ISI's support for terrorism and escalated tensions with Pakistan.

Although U.S. prosecutors have not indicted Saeed, the offer of the reward is clearly intended to increase pressure on Lashkar, the ISI and the Pakistani government. Saeed is a powerful public figure in Pakistan and has held mass rallies in recent months in which he denounced the West and India.

Pakistani authorities have occasionally placed him under brief house arrest, but Western and Indian counterterror officials say he continues to run Lashkar with the support and protection of the Pakistani government. Pakistani authorities have also refused to arrest Mir, Major Iqbal and other suspects despite abundant evidence against them. Their whereabouts, like Saeed's, are well-known.

The trial in Pakistan of Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, Lashkar's military chief, and a few others charged in the Mumbai case has stalled. As ProPublica reported last year, Lakhvi continues to lead the group from jail and authorities have refused to confiscate his cell phone despite a direct appeal from a senior U.S. official to the director of the ISI.

"This is a name-and-shame tactic directed at two of the most public figures in Lashkar," said Stephen Tankel, an American University professor and author of the book "Storming the World Stage" about the group. "It appears to be part of a long-term effort to exert pressure on the Pakistani government."

“The Perfect Terrorist” Investigation Debuts Tomorrow

2011-11-21T12:19:20-05:00

by Mike Webb

Tomorrow, ProPublica and PBS FRONTLINE will publish the results of a months-long investigation into how David Coleman Headley worked as a spy for the Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) while planning the 2008 Mumbai attack for the terrorist organization Lashkar-i-Taiba. In spite of this information, Pakistan has not arrested an ISI officer or other accused masterminds of the Mumbai plot who have been indicted by the U.S. Six Americans were among the 166 people killed in the three-day siege.

In a preview interview today, Fresh Air’s Terry Gross talks to ProPublica’s Sebastian Rotella about the investigation. They will discuss Headley’s role as an informant for the DEA, how U.S. intelligence agencies and law enforcement officials responded to repeated warnings about Headley’s activities and ultimately, as some Indian officials believe, whether Headley was a double agent.

Interviews with Rotella and/or FRONTLINE producer Tom Jennings will also air on the Bob Edwards Show The Takeaway and The World tomorrow. Jennings and Rotella will also participate in a chat on Wednesday at 11 a.m. Eastern to answer any questions you may have about the reports.

The investigation will be published on our website tomorrow morning, and the PBS FRONTLINE episode will air tomorrow night. You can watch a preview below and check here for your local listings.

&amp;lt;a href=&quot;http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php?option=com_mobile&amp;amp;task=viewaltcast&amp;amp;altcast_code=7672de15d6&quot; _cke_saved_href=&quot;http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php?option=com_mobile&amp;amp;task=viewaltcast&amp;amp;altcast_code=7672de15d6&quot; &amp;gt;The Perfect Terrorist Chat&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;

Mumbai Attacks Renew Questions About Pakistan’s Crackdown on Militants

2011-07-13T15:04:04-05:00

by Sebastian Rotella

Indian investigators are only beginning to sift through the wreckage of three terrorist bombings in Mumbai today. Suspicions have immediately turned to Pakistan-connected militant groups. Whatever the investigation uncovers—and it's still very early—one thing is clear: Those groups still operate despite international pressure on Pakistan after the Mumbai attacks of nearly three years ago.

Today's coordinated rush-hour explosions, which killed at least 20 and wounded more than 100, were smaller and less sophisticated than the meticulously planned strike on Mumbai in November 2008. During that three-day rampage by the Lashkar-i-Taiba militant group, 10 gunmen targeted Westerners and Jews, killed 166 people and left India and Pakistan at the brink of war. Testimony at a recent court trial in Chicago revealed that officers of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI, helped Lashkar fund and plan that maritime assault on Mumbai. Commando-style raids are Lashkar's signature.

In contrast, initial reports indicate that today's attack involved bombs planted in strategic locations, a recurring tactic used by Indian affiliates of Lashkar in recent years. In 2006, bombs planted on suburban Mumbai trains killed more than 200 people. Authorities blamed the Students Islamic Movement of India, which, along with another group, the Indian Mujahadeen, has been trained and directed by Lashkar and elements of Pakistani intelligence, according to Indian and Western counterterror officials.

"These groups still have the capacity to strike not just in Mumbai but around the country," said an Indian counterterror official.

The counterterror official and other experts said that while the investigation has just begun, it is likely that Lashkar, a close ally of Pakistani security forces, played a direct or supporting role in today's attacks.

Pakistan arrested Lashkar's military chief and a few other suspects in the 2008 case, but their trial has stalled. Although the United States and Indian governments have pressed Pakistan to dismantle Lashkar and other militant groups, most of the suspected Mumbai masterminds, including veteran Lashkar chiefs and a major in the ISI, remain at large.

Pakistani officials refuse to pursue those suspects, who have been identified publicly, according to U.S. counterterror officials. The major in the ISI and three Lashkar chiefs have been indicted by U.S. prosecutors for the deaths of six Americans in Mumbai. Western and Indian intelligence officials have warned in recent months that Lashkar remains intent on attacks in India and on Western targets.

"That whole crew from the 2008 Mumbai attacks is still sitting there," said Praveen Swami, a journalist at The Hindu newspaper and a respected national security analyst, in a telephone interview today from Delhi. "They haven't done anything big since then. This could be a testing of the waters. It's worth remembering that there were a number of smaller attacks in the buildup to Mumbai."

Recent smaller bombings have included a blast at a bakery frequented by Westerners, which killed 17 in the city of Pune last year. That attack probably had Lashkar links as well. David Coleman Headley, a confessed Lashkar and ISI operative who pleaded guilty to scouting targets for the 2008 Mumbai attack, also conducted reconnaissance in Pune, according to his testimony during the recent trial in Chicago. Headley did that scouting for Lashkar defectors who had joined al-Qaida, an evolving trend that has affected Indian Islamic militants as well and could be relevant to today's attacks, Swami said.

Headley's revelations led to the unprecedented U.S. indictment of the suspected ISI major, another flashpoint in the escalating conflict between the United States and Pakistan since the slaying of Osama Bin Laden in a Pakistani garrison town. During the past week, Pakistani leaders criticized the Obama administration for accusing the ISI of involvement in the murder of a Pakistani journalist and withholding $800 million in military aid.

Today's attacks could also turn out to be part of that shadow-conflict. The ISI uses militant groups as a weapon to strengthen its position in the dangerous triangle of Pakistani relations with the United States and India, according to Western and Indian counterterror officials.

Pakistan has denied any role in terrorism. Pakistani leaders issued public statements today condemning the bombings in Mumbai.

Prosecutor Defends Deal With Mumbai-Attacks Plotter

2011-06-13T15:46:08-05:00

by Sebastian Rotella

The chief prosecutor in a landmark terrorism trial that ended last week in Chicago says a plea bargain with a confessed American terrorist was justified because of his value as a source of intelligence and as a key witness in any future prosecutions.

Jurors last Thursday convicted Tahawwur Rana, a Chicago businessman, after a trial that revealed unprecedented details about the alliance between Pakistani militant groups and that country's intelligence service. In addition to investigative work by the FBI in the United States, Pakistan, India and Denmark, the case centered on five days of testimony of David Coleman Headley, who confessed to doing reconnaissance for the 2008 Mumbai attacks and a failed plot in Denmark.

Jurors convicted Rana on two of three counts of support of terrorism for letting Headley, a childhood friend, use his immigration consulting business as a cover for his plotting overseas. Headley described the Mumbai attacks as a joint operation directed by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) and the Lashkar-i-Taiba militant group. He testified as part of a plea agreement that enabled him to escape the death penalty for his role in the killings of 166 people, including six Americans, in Mumbai.

Defense attorneys argued that using Headley, a former drug dealer and DEA informant, to go after Rana was comparable to using a whale to catch a minnow.

But in a telephone interview Friday, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald of the Northern District of Illinois said the information that Headley provided about the inner workings of terrorist groups and the ISI was unprecedented in its scope and detail.

Headley will testify in any future prosecutions of fugitive masterminds such as al-Qaida chief Ilyas Kashmiri and Lashkar's Sajir Mir, who is charged with a lead role in the Mumbai plot, Fitzgerald said. Fitzgerald declined to discuss details of the case such as the politically sensitive decision to indict a suspected ISI officer who served as Headley's handler and is known only as Major Iqbal.

"In addition to Rana, what we got from Headley was a lot of intelligence," Fitzgerald said. "There is no doubt in my mind that we would have been derelict in our duty if we didn't go after a deal with someone who had sat down with Kashmiri, with Sajid Mir, with Major Iqbal, someone who knew so much about these groups and these plots. He gave us 34 more targets in India. It was a no-brainer to me."

The trial was a duel of big guns. Fitzgerald, one of the government's toughest and best-known prosecutors, is a veteran of major terrorism cases dating back to the 1990s. He has been mentioned as a possible candidate for FBI director.

Defense attorney Charles Swift, meanwhile, is a former Navy lieutenant commander and military defense counsel who successfully challenged the legality of military commissions for Guantanamo inmates before the Supreme Court. After leaving the Navy and going into private practice, he has defended high-profile terror defendants.

In a telephone interview Monday, Swift insisted that Headley falsely implicated Rana and manipulated the government as he had when he was a DEA informant. Swift also said it is doubtful that the top suspects in Pakistan will ever be brought to trial. The FBI has developed a lot of information about the identities and whereabouts of Major Iqbal and other suspected masterminds, but Pakistan has resisted pressure from Washington to go after them, U.S. officials admit.

"The prosecutors got nothing from their deal with Headley other than his allegations against Rana," Swift said. "From my review of the evidence, they got all the significant intelligence from him before they made the deal."

The jury apparently accepted the defense argument that Headley kept Rana in the dark about the Mumbai plot by telling Rana he was doing espionage work for the ISI in India. The jury acquitted Rana of involvement in the Mumbai attacks but convicted him of supporting the failed Denmark plot and of supporting Lashkar.

Swift said the mixed verdict was not surprising.

"From the beginning we feared the verdict could be a compromise," Swift said. "That's why we asked to separate the Mumbai charges from the Denmark charges. There was more evidence on the Denmark plot. He was found completely not guilty on Mumbai."

Nonetheless, Fitzgerald said the verdict shows Rana was aware from the start that he was involved in terrorist activity. He noted that Rana admitted after his arrest in 2009 that he knew Headley had been working with Lashkar for five or six years.

"The verdicts were hardly as inconsistent as some have made them out to be," Fitzgerald said. "The charge on Mumbai required that he know enough about the plot at the time he agreed to provide support to be found guilty of specifically agreeing to aid an attack with guns and bombs. The question was when did he know the full scope of the plot. ... The jury convicted him of the substantive offense of providing material support to the terrorist group that carried out the attack but did not convict him of agreeing specifically in advance to support that attack."

The jury rejected the idea that Rana remained a dupe once the carnage in India had happened. Email and wiretap evidence showed that Rana was a willing and knowing participant in Headley's reconnaissance for an attack on a newspaper in Denmark that has become an internationally known target of terrorists after publishing caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad in 2005, Fitzgerald said.

"The jury could give Rana the benefit of a reasonable doubt as to how much he knew about the Mumbai attacks," Fitzgerald said. "But Rana played a more direct role in Denmark. ... And there was more corroborating evidence beyond Headley, whose credibility was challenged by the defense. Jurors naturally look for intrinsic corroboration. They want to see something in black and white."

Chicago Terrorism Trial: What We Learned, and Didn’t, About Pakistan’s Terror Connections

2011-06-09T20:36:04-05:00

by Sebastian Rotella

The terrorism trial of Tahawwur Rana, a minor accomplice whose trial ended Thursday in a guilty verdict on two of three counts, offered an extraordinary look into the underworld of terrorism and espionage in South Asia and had repercussions much closer to home.

The five days of testimony of confessed American terrorist and Pakistani spy David Coleman Headley were unprecedented in a U.S. courtroom. Headley delivered explosive revelations about how officers in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) funded, supported and directed the 2008 Mumbai attacks along with the Lashkar-i-Taiba militant group.

Because of his mix of front-line experience and high-level contacts, Headley's testimony was like a seminar in how terrorists communicate in code, do surveillance on targets and assemble plots while spies oversee the operations from the shadows like puppeteers.

The case also showed how a growing number of serving and former Pakistani military officers have put their lethal talents at the service of Lashkar, al-Qaida and other groups. It revealed the impunity with which ISI officers and terrorists alike operate in Pakistan even when they target Americans and other Westerners. (See our readers' guide to the trial.)

The evidence combined with the indictment of Headley's ISI handler in the murders of six American victims of the Mumbai attacks has worsened the already troubled U.S. Pakistani-relationship.

"The trial has been yet another bump in the road for U.S.-Pakistan relations," said Stephen Tankel, author of a forthcoming book titled Storming the World Stage: the Story of Lashkar-e-Taiba.

At the same time, the trial left enduring mysteries.

It did not answer questions about whether Sajid Mir, a Lashkar mastermind caught on tape directing the slaughter in Mumbai by phone, was once a Pakistani military officer. It did not explore the extent to which ISI chiefs beyond Headley's handler, known only as Major Iqbal, were aware of the Mumbai plot, which ultimately killed 166 people. Headley testified that he believed top ISI leadership was not aware, but he also said he thought Iqbal's commanding officer and his unit of the spy agency knew about the operation.

Finally, prosecutors managed to skirt two delicate and interconnected issues that the U.S. government refuses to discuss: Headley's role as a U.S. informant and the failure of the FBI to stop his terrorist activity despite at least six warnings during seven years. Headley revealed that he was simultaneously an extremist and an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration for at least two years and that he gathered counterterror intelligence as well as doing anti-drug work.

Headley testified that he stopped working for the DEA in September 2002, but that did not change contradictions and gaps in the U.S. government's official version. The DEA has stated that he was deactivated in early 2002, while other agencies have said he remained an informant until as late as 2005.

The lack of clarity reinforces suspicions that the U.S. government knew more about Headley than it has revealed and that his role as an informant shielded him from more aggressive scrutiny in the years before his arrest in October 2009.

"I don't feel we got the whole story about Headley as an informant from the Americans," said a European counterterror official involved in the investigation. "I believe he was a drug informant and also some other kind of informant."

The jury did not get the whole story either. Headley had already pleaded guilty to doing reconnaissance in Mumbai and for a plot in Denmark. The official focus of the trial was the narrower issue of charges of material support of terrorism against Rana, who owns an immigration consulting firm in Chicago. He was accused of supporting Headley's reconnaissance for the Mumbai and Denmark attacks and of overall support for Lashkar. Prosecutors charged that Rana let Headley open an office of the firm in Mumbai and use the business as cover for his surveillance in India and Denmark.

The verdict suggested a common-sense analysis by the jury. Headley testified that the Mumbai plot was a joint operation in which he was directed by Major Iqbal of the ISI and the Lashkar handler named Mir. The defense established that Rana communicated with Major Iqbal, but not any Lashkar masterminds. Rana's lawyers argued that Headley, Rana's boyhood friend, was a skilled manipulator who convinced Rana that he was doing intelligence for the ISI against India, Pakistan's arch-enemy, and kept him in the dark about the Mumbai plot.

The acquittal on the charge of supporting the Mumbai plot indicates that the jury accepted that argument. But they apparently rejected the idea that Rana remained a dupe once the carnage in India had happened. Headley soon enlisted Rana to assist his reconnaissance on a newspaper in Denmark that has become an internationally known target of terrorists after publishing caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad in 2005. Because Rana was a devout Muslim, it seems hard to believe he did not suspect anything at that point.

Rana's conviction is a small victory. Washington has been pressing Pakistan for more than a year to arrest Major Iqbal as well as Mir and a half-a-dozen other Lashkar chiefs who have been implicated as masterminds. Despite abundant evidence and the U.S. federal indictment, the Pakistani government has not pursued those fugitives. They are not in hiding and continue to be involved in terrorist plotting, U.S. investigators say.

Lashkar is simply too powerful and too close to the Pakistani security forces, according to Western and Indian counterterror officials. Pakistani officials fear that arresting major figures in Lashkar, which has not attacked the Pakistani state, could result in violent backlash and further instability.

"They think they have to leave these Lashkar cadres free to control the organization," an Indian anti-terror official said. "They are worried that if they move against them, it could be a civil-war situation."

Use Our Coverage to Understand Pakistan’s Suspected Terror Connections and the 2008 Mumbai Attacks

2011-06-06T12:04:24-05:00

by Braden Goyette

ProPublica's Sebastian Rotella has spent more than a year investigating suspected links between Pakistan's intelligence service and terrorist groups as well as the failure of the U.S. government to detect the growing threat posed by the Lashkar-i-Taiba militant group. He has traveled overseas and around the United States to track down secret documents and conduct exclusive interviews with counterterrorism officials and people close to David Coleman Headley, a Pakistani-American who has confessed to doing reconnaissance work in Mumbai for Lashkar. Rotella has written more than 33,000 words on the subject, which might seem a bit overwhelming if you're a newcomer to the subject. So here's an overview of the basics to get you started, plus links to stories that can help you dig even deeper.

What's the significance of the terrorism trial going on in Chicago?

The United States has indicted seven suspects in the three-day string of terrorist attacks in Mumbai in November 2008 and a follow-up plot in Denmark. The attacks killed 166 people and wounded 308. Because six of the dead were U.S. citizens, federal prosecutors and the FBI are required by law to pursue an investigation.

On May 23, a Chicago immigration consultant, Tahawwur Rana, went on trial in Chicago federal court on charges of material support of terrorism. The trial has attracted worldwide attention because, for the first time, details about the alleged terror connections of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) are being brought to light in a U.S courtroom. Several of the alleged masterminds of the Mumbai attacks have been linked to the ISI. Though the U.S. has long suspected elements of the ISI of working with terrorist groups, those concerns have been downplayed because Pakistan is a key ally in the fight against terrorism.

The Mumbai massacre is the most spectacular strike to date by Lashkar-i-Taiba, and the first Lashkar attack that has expressly targeted Westerners. Prior to the Mumbai attacks, many U.S. officials assumed Lashkar's energies were focused on India in the struggle over the territory of Kashmir.

Some worry that publicity from the trial could interfere with the U.S. government's goal of keeping Pakistan as an ally.

For the latest from the trial, keep an eye on our investigation page.

Who are the major players in the trial?

Tahawwur Rana is on trial as an accomplice in the Mumbai attack and the Denmark plot. Prosecutors allege that he allowed Headley to use his business as a cover while performing reconnaissance missions related to Mumbai. Rana has pleaded not guilty. For more on Rana, and Rotella's exclusive interview with Rana's wife, see this piece produced by our partners at PBS Frontline.

The star witness against Rana is his boyhood friend David Coleman Headley, a former DEA informant who has confessed to doing reconnaissance work for Lashkar in the years leading up to the Mumbai attacks. Headley also did reconnaissance for al Qaeda in a failed plot to behead employees of a Danish newspaper that published a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad. After Headley's arrest in 2009, he offered to help the FBI capture other terrorists as he sought a deal to avoid the death penalty. Headley's testimony points to a close alliance between Lashkar and ISI officers. Headley, 50, has proven a great asset to the terror groups he has worked with because of his atypical profile: his American passport and Western appearance, his age and language skills, his ability to operate in the West and South Asia and his extensive contacts in Pakistan's elite and the criminal underworld. He is possibly the most colorful character to emerge at the center of a U.S. terrorism trial. You can read more about his background here, and about the credibility of his testimony here.

Two alleged masterminds named in the indictment, Sajid Mir and a man known only as Major Iqbal, are suspected of having ISI connections. Mir was picked by Lashkar-i-Taiba to organize the Mumbai massacre: he chose targets, oversaw the plotting and directed the militants carrying out the attacks by phone from Pakistan. Some anti-terrorism officials say he is a former officer in the Pakistani military or the ISI, though others doubt he was actually in the military. Rotella put together a compelling portrait of Mir and the Mumbai attacks, "The Man Behind Mumbai." It's also available as a Kindle Single.

Major Iqbal is a suspected ISI officer who worked as a liaison to Lashkar. Headley identifies him as his ISI handler, saying Iqbal worked in tandem with Mir, Headley's Lashkar handler. Iqbal trained Headley in espionage skills separately from Lashkar, directed and funded his reconnaissance and played a key role in planning the Mumbai attack, according to trial testimony.

What is Laskhar-i-Taiba?

Lashkar was founded in the 1980s and fought against Soviet incursions into Afghanistan, an effort supported by the U.S and Pakistan. Pakistan's military used the group as a strategic ally in its fight with India over Kashmir, working so closely with Lashkar that the military often assigned officers to work with the militant group. The Pakistani government officially outlawed Lashkar after a 2001 attack on India's parliament. But David Coleman Headley testified that in the years leading up to the Mumbai attacks the ISI retained a close alliance with Lashkar and its officers helped screen and train recruits from overseas at Lashkar training camps.

Lashkar is enmeshed with other terror groups in the region. Its founder, Hafiz Saeed, was a mentor to Osama bin Laden and helped him found a group that was a precursor to al Qaeda. Al Qaeda, for its part, works with the Pakistani Taliban. The Barcelona subway bombing plot of 2008 was believed to have been a joint venture by the Taliban and al Qaeda. The Mumbai investigation showed that a number of Lashkar fighters, including former Pakistani military officers, have defected to the Taliban and al Qaeda in recent years.

Lashkar has long served as an ally for al Qaeda, providing everything from safe houses for leaders to a kind of training ground for aspiring holy warriors. Rotella reported that several led al Qaeda plots against New York and London.

After 9/11, most U.S. counterterror officials dismissed Lashkar as a potential threat because it seemed focused on India. But Lashkar increasingly seems to pose a unique threat because of its para-military discipline, popularity in Pakistan, ample war chest and longtime ties to the Pakistani intelligence service.

Jean-Louis Bruguière, a French judge who investigated Mir, said "Lashkar is not just a tool of the ISI, but an ally of al Qaeda that participates in its global jihad. Today Pakistan is the heart of the terrorist threat. And it may be too late to do anything about it."

For a rundown of Lashkar's origins and a fuller account of the plot behind the Mumbai attacks, read "The Man Behind Mumbai."

How did the U.S. handle warnings about Headley?

Beginning in 2001, five people close to Headley warned U.S. officials about his dealings with terrorists, including two of Headley's three wives. They described his radicalization, his training in Lashkar camps and his apparent missions in Pakistan and India. But the officials said their allegations were too general, didn't point to a particular plot and could have been motivated by personal grudges. Despite the repeated warnings about Headley's terrorist involvement, he wasn't arrested until 2009, 11 months after the Mumbai attacks. Headley served as a DEA informant starting in the late 1990s and testimony revealed that he was still an informant when he trained in Lashkar's camps in 2002. Mysteries persist about the nature of his work as an informant, when it ended and whether it shielded him from more aggressive scrutiny by the FBI.

See this story for details on the substance of the tips, and how they were handled by U.S. officials. As a result of Rotella's stories last October, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence reviewed the U.S. government's handling of Headley. Its findings have not been made public.

What happened with the Denmark plot?

Headley testified in Chicago that the plot to attack the Danish newspaper was launched by the ISI and Lashkar, but they shelved the project after his first reconnaissance trip. The plot then shifted to al Qaeda, with kingpin Ilyas Kashmiri directing and funding Headley's reconnaissance and attempts to recruit an attack team in Europe. News reports from Pakistan this weekend indicate Kashmiri may have been killed in a U.S. missile strike, but U.S. officials have not yet confirmed that. ProPublica and PBS Frontline are working on a documentary about the Mumbai and Denmark terror plots that will air in the fall.

In this video, Sebastian Rotella walks you through the details of Headley's reconnaissance work:

Watch the full episode. See more FRONTLINE.

VIDEO: An Insider’s Look at Confessed Terrorist David Coleman Headley

2011-06-03T10:24:03-05:00

This report is part of a ProPublica and PBS FRONTLINE investigation.

ProPublica's Sebastian Rotella has spent almost a year reporting on the role that David Coleman Headley, a Pakistani-American businessman, played in the 2008 Mumbai attacks. On May 23, Rotella was in the Chicago courtroom when Headley, who has confessed to doing reconnaissance for the attacks, took the stand as the star witness against his boyhood friend Tahawwur Rana, who is accused of supporting Headley's activities. In two short videos produced by Tom Jennings for PBS Frontline, Rotella talks about Headley's demeanor on the stand and his relationship with his family and friends, as well as his terrorist activity. "You get a sense of someone who has lived very intensely and is sort of taking stock of the wreckage of his life," Rotella says.

Get more information. See more FRONTLINE.

Watch the full episode. See more FRONTLINE.

For more, see PBS FRONTLINE's "Trial Testimony Reveals Mindset of Confessed Mumbai Terrorist."

Confessed Terrorist Tried to Help U.S. Track Down Other Terrorists

2011-05-31T18:57:31-05:00

by Sebastian Rotella

CHICAGO—Confessed terrorist David Coleman Headley was so eager to cooperate after his 2009 arrest that he worked with FBI agents to try to engineer the capture of a suspected mastermind of the 2008 Mumbai attacks and proposed setting up another kingpin for a missile strike, according to testimony in federal court Tuesday.

Headley, a Pakistani-American businessman who has pleaded guilty in the Mumbai case and a plot against Denmark, testified that during two weeks of interrogation in October 2009 he worked with FBI agents to try to lure Sajid Mir, a member of the Lashkar-i-Taiba militant group and a suspected mastermind of the Mumbai attack, out of Pakistan so he could be arrested. The attempt failed, Headley testified, and Mir remains a fugitive.

Headley also offered to travel undercover to the tribal areas of Pakistan and present Ilyas Kashmiri, an al-Qaida-connected leader indicted in the Denmark plot, with an ornate sword that Headley suggested could be outfitted with a homing device to set up a U.S. missile attack, according to his testimony.

Headley revealed Tuesday that Kashmiri wanted to assassinate the chief executive officer of the Lockheed Martin Corp, which he said manufactures the Predator drone, as retaliation for the missile strikes that have killed scores of militants in Pakistan. (Lockheed does not, in fact, make the Predator drone. But it does make the Hellfire missiles it uses.)

“Kashmiri was working on a plan,” Headley testified. “He said he knew people who had already done surveillance. And he asked if weapons were available in the U.S.”

Headley, who did not further describe the details of the plot, met with Kashmiri twice in Pakistan in 2009, according to his confession. Officials with the FBI and the Justice Department declined to comment on Headley’s mention of a plot targeting Lockheed CEO Robert J. Stevens. Lockheed officials also declined comment, citing a policy of not discussing specific threats against the company.

Kashmiri was behind a plan last fall to carry out Mumbai-style shooting attacks in Britain, France, Germany and Denmark, counter-terror officials say. Kashmiri has a far-flung network and is one of the most feared terrorist leaders today, especially in the vacuum left by the killing of Osama bin Laden. But it would be a new and troubling development if Kashmiri had directed operatives to work on a bona-fide plot to assassinate a prominent figure in the United States.

Tuesday was Headley‘s last day as the star witness against his boyhood friend Tahawwur Rana, who is charged with material support of terrorism for allegedly aiding Headley’s reconnaissance in Mumbai and Denmark. The trial has drawn international attention because of Headley’s account of a close alliance between Lashkar and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) and his allegations that Pakistani officers helped plan the Mumbai attacks, which killed 166 people, six of them Americans.

During cross-examination, Headley testified that he did not think the top brass of the Pakistani spy agency knew about the Mumbai plot, which he said was planned by his ISI handler, known only as Major Iqbal, in coordination with Lashkar chiefs.

“My belief is that all of ISI did not know,” Headley said. “I would imagine [Major Iqbal’s] colonel would know it. And the group he belonged to.”

That testimony tracks with Headley’s statement to Indian investigators last year that the director general of the ISI, Ahmed Suja Pasha, had been surprised by the attacks. Pasha visited Lashkar’s jailed military chief in 2009 to learn more about the plot, Headley told Indian investigators.

Pakistani officials deny any ISI involvement in the attacks. Some U.S. officials believe only a few mid-level Pakistani officers took part. But other U.S. officials—and Indian government leaders—have said the scope of the plot makes it hard to believe that top spymasters did not approve of the operation. Western counter-terror officials say the ISI’s leadership gives individual directorates considerable autonomy and that some retain close alliances with Lashkar and other militant networks.

Tuesday’s cross-examination featured excerpts of Headley’s videotaped interrogation by FBI agents after his arrest in October 2009. In contrast to his restrained demeanor on the stand, Headley was animated, almost frantic, as he told the agents he wanted to help them make arrests in the case, the video showed.

During the two-week interrogation after his arrest, he worked with the agents to communicate with Mir in a failed attempt to draw the suspected Lashkar mastermind out of Pakistan and enable his arrest, according to his testimony. He also offered up a German extremist he knew and proposed a rather fanciful scheme to set up Kashmiri for a missile strike by giving him a gift containing a homing device. Headley said he told the agents he knew he needed a “home run” or a “Hail Mary pass” because he was facing the death penalty.

Headley denied the defense’s assertion that, after insisting for days that Rana was innocent, he changed his story and falsely implicated his old friend out of desperation. He also endured a withering series of questions in which Patrick Blegen, Rana’s lawyer, accused him of lying repeatedly to prosecutors, judges, his wife, Rana and others during the case and in the past.

Although Headley had stated under oath that he had never been treated for a mental disorder, Blegen confronted him with evidence that he had undergone psychological treatment and been diagnosed in 1992 with mixed personality disorder. That condition combines symptoms of several disorders and generally involves difficulty in controlling impulses, using judgment and dealing with other people.

The prosecution is expected to wrap up its case against Rana tomorrow with testimony from FBI agents and civilian experts.

ProPublica’s Sergio Hernandez contributed to this report.

Correction (6/1): This post originally said that Headley was arrested last October. He was in fact arrested in October 2009.

(6/3): Wired magazine spotted an error in David Coleman Headley’s testimony. Headley said that the CEO of Lockheed Martin had been targeted for assassination, because Lockheed makes the drones that are used to kill terrorists in Pakistan. It turns out that General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, not Lockheed, makes the drones. Lockheed does, however, make the Hellfire missiles used by the drones.