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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Reporting & Essays |
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Reportage |
The Art of the Deal
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| David Headley saves his own life in a Chicago courtroom |
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PETER KEEP / REUTERS |
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| Smoke rises from the Taj hotel on 27 November 2008.
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HE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT of the Northern District of Illinois is an enormous glass cube of a building that occupies an entire block in downtown Chicago. When I arrive there on a cold and wet afternoon in the middle of May, the lobby is scattered with bomb-sniffing dogs and dozens of US Marshals. A sign outside the building noting “heightened |
security levels” suggests this is no ordinary state of affairs, even though America seems these days to be in a perpetual state of heightened security. But in this case a little paranoia could be forgiven: the trial getting underway is one of the most significant terrorism cases to have taken place in the US.
The defendant, a 50-year-old Pakistani-Canadian businessman and Chicago resident named Tahawwur Hussein Rana, is accused of the uniquely American crime of “providing material support to terrorism” in three instances: to the 26 November 2008 attack on Mumbai; to a plot against Jyllands-Posten, the Copenhagen newspaper that published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed in 2005; and to the Pakistani terrorist outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). He is being tried in America, rather than India or Denmark, in part because of the six Americans killed in the Mumbai attacks.
But the trial—which promises to linger in great detail on the workings of LeT and its relationship with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), as well as the involvement of al Qaeda in the Danish plot—doesn’t seem to be attracting much local attention. Judging from the headlines, Chicagoans are far more interested in the corruption trial of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, the taping of Oprah Winfrey’s final talk show, and the predictions of an octogenarian Christian evangelical that the world will end on 21 May.
Even among the few reporters who have been closely following the case, no one really cares much about Rana. The star attraction will be David Coleman Headley—formerly Daood Gilani—who is expected to take the stand as a key witness against Rana, his oldest and best friend. A handful of Headley-obsessed journalists are converging on the courthouse for a chance to hear the man whose bizarre life they have been investigating for more than a year.
Headley had been arrested on suspicion of plotting an attack on Jyllands-Posten, to which he has confessed; he has also admitted his role in the Mumbai attacks and his collaboration with LeT and with senior al Qaeda commander Ilyas Kashmiri. He is a valuable intelligence asset—too valuable, the Americans clearly believe, to hand over to India, though they did allow a team of Indian investigators to interrogate him in the US in June 2010. And while many aspects of Headley’s terrorist activities will be recounted exactingly, the greater courtroom drama revolves around what the defence will try to portray as a kind of Shakespearean betrayal: the deal Headley has struck with US prosecutors to save his own skin by testifying against his best friend.
Before the trial, Rana’s attorneys said that they would argue their client’s only crime was his friendship with Headley, who they call a “master manipulator”—the quintessential unreliable witness. Headley’s five days on the witness stand are packed with tantalising information about the ISI and its support for LeT and the Mumbai attacks, which in turn make for sensational headlines in India. But it would be unwise to take his testimony entirely at face value: one thing the trial makes abundantly clear is that Headley knows how to play to his audience.
In October 2009, two agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested David Headley at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport as he was about to board a flight to Philadelphia. His intention, he later told interrogators, was to go from there to Pakistan and then on to Copenhagen to attack the Jyllands-Posten newspaper. At the time, investigators had no idea Headley had been involved in the Mumbai attacks (a detail he offered up after he was in custody), but he had been fixated on the Denmark plan following the “success” of 26/11, and intended to carry it out on his own, if necessary.
Although he had been trained to use AK-47s and grenades, Headley had never killed anyone with his own hand. His contribution to the 26/11 attack was intelligence from Mumbai: he provided his LeT handlers with hours and hours of video footage and offered strategic suggestions based on his time living in and scouting out the city. He was impatient for more action, and now wanted to attack the West. But LeT was under intense scrutiny after the Mumbai attacks, and his handler—though initially enthusiastic—had told him to back off. So he turned to al Qaeda. And when the men in Europe whom al Qaeda said would carry out the Copenhagen job were unwilling to do so, he offered to do it himself.
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The trial’s star attraction, David Headley, in an undated photo.
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The plan was to enter the newspaper’s heavily secured office building with guns and knives, take hostages, shoot them, and then cut off their heads and throw them out the window into King’s New Square. As in Mumbai, the attackers were not supposed to survive. So it seems that the FBI might have saved David Headley’s life by arresting him—a courtesy they would extend again when he agreed to plead guilty and cooperate with the US government in exchange for a promise that he would avoid the death penalty and extradition to Denmark, Pakistan or India. The latter was something Headley wanted to avoid at all costs.
I had been following the Headley saga since November 2009, when I happened to see a MiD DAY gossip column headlined “Did Headley Date Starlet?” The piece began: “Lashkar-e-Taiba mastermind David Coleman Headley (49), whose reputation as a strikingly handsome charmer almost matches that of his terror history, may have dated starlet Aarti Chhabria.” My first thought—reading the paper online from London—was “who the hell is David Headley?” Though he had been arrested in October, very little information about him had been released, and there had been almost no press coverage, apart from a few small items in Indian newspapers.
As Headley’s story unfolded in ever more improbable detail over the next year and a half, it became stranger and stranger, half-soap opera and half-horror movie. This seducer-fundamentalist, the child of a beautiful and rebellious Philadelphia socialite and a charming Pakistani diplomat and poet, couldn’t be invented. With one brown eye and one green, he embodied the cliché “torn between two worlds”. He spent the first half of his adolescence at Pakistan’s elite Cadet College Hasan Abdal, where he was a poor student, and the second in Philadelphia, where he managed his mother’s bar and nightclub the Khyber Pass, and ran it into the ground. He then started a chain of video stores in New York (almost certainly a front), became a heroin addict and was arrested twice attempting to smuggle heroin into the US from Pakistan. Both times, he cooperated with the government in exchange for light sentences: after his first arrest, he set up a few other dealers, and after the second, he signed on as an informant for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), which later sent him to Pakistan to spy on heroin traffickers.
In March 2010, Headley struck another bargain, pleading guilty to all charges, expressing sincere remorse and promising reams of valuable information on LeT, the ISI and al Qaeda. Of course, the last time Headley had been directed to provide information to the government, he used the opportunity to plot a spectacular terrorist attack from Pakistan, about which he didn’t bother to warn the Feds; so some might question the accuracy of the intelligence he has offered.
Which brings us back to Chicago. Though Headley’s evidence led to the indictment of a half-dozen conspirators, including Ilyas Kashmiri and chief Mumbai plotter Sajid Mir, his friend Rana was the only one of the accused who wasn’t in Pakistan. So Rana would be tried, and Headley would be the prosecution’s star witness—in fact, practically their only witness.
When Headley was arrested on his second heroin smuggling charge, Rana put his house up as bond (a fact that should allow him to plead insanity). When Headley sold his video-rental business, he gave Rana $100,000 “to hold”. When Headley brought his wife and young kids over from Pakistan, they stayed at the Ranas’ house; and Rana was one of the few people in the US who knew that Headley was simultaneously married to a Moroccan woman in Lahore (a crime in the US). On first glance, it’s hard not to conclude that it is precisely because he so frequently and unquestionably assisted Headley that Rana is in prison; even now, Rana’s wife continues to pay the rent on the Chicago apartment where Headley’s family lives. Rana has maintained that he had nothing to do with Headley’s terrorist plots, and the defence strategy will revolve around Rana’s ignorance and Headley’s duplicity. The prosecution, on the other hand, will argue that Rana knew all about Headley’s activities in India and Denmark, and deliberately allowed his business to be used as cover for Headley’s reconnaissance missions.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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arumughom pillai.s.
15 September 2011
09:06 AM
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Really wonderful observations of American court proceedings in a trial of international importance.Mermin has captured the prosecution"s unwise handling the matters as a routine, total failure of Govt Intellegence Agencies infinding out such terrorist activities, how tactful Hedley is, how the prosecution"s advocates are presenting their case in awkward manner, how Swift and Blegen act intellegently and tactically to demolish the prosecutin"s case by getting the real facts from Headly through cross-examination. She had not missed any of the happenings in the court room, including non-interest shown by some co- press people, silly and irrelevant observations by some of them, Judge starts the day in a cheerful and correct way, but later fading, the moments of nodding off by the Judge and some of the Jury, etc. Congratulations as it is a very good work presented in an interesting way. such perfection can be expected only from such a creative personality dedicated to work.
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Vashisht
23 July 2011
07:40 PM
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Thank you Liz Mermin for a beautiful piece.I don't read a lot as nothing seems as near as visual works.But you made it quite possible for me.You started very well and made me travel with your journey of observing 'Headley'.I resisted myself to use the word 'trial' as it appeared to me that you were moved and taken by him even before the beginning of the trial.It was going good until the cross questioning started.It was boring.Then you had the obligation to end it in a way that you initially came.You made him the protagonist of the whole which was inevitable which surely may be the outlook but he didn't knew.All the while your ego-centric wit concerning others were convincing.
This is my first time that I read a piece promisingly,got the opportunity to comment first and I would like to hear from you which will also be the first time.
Bye.Good health to you.
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AC
23 July 2011
02:21 AM
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This is a fascinating account of the Headley-Rana trial, and really the story that went untold as of now. It's true that India media presents a very biased picture and considers almost every Pakistani culpable of waging war on the Indian soil. Liz Mermin's narrative is taut as a string—and is deeply engaging, as it is reflective. The circuitous ways of the fundamentalist terrorists–who don't hesitate to implicate their "best friends" in plots so heinous—is an impeccable testimony to the inherently inhuman nature of their projects, and is also a reminder that the governments and military all over the world are in bed with these people, to a greater or lesser extent. I can't wait to see the dramatisation of this story—I could picturise every scene that Mermin takes us through.
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