The Siege

by Adrian Levy

  The stories from within the Taj were painstakingly drawn from Taj staffers and their families, as well as guests and diners. Without them, and especially the Taj chefs and managers, we would never have understood the sacrifices they made in the hours before any rescue took shape. Without doubt, the unarmed Taj security team, the Black Suits, as well as the hotel’s chefs and managers, saved hundreds of lives.

  Acknowledgements

  An enormous and heartfelt thank you to everyone at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai who took a risk in collaborating with us. In some cases they did this physically, walking us through Mumbai and the hotel. Others spent hours reliving the events from afar. Thanks especially to Amit Peshave, Mallika Jagad, Grand Executive Chef Hemant Oberoi and Sous-Chef Nitin Minocha, who patiently explained the internal workings of the vast Taj machine so that we could understand the minutiae of its processes. We hope we have created some kind of consensus and also a testament to the staff who survived and those who succumbed. Thanks also to Florence Martis and family for opening up the life of the remarkable Faustine Martis.

  Thanks to Nikhila Palat, Director of PR at the Taj, for being patient, even when the hotel’s goals differed from ours. Also to Deepa Misra Harris, Senior Vice-President of sales and marketing. Thanks to Padmini Mirchandani, publisher at Pictor, for The Taj on Apollo Bunder, which brilliantly depicted the history of the hotel, including a chapter on the attacks. We also need to thank Charles Allen, who wrote it, along with Sharada Dwivedi, Mumbai’s prima historian. There are many others inside the hotel who have asked not to be named. Thanks to all of you for talking to us.

  Dozens of soldiers and police officers who spoke to us also do not want to be named, and we are very grateful to them.

  Thanks to Rakesh Maria for giving us his time. Particular thanks must go to Vishwas Nangre Patil and Rajvardhan Sinha for giving us detailed accounts of the police’s best attempts at detecting the attacks and then containing them. Deven Bharti was key to our understanding of the ending of the siege and the electronic monitoring of Lashkar’s handlers. Deepak Dhole and several others from the stations that surrounded the Taj were patient with us, while officials in state and national domestic intelligence took risks in expanding on the trail of warnings, explaining, frankly, the electronic monitoring operation during the days of terror. One Intelligence Bureau stalwart has moved into a different area of public service, while the other continues to serve. Two more are retired and took considerable risks in coming forward. Thank you, Brigadier Govind Singh Sisodia and family, for walking us through many aspects of the National Security Guard (NSG) operation. Thanks also to J. K. Dutt, whose overview of the NSG mobilization and modernization was critical.

  Thank you to the counter-terrorism practitioners and experts in Britain (Scotland Yard and the Foreign Office), in France, and especially the US, where we broke much new ground thanks to the enthusiasm of retired operatives who worked for the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the FBI and CIA. Also a huge thank you to those members of David Headley’s family who took a chance to open up to us about their ‘sociopath’ relative, with his split personality; a heavy weight for any family to bear. Thanks to Jean-Louis Bruguière for his insight and detailed account of the Sajid Mir operations in France and beyond. Thanks too to Marc Sageman, Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute who was the CIA’s foremost Al-Qaeda expert. He was brought in as an expert witness during the trial of Tahawwur Rana, and shared with us his knowledge in so many areas.

  Thank you to Sachin Waze (and family) for a 1 a.m. dinner in Thane and much banter afterwards over email.

  Special thanks go to Vinita Kamte, the widow of Additional Commissioner East Ashok Kamte, and family, who have risked much to try and understand the circumstances surrounding the Rang Bhavan Lane shootings. Vinita Kamte’s book, To the Last Bullet, written with journalist Vinita Deshmukh, is a bold epitaph for her ‘braveheart’. They have recently forced a government probe into the alleged tampering with police call log records for 26/11.

  Thanks to Suketu Mehta and Jeet Thayil for writing Maximum City and Narcopolis, two of the best contemporary works on Mumbai. Thanks to Sheela Bhatt, managing editor at Rediff, who has continually given advice, contacts, friendship and provided great ‘Guj’ food. Also to Hussain Zaidi, the crime reporter, who knows Thayil’s Brown Crows better than anyone. Zaidi was a great counsellor and a good man to chow down with at midnight in Bandra. Thank you also to his family for the idli and samba, and for his book Headley and I, which gives a colourful and insightful account of the bizarre relationship that blossomed between David Headley and Rahul Bhatt, the Bollywood actor and bodybuilder. Ashish Khetan did not help us, but has wrestled long and hard with differences between the public and private versions of 26/11. Thank you, Meenal Baghel, editor-in-chief of the Mumbai Mirror, who is also an accomplished writer. Her powerful Death in Mumbai, an account of a shocking Bollywood murder, was the first of its kind of crime writing in the city. Thank you to the photographer Ian Pereira for taking such a great portrait of the chefs at the Taj and to Harinder Baweja for editing 26/11 Mumbai Attacked, which, as an early take on those days, was remarkably shipshape.

  All the Taj guests who dared go back with us into their memories require a vote of thanks. Thank you, K. R. Ramamoorthy and family, for the company, stories and reflections. Thank you, Remesh Cheruvoth, for recalling his former boss Andreas Liveras so vividly. Nick and Woody Edmiston brought the days and night aboard the Alysia to life for us, as did Ratan Kapoor in Delhi, and Will Christie and Tomaso Polli in London. Thanks to Will and Nigel Pike for putting up with our constant questions and intrusive demands. Thank you especially to Nikhil Segel and to Savitri Choudhury (and family) for introducing us to Sabina Sehgal Saikia and her world. Thank you also, Ambreen Khan, for sharing your innermost thoughts, and Sunil Sethi for setting us on the right path.

  Amit and Varsha Thadani. This was your wedding. Thanks for reliving it for us, which we know was arduous, given how busy your lives are. Sir Gulam Noon was endlessly patient with us, as we probed and picked apart his account of being trapped in the Taj. Presently working in Singapore, Dr Mangeshikar talked us through the Chambers and more, as did Bhisham Mansukhani, a great writer and observer of life, who has a remarkable recall of the hours trapped in Chambers and the final evacuation. Thanks to Rory Steyn and Bob Nicholls for the networking and the tales of Souk. One day we hope all to be in Mumbai at the same time. Ravi Dharnidharka, with a pilot’s eye for remote detail, got us from Souk down to the Gateway.

  Thanks to the resourceful Mike Pollack. And special thanks to Line Kristin Woldbeck for getting us from Leopold’s to the Bombay Hospital. It took some courage to go back, and put us in touch with her circle of survivors.

  In Pakistan, many who helped us have asked for anonymity. Those that can be named for their long-term support and advice include Syed Kaleem Imam, the former Inspector General of Police in Islamabad, Samina Pervez, the Director General of External Publicity at the Ministry of Information, and Wajid Shamsul Hasan, the Pakistan High Commissioner in London. We look forward to sharing a cigar in North London. Syed Zulfikar Gardezi, Deputy High Commissioner in London, dealt with our demands helpfully, as did Muneer Ahmad, press attaché, and our good friend, Shabbir Anwer, the Minister Press, who will hopefully be enjoying a well-deserved retirement by the time this book is published. Naghma Butt, the High Commissioner’s social secretary, has got us into many meetings, and was always a pleasure to call.

  We must thank Sabookh Syed from Geo News and Tamur Khan Yusufzai, who worked with us in Swat and elsewhere. Smart and insightful, he is emerging as a formidable guide to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Thanks also to his father, Rahimullah Yusufzai, one of the country’s most modest but knowledgeable and well-connected journalists. Over many years Rahimullah has given us advice, lent expertise, made calls on our behalf, and tested hypotheses, challenging laziness and crass assumptions. We await his definitive book on Pakistan.

  Our hearts sank w
hen Tariq Parvez retired as chief of Pakistan’s National Counter-Terrorism Authority. With a long view from the Punjab force, where he was head of CID, to the Federal Investigation Agency in Islamabad, which as Director General he revamped, Parvez went some way in creating Pakistan’s first real counter-terrorism force. He continues to work hard connecting people and ideas. So does the formidable Additional Inspector General of Police Syed Asif Akhtar, who travelled from Pakistan to Interpol and now, in retirement, to Karachi. Special thanks to Khalid Qureshi, head of the Special Investigations Group (SIG) at the FIA, and to his Waziri deputy, Sohail Tajik, who is now a Senior Superintendent in the Punjabi heartland city of Bahawalpur.

  Thank you, Dr Feriha Peracha, for introducing us to your work on deradicalizing young men and boys in Swat and elsewhere. Thanks to her assistant Sadia Khan. Condolences to the family of the diligent and enthusiastic Dr Mohammed Farooq Kahn, a pragmatic and optimistic man who believed his work in educating young extremists about the true messages of Islam could make a difference. A devout and hard-working academic, he spoke with us at length in Swat in July 2010, but by October he was dead, killed by Pakistan Taliban gunmen.

  Sarah Tareen, executive producer and CEO of Concordia Productions in Lahore, thanks for your help, as always, and congratulations on getting your first feature, Tamanna, to the big screen, with award-winning music by Rahat Fateh Ali Khan. Thanks to Major Muhammed Ali Diyal at the Pakistani Army’s Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), who dealt with our burgeoning requests politely and efficiently, getting us up and down the country.

  In Mumbai, thank you to Pranati Mehra, a skilful journalist, who made the running on some of Mumbai’s biggest stories, in its darkest days of serial bombings and communal riots, and who helped us marshal research and contributors. Thanks also to Shree Thaker Bhojanalay, in Dadisheth Agyari Lane, off Kalbadevi Road, for keeping us refuelled in between driving, meeting and talking. Thank you to the accident-prone fixer Nandan Kini, who tirelessly wrangled locations and people with humour, precision and calmness. In London, thanks to the team at True Vision Television, who continually support and promote our projects.

  A huge thanks goes to our agent, David Godwin, for his invaluable support and to his colleagues at David Godwin Associates: Anna Watkins and Kirsty Mclachlan. Thanks to our army of editors at Penguin for marshalling and honing down the manuscript across three continents and through its multiple forms: Joel Rickett in London, Chiki Sarkar in New Delhi and Emily Baker in New York. Thanks also to our copy-editor, Mark Handsley, for his painstaking rereading of the manuscript. Thanks finally to friends and family in London, who put us up and fed us during our constant comings and goings between Europe and South Asia: Katy and Kevin Whelan, Lesley Thomas, Ninder and Ajay Khandelwal, and Karen and Jeremy Levy.

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  First published by Viking 2013

  Published in Penguin Books 2014

  Copyright © Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy, 2013

  The moral right of the authors has been asserted

  Cover design by Leo Nickolls

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  Typeset by Jouve (UK), Milton Keynes

  ISBN: 978-0-670-92258-1