The Mind of a Terrorist

by Kaare Sørensen

  While Headley was in prison, the Middle East was in a state that would give new direction to international jihad.

  Under the cover of darkness, at 2:00 a.m. on August 2, 1990, Iraqi special forces and the broader army attacked the oil-rich but poorly protected neighboring country of Kuwait by land, by sea, and from the air. More than six hundred oil fields were set alight during the battles. Iraq’s 5,700 tanks rolled steadily forward.

  No country was more worried about the attack than Saudi Arabia. The Iraqi army was one of the world’s largest, and while the Saudi royal family had spent their oil money partying at European nightclubs, Saudi Arabia was easily vulnerable to being overrun by the Iraqi military. The generals closest to Saddam Hussein had the will and daring.

  The Americans immediately offered help. All the necessary planes, soldiers, and materiel—everything could be ready in just a few days if Saudi Arabia were to request it officially, said Washington, DC, while the rest of the Western world denounced Saddam’s attacks and his conquest of Kuwait’s vast oil resources.

  Behind the scenes, the relatively unknown Osama bin Laden—who up until that point had primarily been involved in the jihad in Afghanistan—urgently asked the Saudi royal family to tell the Americans no thank you.

  “You don’t need any other non-Muslim troops. We will be enough,” was his contention.

  Bin Laden told prince Sultan, the Saudi defense minister, that he could assemble 100,000 men and have them “battle-ready” without a problem in three months. But the prince shook his head at bin Laden. The tall, slender resistance leader’s experience from Afghanistan was mainly of battles from cave to cave. A war against Iraq on open plains and sand, on the other hand, would require something completely different. And what if Saddam Hussein used his feared chemical and biological weapons against bin Laden’s men?

  “We’ll fight him with faith,” bin Laden replied. And he believed it.

  Four days after the invasion of Kuwait, American defense minister Dick Cheney arrived in the large Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah with his entourage. The Iraqi army is twenty times as big as yours, and you’ll be destroyed if you don’t accept our assistance, said Cheney in his presentation. That offer wasn’t good enough, though. Only when the Americans agreed to leave Saudi Arabia immediately after an Iraqi defeat in Kuwait—or if Saudi Arabia requested it—did King Fahd’s attitude thaw, and he began to deliberate with his advisors in Arabic.

  A short time later, King Fahd turned to Cheney.

  “Come with all you can bring. Come as fast as you can.”

  Cheney called President George H. W. Bush, and soon forty-eight F-15 planes were on their way to the Middle East to protect Saudi Arabia. After that came an even larger force.

  The defensive mission quickly became an offensive one against Iraq, with the participation of a number of countries under the UN flag and the famous name of Operation Desert Storm. In Iraq, the humiliated soldiers waved white flags in the air, and the Western forces sent them packing back to Baghdad.

  After the war, most of the American forces remained in Saudi Arabia. The royal family didn’t dare to protest. Officially, the mission was to protect the country’s northern border against new attacks from its aggressive neighbor. But for many Muslims, the mere presence of American soldiers near Islam’s holy places—the cities of Mecca and Medina—was a disgrace. And even if the Americans kept away from the large Saudi city centers, the damage was done. The West had arrived in the Middle East. They felt occupied.

  Behind bars, Headley followed the war in Iraq on CNN, and he realized that two worlds were about to collide. The Americans were increasingly engaged in the Muslim world. And the Muslims increasingly distanced themselves from the West’s worldview. Headley had to choose a side.

  In prison, Headley met a number of semi-militant African-American Muslims, who were in for crimes considerably more serious than Headley’s petty smuggling. They could hardly even believe he called himself a Muslim. He had stopped praying, he had taken drugs, he had wallowed in women, and neither in practice nor in theory did he behave like a good, orthodox Muslim. Not even close.

  When Headley left prison, he felt a desire to start over. Of course, it also helped that everyone in Philadelphia knew that he had ratted on his friends. So Headley decided that New York might provide the clarity he was missing in his life.

  In New York, Headley met again with Rana, who gave his friend the big sales pitch: he had to give up drugs, alcohol, and the random women and start living his life as a real Muslim. It was in his blood.

  “I won’t allow you to see my children or my family so long as you’re like that,” said Rana.

  Headley’s father, who meanwhile had become the general director of Radio Pakistan, also visited his son in New York and didn’t mince words either. Headley told both of them that he would consider a new path.

  For the next few years, he lived at a series of different addresses in Manhattan, and from the mid-1990s—with about $100,000 from his father and another $75,000 from selling heroin—he opened a chain of video stores that specialized in delivering videos with pizzas. Among them was Flik’s Video to Go at 175 West 72nd Street, from which highly dubious copies of popular films were rented, and where the customers were pressured to buy expensive “platinum” memberships with advance payment plans.

  Headley enjoyed his video store in Manhattan. He loved movies, the whole world surrounding film production, and all the explosions, car chases, and grand dramas.

  But other temptations were too great in the noisy American metropolis. According to police records from February 6, 1997, Headley paid $3,000 in a hotel room in New York—perhaps just a down payment—for a suitcase containing a kilogram of heroin. And then the police put him in cuffs. The seller was an undercover DEA agent.

  When one is arrested, rule number one in the offender’s handbook is very simple: deny everything. No, you suddenly can’t remember your contacts or your friends, you can’t remember where you were a few minutes before it happened—and certainly not where you were going to go after.

  No, that exact photo? You don’t recognize it. And no, that telephone number doesn’t ring any bells either. Only vaguely can you remember your own name.

  Headley chose the exact opposite strategy. The one kilogram of heroin was but a drop in the ocean. He had actually participated in the distribution of about fifteen kilograms of heroin in the past few years, and he had no problem remembering where it came from. And where it ended up, he said.

  The strategy was the same as when he was detained at the airport in Frankfurt, and he was excited to see that he could once again turn his defeat into a sort of victory. He became an important man with tons of connections that the agents from the American narcotics authorities would love to know more about.

  In February 1998, Headley traveled to Pakistan, where he helped the Americans discover a series of Pakistani mid-level suppliers who planned to smuggle heroin into the USA. He made over one hundred phone calls, all of which the narcotics authorities listened to and recorded.

  With “information, assistance, and testimony,” Headley had “provided substantial assistance to the government in the investigation and prosecution of others,” wrote the prosecutor in a letter to the court in September 1998. He explained that the agents who had worked with Headley had found him “reliable and forthcoming. The arrests and seizure of 2.5 kilograms of heroin would not have taken place without his assistance.”

  This was the beginning of a long-term job as an agent for the American narcotics authorities.

  Headley got off with a sentence of fifteen months in prison, and then five years of so-called supervised probation, a sort of parole that required him to request permission to travel abroad and to provide urine samples from time to time that would be checked for traces of drugs. He also had to get used to a life with several unannounced visits from the government, whose agents had the right to search through his closets, drawers, and clothing without warning
for illegal substances.

  Monday, November 6, 1998, Headley walked through the door of Fort Dix prison in New Jersey to do his time.

  The following summer, Headley was allowed to travel to Pakistan for a month, where he married Shazia, a Pakistani woman from Lahore. Shazia initially remained in Pakistan while Headley returned to the US to do the rest of his time. During that period, Headley continued to help the American authorities, which resulted in the seizure of another kilogram of heroin.

  They had good reason to trust him.

  “Send money for the jihad against India.”

  Headley read the words on the sign a few times.

  It was winter in the year 2000, and Headley was out of prison once again. If he was to follow the rules of his parole, he would have requested permission to leave the US and travel to Pakistan. He didn’t waste time on that. The authorities hadn’t confiscated his passport, so he simply bought a ticket and left.

  Now he sat in the al-Qadsia mosque in Lahore, one of the city’s largest, with room for 15,000 praying men. He tried one more time to give his life some meaning.

  He looked at the sign again. There was a phone number at the bottom, which he made a note of as he weighed his next move.

  Headley hadn’t ever actually been particularly religious. His life hadn’t been filled with limitations, and the various demands of Islam to refrain from worldly pleasures didn’t fit his lifestyle.

  Yes, he had read the Qur’an, and yes, he’d had some periods where he read books about Muhammad’s achievements. But only now did he seriously start to want more from it. He had recently turned forty, and to put it nicely, the first forty years of his life had been a mess.

  He needed change. Needed to believe that there was a place in the world that was right for him. At the same time, he had a hard time seeing himself living without excitement and without opportunities to put to use everything his life had taught him. His pulse had been quick his entire life, and he wanted it to stay that way. But if there was a spot for him in the fast lane somewhere out there, he’d take it.

  The prophet Muhammad had also experienced a lot in his life. All of it had made him stronger.

  At home, Headley called the number on the sign and spoke for the first time with a Lashkar-e-Taiba representative. We’ll come by, they said, and the same day, some people from the mosque came to visit his house and tell him about their organization, about their charitable work and the holy war against all that is unclean and unjust.

  The men presented themselves as members of Jamaat-ud-Dawah, a religious movement that had started an armed branch in the 1990s, Markaz-ud-Dawa-wal-Irshad, which later came to be known as Lashkar-e-Taiba. When the religious fellowship ended and the militant part began is notoriously unclear—which is why the UN today considers Jamaat-ud-Dawah a terrorist organization.

  Headley gave the men 50,000 Indian rupees the same day, about $800, and as thanks, they invited him to a private lecture that same evening at the home of a Pakistani businessman in the neighborhood, in the affluent district of Model Town.

  Things suddenly got serious. If faith could move mountains, then cash could move whole mountain ranges.

  The main speaker at the lecture was a man by the name of Hafiz Saeed, whom Headley quickly recognized by his henna-colored red beard. They called him “the Professor.” The charismatic leader of Lashkar was a man with close connections to pretty much everything of any importance in Pakistan. An untouchable man.

  At the meeting, which had about two hundred participants, Saeed quoted a holy text that explained that “one instant spent on jihad” pleased God more than millions of prayers. Action meant more than nice words.

  Saeed had no problem speaking confidently about war. He especially wanted to throw India out of the Kashmir province and to “swallow” the rest of India. The Professor was also ready to plant “the flag of Islam” in the front yards of Washington, DC, Tel Aviv, and New Delhi.

  “Democracy is among the menaces we inherited from an alien government. It is part of the system we are fighting against. Many of our brothers feel that they can establish an Islamic society by working within the system. They are mistaken. It is not possible to work within a democracy and establish an Islamic system. You just dirty your hands by dealing with it. If God gives us a chance, we will try to establish the pure concept of an Islamic Caliphate,” he said.

  Jihad, for Saaed, had two clear goals: independence for Kashmir province. And physical revenge on the Indians for the civilians they killed there. Jihad wasn’t a choice; it was a must, the Professor explained.

  At this juncture, Headley was still officially working as an informant for the American authorities. But he kept his experience in Model Town to himself.

  After the event, he got a handshake and a brief conversation with Hafiz Saeed, and he could hardly wait to get home and look everything up in the holy texts.

  Was it really true, what Saeed had said about jihad? Headley flipped through his books in the house in Lahore, and that same evening, he was convinced. It all made sense.

  On his next trip to the United States, Headley landed with a feeling that he had found an unknown path, and a reason to follow it. And in the spring of 2001, he promised himself that if he could find a way out of his unsuccessful stints as a middleman in the drug business or a DEA informant and get back on his feet, he would devote his life to Islam. Unconditionally.

  He reread the Qur’an, he began praying again, and when the sun stood high over Manhattan in May of the same year, he put out his last cigarette.

  He had decided: his life belonged to jihad. He would enlist and go to the training camps. He wanted to make everything right again.

  A few months later, the world became a little bit more complex.

  While passenger planes traveling at about five hundred miles per hour went hurtling toward their targets on the East Coast of the United States on September 11, 2001, Headley’s position between two worlds was starker than ever before.

  United Airlines Flight 175 and American Airlines Flight 11 struck Tower 1 and Tower 2 of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, not far from Headley’s own apartment in the city. The Pentagon was in flames in his birth town of Washington, DC. In Pennsylvania, where he had lived for much of the time he spent growing up with his mother, the wreckage of United Airlines Flight 93 lay in flames in a field near Shanksville.

  If Headley had an America, it was the America that was attacked that Tuesday.

  At the same time, he experienced both an inner and outer Muslim awakening. Words became truths. Suddenly, so much made sense.

  Headley himself had a number of reactions to the attack and the killing of roughly 3,000 civilians on September 11, 2001. He was outraged, angry, and hungry for vengeance when he spoke with his American friends. Yes, he was Muslim, but more than anything else, he was an American citizen, and that was what was deepest in his heart, he explained.

  It wasn’t quite that simple.

  Already the day after the attack—while the dry dust from the collapsed towers still hung in the air over Manhattan—Headley received a call from his DEA contact. Everyone was summoned into work, and the American authorities were searching for any sort of clues as to the men behind the attack, or details about additional possible attacks.

  The clues those days were pointing to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and many other Middle Eastern countries. All contacts with those countries were checked out. And at this point, Headley’s name and dossier came to light.

  Even though he had already devoted himself to the global fight for jihad and had made his first contacts with Lashkar in Pakistan, Headley said nothing. Instead, he became angry over the fact that the authorities could somehow entertain the idea that he was involved in, or had the slightest knowledge of, the attack; or that he, in some way, sympathized with the men on board those four planes.

  He felt the authorities suspected him of working against his own country. He would never do that, he explained. Why should he?
He was born here, after all.

  The FBI confronted him with statements that friends had heard about his potential engagement in the “fight for freedom” in Kashmir.

  That was all just a cover, Headley explained. He had said those sorts of things in order to maintain his credibility while he infiltrated Muslim circles that were dealing in heroin.

  In the period that followed, Headley supplied the authorities with information about religious extremists in Pakistan. He also worked undercover at a mosque in Queens, New York, on behalf of the authorities.

  His very closest friends, though, saw a different Headley. He was excited by the attack and said that the US had simply gotten what it deserved. They had tasted their own medicine, and it wasn’t the worst that could happen, either.

  After the attacks of September 11, the American intelligence agencies had but one goal: it must never happen again. Never again could attacks of this sort be planned against the United States and executed, with so many thousands killed. No matter the price. From the White House, methods of torture that had previously been banned were approved for interrogations in gloomy prisons, and in Cuba the prison at Guantánamo was constructed shortly after the counterattack against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

  Technically, Headley was still on parole in the United States, and until 2003 he was supposed to meet regularly with his supervising officer, Luis Caso. The prosecution had fought hard to secure that, based on Headley’s intense clinch with heroin.

  But then, something unexpected happened.

  A few moments before a hastily called meeting on Friday, November 16, 2001, in the district court’s offices in Brooklyn, Headley’s lawyer, Howard Leader, received a crucial letter. Who its sender was remained a secret.

  “Your honor, I would like to hand up a copy of a fairly brief letter that might be of some assistance to the Court in this matter,” said Howard Leader.

  “I don’t know…. Have you given me a recommendation on this?” replied Carol B. Amon, the judge.