The Mind of a Terrorist

by Kaare Sørensen

  “No, your honor, pardon my appearance. I wasn’t expecting a hearing today. I was informed at the last minute. I just received the documents this morning.”

  Michael Bays, the attorney for the prosecutor’s office, interrupted for a helpful word: for two and a half years now, Headley had been on parole, and he had two and a half years left. But the prosecution was prepared to excuse Headley from the associated obligations.

  It was never said aloud in the court, but the reasons behind this were clear enough: Headley needed the freedom to travel to Pakistan or other countries to help the American authorities gather information about militant Islamists, without having to request permission to travel each and every time. He looked unmistakably American but had intimate knowledge of Pakistani conditions and was fluent in Urdu, Arabic, Punjabi, Hindi, and English—in other words, the dream of any intelligence service and a country that was on its way to war against an unknown enemy.

  “He’s been an outstanding supervisee. No complaints,” said Michael Beys—not knowing that Headley actually had traveled to and from Pakistan without the knowledge of the authorities, and had devoted his life to Lashkar-e-Taiba in the process.

  Headley himself said nothing to the court.

  “What is the letter that you have, Mr. Leader?” asked the judge of Headley’s lawyer.

  “Your honor, yes, I would like to hand up a copy of a letter that I was given about twenty minutes ago.”

  “From who?”

  “It speaks for itself, your honor,” said Leader, avoiding the question. He knew that every word spoken would be recorded and transcribed. And it was no ordinary letter.

  It became quiet in the courtroom.

  After having read the letter, the judge was instantly prepared to set Headley free. But she didn’t know offhand which section of the law would allow her to release a person who still had several years left on his parole.

  After bending the relevant paragraphs of the law a little, the attorneys came to the conclusion that Headley could “certainly” be set free, referring to a rule that concerned assisting the authorities, as he had.

  The public has never had a chance to see the letter that decided Headley’s case. Initially, the authorities revealed that it was kept in a locked safe deposit box in Brooklyn. Then that it had gone missing. And then that it was found again but still could not be made public.

  But regardless of the contents and the sender, the letter had the desired effect: on December 18, 2001, Judge Amon signed off on the formal papers and gave Headley his freedom back, without restrictions.

  It was also around this time that Headley entered into a controversial agreement with the authorities. He would travel to Pakistan and promised to pass along any useful information if he came into contact with terrorism, drug trafficking, or other suspicious activities. The agreement with the American authorities was set to last for one year, and according to Headley’s interpretation, it would automatically expire in September 2002.

  “I want to do something important in my life. I want to do something for my country,” said Headley, who told his friends that the authorities had asked him to infiltrate Lashkar.

  Headley’s actions, however, don’t support that interpretation.

  Shortly after the court’s decision, he was at JFK airport in New York with a plane ticket to Pakistan, by all accounts without any plans to ever help the Americans again. He burned all bridges and never worked for the United States again, at least never officially.

  The terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 had, paradoxically, freed him of all his ties to the United States. And Headley took advantage of his freedom to devote himself to jihad.

  A few months later, he visited his first training camp.

  7

  A DREAM ABOUT THE PROPHET

  The gray town house sat quiet and undisturbed.

  On North Francisco Avenue, nobody cared too much to speak with their neighbors, so if you wanted privacy in the metropolis that is Chicago, this quiet street in the northern part of the city was a good place to be.

  According to the lease and the buzzer downstairs, the two-thousand-square-foot apartment on the third floor in the three-story town house was occupied by Adeem Kunwar Aziz, an older Pakistani businessman who had lived in Chicago for several years. He kept to himself most of the time.

  In fact, his neighbors hadn’t seen him at all lately. But that was for a different reason entirely: Aziz had died of a heart attack and been buried, and his wife and children had been sent back to Pakistan.

  Instead, Headley had secretly taken over the apartment, using it as his base when he was staying in America. He had taken his cell phone and even used the name Aziz when he needed an extra identity.

  A few months before the Mumbai attack, he had moved his wife, Shazia, his two daughters, Haider and Sumya, and his two sons, Hafsa and Osama, to Chicago. Now the whole family lived in the town house with the little green lawn.

  If the mission were to fail, if someone was caught, or if he was killed, his family would at least be safer in the United States than in Pakistan, Headley had concluded.

  Shazia was Headley’s confidante. She knew the double game he was playing and supported her husband.

  “Congrats on your graduation … Graduation ceremony is really great. Watched the movie the whole day,” she wrote in an email to him sent from Chicago while she watched the Mumbai attack on the television.

  A few weeks after the attack, Headley traveled to Chicago to be with his family.

  While in Pakistan, their sons had seen their father practice shooting targets behind the wall in their big backyard, and in Chicago he continued to inculcate military discipline in them. He hoped one day to see his sons become members of the Pakistani special forces, the Special Services Group. He told them this often.

  In fact, the military training in the family was so intense that at soccer practice five-year-old Osama didn’t kick the ball when the coach yelled, “Shoot!” from the sidelines. Instead, Osama flung himself down, took a rolling fall, and made as if he was holding a handgun. He’d seen his father do this when he heard the word “shoot” before.

  Headley thought this was a fantastic story. He was proud of his children. And yes, he had indeed named his son after Osama bin Laden. Naturally.

  That part of Chicago was a good fit for Headley. When he walked out the front door and took a right down the street, he came to West Devon Avenue, in the heart of the Pakistani and Indian neighborhood. A large group of Pakistanis had settled there, and Chicago had one of the largest Muslim populations of any American city. The location of the apartment was also perfect for other reasons. Often he walked the not quite quarter mile from his apartment to 2809 West Devon Avenue, where he could he could visit his childhood friend Rana at his business and give him a good hug.

  Rana was actually the reason that Headley had chosen to settle in Chicago.

  “Uncle!” Rana’s children would exclaim excitedly whenever their father’s close friend from Pakistan would come to visit him at home.

  Their friendship was stronger than ever.

  For the now full-bearded Rana, the journey to Chicago had been a long one.

  While Headley was in an American prison for smuggling heroin, Rana had finished his training as a combat medic and was sent to Saudi Arabia to help the Americans with their military operation against Iraq during the attack on Kuwait.

  He had distinguished himself during that operation and was later awarded a medal for his efforts, but Rana had been injured too and spent the end of the war recovering in a hospital in Germany.

  Later, he was sent to the Siachen glacier along the border between Pakistan and India. Soldiers from both sides contested the border demarcation in almost inhuman conditions: it could easily get as cold as minus 60°F, and every winter, about thirty feet of snow fell. The glacier is around two to three miles high, and for that reason the border has been called the world’s highest combat zone. Some soldiers lost their l
ives to the brutal conditions rather than to the battles themselves.

  During his posting in the mountains Rana endured chronic altitude sickness. He tried to have himself reassigned, but the Pakistani military told him that wasn’t possible.

  During a trip outside the country, Rana decided that he wouldn’t return. He deserted from the army, and like many other deserters, moved to Canada to begin a new life with his wife, Samraz. They settled in Ottawa, where they bought a house—which Rana had to mortgage soon after in order to post Headley’s bail following his arrest for dealing in heroin in New York.

  After a few years in Canada, Rana moved more or less permanently to the United States, though neither he nor Samraz actually received residence permits. In the summer of 1995, Rana bought a modest, tree-sheltered redbrick house at 6018 North Campbell Avenue—less than a mile from Headley’s clandestine apartment.

  On the roof, Rana installed what was without a doubt the largest satellite dish in the neighborhood, ensuring that he could watch the news from Pakistan every day. The Rana family did not watch American TV. They kept entirely to themselves. Though Rana always greeted his neighbors cordially, none of them was ever invited in.

  The house had cost Rana $147,500, and to swing this amount he had borrowed a large sum from Headley. Or, rather: since it is against the Qur’an to charge interest, there was no talk of a loan in the ordinary sense. Instead, Headley “deposited” the large sum with Rana, which Rana—without interest or fees—would hold for him. When Headley needed money, a plane ticket, or something else, Rana covered it, and the amount was tallied on a statement that Headley would send Rana regularly.

  It was also by means of Samraz’s private credit card that the secret mobile phone—still in the deceased Adeem Azis’s name—was paid for. The charge too was deducted from Headley’s “deposit.” In this manner, Headley avoided having an account at an American bank, and Rana acquired a large sum of money with which to start his new life in America.

  Rana abandoned the medical profession and devoted himself to running an immigration business by the name of First World Immigration Services, which helped Pakistanis and others to receive temporary or permanent residence permits in the US and Canada. The company had offices in various countries around the world, among them one on the 53rd floor in the Empire State Building in New York and another in Toronto, Canada. But it was on West Devon Avenue in Chicago that he had his headquarters under the name Immigrant Law Center, with three coworkers and a lawyer who took care of papers. Rana himself worked in the headquarters sometimes.

  Apart from the immigration business, which had clients from many Middle Eastern countries, Rana was involved in several smaller businesses: a convenience store in Chicago and some other, rather shady operations. In the city of Kinsman, a few hours’ drive from Chicago, he ran an agricultural business where lambs and goats were slaughtered according to halal principles for Muslim customers.

  Rana was creative—with finances, too. He cheated his way out of more than one hundred thousand dollars in taxes, according to the authorities.

  He found several methods of falsifying documents so Pakistani friends or clients could more easily acquire American visas. For example, he wrote fictional employment contracts backdated to 1983. The contracts showed that their holders had worked faithfully as a cook for a number of years but had chosen to resign from the job to look for newer and better jobs.

  “Cook” was always a big hit with the Americans, Rana knew. He was careful about the small details: laser printers hadn’t been invented in 1983, so the fake contract would be typed up on a typewriter.

  Rana was very good at keeping secrets.

  There was a story Headley told Rana often.

  One hundred men are standing on a dock when they see ten men far out in the ocean, flailing with their arms, about to drown. From the dock, three men jump in the water, and they’re not able to rescue more than one each out of the ten men. The other seven drown in the waves.

  The hundred men on the dock were there by chance. They hadn’t asked to be put in that situation. Maybe they were running late for work. Maybe they weren’t particularly good at swimming. Maybe they simply didn’t want to get their clothes wet. But for whatever reason, those ninety-seven committed a sin by choosing not to jump in the water and help. They all bore a portion of the blame for the seven dead men.

  Muslims all over the world were in this same situation, Headley explained.

  In the province of Kashmir, in Afghanistan, in Palestine, and in many other places, Muslims were about to drown, and far too many other Muslims stood on the dock and watched. They let it happen.

  Headley was convinced that an angel sat on his right shoulder counting his good deeds, while another angel sat on his left, noting all his errors and shortcomings. The one on the left was a tad too busy in his younger years, so now it was time for him to make the effort to restore the balance. He couldn’t be one of the men on the dock any longer.

  Headley cited the story to argue that Lashkar and other terrorist groups were justified in using bombs and suicide bombers. After all, it was in reality self-defense against a greater power. It was defensive jihad, not offensive jihad, he said.

  And civilian deaths were permitted, too, Headley thought. Sure, the Qur’an says that one shouldn’t kill civilians. But exceptions could be made, provided they were defensible.

  “If the enemy is doing that, then in response, it would be allowed,” he said.

  Rana disagreed. He thought Headley was interpreting the Qur’an too loosely, in contrast to the more literal reading Headley would always invoke in other matters.

  As a deobandi—a member of a certain branch of Sunni Islam—Rana was of the opinion that militant jihad was legitimate but that it must be declared by a state leader in the form of a fatwa. If that hadn’t happened, nothing could be done.

  Like all the other members of Lashkar, Headley was a Salafist and believed that Islam was perfect in the time of the prophet Muhammad. Nothing should be added, nothing removed.

  He had previously succeeded in making Salafists of all of his in-laws, who were now followers of this orthodox version of Islam, and he naturally tried to do the same with Rana. Lashkar had given him advice on how to win Rana over. In the summer of 2006, Headley told him that he had begun training with Lashkar in the mountains in Pakistan.

  He provided Rana with a succession of books about terrorism, among them an encyclopedia of the rules of Islamic jihad and a book entitled The Judeo-Christian Mischief and the International Jihad Movement, which featured the cover illustration of a cross and a star-of-David in flames. He also gave him The Religion of Ibrahim, a book contending that unbelievers should be punished.

  Though Rana would listen as Headley sought to persuade him, often at length, that a stricter interpretation of Islam was the only correct one, he wasn’t convinced. Nor did they agree on whether twenty or eight prayers were required for Eid al-Fitr, the holiday that marks the end of Ramadan.

  But, despite these difference, Headley and Rana shared a world they tried to keep hidden from most others. In Rana’s living room they watched movies with footage from terrorist attacks in Afghanistan while their families were busy with other activities. They discussed such things as the right revenge for the cartoons that depicted the Prophet Muhammad.

  Headley felt that the men responsible should be hanged or killed in some other way. He would grow extremely angry when he talked about it.

  Rana had never seen the drawings himself, but that didn’t stop him from having strong views about them and the people who were responsible for their dissemination. The artist behind the drawing with the bomb was just one man, sure, but why didn’t anybody stop the newspaper? Why hadn’t a responsible editor and a responsible country done something to stop the illustrations from being published? And why was nobody held responsible afterwards?

  It didn’t make sense.

  The men went to the mosque every Friday, they watched crick
et together, and they often sat in Headley’s secret apartment or in Rana’s house late into the evening, discussing politics, Islam, and terrorism—which were often one and the same to them. Or the subject could be the rumor that the young senator Barack Obama was Muslim. Obama lived just half an hour away by car, farther south in Chicago, and had just won the presidential election. Neither Headley nor Rana trusted him. Muslim or not.

  Headley never shared any actual plans for the attack in Mumbai with Rana, but he did ask if he could open a branch of First World Immigration Services in the city. He explained that he was doing this at the behest of Pakistani authorities, though it’s not clear whether he named the ISI as having given him the assignment.

  For Rana, there were real advantages to the prospect: he’d fulfill his dream of opening an office in India, and he wouldn’t have to pay for it. Headley wouldn’t even draw a salary.

  Rana was sometimes a slightly chaotic man, so busy he would answer his mobile phone in the middle of a conversation and try to carry on both conversations at the same time. He managed his finances in a similar fashion: he often had to buy lambs for his slaughterhouse but then would put off payment for months, paying only when the lamb had been sold in the shop. There was no way he’d be in any shape to pay back Headley’s “deposit” if Headley asked for it. So the offer of a new office with new clients was fantastic.

  Headley also let Rana know that his informal cooperation with the Pakistani authorities might make it possible for him to return someday to Pakistan, where a prison sentence for desertion still awaited him.

  Of course, he said yes.

  Rana was so unaware of the plans for the terrorist attack that he took his family to Mumbai on a combined vacation and business trip in November 2008 on short notice. He didn’t know that the attack was going to take place that month. On their way home to the United States, the Rana family had layovers in Dubai and China, and it was during one of these stops that he discovered on a TV screen that an attack had begun. They had gotten out just in time.