Headley had his rights read to him, including the right to remain silent, and the accompanying explanation that his words could be used against him in judicial proceedings, should he choose to speak.
“Having these rights in mind, do you wish to talk to us now?” asked one of the two agents.
Headley had previously ratted out his drug contacts, but he had kept his contacts among the world’s most wanted terrorists to himself for nine years. In fact, he had often mocked the Muslims who caved in to the pressure and ran their mouths off with details about friends, family, and their religious brethren.
“A Muslim never turns over a fellow Muslim to a Kafir EVEN if he is guilty, and gives his brother help against his enemy and gives him shelter when he needs it and makes ease for him in difficulty and in return Allah will make ease for him on a very difficult day,” Headley explained in an email to his old classmates.
Headley explained that the lack of unity among Muslims was worst in Pakistan, where the government had on several occasions turned Muslim captives over to the United States. It was another story with Afghanistan, an example of a state that completely understood what was at stake: “The Taliban refused to turn over even one person to the Crusaders and preferred losing their government rather than violating one Islamic principle.”
Headley also thought that such important battles as the one at Karabala in the year 680, during which several of the prophet Muhammad’s closest family members were killed, had an important message for Muslims that they would do well to take to heart:
“In my very humble and ignorant opinion, that is one of the main lessons of Karbala: To be prepared to sacrifice everything, including your family, for the Honour of the Divine Faith.”
The punishment for failing one’s Muslim brothers should be the highest, Headley concluded.
“As far as executions of folks go, who support Kuffar against Muslims in ANY way, I support it, regardless if they are Shia, Deobandi, Salafi or Barelvi, whether they have a beard or not or if they are punctual in their prayers or whether their names are George or Abdullah.”
The majority of the jihadists in American custody had stood by that code. Hoping to either die martyrs or gain respect from their religious brethren in their home countries, they spat on their interrogators, went on hunger strikes, or refused to say a single word. Among them was the Pakistani-born Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who refused to speak when he was arrested in March 2003. He was then waterboarded 183 times before being sent to Guantanamo.
David Headley observed the agents in the room.
It had been half an hour since he had been arrested. Half an hour since he had been on his way to Pakistan to visit one of the most wanted terrorists in the world—to complete the plans for a large-scale terrorist attack against the West.
And then he started to talk.
What followed was described by FBI Director Robert Mueller as the most significant revelation of terrorism-related intelligence the American government had received in at least half a year. The information was so crucial that in a short time it had been sent directly on to the White House and likely also to president Barack Obama personally. Dianne Feinstein—the powerful leader of the Senate’s often very secretive intelligence committee—was briefed thoroughly.
Headley spoke for more than a week. In long, eloquent sentences, the forty-nine-year-old explained how he had been in touch with Lashkar-e-Taiba for nearly nine years. He talked about his stays at training camps in Waziristan and the plans for kidnappings, counterfeit money, and murders. He told them about the current plans for a large attack in Copenhagen, targeting Jyllands-Posten’s offices specifically but also with the goal of killing a great many random Danes. Perhaps even members of the queen’s Royal Life Guards, if they got in the way.
He talked about the men in Derby, about his meeting with the Islamist Farid Lamrabet in Stockholm, and his contacts in Pakistan.
The FBI agents knew much of this beforehand. They had been focusing on the attack on Jyllands-Posten for a good while. But as they sat now with his passport in their hands, seeing the many stamps from the Mumbai airport, it became clear that he could also be tied to the attack in Mumbai.
Yes, said Headley. He had planned that attack in detail. He had visited and chosen several locations.
He had produced fifty hours of video recordings.
The 166 deaths were partially his responsibility.
After that, he named all the people in the control room in Karachi, and he drew and told of their internal connections to each other. For each of his contacts—Sajid Mir, Pasha, Major Iqbal—he gave detailed information: unusual characteristics, the way they spoke, their psyche, their background, their weaknesses, how he contacted them.
He described in detail the manner in which the terrorist organizations communicated in code. He named specific targets the American and Indian governments weren’t aware of and was able to point out specific weaknesses in the American government’s surveillance of terrorists.
Headley also revealed details that are still classified, which the American government will likely keep secret forever.
Every day, Headley was brought to the small place in Chicago, with his back to a wall and behind a table with bottles of water and food, and in this way, the “interrogation” of the free-talking detainee proceeded: Headley went detail by detail through his trips to Pakistan, India, and Denmark; the training camps; contacts; and the preparations for the attack in Mumbai. The sessions often went on for eight to ten hours at a time.
Headley also signed a declaration that gave the agents the right to examine the files on his memory stick, and he gave them the password to his email accounts, and access to his computer.
Soon it became clear to Headley what he personally could expect to be charged with: acting as an accomplice to the murders of six Americans during the Mumbai attack; plans to kill, bomb, and give support to the attack in Mumbai; supporting a known terrorist organization; and planning killings in Denmark and supporting those plans.
The case would immediately go to trial in an American court with American judges, and it was clear that in the worst-case scenario, Headley would be sentenced to death in Chicago. The agents also made Headley aware of an important detail: the case—or perhaps part of it—might end up before a court in India.
Prisons in India are not known for their high standards. Especially not for terrorists. And by no means for a jihadist who acknowledged being behind the planning of an attack where 138 of the 166 who were killed were Indians.
Headley understood the message.
“I know I’ll never come back if I’m sent to India,” was his conclusion.
And so he began playing the game he had played so many times before: a hunt for the greatest possible reduction of his sentence, despite starting with no good cards in his hand.
Headley needed a guarantee that he wouldn’t be sentenced to death, and he demanded that neither India, nor Pakistan, nor Denmark be able to request his extradition for judicial proceedings or punishment. In return, Headley was ready to help the American government capture some of the people to whom he had otherwise sworn eternal loyalty.
Headley pursued three concrete plans, in particular. He tried to help the FBI with information that could lead to the capture of his weapons contact in Germany.
He offered to travel to North Pakistan and arrange a meeting with Ilyas Kashmiri. Headley suggested that, during the meeting, he could present Kashmiri with an antique sword as a gift. The sword would contain a hidden GPS unit that would make it possible for American drones to find Kashmiri and send him a Hellfire greeting from above.
The third plan was to lure Sajid Mir out of Pakistan and to a more cooperative country, where the Americans could then arrest him and send him to Guantanamo, or wherever they liked.
One afternoon—after eleven days of questioning—Headley was getting impatient.
“You have any plans to nab these guys? Or are there no plans?”
> “You know there are some things we can’t share with you,” one of the agents replied.
“No, I understand that. I’m not saying what plans, I mean: Are we working on this thing or not?”
“Always working.”
“Okay, good,” Headley said, rocking back and forth on the chair in the place. “That would be a plus for me … and for you,” he said, smiling as he stretched his hands out toward the FBI agents.
“David,” said one of the agents, “You’ve provided useful information so far. You cooperated.”
Headley lifted his right hand for a high-five.
But the FBI agent’s words hadn’t appeased him. The following day, he sat once again in the interrogation place wearing the same gray shirt, black jacket, and light pants.
“I want some … I mean, I would like—it doesn’t matter what I want…. But from my … I want some busts to happen…. I don’t wanna keep on … I know you have plenty of evidence against me, but really I’m just providing you more and more evidence against me, and we are not making any arrests,” Headley said, emphasizing his worries with some nervous gestures.
“We understand.”
“We have to make some. I mean—”
“We understand.”
“That’s why I was thinking about this thing with Sajid. Maybe something happened? If nothing works out then all of this stuff is gonna be sitting there…. And I’ll be the only person that you’ve got. Do you know what I mean?”
“We understand completely.”
“Yes.”
In Pakistan, it must have slowly become apparent to the Lashkar people that something hadn’t gone quite according to plan.
Headley didn’t show up as arranged in Pakistan. Even though he sent explanations by email, it must have confused them that he had previously insisted on getting to Pakistan so quickly to meet Kashmiri so that the details for the Copenhagen attack could fall into place—yet now a week had passed and he still hadn’t shown up.
Nor did Rana, in Chicago, know that Headley had been arrested.
Thursday morning, October 8, 2009—five days after Headley’s arrest—Rana went to gmail.com and created the [email protected] account, as they had agreed. He believed that Headley was in Pakistan, and with help from the authorities, Headley did everything he could to ensure that Rana remained convinced of this.
Before his departure, Headley had been talking about an investment in a construction project in Karachi that would secure apartments for veterans from the Pakistani army. Headley had access to some land that could probably be resold for a significant profit; he now offered Rana the opportunity to invest in the project. While Headley was sitting in daily interrogations in Chicago, Rana informed him that he would be happy to put $11,000 into the project.
Headley also sent a fax to Rana’s office, which was currently in the process of helping Headley’s wife get a residence permit in the United States.
The FBI agents became increasingly interested in this Rana. But Headley refused to tell on his friend. He lied about Rana on several occasions. No, Rana hadn’t participated in the terrorism plans. Headley readily discussed his childhood with Rana, their friendship, and their work together in the immigration business, but under no circumstances would Headley talk about Rana’s connections to terrorism, fearing that his words would be misinterpreted, distorted, and used against his friend.
“If … my wife knows something or Dr. Rana knows something … it’s just because of their closeness to me…. And I don’t feel that they should be targeted … for that,” he said, during one of the first interrogations.
“Does your wife know what you’re doing?” asked FBI agent Jeffrey Parsons.
“I don’t wanna say that.”
“Okay. Fair enough.”
“But if she did … which I’m not saying that she does … but then it would be the same thing as for … Dr. Rana. That if he … it would be like they wouldn’t know, if they did know.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Which I’m not saying that they did.”
Every day, the questioning resumed where it had left off the previous day. And every day, the agents began by explaining that Headley needed to tell about Rana.
Headley was silent. Instead, the FBI’s investigators began to dig through Rana’s past. They wondered about, among other things, how he had earned at least $475,000 from his activities in 2008, but only paid about $37,000 in taxes. For income at that level, a tax rate of about 8 percent was definitely not normal.
One of Rana’s wife’s telephone conversations had also piqued the FBI’s interest. She talked about Headley’s and Rana’s friendship and declared that the two gradually began thinking the same way: “They talk nonsense all day, idiots. That’s not how Islam spreads! … Such as, ‘kill him, he is not practicing like us—kill him, do that to him, do this to him, he is like this—look, how that woman is’—is this how Islam spreads? … Hatred spreads like this, not Islam,” she said.
Mayor Mark Harlow was used to very little happening in Kinsman on a Sunday. Or, for that matter, on any other day of the week. The little town has one hundred residents and fourteen small streets, three of which don’t even have names. There’s a church, a post office, and a small bar. But there’s no gas station, no shops, no police station. The city is divided down the middle by a railroad where trains carrying goods rumble through uncontested with an endless hail of cars. When the train has passed, the city is still once again. Just as it was that Sunday morning, October 18, 2009.
In the distance, though, the town’s residents could make out a rumbling sound that quickly transformed into the unmistakable sound of rotor blades, and when the helicopter appeared, the sight of snipers with raised weapons quickly followed. Simultaneously, some one hundred agents rolled noisily through the city in their FBI cars.
The police had been monitoring Headley and Rana’s visits to the farm on South Kinsman Road for several months. Now they wanted to know just what was really going on in there—apart from the slaughter of a few hundred goats per day.
They went through the building with a fine-toothed comb searching for evidence, and the people on the farm—Doctor Syed Hamed, for example, the fifty-one-year-old head of the business—were quickly detained and barred from going into the small shed where he normally both slept and stayed. The authorities confiscated, among other things, a computer, which they had been following from a distance for some months. A computer from which Headley and Rana had sent emails to Pakistan.
The agents remained silent about the reason for their visit to Kinsman.
“What are they doing? We don’t know. Are they making bombs? We don’t know,” stated Mayor Harlow, who couldn’t find out anything from the local sheriff either. The sheriff could say only that he had been aware of the plans for a raid for “several weeks.” The FBI is in charge of everything, he offered.
Nor could the local TV stations explain the presence of a huge police force in a small, almost unknown town in Illinois a few hours’ drive from Chicago. The massive police presence became a local mystery.
While the Kinsman farm was being raided, the Rana family was simultaneously awakened at their private address in Chicago. Without resisting, Rana was led out of the house and driven away. In the house, the agents found among other things the DVD with recordings of the burning Danish embassy that Headley had acquired in his time in Pakistan. Rana’s immigration office was raided that same morning at 8:00 by a team of FBI agents.
The FBI also showed up at Headley’s secret apartment, warrant in hand. Since his arrest, Headley had been in almost daily contact with Shazia, but he hadn’t shared the whole truth with his wife, either.
While the FBI agents turned the apartment inside out, Headley spoke with Shazia over the phone to calm her, and later that day she was allowed to visit him at the FBI office, together with their four children.
It’ll be okay. I’ll be out again in a few months, Headley explained, and fed her another
lie, that the FBI would try to get her an American passport. He just needed to set some things straight for them.
The FBI’s goal in the comprehensive operation was to obtain an answer to one question in particular: did Rana know about Headley’s terrorism plans to such a degree that he could be considered an accomplice? Was there something at one of those three addresses that could support that theory?
In the small interrogation space, Rana spoke in broken English; he was eager to explain himself and went on interrupting himself and stumbling over his words. It was often difficult for the FBI agents to understand what he was saying. But the man spoke for six hours straight without asking for a lawyer.
First, they talked about Headley. Yes, he had told Rana about his connections to Lashkar, ISI, Ilyas Kashmiri, and about “running around” in some camps. And maybe there were weapons, sure; in Kashmir province a liberation war was being fought, so that would make sense, Rana said. But on the other hand, Rana hadn’t thought much of it. It was just talk.
“I say okay. He makes up those stories and tell them with a lot of love and passion, and I said well, yeah, okay…. Friends are talking, loose talk, good talk, bad talk. Yeah, but I don’t specifically would say that at this very day, he did some training or that,” Rana said.
He used Headley’s dog, Tyson, as an example of Headley not always doing what he said he was doing. After all, he claimed to follow a literal interpretation of the Qur’an. But a true orthodox Muslim cannot own a dog.
That’s how it often was with Headley, Rana explained. You couldn’t always trust him.
The FBI agents also shifted the discussion to the Muhammad cartoons. He had never seen them, Rana said.
But he had heard Headley say that the men behind them would have been sentenced to death “in the perfect world, in the prophet’s time.” They had spoken about the cartoons for hours and were upset about the artist, but more than anything about the ones that did nothing to stop it. Editors, journalists, newspaper owners, and Denmark’s prime minister. They were the real villains.
“How do you feel about those cartoons?” FBI agent Parsons inquired.
The Mind of a Terrorist Page 22
