David Headley Arrest- Heroin, ISI, DEA, "Terrorism"

[American Dream]

http://www.telegram.com/article/2009112 ... 20364/1052

Nov 22, 2009

Terror suspect torn between two worlds

THE NEW YORK TIMES

PHILADELPHIA — The trip from a strict Pakistani boarding school to a bohemian bar in Philadelphia has defined David Headley’s life, according to those who know the middle-age man at the center of a global terrorism investigation.

Raised by his father in Pakistan as a devout Muslim, Headley arrived back here at 17 to live with his American mother, a former socialite who ran a bar called the Khyber Pass.

Today, Headley is an Islamic fundamentalist who once liked to get high. He has a traditional Pakistani wife, who lives with their children in Chicago, but also an American girlfriend, a makeup artist in New York, according to a relative and friends. Depending on the setting, he alternates between the name he adopted in the United States, David Headley, and the Urdu one he was given at birth, Daood Gilani. Even his eyes — one brown, the other green — hint that he has roots in two places.

Headley, an American citizen, is accused of being the lead operative in a loose-knit group of militants plotting revenge against a Danish newspaper that published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. The indictment against him portrays a man who moved easily between different worlds. The profile that has emerged of him since his arrest, however, suggests that Headley felt pulled between two cultures and ultimately gravitated toward an extremist Islamic one.

“Some of us are saying that ‘Terrorism’ is the weapon of the cowardly,” Headley wrote in an e-mail message to his high school classmates last February. “I will say that you may call it barbaric or immoral or cruel, but never cowardly.”

He added, “Courage is, by and large, exclusive to the Muslim Nation.”

Headley’s e-mail messages, including many that defend beheadings and suicide bombings as heroic, are among the evidence in the government’s case against him and his accused co-conspirator, Tahawwur Hussain Rana, who was born in Pakistan, is a citizen of Canada and runs businesses in Chicago.

The men, who became close friends in a military academy outside Islamabad, were arrested last month in Chicago. They are charged with plotting an attack they labeled the Mickey Mouse Project against Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper whose cartoons had provoked outrage across the Muslim world.

Since then, the investigation has widened beyond Chicago and Copenhagen. The authorities have learned more, with cooperation from Headley, about the two men’s network of contacts with known terrorist groups, including al-Qaida and Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani militant group, as well as officials in the Pakistani government and military. American and Indian investigators are also looking into whether the two Chicago men, who traveled to Mumbai before the deadly assault there last November, may have been involved in the plot.

Headley, 49, and Rana, 48, stand out from the young, poor extremists from fundamentalist Islamic schools who strike targets in or close to their homelands. Instead, their privileged backgrounds, extensive travel and bouts of culture shock make them more like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed architect of the Sept. 11 attacks who attended college in the United States, and Mohammed Atta, one of the lead hijackers.

Those who knew Headley paint a troubled image.

In 1977, Pakistan’s government was overthrown in a military coup, and Headley’s mother, friends said, feared for her children. She traveled to Pakistan, withdrew Daood from the Hasan Abdal Cadet College and brought him to live with her, a move recorded by The Philadelphia Inquirer. (Her daughter, Syedah, stayed behind with her father for several years.)

According to family friends, the teenager soon rebelled against his mother’s heavy drinking and multiple sexual relationships by engaging in the same behavior.

“Those were the days when girls, weed and whatever were readily available,” Jay Wilson, who worked at the Khyber Pass, wrote in an e-mail message from England. “Daood was not immune to the pleasures of American adolescence.”

Later, said Lorenzo Lacovara, another former worker at the bar, Gilani began expressing anger at all non-Muslims.

“He would clearly state he had contempt for infidels,” Lacovara said in a telephone interview from New Mexico. “He kept talking about the return of the 14th century, saying Islam was going to take over the world.”

Headley tried to help her son straighten out his life. In 1985, she put him in charge of the Khyber Pass, but he proved to be such a poor manager that they lost the bar a couple of years later, friends of the family said.

In 1998, Gilani, then 38, was convicted of conspiring to smuggle heroin into the country from Pakistan. Court records show that after his arrest, he provided so much information about his own involvement with drug trafficking, which stretched back more than a decade, and about his Pakistani suppliers that he was sentenced to less than two years in jail and later went to Pakistan to conduct undercover surveillance operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration.

In 2006, Gilani changed his name to David Headley, apparently to make border crossings between the United States and other countries easier, court documents say. About that time, his uncle said he moved his family to Chicago because it had a large Muslim community and he wanted to send his four children to religious schools.

Earlier this year, Headley complained in an e-mail message about “NATO criminal vermin dropping 22,000 lbs bombs on unsuspecting, unarmed Afghan villagers” or “napalming southeast Asian farmers.” Writing about Pakistan’s chief enemy, he said, “We will retaliate against India.”

And in an e-mail message defending the beheading of a Polish engineer by the Taliban in Pakistan, he wrote, “The best way for a man to die is with the sword.”

[American Dream]

November 22, 2009

US sleuths believe ISI had links with Headley


The US investigators believe some elements in Pakistan's ISI could be linked to American terror suspect David Headley, who is currently in FBI custody for trying to plot attacks in India.

The investigators made this assessment on the basis of the arrest of "two key persons" in Pakistan, sources said. Illyas Kashmiri, a former Pakistani military officer who has become a militant commander associated with both Al-Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), is one among them.

They have also zeroed in on a Pakistani national who is suspected to be a key link between LeT handlers and Headley and his Pakistani-Canadian associate Tahawwur Hussain Rana, the sources added.

The sources said India is expected to know in a week from the US whether Headley and Rana, who are operatives of LeT, were involved in Mumbai attacks. Agencies in India have been suspecting that the duo could have been involved in 26/11.

The sources said there is no evidence so far to link the duo with the Mumbai attack.

India and the US are in constant touch on the Headley case and Washington has conveyed that within a week there could be "authentic" information whether they were involved in the attack, the sources added.

A Pakistani national believed to be a common link between the LeT handlers like Zaki-ur Lakhvi and the two terror suspects detained by the FBI has been identified and probe on him is expected to reveal whether Headley and Rana had any role.

The national, whose identity has been kept secret, is believed to have been in Pakistan at the time of Mumbai carnage.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage ... 79074.aspx

[beeline]

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/breaking/20091207_American_charged_in_Mumbai_attacks.html

Posted on Mon, Dec. 7, 2009


Former Philadelphia man charged in Mumbai attacks
By Joseph Tanfani

Inquirer staff writer

Federal authorities in Chicago have now charged a former Philadelphia man with helping to plan the deadly November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India.

David Coleman Headley, 49, who was brought to Philadelphia from Pakistan as a teenager, spent nearly two years scouting locations that figured in the terror attacks, including the Taj Mahal hotel, a cafe and train station.

Headley turned over the information to a Pakistani terror organization, Lashkar e Tayyiba, or The Army of the Good. Ten Lashkar-trained commandos landed in Mumbai last year and carried out three days of attacks with rifles, grenades and bombs, killing 170 people, including six Americans.

Authorities previously charged Headley with plotting to attack the Danish newspaper that angered Muslims by printing a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad.

Headley was born Daood Gilani, the son of a prominent Pakistani official and Serrill Headley of Bryn Mawr. Headley for years ran the Khyber Pass restaurant/pub in Old City.

He is cooperating with the ongoing investigation, federal authorities said.

Also today, a criminal complaint was unsealed in federal court in Chicago charging Abdur Rehman Hashim Syed (Abdur Rehman), a retired major in the Pakistani military, with conspiracy in connection with the Danish terror plot. Another Chicago man, Tahawwur Hussain Rana, was arrested in October on charges related to the Danish conspiracy.

[kenoma]

The shadow of a friend

It began with a mistake at the gym. The muscular, 6 ft-2 inch white man had been coming to the Mumbai gym called Moksha (salvation) for about three months in 2006, thrice a week, every evening around 9 p.m., keeping to himself. Once in a while, he greeted some people from the US Consulate across the road, who came there as well.

His name was David Coleman Headley. He would tell his friends he was born in Philadelphia, had Irish ancestry, and had served with the US Army. He spoke English with an American accent, knew some words of Hindi, was a teetotaller, wore Ray-Ban glasses, had his hair tied in a ponytail, and his face was tanned — “red like a tomato”, a friend of his would say later. He had a chiselled face and green eyes, with one eyeball a slightly different shade from the other.

Vilas Pandurang Varak, 31, one of the gym instructors, had never spoken to the man but had certainly noticed him earlier — he was an instructor’s delight, extremely fit, extremely dedicated. He usually used only the tough-to-do cross-trainer, for up to an hour. Varak, who lived in a central Mumbai chawl (residential cluster) and is to get married on December 9, knew the drill: don’t bother the expats until they need something. But the man was doing it all wrong today on the squatting rack; he could hurt himself. Varak told him so.

“Will you train me?” Headley asked later.

“I work here, I will help you out whenever you want,” Varak said.

Soon, they would become friends, hanging out once in a while with Vilas’s friend and fitness guru, 27-year-old Rahul Bhatt. Headley was never star-struck — although his friend belonged to one of the most famous film families in Bollywood: his father is famous filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt, his uncle the leading producer Mukesh Bhatt, his sister the actor-director Pooja Bhatt.

Headley said he was an immigration consultant whose boss was one “Mr. Sanders” in New York. He said he was helping poor Pakistani youth emigrate from their embattled nation. He never let his young friends pay for the expensive dinners — and happily went to have the famous vegetarian lunch at the city’s Hare Krishna temple, where he lectured his Indian friends on Lord Krishna. He had copies of the Bible, the Quran and the Gita.

Headley loved having spicy chaat (streetside snacks). He lived in a house with a large hall partitioned hostel-style for other inmates — several other white men. He watched movies with Bhatt and Vilas Varak, and even went to see a Bollywood film. He seemed to know everything about everything — including how Belgian Shepherd dogs were better than German Shepherds. So Bhatt jokingly called him an American spy, a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent whom he addressed as “Agent Headley” in jest.

They spoke about special military units and secret squads the world over. They discussed Bhatt’s planned film Suicide Bomber. Headley brought books for Bhatt from the United States that the aspiring actor needed as reference material. Headley told him he should go and work in Hollywood; with his big muscular body and long legs he was “too big for Bollywood”. They talked about nutritional supplements. He found a co-worker’s daughter attractive. He was fond of children.

This autumn, he became quite something else for them.

Their white friend who loved his Philadelphia steak sandwich and apple pie with vanilla ice-cream was, investigators said, actually a globe-trotting terrorist.

Chicago’s O’Hare airport buzzed with passengers. It was October 3, 2009; the flight to Philadelphia would soon take off.

As one of the passengers prepared to board, Federal Bureau of Investiga-tions (FBI) agents moved in, led by Special Agent Lorenzo Benedict.

The passenger was arrested, his bags searched. There was a photocopy of an August 1, 2009 issue of the Jyllands-Posten newspaper, a Copenhagen street guide, a list of phone numbers, including that of a Pakistani man he had been in constant touch with; a book titled How to Pray like a Jew, and a memory stick containing 10 short videos, showing the exterior and nearby surroundings of the newspaper office.

The man was David Coleman Headley — a Pakistan-born American also known as Daood Gilani. The same man who had watched a Bollywood movie at the Metro theatre in Mumbai with his friend Vilas Varak.

Benedict, who had joined the FBI in September 2004, had been handling counter-terrorism investigations since March 2005. He had been preparing for this moment for months, intercepting Headley’s phone calls and e-mails, keeping track of his plans to travel to Pakistan some days later.

Eight days after the arrest, on October 11, he brought charges against Headley. Benedict accused Headley of working for the outlawed Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, and planning a daring attack in the office of the Danish newspaper that had published cartoons offensive to Muslims, and another terrorist attack in India, in or around Mumbai.

Headley would soon become India’s most famous terror suspect.

Half-way around the world in Mumbai, Rahul Bhatt had just entered his apartment and was walking to his room when he froze. His mother was watching the TV in the living room on the November day, and he had just heard something familiar.

“Flip back! Flip back!” Bhatt, a fitness consultant, told his mother Kiran.

David Headley had walked back into Bhatt’s life — this time with a tag of a terrorist. And Benedict, the FBI agent, had alleged in court papers that Headley had frequently mentioned an actor called “Rahul”, also used interchangeably as a code for the city, in his mails to a Pakistan-based handler.

Forty-eight hours later, Bhatt and Varak sat alongside Mahesh Bhatt, before Rakesh Maria, Mumbai’s Crime Branch chief. They told him all they knew of Headley. These were crucial leads for security officials, who had been stunned by the FBI arrest.

Headley, a man who was staying in Mumbai, allegedly planning a terrorist attack and had access to influential opinion-leaders in the run-up to, and after, the 26/11 terrorist attacks, had completely foxed the police and intelligence agencies.

Two Mumbai boys would now lead the way with crucial leads.

“That’s not the David I knew,” Bhatt says as he sits in his living room, the sounds of a news bulletin merging with the din of street traffic filtering in.

Bhatt and Headley first met in early 2007, at a ‘Mr. Mumbai’ bodybuilding competition at Mumbai’s Maratha Mandir auditorium. Vilas had told Headley they would go meet “my fitness guru”.

“The hall was packed, there were no seats, so I offered him mine, and went and sat elsewere,” Bhatt says.

Then Headley started coming for fitness counselling. They became friends. They met sometimes at the Barista on Chapel Road in Mumbai’s Bandra neighbourhood, mostly on Sundays. He usually came sitting with Varak on his motorbike. Bhatt e-mailed him occasionally, and sent him mobile text messages — all of which were being read by investigators along with Headley’s other communication.

“We watched movies at PVR or INOX. We went once to the Sea Lounge at the Taj (Mahal hotel), we sometimes ate at Indigo resturant,” Bhatt says.

They were sitting at Indigo once, Headley wearing a cap of the Philadelphia Phillies, the city’s baseball team, having a Philadelphia steak sandwich. “It’s even better than what you get in Philly (the short form of the city’s name),” he said. A white woman walked up, saw his cap and said: “Are you from Philadelphia? Me too!”

“He knew I am a recluse. I don’t go to parties or pubs; he never once asked me to. He said he would be very proud to see me successful as an actor,” Bhatt says. Bhatt was about to make his debut as an actor in the film Suicide Bomber, loosely based on the London terrorist bombings. Headley brought him books he needed for reference. The film never took off.

Headley offered to help him migrate to the United States, to seek work in the movies.

“And he said he would take me to Pakistan and change my name to Akbar,” the tall, muscular Varak says, sitting nervously on the edge of the sofa at the Bhatt home. “I used to get so scared.”

Headley carried a mobile phone but it never rang in his friends’ presence – though they would be together for up to seven hours on a Sunday.

Varak sometimes found him reading a book in a foreign script.

“I don’t know what it was, whether Urdu or something else,” he says.

Bhatt was certain he was a CIA agent. “What on earth was he doing in Mumbai?” Bhatt says. “Then I thought I was being just a kid, that it was because of my overdose of spy movies.”

Even as he deals with the media playing up Headley’s friendship with the two men, despite their help with the probe, Bhatt has not lost his dark humour and sense of irony.

“This might finally help my movie career,” he says.

[beeline]

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/homepage/20091208_Man_with_Phila__ties_charged_in_planning_of_Mumbai_attacks.html

Man with Phila. ties charged in planning of Mumbai attacks
By Joseph Tanfani

Inquirer Staff Writer

A former Philadelphia tavern operator-turned-terror suspect played a key role in planning last year's deadly assaults in Mumbai, India, according to new federal charges.

David Coleman Headley, 49, who was brought to Philadelphia from Pakistan as a teenager, spent nearly two years scouting locations that figured in the attacks on targets including the Oberoi and Taj Mahal hotels, a cafe, and a Jewish center, federal authorities say.

Headley turned over the information to a Pakistani extremist organization, Lashkar-e-Taiba, or the Army of the Good, a group primarily focused on separating the Kashmir region from India.

Ten Lashkar-trained commandos landed in Mumbai last year and carried out three days of attacks with rifles, grenades, and bombs, killing 166 people, including six Americans.

Headley has been in jail since October, charged with plotting to attack the Danish newspaper that angered Muslims by printing a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad. That attack never occurred.

Also yesterday, prosecutors unsealed charges against Abdur Rehman, a retired major in the Pakistani military. He is accused of participating in the Denmark conspiracy.

A third man, Tahawwur Hussain Rana of Chicago, a classmate of Headley's at a Pakistan military academy, also was arrested in October in connection with the alleged Denmark plot.

Headley has been cooperating with the investigation into both the India and Denmark terror plans, his lawyer and federal prosecutors said.

Prosecutors said they believed the arrests were unraveling a significant terror network that managed to build ties to operatives in the United States. They are continuing to share tips and leads with investigators in other countries as they pursue other suspects.

"This investigation remains active and ongoing," said Patrick J. Fitzgerald, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois.

An affidavit says Headley began talking to the FBI after his Oct. 3 arrest at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago. He was preparing to board a plane to Philadelphia, a planned stopover on a trip to Pakistan.



'Pretty serious'
"We're looking at the evidence," said Chicago defense attorney John Theis, declining to comment on the substance of the charges against Headley. "These are pretty serious allegations involving pretty serious conduct."

The Mumbai charges, filed yesterday in federal court in Chicago, added a chilling new dimension to the already strange saga of Headley - born Daood Gilani, the son of a prominent Pakistani broadcaster and a striking Main Line woman with a taste for adventure.

A U.S. citizen, Gilani attended Lashkar training camps beginning in February 2002. In 2006, after learning that the organization wanted him to perform surveillance in India, he changed his name to Headley in Philadelphia so he could travel more easily, authorities say.

Posing as a representative of an immigration-services business, Headley began traveling to Mumbai in September 2006, the charges say.

He made five extended trips, shooting videos of a number of public places, including some eventual targets of the attacks: the Oberoi and Taj Mahal hotels, the Leopold Cafe, the Nariman House synagogue and Jewish center, and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus train station.



'Old-fashioned'
He scouted other places that were not attacked, including the National Defence College in India. After the trips, he would return to Pakistan and drop off photos and videos.

In April 2008, seven months before the attacks, Headley carried out Lashkar instructions to take boat trips in and around Mumbai harbor to scout for potential landing sites; the Lashkar terror squads later entered the city by rafts.

Working with another Pakistani extremist organization, Headley also took repeated trips to Copenhagen to scout out the offices of the newspaper that printed the offending cartoon. The original plan was to blow up the building, but Headley said he argued for killing the cartoonist and an editor instead.

"Call me old-fashioned, but I feel disposed toward violence for the offending parties," he wrote in a computer message to his old classmates at the military academy, the charges say.

Headley was born in 1960 in Washington to Serrill Headley, who grew up in Bryn Mawr, and Syed Saleem Gilani. Headley married Gilani at age 19, according to an Inquirer story. After Gilani's job in Washington ended, the couple returned to Pakistan.

The couple divorced. Headley married and later divorced a second Pakistani - an executive - before returning to Philadelphia. After several attempts, she was able to get her son Daood out of Pakistan in the 1970s and later bought and renovated a pub at 56 S. Second St. that she called the Khyber Pass. She died last year.

The boy - described by family friends as sullen but handsome, with one blue eye and one brownish-green - had trouble adjusting to life in the States after his conservative upbringing in Pakistan, friends said.

Headley later took over the bar but drove it into bankruptcy. He also took accounting classes at the Community College of Philadelphia in the 1990s but did not earn a degree, and he managed video stores for a time in Philadelphia and New York.

In 1998, he was sentenced to 15 months in jail in New York for smuggling heroin from Pakistan.

The current case has been huge news in India, with media chasing scraps of information about Gilani's comings and goings.

On Saturday, Danyal Gilani, a spokesman for the Pakistani prime minister, confirmed that Headley is his half-brother, but said he had little contact with him since 2002. He last saw him at his father's funeral in 2008, according to a report in the Times of India.

He said his family was not related to the prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani. The prime minister did visit his house after his father's death last year to offer condolences, he said.

"This he did out of courtesy because I was working as his [public-relations officer] and also because my father was a renowned broadcaster and a known personality of his time," Danyal Gilani said. "At that time, Daood [Gilani] was not in Pakistan."

Headley was charged with providing support to foreign terrorist plots and six counts of aiding and abetting the murder of U.S. citizens in India. He could face life in prison or the death penalty.

[kenoma]

5 U.S. men arrested in Pakistan were trying to join militants, police say
Five young Americans detained in Pakistan this week had been trying to link up with a militant organization affiliated with the Taliban and Al Qaeda and based in Pakistan's troubled tribal region along the Afghan border, police said today.

The men, Muslims from northern Virginia and the Washington area, remain in the custody of Pakistani authorities in Sargodha, the eastern city where they were arrested. They have yet to be charged.

"They were definitely planning jihad activity," said Sargodha's top police official, Usman Anwar. "The planning was almost complete, but we arrested them and their plot has failed."

Anwar would not say what that plot was or whether the men had developed a specific target. He said the Pakistani militant group that the men had been communicating with had no name but was based in northwestern Pakistan, where Al Qaeda and the Taliban maintain strongholds.

Their plans for joining jihad, or holy war, were contained in laptop computers found at a Sargodha house belonging to an uncle of one of the men, Anwar said. However, Anwar would not elaborate on what evidence was culled from the laptops.

Anwar identified the men as Umer Farooq, Ahmed Abdullah, Waqar Khan, Ramy Zamzam and Aman Yasser. Farooq, Abdullah and Khan are of Pakistani descent. Zamzam, a dental student at Howard University in Washington, is of Egyptian descent, while Yasser's family is Yemeni. Anwar did not specify the ages of each of the men.

The arrests have renewed concerns that Pakistan-based Islamic extremist groups are trying to recruit American Muslims to carry out terrorist attacks.

In Chicago, David C. Headley and Tahawwur Hussain Rana are charged with plotting an attack on a Danish newspaper over its publication of unflattering cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. Headley also is charged with conducting surveillance of the hotels and other locations later targeted in an assault that killed 166 people in Mumbai, India, in November 2008. Prosecutors allege Headley and Rana were working with leaders of the Pakistani militant group blamed for the Mumbai attacks, Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Afghan native Najibullah Zazi of Colorado is charged with conspiring to detonate homemade explosive devices in the United States, in what authorities have called the first Al Qaeda-linked plot on U.S. soil since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Zazi allegedly trained with Al Qaeda in Pakistan.

"We know we have to work more closely with Afghanistan and Pakistan," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Wednesday in Washington, "to root out the infrastructure of terrorism that continues to recruit and train people who are willing to do what is alleged with Mr. Zazi and David Headley, and others in the recent cases that have come to light."

The men arrested in Sargodha are all U.S. citizens and 20 to 25 years old, Anwar said. After the men suddenly disappeared in late November, their families sought the help of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington-based Muslim civil-rights and advocacy group. The students' parents and council officials decided to notify the FBI to help track the men down.

One of the men left behind a video that called on Muslims to defend fellow Muslims and depicted American casualties, in what appeared to be a farewell message.

Pakistani media reported that an FBI team was in Sargodha today independently questioning the men. U.S. Embassy authorities said they could not confirm that.

Anwar said the men arrived in Pakistan's largest city, Karachi, on Nov. 30. They traveled to the nearby city of Hyderabad and, afterward, to the eastern city of Lahore before heading to Sargodha.

In Sargodha, they stayed for several days at the house of Fahim Farooq, the brother-in-law of Umer Farooq's father. Acting on a tip, Sargodha police raided the house Wednesday night and arrested the five men.

In addition to the laptop computers, police found jihadist literature and maps that highlighted the location of Miran Shah, a Taliban stronghold in North Waziristan, a tribal region along the Afghan border.

Pakistani media reports have alleged that Fahim Farooq's home was linked to Jaish-e-Mohammed, a Pakistani militant organization with ties to Al Qaeda. However, Anwar said that was not true and added that there was no evidence that the organization the men were trying to link up with was Jaish-e-Mohammed.

....

[beeline]

Posted on Wed, Dec. 9, 2009


Five missing Americans probed for terror links
DEVLIN BARRETT and PAMELA HESS

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Five young American Muslims captured in Pakistan are under investigation for possible links to terrorism after their families found a disturbing farewell video the missing men left behind showing scenes of war and casualties and saying Muslims must be defended.

Frantic relatives and worried FBI agents have been searching for the five men for more than a week, since their disappearance in late November. The missing men, ranging in age from 19 to 25, have family roots in the northern Virginia and Washington, D.C., area. One, Ramy Zamzam, is a dental student at Howard University.

Two U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case, said the five are believed to be under arrest in Pakistan.

On the heels of charges against a Chicago man accused of plotting international terrorism, the case is another worrisome sign that Americans can be recruited within the United States to enlist in terrorist networks.

Leaders of an Islamic American group said the families of the five men asked the FBI for help and were particularly disturbed to see the video message.

"One person appeared in that video and they made references to the ongoing conflict in the world, and that young Muslims have to do something," said Nihad Awad, of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR.

"The video's about 11 minutes and it's like a farewell. And they did not specify what they would be doing. But just hearing and seeing videos similar on the Internet, it just made me uncomfortable," Awad said. The video has not been made public.

Before the men left, they did not seem to have become militant, a local imam said.

"From all of our interviews, there was no sign they were outwardly radicalized," said Imam Johari Abdul-Malik.

One of Zamzam's younger brothers, interviewed at the family's Alexandria, Va., apartment, said Zamzam has a 4.0 grade-point average and is "a good guy."

"He's a normal Joe," said the brother, identifying himself only by a nickname, Zam.

In Pakistan, police officer Tahir Gujjar said five Americans were picked up in a raid on a house in Sarghoda in the eastern province of Punjab. He did not identify them, but said three are of Pakistani descent, one is of Egyptian descent and the other has Yemeni heritage.

S.M. Imran Gardezi, press minister at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, said the men "are under arrest in Pakistan. The investigation is to see whether they had any links to any extremist groups." No charges have been filed.

Pakistani regional police chief Mian Javed Islam told The Associated Press that the men spent the past few days in the city of Sarghoda, which is near an air base about 125 miles (200 kilometers) south of the capital, Islamabad.

U.S. Embassy spokesman Rick Snelsire said officials there were aware of the reported arrests, but could not confirm them.

Pakistan has many militant groups based in its territory and the U.S. has been pressing the government to crack down on extremism. Al-Qaida and Taliban militants are believed to be hiding in lawless tribal areas near the Afghan border.

In Washington, a spokeswoman for the FBI's local office said agents have been trying to help find the men.

"The FBI is working with the families and local law enforcement to investigate the missing students and is aware of the individuals arrested in Pakistan," said the spokeswoman, Katherine Schweit. "We are working with Pakistan authorities to determine their identities and the nature of their business there if indeed these are the students who had gone missing."

She said the investigation continues, declining to comment further.

According to officials at CAIR, the five left the country at the end of November without telling their families.

After the young men left, at least one phoned his family still claiming to be in the United States, but the caller ID information suggested they were overseas.

The families, members of the local Muslim community, took their concerns to CAIR, which put them in touch with the FBI and got them a lawyer, the group said.

A Howard University spokesman confirmed Zamzam was a student there but declined further comment.

Samirah Ali, president of Howard University's Muslim Student Association, said the FBI contacted her last week about Zamzam, and told her he had been missing for a week.

Ali said she's known Zamzam for three years and never suspected he would be involved in radical activities.

"He's a very nice guy, very cordial, very friendly," Ali said, adding that he has a bubbly personality. "It really caught me off guard."

,,,

Associated Press writers Eileen Sullivan and Matt Apuzzo in Washington, Zaran Khan in Islamabad and Nafeesa Syeed in Alexandria, Va., contributed to this report.

http://www.philly.com/philly/wires/ap/news/nation/washington/cabinet/78901797.html

[kenoma]

Gerard Posner:
...
In February 1997, Headley was arrested in New York for conspiracy to import heroin into the U.S. The indictment was brought under his original name, Daood Saleem Gilani, along with a codefendant James Leslie Lewis. (Lewis got a 10-year sentence, later reduced to 100 months.)

Headley was detained pending trial. After the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Eastern District of New York submitted five sealed documents, Headley was released on bond (those sealed papers are probably the official notice that he had chosen to cooperate with prosecutors, and he did later testify for the government in another heroin case). Headley got a 15-month sentence and five years of supervised release. My review of the court documents in the case indicates that Headley was scheduled to turn himself in on October 9, 1998. A week before that, the prosecutors submitted another sealed letter into the file. Headley’s surrender date was postponed for a month. When he did turn himself in, he was delivered to the low-security Federal Correctional Institution in Fort Dix, New Jersey.

The following July, a letter endorsed by Headley’s New York-based attorney, Howard Leader, requested permission for Headley to travel to Pakistan from August 10, 1999, through September 15. Judge Carol Amon granted the unusual request for the Pakistani travel. By that time, a former agent with the DEA discloses to The Daily Beast that Headley had begun cooperating with the agency, whose investigators had originally made the case against him. (The DEA had no comment on any aspect of Headley or his alleged informant status.)

There is no record of that first trip Headley took to Pakistan for the feds, and Fort Dix refuses to disclose any information about his supervised leave from their facility in 1999. But the same DEA source, who fingers Headley as an informant, says he did travel to Pakistan that year and conducted undercover surveillance operations on an Afpak drug gang. What is indisputable is that on November 16, 2001, just two months after the 9/11 attacks, Leader, Headley’s attorney, and an assistant U.S. attorney, Loan Hong, made a joint application to Judge Amon to terminate Headley’s supervised release three years early. Judge Amon agreed and discharged Headley from any further probation.

In a post-9/11 world of high security, Headley somehow managed to then move with apparent ease in and out of Pakistan. A convicted felon of Pakistani descent, making frequent trips back and forth to the U.S. (there were apparently at least four in one year), would have been monitored by U.S. tracking agencies. People traveling to and from Pakistan automatically came up on scanner software installed shortly after 9/11 at airports. Moreover, Headley also evidently visited the United Arab Emirates, a source of considerable money to terror groups like al Qaeda. The Daily Beast has learned that Headley is the half-brother of the public-relations officer for the current Pakistani prime minister and an American intelligence asset says that one of Headley’s other Pakistan-based relatives in 2001 was a ranking officer in that country’s equivalent of the CIA, Inter-Services Intelligence. ISI was considered a pro-Taliban intelligence agency not friendly with the West.

Privately, U.S. government officials, who downplay any nefarious connotation about Headley’s post-9/11 travel, tell me that he changed names to make travel easier (in 2006, for instance, he changed his name from Daood Gilani to David Coleman Headley, but he had been known under the Headley name in federal files before he adopted that name for travel). Since U.S. agencies keep data on drug offenders, it is unlikely he gave U.S. intelligence and Homeland Security the slip by simply changing his traveling name to an alias that was already known to U.S. authorities. More probably: He did enough to continue to merit the protection of the DEA or had by that time been passed along as a potential asset to another branch of U.S. intelligence.

Indian intelligence believes that Headley was an undercover U.S. agent who went rogue, says a source familiar with their thinking. Headley, who is now cooperating with federal authorities in the terror probe, has evidently admitted joining Lashkar-e-Taiba in 2006, and having received training in one of their terror camps in Pakistan. This theory goes that Headley was used by U.S. intelligence to infiltrate the Lashkar terrorists, but gradually turned under the influence of those very terrorists he was supposed to spy on.

Fueling the speculation abroad is that the FBI managed to warn its Indian counterparts of a planned attack in Mumbai in September 2008. The’s FBI accurate intel about that operation has been corroborated by Azam Amir Kasab, the only surviving terrorist from Mumbai, who admitted under interrogations that the attack was originally set for September but had to be aborted. The Indians thought the FBI alert for September was so specific—even mentioning target hotels, including the eventual main target, the Taj Mahal Palace—that the Bureau might have an informant inside a Pakistani terror group. Indian intelligence believes that it was Headley who passed along that info to the FBI. But then, his information to his American handlers suddenly dried. By the time the terrorists eventually pulled off the successful November attack, U.S. intelligence agencies were caught flat-footed.

It was shortly before the Mumbai attacks that the FBI evidently first put Headley under its surveillance, leading to his arrest this past October. The FBI has rejected the requests of Indian investigators to talk to Headley or his co-conspirator, Tahawwur Hussain Rana, a 48-year-old Pakistani native with Canadian citizenship. U.S. officials blamed “bureaucratic” and “procedural” hurdles for denying Indian investigators access to Headley. But keeping Headley locked up and away from other investigators isn’t stopping the questions posed by some foreign governments about whether an American informant turned on his handlers and might have helped pull off India’s 9/11.

[kenoma]

Was Headley CIA double agent?

NEW DELHI: Shadows of doubt have come over LeT terror suspect David Headley’s role with Indian authorities suspecting him to be a double agent who might have been either planted as an agent in the CIA by the LeT itself or may have done the recce for the Mumbai attacks as a side business.

Sources in the intelligence agencies, said that it did not seem to be an open and shut case and there were reasonable grounds to have doubts on the story made known so far. Indian agencies also have apprehensions about nailing the masterminds in Pakistan by putting Headley in jail on charges of involvement in the 26/11 attacks.

“Even if Headley is convicted, it won’t put pressure on Pakistan to do more and they could still claim of not having enough evidence to act against the masterminds of Mumbai attack - Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi and Hafiz Sayeed,” said a source.

What has surprised the agencies here is that why the US agencies figured out Headley’s change of name from Daood Gilani as late as on February 15, 2006, in Philadelphia, when every Pakistani or Arab born citizen is double-checked after the 9/11 fateful twin tower attacks.

[kenoma]

Why are David Headley's visa papers missing?

How did terror suspect David Headley get a visa to India? What documents did he provide to establish his identity?

Uncovering this will be tough since it's now official that Headley's papers have gone missing from the Indian Consulate in Chicago which granted Headley his visa. Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao has written to the Consulate asking for an explanation.

The missing papers are the latest in a mystery that tends to get deeper and darker everyday. At the heart of India's concerns are suspicions that Headley was originally a CIA agent who switched sides and then planned the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai with the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT).

Headley, a US national who left Pakistan with his mother as a teenager, was arrested in Chicago by the FBI in October.

NDTV has reported extensively on whether Headley started out working for the Americans. These reports have been brought up in Parliament, with CPM MP Brinda Karat asking why America is not allowing India access to Headley. In a Chicago court, US prosecutors have charged Headley with plotting the 26/11 attacks as an undercover agent of the LeT.

Headley made multiple trips to India before 26/11. He allegedly took photographs and videos of the four sites that would later come under siege by Pakistani terrorists.

Indian sources are unhappy that despite these charges, Indian officials have not been allowed to meet Headley. America has also said that it's "too premature" to discuss Headley's possible extradition to India after his US trial is completed.

What's more worrying for India is that America's surveillance of Headley began in September last year, before the 26/11 attacks. Yet, no information on him was shared with India. America clearly had specific intelligence reports about the possibility of Mumbai hotels being targeted by terrorists - the Taj was mentioned in the warning passed onto India. But Headley did not figure in this alert.

Worse, India was not told about Headley even when he visited the country in March this year, supposedly to plan a new round of terror attacks. Instead, America waited till after Headley's arrest to share intelligence on him.

Sources say India suspects that Headley was enrolled as a spy after he was arrested for smuggling heroin in 1988. Did America then use him to infiltrate Pakistan's narcotics underworld? And did Headley use that as a cover to start working for Pakistani terrorists against India? Questions that now have India questioning whether America has shared everything it knows about a man named Daood Gilani who morphed into David Coleman Headley.

[Jeff]

From Times Online
December 17, 2009

Mumbai terror suspect David Headley was ‘rogue US secret agent’

Rhys Blakely in Mumbai

A key terror suspect who allegedly helped to plan last year’s attacks in Mumbai and plotted to strike Europe was an American secret agent who went rogue, Indian officials believe.

David Headley, 49, who was born in Washington to a Pakistan diplomat father and an American mother, was arrested in Chicago in October. He is accused of reconnoitring targets in India and Europe for Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the Pakistan-based terror group behind the Mumbai attacks and of having links to al-Qaeda. He has denied the charges.

He came to the attention of the US security services in 1997 when he was arrested in New York for heroin smuggling. He earned a reduced sentence by working for the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) infiltrating Pakistan-linked narcotics gangs.

Indian investigators, who have been denied access to Mr Headley, suspect that he remained on the payroll of the US security services — possibly working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) — but switched his allegiance to LeT.

“India is looking into whether Headley worked as a double agent,” an Indian Home Ministry official said yesterday.

Mr Headley, who changed his name from Daood Gilani, was in Mumbai until two weeks before the attacks on the city, which claimed 166 lives last November. It is alleged that he spent months checking targets in India’s commercial capital, using his Western looks and anglicised name to move in elite social circles, hobnob with Bollywood actors and even to pass himself off as Jewish.

Despite being firmly on the radar of the US intelligence agencies, he was allowed to return to India as recently as March. Indian officials are furious that their American counterparts did not share details of that visit at the time. The Indian media has raised the possibility that Mr Headley was being protected by his American handlers — a theory that experts say is credible.

“The feeling in India is that the US has not been transparent,” said B. Raman, a former counter-terrorism chief in the Indian foreign intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing.

“That Headley was an agent for the DEA is known. Whether he was being used by the CIA as well is a matter of speculation, but it is almost certain that the CIA was aware of him and his movements across the subcontinent.”

According to Mr Raman, it is probable that Mr Headley, who was arrested when the US authorities learned that he was about to fly to Pakistan, was listed on the main database of the US National Counterterrorism Centre, a facility used by the CIA and several other American agencies to track terror suspects.

Indian officials suspect that US agencies declined to share intelligence to avoid compromising other secret operations and to to be able to deny any link with Mr Headley.

Analysts believe that the US may also have been anxious to avoid sharing information that could further raise tensions between India and Pakistan, nuclear-armed neighbours who have fought three wars.

According to documents put before a court in Chicago, Mr Headley had links with the Pakistan Army and, through it, with al-Qaeda.

As well as helping to co-ordinate the Mumbai atrocity, Mr Headley is accused of planning attacks on Mumbai’s Bollywood film industry, the Shiv Sena, a Hindu extremist group also based in Mumbai, a major Hindu temple, and a Danish newspaper that had published cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

The US authorities allege that he was close to Tahawwur Hussain Rana, a former Pakistani schoolmate and businessman who is also being charged with planning to attack the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten. Mr Rana is accused of having known about the attack on Mumbai in advance.

The CIA denied that Headley had worked for the organisation.

“Any suggestion that Headley was working for the CIA is complete and utter nonsense. It’s flat-out false,” Paul Gimigliano, from the CIA’s Office of Public Affairs, said.

The Indian Home Secretary, Gopal Krishna Pillai, has said that his Government would seek the extradition of Mr Headley — a request that has so far been stonewalled by US officials.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 960182.ece

[cptmarginal]

Mr Headley, who changed his name from Daood Gilani, was in Mumbai until two weeks before the attacks on the city, which claimed 166 lives last November. It is alleged that he spent months checking targets in India’s commercial capital, using his Western looks and anglicised name to move in elite social circles, hobnob with Bollywood actors and even to pass himself off as Jewish.

Hmm...

[MinM]

Posted on Wed, Dec. 9, 2009


Five missing Americans probed for terror links
DEVLIN BARRETT and PAMELA HESS

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Five young American Muslims captured in Pakistan are under investigation for possible links to terrorism after their families found a disturbing farewell video the missing men left behind showing scenes of war and casualties and saying Muslims must be defended.

Frantic relatives and worried FBI agents have been searching for the five men for more than a week, since their disappearance in late November. The missing men, ranging in age from 19 to 25, have family roots in the northern Virginia and Washington, D.C., area. One, Ramy Zamzam, is a dental student at Howard University...

5 U.S. men arrested in Pakistan were trying to join militants, police say
Five young Americans detained in Pakistan this week had been trying to link up with a militant organization affiliated with the Taliban and Al Qaeda and based in Pakistan's troubled tribal region along the Afghan border, police said today.

The men, Muslims from northern Virginia and the Washington area, remain in the custody of Pakistani authorities in Sargodha, the eastern city where they were arrested. They have yet to be charged...

How To Prevent Home Grown Terrorism : NPR
This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington.

Last week, Pakistani authorities arrested five young Muslim Americans from the Washington, D.C., area. Investigators believe the young men left home in northern Virginia with the intention of getting training to go fight U.S. forces in Afghanistan. U.S. officials say the group used social networking site Facebook and Internet videos on YouTube to contact extremist groups in Pakistan.

Small groups of self-radicalized American Muslims have plotted attacks in this country since 9/11, but there appears to be a change in this pattern lately. The Alexandria Five, as they're being called, used contacts overseas. So did Major Nadal Hasan, the man accused in the shootings at Fort Hood, and Najibullah Zazi allegedly planned to blow up buildings in New York after being trained in Pakistan...

CONAN: And what do we know about these five young men?

TEMPLE-RASTON: Well, I'll tell you, what's really different about these five young men, they went overseas, and they clearly - FBI officials feel they clearly radicalized themselves watching videos on the Internet and seem allegedly to have wanted to find some sort of training so they could attack U.S. troops overseas. That's sort of the broad outline of it, but what is very interesting about this, for someone who watches a lot of these plots on a day-to-day basis, or a lot of these alleged plots, is that this group was very mixed.

I mean, generally you see groups of young men who have similar ethnicities. And in this case, we've got someone from Eretria, we've got somebody from Egypt, we've got somebody from Pakistan. And it's sort of this melting pot of Muslims who decided to come together, and decided what their common cause was, was to go overseas and potentially fight American troops.

CONAN: So this is in distinction to the young Somalis from Minneapolis and St. Paul area who've gone over to fight in that country, a geographically coherent group. This is - the geographic coherence seems to be northern Virginia.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Yes, exactly, and the fact that they all speak English with an American accent.

CONAN: And so these are - we've all thought, all along, again unlike the Somalis who are a distinct community and recent arrivals, that American Muslims are much better assimilated in this country than they are in places like Britain and that the appeal of homegrown terrorism may be diminished because of that.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Yes, I think that's been a false hope for some time. There were mostly two groups that intelligence officials were taking a look at in this country as being less well-assimilated than other groups. And that would be Somalis - and as you say, the Somalis in Minneapolis, that's where the largest concentration of Somalis in this country are - and then the second group was Yemenis. And what they have in common is that they tend not to assimilate as well because they're working three jobs. They're usually pretty poor. Usually, their households are headed by mothers who came over here alone. They are very connected to the political goings-on in their home countries, and they never really get politically connected to what's going on in this country. And together, that makes - puts them in a kind of bubble that intelligence officials think make them much more susceptible to radicalization.

CONAN: And it's a - it is again self-radicalization through the Internet?

TEMPLE-RASTON: That's what it looks like. Now, in the case of the Somalis in Minneapolis, I think we're seeing, in a drip-drip-drip fashion, more and more people getting arrested as actual recruiters and people who inspired these kids. The Internet has always played a role.

The sort of first in this group of would-be jihadists was, if you recall, the Lackawanna Six, which was back - they went to an al-Qaida camp. They were from upstate New York. Six men went to an al-Qaida camp in Afghanistan the spring before the 9/11 attacks. And they're often cited as the first so-called sleeper cell in this country, although there's some doubt as to whether or not they were. They were all Yemeni, and one of the ways that they sort of - one of the tools that was used while they were recruited - there was an actual, physical recruiter here, too - was the Internet, watching videos about what was going on in the Middle East, what they felt the Americans were doing to their fellow Muslims. So the Internet has always been used as a tool, but now it's becoming - almost taking the place of a recruiter.

CONAN: In fact, the Internet telling a story, a version of the story, whether it's from a different point of view than they might see on CNN or ABC or Fox News.

TEMPLE-RASTON: That's right. There's very much a narrative about how young Muslims need to rise up and defend their other Muslim brothers. And one of the problems has been for U.S. intelligence and the Pentagon, they've been trying to, through their own psychological operations, or psych-ops, to do what they call counter-messaging, which is trying to change the narrative, trying to explain that, for example, a lot of these attacks that we see overseas in Afghanistan and Pakistan, particularly recently, are killing more Muslims than they are Americans. And this is something - this is Muslims killing Muslims. This is not Americans killing Muslims..
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... =121473067

Why are David Headley's visa papers missing?

How did terror suspect David Headley get a visa to India? What documents did he provide to establish his identity?

Uncovering this will be tough since it's now official that Headley's papers have gone missing from the Indian Consulate in Chicago which granted Headley his visa. Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao has written to the Consulate asking for an explanation.

The missing papers are the latest in a mystery that tends to get deeper and darker everyday. At the heart of India's concerns are suspicions that Headley was originally a CIA agent who switched sides and then planned the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai with the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT)...

The Telegraph - Calcutta (Kolkata) | Nation | Headley visa mystery deepens

Video: Scary Plotter | The Daily Show | Comedy Central

aangirfan: HEADLEY, LIKE DAWOOD IBRAHIM, LINKED TO 1993 BOMBINGS; CIA INVOLVEMENT IN INDIA

aangirfan: HEADLEY, THE CIA, NARIMAN HOUSE, FALSE FLAG OPS

aangirfan: HEADLEY INTERROGATED MORE THAN ONE MUMBAI SUSPECT - REPORTS

aangirfan: "KASAB WAS INTERROGATED BY HEADLEY"

aangirfan: DID US SPECIAL FORCES CARRY OUT THE MUMBAI ATTACKS?

[kenoma]

26/11 drama: Kasab retracts
SATISH NANDGAONKAR

Mumbai, Dec. 18: Pakistani gunman Mohammed Ajmal Kasab today retracted his confession of guilt, claimed he had been falsely implicated and made a reference to US terror suspect David Headley in a courtroom drama aimed at derailing the 26/11 trial.

A number of eyewitnesses have identified Kasab and CCTV cameras at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus have captured him blazing away.

But Kasab made seemingly bizarre claims, contradicting his July 20 voluntary confession made before judge M.L. Tahilyani as well as the one recorded before a magistrate in February.

The 22-year-old said he was not a terrorist, had not fired at commuters at CST and had never ever seen an AK-47 before he was put on trial.

He said he travelled from Pakistan to New Delhi by the Samjhauta Express and came to Mumbai 20 days before 26/11 to find a house.

Special public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam said Kasab’s retraction would have no impact on the trial as the prosecution had produced adequate evidence of Kasab’s role in the terror attacks.

“We have produced sufficient evidence consisting of photographs, CCTV footage, and 610 witnesses to nail him,” he said.

Leading criminal lawyer Majid Memon agreed. “It is a mere formality. The accused is expected to deny all charges framed against him,” he said.

Kasab also attempted to throw the prosecution off track by mentioning the name of Headley, the alleged Lashkar-e-Toiba operative arrested in the US.

Kasab said “four white men” — a reference to the FBI team that visited Mumbai — had come to interrogate him and seemed to indicate that Headley was among them. However, as soon as he mentioned the name “Headley”, the judge stopped him and warned him to only reply to questions he had been asked.

Nikam said Kasab had deliberately made references to Headley in a bid to prolong the trial.

“He is very clever and knows how to pick up leads from court proceedings. Headley’s name was referred in the court earlier and he may have picked up the reference,” he said.

The gunman doesn’t have access to newspapers and lives in solitary confinement in a heavily guarded cell.

[Jeff]

From another thread:

Terrorist or CIA agent? May be both?


U.S. citizen David Headley, who was arrested in connection with last year's Mumbai terrorist attacks, may have been a double agent for the CIA at the time of the incident, according to U.S. journalists.

More than 160 people were killed in the financial hub of Mumbai in three days of attacks by a group of 10 gunmen, beginning on November 26, 2008.

Headley had allegedly helped plan the attack by conducting reconnaissance missions in Mumbai.

More than two months after Pakistani-American jihadist David Headley was held in Chicago, India’s intelligence services are divided on whether they were told the whole truth about the Lashkar-e-Taiba clandestine agent’s operations.

Many in the intelligence services even suspect that the United States is less than committed to letting the whole truth be known.

Public debate has focused on claims that Headley—who served as a Drug Enforcement Administration informant after being arrested with two kg of heroin in 1988—may have been planted by U.S. covert services inside Lashkar after his release in 2002.

“If this David Headley was working for the CIA all along, which is a very plausible conclusion,” says writer and journalist Webster Tarpley, “It means that the CIA implicated and was running and masterminding the Mumbai terror attack of 2008.”


Did America keep mum on 26/11?

Did the Americans have detailed advance information about the 26/11 plot which they did not share with India, only passing on a watered-down warning? And was there an American spy within the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba who kept Washington (or Langley) informed of terror acts planned against India — even if this information was never handed over to us?

It is certainly beginning to look that way.

When Headley was first arrested, the Americans declared that they had foiled a plot to kill a Danish cartoonist. Then, more details began to trickle out. The terror suspect, we were told, was a US citizen of Pakistani origin. He had some links with the LeT. He had visited India. He may have been part of an advance team for 26/11.

Indian investigators, intrigued by these reports, flew to Washington to meet Headley. They were denied any access to him. They tried to work out if Headley was in fact somebody they themselves had been looking for. They had asked the CIA if it had any information about an American who, their sources had told them, was part of the LeT. They received no real cooperation.

Then, even as the Indian media were obsessing about Headley’s friendship with Mahesh Bhatt’s son, investigative journalists in America tracked down court papers pertaining to Headley’s arrest on drug charges in 1998. These papers showed that Headley had been convicted and sent to jail. But after 9/11, he had been set free and sent to Pakistan to work as an undercover agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

According to US journalists, Headley had been given a new passport in the American name of David Headley (his American mother’s maiden name is Headley) rather than his original name of Daood Gilani. He flew around the world, entering and leaving the US at will, avoiding the sort of attention that a convicted drug criminal was certain to attract at US airports.

Further, suggested US journos, the DEA assignment may have been a cover. After 9/11 America was under pressure to infiltrate Pakistan’s terror groups and many undercover agents were sent into Pakistan for this purpose.

Upto this point, we had two stories. The first was the version of the US government that it had arrested a terrorist. The second was the version favoured by the US media that this ‘terrorist’ had actually been sent to Pakistan by the Americans as an undercover agent.

American journos, on the whole, refused to believe that he worked only for the DEA and thought that he was probably in the pay of the CIA. But, many said, Headley had clearly gone rogue, becoming a double agent and owing true loyalty to the LeT.

Indian investigators had many questions. We know now that the US tipped us off that attacks on the Taj Mahal Hotel were imminent and that the terrorists would use the sea route. (Of course, our local flatfoots ignored the warnings.) At that stage, it was believed that the intel came from a CIA mole within the terror network. Could Headley have been that mole?

Besides, if US investigators had been on Headley’s trail for a while — as the US officially claims — and they knew that he was regularly visiting India on behalf of the LeT, why was this information never passed on to New Delhi? If you accept the official version, that Headley was a terrorist they were tracking, then surely we had a right to be informed of his visits to India? If he was an agent who had gone rogue (the non-official US version), even then we should have been told. So why were we kept in the dark?

As far as I know, there has been no official answer to any of these questions.

So all we have is the theory of the Indian investigators. It goes like this:

In the aftermath of 9/11, the US was desperate for spies it could sent into Pakistan. Headley was sprung from jail and asked to infiltrate terror groups. Assisted by the US government (new passport etc.), he worked for the LeT using his American passport to gain access to places where he would normally have been treated with suspicion if he had revealed his Pakistan roots.

He came to Bombay not just to check out the Taj but do a recon of Nariman House. He posed as an American Jew and sent back detailed reports. Along the way, he revealed details of the 26/11 plot to his American handlers. The US was caught in a bind. If it told us everything, the LeT would know that Headley was the source and his cover would be blown. Yet, it could not sit by. So, it compromised by giving us some intel about the attack that could not be traced back to Headley. And Headley continued to operate as a US asset inside LeT.

A few months ago, Indian agencies began tracking a Bangladeshi with US links. That trail led to an American who was involved with LeT. They asked the US for help. Headley was arrested soon afterwards.

The arrest took India by surprise. The way these things work is that if the US knows about a terrorist, it allows him to fly to Pakistan or India (both frequent Headley destinations) and then tips off the local intelligence service. The terrorist is arrested and tortured to extract information. (Americans are now banned from using torture.) When the terrorist has been wrung dry, he is handed over to the US, along with his confession.

In this case, however, the Americans arrested Headley before he could fly out. He was formally charged, allowed to appoint a lawyer and is now entitled to all the protections of the US Constitution: he would be within his rights to tell Indian investigators to take a flying jump.

Why would the US treat a 26/11 suspect with such consideration?

The only explanation that fits is this: he was an American agent all along. The US arrested him only when it seemed that Indian investigators were on his trail. He will be sentenced to jail, will vanish into the US jail system for a while and will then be sprung again — as he was the last time.

So, could 26/11 have been avoided? If this theory is right, then yes, the Americans could have told us more. And we could have foiled the plot.

On the other hand, given that we ignored the warnings they did give us, who is to say that our inept national security structure would not have failed yet again, even if we did have full information?

Ultimately, intelligence is only useful if it is accessed by the intelligent.



India to seek US terror suspect Headley's extradition
Dec 21, 2009, 11:54 GMT


New Delhi - India is to seek the extradition of suspected US terrorist David Headley after charges were filed against him in court for his involvement in the November 2008 Mumbai attacks, news reports said Monday.

India's National Investigation Agency was probing Headley's movements in India prior to the attack, federal Home Secretary GK Pillai was quoted as saying by PTI news agency.

More than 160 people were killed in the financial hub of Mumbai in three days of attacks by a group of 10 gunmen which began on November 26, 2008.

Headley had allegedly helped plan the attack by conducting reconnaissance missions in Mumbai.

'When our investigation is complete, we will file a charge sheet in an Indian court ... After getting the warrant of arrest, we will approach America (for extradition),' Pillai was quoted as saying.

Chicago-based Headley, who was born to a Pakistani father and a US mother, was arrested by the FBI in October.

He has been charged with 12 criminal counts, including conspiracy to bomb public places in India, murder people in India and Denmark, and provide material support to the Pakistan-based terrorist organization Laskhar-e-Taiba.