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

[Nordic]

Gee, how'd I miss all this until today?

Wouldn't it be funny if India blew the lid off 9/11?

That's what crosses my mind reading this stuff.

Sounds like Headley was one of those blackops CIA guys we know about, but who rarely turn up in the nets.

India doesn't seem to be messing around, but who knows, they might play ball if they're forced to.

[American Dream]

Extraditing Headley will Expose CIA

By Bipin Kumar Singh

www.mid-day.com/news | 2009-12-28


Security experts say USA fears LeT operative's links with their intelligence may be exposed if he is handed over to India

Indian security experts say the US Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) refusal to extradite LeT operative David Coleman Headley confirms their long-held suspicion that the suspected 26/11 plotter is a former CIA agent.

The experts add that the Indian government's failure to provide the US sufficient proof of the alleged 26/11 handler's involvement in the attacks is also coming in the way of putting up strong case for Headley's extradition.

Prakash Singh, former BSF chief, said, "It is well-known that Headley was a CIA agent who later started working for the ISI and some militant outfits in Pakistan.

The US knows that Headley's CIA links will be exposed if he is handed over to India. This will damage its anti-terror image.

We have allowed the FBI to interrogate people in India and they should allow us to do the same on their soil. But who will tell politicians, who have made it a habit to cry out to the US for help?"

M K Dhar, a former joint director of the Intelligence Bureau, said, "We have failed to give the FBI sufficient proof about Headley's involvement in 26/11.

We have merely pointed out that he visited different places in India. However, we have not indicated how his visits were criminally motivated."

A former state DGP said he agreed that the Americans were not extraditing Headley as they feared being exposed.

"The US supports terror-promoting nations to further their selfish ends and then these nations go against them. This is what happened in Afghanistan as well."

[kenoma]

BTW, I'm only posting to this thread for the sake of continuity and searchability. The OP title is ludicrous - there is NO convincing connection between Headley and ISI, certainly none that is remotely comparable to his proven links to US intel .... the habit of displacing US crimes onto nefrarious Pakistanis on the basis of fuck all is one that dies hard in conspiracy circles, but it needs to die soon.

[url=http://www.indianexpress.com/news/Was-sure-Headley-worked-for-FBI--Rahul/572213]Rahul Bhatt, son of director Mahesh Bhatt, is “convinced” David Headley was working for FBI when he was in Mumbai before the attacks.

“I’m convinced Headley was working for Americans, for FBI. I’d nicknamed him agent Headley,” Rahul said in an interview to UK’s Channel 4.

“It was the Americans’ deepest wish to infiltrate al-Qaeda. And David did exactly that for them. I had a hunch then and I have a hunch now that he was an American agent of some sort,” Rahul said. “You know, he even begged me to stop calling him Agent Headley in public. It really pissed him off. Now I know why. He was a great guy. He was charming, had a great sense of humour and was caring, sensitive and very well-informed. I feel hurt. I liked hanging out with him because he could teach me things about my areas of interest, be it guns, intelligence, spy-craft. I feel hurt, because it’s a sort of rape when you have a close friend who... (does not finish sentence). I have stopped trusting people.”[/url]

Interesting nuggets have also been pieced together after Rahul Bhatt and Vilas Varak have been questioned and SMSs exchanged between them examined. Rahul, for instance, has said that Headley was familiar with names and titles of senior Defence personnel in Mumbai and New Delhi and boasted that he could count 242 shakhas of the Shiv Sena. Rahul also said that Headley was familiar with the functioning of special commando units in India, Pakistan and Israel and that he had seen him reading former sleuth B Raman’s book “The Kaoboys of RAW.”

[American Dream]

Of course there is a very convoluted and deep history between the ISI and the CIA, DIA, DEA etc.. so we should never think of Pakistani and American connections to covert ops as an either/or propostion. In this case, I agree that Headley seems like a probable agent of the American secret services...

[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 Zaziallegedly 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

Patsy Zazi confesses to NYC subway bomb plot

Feb 26, 2010, 00:50
No, Patsy Zazi isn’t a Mafia guy from Bensonhurst. He’s from Afghanistan, full name Najibullah Zazi, working as a shuttle bus driver here, and here to detonate potent explosives in New York’s subway system. Probably can’t stand the increased crowds, fares, and reduction in services, especially on the weekends.

Actually, the Washington Post and the New York Times were more than relieved to tell us in almost identical three page rewrites of White House press releases that his real mission is to play out his role in a “martyrdom operation” that the powers that be call “one of the most serious terrorism plots on American soil since 9/11/2001.”

And lucky for us, this is the one they managed to catch, not like the original perpetrators of 9/11 who managed to kill some 2,600 souls, and whose deeds are now threatening the lives of more than 9,000 first responders who dug themselves into “the hole” of Ground Zero, coming down with any number of fatal diseases working in the non-stop eight-month clean-up (for which 30 months had been allotted by Sheriff Giuliani). No thanks Rudy.

If I sound pissed off, I am, especially at the effrontery to my intelligence by US intelligence for this, the fourth so-called “terrorist” who targeted US sites, preceded by accused US army base shooter Major Nidal M. Hasan in Fort Hood, Texas’ Nigerian youth Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, plus idiot shoe bomber Richard Reid flying into Miami, using the identical explosive PETN in one in of his shoes, as Farouk did in his shorts, both lacking blasting caps to guarantee failure.

It’s already been shown that Abdulmutallab was ushered onto a plane without a passport, only a visa, by a large, well-dressed man with an American accent (most probably CIA), who said to the airline desk person, Farouk was a poor Sudanese and this is how we do it, and zap, Farouk was good to go.

Of course, this poor Sudanese had come up with $2,800 bucks or so in cash to buy a ticket to travel, and carried only one bag. Who the hell are they kidding? The Boston couple, both lawyers, that overhead the dialogue have been shunted into silence, though they spoke out originally on the Internet of the “hoaxability” of it all. Additionally, we have learned that the Schipol Airport in Amsterdam, from which Farouk’s last hop to the US originated, is an Israel/Mossad operated transit point for whatever needs to be shipped.

This all came on the heels of New York Governor David Paterson telling House staff members New York City could not handle the trial of waterboarded [183 times in March, 2003) Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his quartet of alleged conspirator/singers, because it would only “exacerbate tension and anxiety in the area,” which includes the notorious Wall Street, mother of all financial 9/11s. Wouldn’t want to slow those terrorists down for a minute, would we?

Returning to Zazi, an Afghan immigrant legally residing in the US . . . he purportedly traveled to “an al-Qaeda stronghold [WP] in Pakistan in August 2008 to receive weapons training so he could fight alongside the Taliban, according to Justice Department and FBI officials. But jihadists redirected him and two confederates to focus their energies on a suicide attack on the US mainland.” What a coincidence. It seems all the others patsies had contact with al-Qaeda terrorists or friends of same, and were pumped to hurt us.

In Zazi’s case, he went back to Colorado in January 2009, carrying notes on how to mix explosive chemicals. This dumb ass actually bought large volumes of beauty supplies that contained hydrogen peroxide to make TATP, the explosive involved in the 2005 bombings of the London transit system, another MI5/6 op, which had a parallel terror-drill running with it as on 9/11.

I’m surprised he didn’t tell them he wanted to be a blond, seeing how much success blonds have in our culture, even a cult-status in the movies. Also, if he wanted that much peroxide why didn’t he buy peroxide? I mean the thin cover of other beauty supplies afforded him no cover. Or was the guy contemplating becoming a cross dresser?

This stuff gets so stupid it crosses my eyes. We even have Zazi on tape, filling up his shopping cart with the “beauty supplies.”

Anyhow, the 25-year old Zazi “aroused the interest” of law enforcement and was tracked by teams of FBI agents, police, and home-selling beauty products saleswomen for Avon. He seems he really ticked off the stock clerk at the cosmetics outlet. Why not? Anything’s possible.

The law enforcers stopped Zazi in his vehicle crossing into Manhattan. Just the way they stopped the five dancing Israelis in their Urban Movers van on whose roof they had been dancing in Liberty Park as the Towers were going down across the Hudson River in the background and the dancing dude was flicking his Bic, thinking it was all a big joke.

They were busted by the FBI and hung out for several months in jail, but then were released to go back to Israel. There they appeared on TV and told the homeland they were documenting the event. For what, their files on false-flag ops? Their boss, who had escaped before they did, stayed in Israel as well. Not a one extradited.

Bottom line, of the three Urban Movers’ vans found, one near the Holland Tunnel, one near the George Washington Bridge, and the one in Jersey, bomb-sniffing dogs discovered explosives. There were also wads of cash in the vans, maps of the NYC transit system, bridges and tunnels as well. And they walked away clean, no confessions, no I’m sorry, no nothing. This not only compounds the idiocy but points to the demonization of Muslims, and the presence of Israel in what seem more like false-flag operations.


And listen to the WP . . . [They] “had timed their plot to occur in the subway on Sept 14, 15, or 16, but backed away after realizing that they were under surveillance.” How did they discover that? And why weren’t they shooting for Sept 11, the 8th anniversary of 9/11? Couldn’t they remember the right date?

Then we have the WP telling us, “Bruce Hoffman, a counterterrorism analyst at Georgetown University, saying the case was in some ways more troubling than the Christmas bombing attempt, in which a Nigerian man is suspected of trying to detonate explosives aboard a transatlantic jetliner bound for Detroit.”

Why is that more troubling? Because he says so? What is more troubling, once again, is that when push comes to shove, we let the Israelis go after 9/11 occurred, and arrested these obvious dupes, and tried to spin some big law enforcement triumph out of it.

FBI Deputy Director John Pistole told reporters (who are not reporters but note takers) that the Zazi case and intelligence by the defendant have “given us all greater insight into the evolving nature of terrorist activities.” You mean that beats somebody leaving a truck-bomb in a white van in the basement of WTC Tower 1 in 1993, and it explodes?

And Wiki tells us, “The attack was planned by a group of conspirators including Ramzi Yousef, Mahmud Abouhalima, Mohammad Salameh, Nidal Ayyad, Abdul Rahman Yasin and Ahmad Ajaj. They received financing from Khaled Shaikh Mohammed, Yousef’s uncle. In March 1994, four men were convicted of carrying out the bombing: Abouhalima, Ajaj, Ayyad and Salameh. The charges included conspiracy, explosive destruction of property and interstate transportation of explosives. In November 1997, two more were convicted: Yousef, the mastermind behind the bombings, and Eyad Ismoil, who drove the truck carrying the bomb.”

But Wiki doesn’t mention that the FBI had a Muslim plant in the group who was warning them about what he had been instigating these guys to do. And that they had asked him to purchase explosives for the van. He got back to his FBI handlers and said, look, I can put non-explosive powder in the kegs and no blast will go off. Then you can pick up the guys. Your choice. And the FBI tells him to use the real deal, the blasting powder. And you have the 1993 bombing.

Here’s the story, Who Bombed The World Trade Center? FBI Bomb Builders Exposed!! And here is some selected reading from it . . .

“Two cassette tape recordings, obtained by SHADOW reporter Paul DiRienzo of telephone conversations between FBI informant Emad Salem and his Bureau contacts reveal secret U.S. Government complicity in the February 26, 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City in which six people were killed and more than a thousand were injured.


“After careful deliberation, the SHADOW believes the question regarding the bombing boils down to the following: Did the FBI do the bombing, utilizing informant Salem as an “agent provocateur” or did it fail to prevent an independent Salem and his associates from doing it? The taped conversations obtained by the SHADOW seem to indicate the former.

“FBI Informant Edam Salem:’ . . . we was start already building the bomb which is went off in the World Trade Center. It was built by supervising supervision from the Bureau and the DA and we was all informed about it and we know that the bomb start to be built. By who?

By your confidential informant. What a wonderful great case!’

“Who is Emad Salem? FBI bomber, Arab double-agent or just greedy? Possibly a combination of all three. Salem is a former Egyptian Army officer who is currently the U.S. government’s star witness against Egyptian cleric Dr. Omar Abdel Rahman, whom the FBI says was the ringleader in several bombing plots, including the World Trade Center. Shortly after the bombing at the Twin Towers (World Trade Center) the U.S. government moved to take Salem into the Witness Protection program.” [Italics mine]

Returning to “antiterrorism expert” Hoffmann, he adds: “It’s remains unclear how US authorities came to suspect Zazi. Did they pick up the plot through a web of proved post-9/11 intelligence collections methods, or did the US government simply stumble across an informant?” Or did the US government set the whole op up to create fear and panic?

He goes on to further pat everyone and himself on the back for this non-event by saying, “It’s a tremendous triumph for the US national security system and justice system that we got him, but the circumstances that led to that, do they reflect that the US is on the right track in counterterrorism, or did we just get lucky? . . . How much of it was skill, and how much of it was luck?” And how much of it was a totally fabricated op? ...

[jingofever]

A spy unsettles US-India ties.

News that the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had reached a plea bargain with David Coleman Headley, who played a key role in the planning of the terrorist strike in Mumbai in November 2008 in which 166 people were killed, has caused an uproar in India.

The deal enables the US government to hold back from formally producing any evidence against Headley in a court of law that might have included details of his links with US intelligence or oblige any cross-examination of Headley by the prosecution.

Nor can the families of the 166 victims be represented by a lawyer to question Headley during his trial commencing in Chicago. Headley's links with the US intelligence will now remain classified

information and the Pakistani nationals involved in the Mumbai attacks will get away scot-free. Furthermore, the FBI will not allow Headley's extradition to India and will restrict access so that Indian agencies cannot interrogate him regarding his links with US and Pakistani intelligence...

Headley being jailed on drug charges and then being released to become an agent for the government reminds me of Aslam Adam. But we never found out why Adam was pardoned.

[American Dream]

This article is truly horrifying in the kind of perspectives it omits, but still may be of interest:

http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/news- ... hilly.html

The Life & Crimes of a Jihadist from Philly

An Old City barkeep helped terrorists carry out the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

By Jonathan Valania

Posted May. 18, 2010

On the afternoon of Nov. 26, 2008, death came ashore at the Indian coastal city of Mumbai in the form of 10 Pakistani assassins aboard a rubber dinghy. Young and cocky, the killers were dressed in bluejeans and cargo pants, pumped up on steroids and ripped from months of rigorous physical training. They brandished AK-47s and carried backpacks loaded with grenades and ammo. When fisherman asked them what was going on, the gunmen told them in fluent Marathi to, in effect, go fuck themselves. The fishermen reported the incident to police who, tragically, paid it no mind.

Over the course of the next 50 hours, the gunmen would kill 164 people—including six Americans—and injure hundreds in a vicious three-day wave of violence, according to the Department of Justice. They split up into small groups and fanned out across the city, navigating by GPS and keeping in constant cell phone contact with their minders back in Pakistan. They blew up taxis, tossed grenades into crowds, murdered police officers and indiscriminately mowed down bystanders at a crowded cafe, movie theater and a train station with a blizzard of hot lead. They stormed two five-star hotels, set them on fire, took hostages and slowly tortured, disfigured and then executed them one by one.

One team of gunmen entered a women and children’s hospital with the intent of killing as many patients as they could, only to be thwarted by hospital staff that had locked down certain wards. Once inside, the gunmen again asked the staff their religious affiliation. When one man answered ‘Hindu’, they shot him in the head. Another team took over a Jewish center called the Mumbai Chabad House, where they killed six hostages, including a rabbi and his pregnant wife. The gunmen injected cocaine, LSD and steroids to enable them to fight police for 50 hours straight without food or sleep. Nine of the 10 were eventually killed by police, with one taken alive.

This would become known as the Mumbai Terror Attacks around the world, but inside India it would be called 26/11, or India’s 9/11. The bloodbath would shock the world and push India and Pakistan, two nations with nuclear arsenals and a long history of violence, to the brink of war.

The trail of evidence led not only back to neighboring Pakistan but also halfway around the world to Philadelphia.

David Coleman Headley lived in Philly for more than 30 years before moving to Chicago shortly before the Mumbai attacks. Authorities allege that Headley served as advance man for many jihadist terror plots, and scouted out locations for the Mumbai attacks. He was arrested by federal agents back in October, and in late March he pleaded guilty to charges that he served as reconnaissance man for the Mumbai operation, traveling to India on five occasions to scope out and videotape the pre-ordained killing zones—chosen for their landmark status, sizable number of foreigners they attracted and relative lack of security—and record GPS coordinates, all of which he hand-delivered to the operation’s Pakistani masterminds.

Headley also pled guilty to being one of the ringleaders of a plot to attack the offices of Jyllands-Posten, the Denmark newspaper which drew the fury of the Islamic world in 2005 for publishing mocking cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Working in tandem with al Qaeda, Headley made numerous trips to Copenhagen to scope out and videotape the newspaper offices. The plot was simple: storm the newspaper, take everyone hostage, behead them one by one and throw their heads out into the street. It was designated a suicide mission and if all went according to plan there would be no survivors. The plot was in its advanced stage, but authorities arrested Headley before it could become operational.

Headley struck a deal with authorities after his arrest. He would be spared the death penalty in exchange for complete cooperation. His information has reportedly led to numerous arrests in Pakistan, including former army officers, former intelligence operatives and members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a militant Islamist organization based in Pakistan that routinely carries out paramilitary operations in the Kashmir region that buffers the borders of India and Pakistan. LET is said to have a cozy relationship with Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the equivalent of the CIA. Additionally, Headley’s cooperation led to the arrest of an officer in the Indian army who was caught forwarding classified documents to the Pakistani army via computer, according to news reports.

Headley is an American citizen whose mixed parentage—his father was a Pakistani national and his mother was American—enabled him to straddle the divide of the secular West and the Islamic East, making him a high-value asset for any jihadist organization. Headley’s mother, Serrill Headley, founded Old City’s Khyber Pass (now just known as the Khyber) back in the ’70s. As a teenager, Headley lived above the bar and he would eventually manage it for his mother. He would later go on to become a video-store entrepreneur, international drug smuggler, and, after getting caught with two kilos of heroin, he bacame an informant for the DEA, according to the Inquirer. He would also earn the grim distinction of being the American jihadist with the highest body count. Much has been written about Headley, especially in India, where he is regarded as Public Enemy No. 1, but for all we have learned, he remains something of a cipher, quite literally an international man of mystery.

Headley was born Daood Gilani in 1960 in Washington, D.C. His mother, who died in 2008, grew up in Bryn Mawr and ran away from home when she was 15, eventually settling in the nation’s capital and finding work as a secretary, according to the Inquirer.

“She was very independent, very freewheeling,” says her brother, William Headley, who owns a day-care center in Nottingham, Pa.
It was in D.C. that Serrill met and eventually married Pakistani diplomat Syed Saleem Gilani.

“He was very charming and distinguished,” William says. “He swept her off her feet.”

Shortly after Daood was born, the family moved to Karachi, Pakistan. But Serrill, whom her brother characterizes as a proto-feminist, soon chafed under the chauvinism of Pakistani society.

“She told me that Daood’s father had hit her,” says Lisa Sloat, a veteran bartender in the Philadelphia restaurant scene who interviewed Serrill for a bar guide she used to publish in the early ’90s. “She told me she left him and escaped through the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan. That’s why she named the bar Khyber Pass.”

Serrill eventually returned to Philadelphia—without Daood (“In Pakistan, men own the children,” she was quoted as saying at the time. “There are no rights for women.”)—and in 1973 she enrolled in bartending school.

“She was a stunner, snow-white skin,” recalls Ronnie Horsman, 85, who ran the Philadelphia Bartending School. “After she took the course she told me she was going to buy a bar on Second Street. I told her ‘Hold on, you should try this out first and see if you like it’ but she had her mind set.”

And so the Khyber Pass was born. Serrill decorated the joint with exotic accents, like the hide of a Bengal tiger that once killed a man on the Ganges and an oversized portrait of Queen Victoria. She covered up the water-damaged ceiling with tented fabric, mounting hand-painted camel skin lamps onto the bar and knocking out two holes in the wall to create a music-performance space next door. She also offered customers an extensive selection of beers, stocking the cooler with nearly 200 brands from around the world.

“That was unheard of at the time, this was way before the craft-beer revolution,” Sloat says. She opened the city’s first wine bar upstairs. Year after year, the Khyber Pass would be voted Best Pub, Best Jukebox and Best Live Music Venue in readers’ polls.
In 1977, Serrill returned to Pakistan and convinced the then teenage Daood to drop out of the military academy he was attending and come live with her in Philadelphia.

“I remember him showing up dressed in white and carrying a cricket bat,” William says. Hours in front of the TV helped soften the culture shock. “I think Daood learned everything he needed to know about the American family from Happy Days.”

Still, Daood was shocked by his mother’s libertine lifestyle: the drinking, the revealing clothes, the flirting with men.

“In Islam, human behavior is divided into two categories: ‘halal’ and ‘haram’, the permissible and the forbidden,” William says. “My sister did a lot of things that are ‘haram’.” Serrill’s romantic life was further cause for friction between Daood and his mother. When Serrill found a new love interest, it took precedent over everything else in her life, including Daood, according to William. “She eventually turned her back on David and that was just unforgivable, in my opinion.”

Eventually, Daood assimilated into American life. He enrolled in Valley Forge Military Academy, but lasted just one semester. Friends of his mother believe that it was there that Daood first developed a taste for illegal drugs. He also developed a taste for alcohol, holding court at the Khyber Pass over splits of champagne, romancing a string of young women drawn in by his striking good looks and unusual eyes—one blue, brown.

In 1985, he married a woman he met at the bar, a Penn State grad who lives and works in the area as a real-estate consultant, but who has asked that her name be kept out of news reports. “When he would go to Pakistan he would get all riled up again,” the woman told the Inquirer last fall.

“Infidels. He would use words like that. When he would see an Indian person in the street, he used to spit—spit in the street to make a point.”

Much like his parents’ marriage, this union would not survive the cultural differences; two years later it ended in divorce. “I guess he was torn between two cultures,” she told the Inquirer. “I think he liked both. He didn’t know how to blend them.”

By 1987, hobbled by health issues and business difficulties, Serrill put the bar up for sale. It was eventually purchased by the Simons family. Brothers Steve and Dave Simons assumed management duties and the Khyber re-opened in the fall of 1988. Under their stewardship, the Khyber would become a local mecca of indie-rock with a national rep among touring bands as the place to play in Philadelphia.

Meanwhile, Daood and his mother started a video-store business called Flik’s, which would deliver rental videos to your doorstep. He also became involved in less legitimate forms of commerce.

“He got involved with some bad people, which is not unusual when you live above a bar,” William says. Returning from a trip to Pakistan in June 1988, he was arrested at the airport in Frankfurt, Germany, when customs agents discovered two kilos of heroin hidden in the false bottom of his suitcase. Daood was turned over to the DEA and quickly agreed to cooperate in return for a lighter sentence. Two days later, he was back at his apartment on New Street, which had been wired for sound and video by the DEA, handing the suitcase of heroin over to two drug associates just before the feds pounced. In return for his cooperation, his sentence was cut in half, to four years. He was released on probation in 1992 and his passport returned to him so that he could return to Pakistan to proceed with an arranged marriage to a woman named Shazi, who would eventually bear him four children. But Daood had a hard time meeting the terms of his release, and after flunking a series of drug tests, he was sent back to prison in 1995 for six months. Two years later, he was again arrested by the DEA for smuggling heroin from Pakistan into the United States, and quickly agreed to wear a wire when he delivered the drugs to dealers in a New York hotel room.

Despite this being the second time he was arrested for the same felony, he was sentenced to just 15 months. The man he delivered the drugs to, James Leslie Lewis, was sentenced to 10 years. In exchange for his light sentence, Headley worked as a confidential witness, ensnaring three low-level drug dealers in heroin buys. Within six months, Headley was released and allowed to travel to Pakistan, where he collected intelligence on the heroin trade for the DEA, according to the Inquirer.

“The people he was fingering were very scary people, very high up in the Pakistani drug trade,” William says. In exchange, his probation, originally intended to extend to 2004, ended in December of 2001. “Daood told me that when he got busted the second time he told himself that if he got out of this, he would give his life over to Allah. I don’t think he ever took a drug or a drink again.”

Two months later, he was back in Pakistan, this time attending a Lashkar-e-Taiba training camp, where he received a three-week ideological course on the merits of waging a jihad. Over the course of the next year, he returned to Pakistan four more times for jihadist training. In August 2002, he attended a three-week course on the use of weapons and grenades and other skills. In April 2003, he attended a three-month course on close-combat tactics, use of weapons and grenades, and survival skills. In August 2003, he attended a three-week course on counter-surveillance. Finally, in December 2003, he attended a three-month course on combat and tactical training.

In 2005, he began conspiring with LET operatives in Pakistan to stage a spectacular attack inside India. It was determined that his role in the plot would be to travel to India repeatedly, scoping out targets and videotaping locations and recording GPS coordinates that would guide a team of assassins to the various killing zones. In February 2006, he legally changed his name from Daood Gilani to David Coleman Headley to make it easier to travel back and forth from Pakistan to India without raising red flags at security. He would dress western and, if asked, he would present himself as an American Jew. Before heading to India, he moved his family to Chicago, telling relatives in Philadelphia that he wanted to raise his children Muslim, and there was a much larger Islamic community with better school options in the Windy City. It’s more likely he moved to Chicago to forge an alliance with Tahawwur Hussain Rana, a friend he first met as a cadet at military school back in Pakistan.

Rana owned and operated First World, an immigration service for Pakistani nationals. Headley would claim he was setting up an office for First World if anyone asked him about the nature of his business in India. All told, he made five extended trips to Mumbai—in September 2006, February and September 2007, and April and July 2008—returning each time to Pakistan to drop off the videotapes with LET operatives.

In November 2008, just weeks before the Mumbai terror attacks were scheduled to commence, Headley was instructed by LET operatives to fly to Denmark and conduct reconnaissance on the Jyllands-Posten newspaper. Headley entered the offices of the paper under the pretense of placing an ad for Rana’s First World Immigration Service. When he returned to Pakistan, he turned over his videotapes to LET operatives. They discussed the scope of the operation. Headley, according to authorities, thought they should only target those directly responsible, specifically the cartoonist and the editor. One LET operative told him: “All Danes are responsible,” according to court documents.

In the wake of all the heat generated by the Mumbai attacks, LET chose to put the Copenhagen attack on the backburner. One of the LET operatives, Ilyas Kashmiri, told Headley that if LET didn’t want to proceed, he knew people in al-Qaeda who did. In May 2009, Headley met with Kashmiri in Waziristan. Kashmiri told him he had spoken with the senior al-Qaeda leadership and that they wanted the Copenhagen operation to happen as soon as possible. He directed him to a European contact who would provide money, weapons and manpower. Kashmiri instructed Headley to tell the European contact that the gunmen should prepare martyrdom videos; this would be a suicide mission.

In July 2009, Headley flew to Denmark for final surveillance of the newspaper offices, and established contact with the man who would provide the weaponry and manpower for the attack. He laid low in Chicago for a couple months, reportedly meeting with Rana and keeping him apprised of the plot. They spoke in code, referring to the Copenhagen plot as the Mickey Mouse Project.
But it all came to an end Oct. 3, 2009, when Headley was arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, attempting to board a flight bound for Philadelphia. From there, he was to fly to Pakistan. In his luggage, authorities found video footage of the Danish newspaper offices on a memory stick, and the front page of an edition of the paper. That same day, authorities arrested Rana.

In exchange for his guilty plea and full cooperation, Headley was spared the death penalty and extradition to India or Denmark. He will not be sentenced until after testifying against his old friend Rana, who has pled not guilty and is scheduled to stand trial in the beginning of November.

“I believe Daood’s upbringing damaged him in a way that he never really stood a chance in life,” William Headley says. “His father was unbelievably strict; he lived and died by the Koran. His mother was a libertine, her creed was ‘if it feels good, do it’. And he was never able to reconcile those two worlds, because they can’t be reconciled. There is a reason he was a heroin addict. And there is a reason he became a jihadist. I have to believe that—it’s the only way I can make peace with what happened.”

Jonathan Valania is the editor-in-chief of Phawker.com





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