Getting a Terrorist to Talk

FOR SOME TIME before the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) detained David Coleman Headley on October 3, 2009, just as he was about to board a flight at Chicago, the agency’s coun­ter-terrorism investigators were well aware of his involvement in the 26/11 Mumbai attack and his plans for a terrorist attack on the office of Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten that was to culminate with the beheading of its staff. So chuffed was Headley by the success of the 2008 Mumbai attack that even the reluctance of his patrons in Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba to proceed with the Denmark plan due to the heat generated by the Mumbai attack did not de­ter him. He met Ilyas Kashmiri, a prominent jihadist known to be close to Al Qaida, to plot against the Danish publication that had printed cartoons of Prophet Muhammad which had enraged many Muslims.

The bloodlust that overcame Headley re­sulted in the 26/11 plotter, born to a Pakistani father and an American mother, to commit several mistakes. He had travelled frequently to Pakistan, India, the UAE, and Denmark and had little evidence to support his claim to be work­ing for an immigration company and that his visits were genuine business trips. His mobile phone and residence were leased in the names of deceased people and his luggage contained no business-related papers. The apparent delay on the part of FBI in reeling in Headley has never been fully explained, but it was only after his arrest did Indian investigators get substantial leads on the involvement of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in 26/11.

Days after Headley’s arrest, federal agents picked up Tahawwur Rana, a former Pakistan army medic who was a Ca­nadian citizen based in Chicago. Not only was Rana a childhood buddy of Headley, he was a key facilitator for the attack on Mum­bai that resulted in the deaths of 166 people and injured hundreds. None of the plans Headley hatched with Lashkar leaders in Paki­stan would have fructified without Rana’s active and informed assistance. Rana’s later bid to latch on to Headley’s exculpatory references to him did not cut ice with US courts which dismissed his pleas of being an unwitting accessory to the terror attacks. It was Rana’s First World Immigration Service that was Headley’s cover on his visits to India and later Denmark. It was Rana who had contacts with Pakistani diplomats and advised Headley on how to get a five-year visa for India.

Rana’s extradition to India on April 12 after close to five years of legal wrangling where his lawyers resisted his removal from the US tooth-and-nail will help Indian agencies probe the links between ISI, Lashkar, Headley and Rana. The former Pakistan army doctor was no small cog in the Lashkar-ISI terror wheel. The National Investigation Agency (NIA) was given access to Headley in June 2010 and he spoke freely about himself, ISI and Rana. He told the NIA team that he stayed at Rana’s house for a few weeks in June 2006. “During this period, we had an elaborate discussion on the establishment of the Immigrant Law Centre (ILC) in Mumbai. I told Dr Rana the entire plan of the LeT and lSI,” he said. There was nothing passive about Rana’s involvement as Headley spoke of funds he received from his friend while in India apart from the cover of his immigration firm. “I received money from Dr Rana on two occasions. On both the occasions, I received the money from a bank located very close to the Hotel Oberoi,” Headley told NIA.

During the interaction the Pakistani American spoke in detail of his meetings with Lashkar chief Hafiz Saeed—who even tried to sort out troubles in Headley’s second marriage—senior Lashkar commander Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi who oversaw the Mumbai attack, other key 26/11 figures like Sajid Mir (present at the Karachi control room that directed the Mumbai gunmen), a former Lash­kar man Abdur Rehman alias Pasha and others like Abu Alqama, Abu Qahafa, Abu Anas and Abu Hamza. Importantly, he briefed Rana about his meetings and the doctor-turned-jihadist had conversations with some of these individuals as also with Headley’s ISI contact identified as Major Iqbal. Since Rana had deserted the Pakistan army, he was keen on finding a way to safely visit Pakistan in lieu of his services in the attack on Mumbai.

Headley mentioned he exclusively briefed his ISI handler after his India visits and NIA is bound to check these claims with Rana’s account of interactions with the Pakistan army unit that coordi­nates jihadist activities. Headley has at one point claimed that for a long time, the plan was to only attack the Taj Mahal Palace hotel. But given Sajid’s interest in timing the attack with a software conference at the hotel and the iconic stature of the property, the plan cannot be described as a ‘minor’ plot. Also, by 2007 surveillance of multiple sites in Mumbai was being keenly examined by Lashkar bosses, including Saeed. It seems evident that the ISI-Lashkar leadership was in a position to scale up the attack even if it may be difficult to pinpoint just when the final plan took shape. Rana’s testimony to NIA can help improve the agency’s understanding of the roles of Lashkar figures like Abu Qahafa, Abu Alqama and Abu Hamza. Headley described Major Iqbal, his primary ISI contact, as about 5 feet 9 inches in height, fat, with a moustache, thick hair and a deep voice who was also a smoker. Major Iqbal introduced Headley to his senior, one Lt Colonel Hamza, a man then in his early forties and like his junior overweight by military standards. Headley was definitive that Lashkar chief Saeed is aware of the terror outfit’s smallest detail and planning a major operation like 26/11 needed his concurrence at every stage. “Without his approval, 26/11 would never have happened,” he told the NIA team. The role of the Lashkar Amir and LeT is precisely what NIA interrogators will zone in on while interrogating Rana. In one of the more astonishing details he shared, Headley said Abdur Rehman had told him that he and Sajid Mir had actually visited India in April 2005, when visas were eased to allow Pakistani visitors to watch an India- Pakistan cricket match in Delhi attended by then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf.

In 2006, after he changed his name from Daood Gilani to David Headley, he successfully applied for an Indian visa. As he has noted himself, his US passport had the record of his visits to Pakistan and it is extraordinary that his application was processed seamlessly and he was not placed under watch in India. Rana was Headley’s conduit to ISI when the former was in India. “While in India I never contacted anyone from my cell phone in Pakistan as instructed. I would communicate with Rana who in turn would talk to Pakistan,” Headley told NIA.

On more than one occasion, his visits to India were preceded and followed by meetings with ISI and Lashkar personnel in Paki­stan but this does not seem to have raised red flags with Indian immigration or intelligence agencies. Headley’s account suggests that a ‘grand strike’ in India was considered necessary to provide jihadist outfits focused on Kashmir a sense of achievement and move the theatre of violence from Pakistani soil itself. Headley was possibly referring to attacks by the Tehrik-e-Taliban Paki­stan on Pakistani targets, including military installations. ISI was concerned by the drift of jihadists towards Afghanistan where they were fighting alongside Taliban, and in some cases turning against Pakistan. “I understand this accelerated the Mumbai at­tack project. Earlier it was a limited plan to attack only Taj Hotel in Mumbai with a couple of attackers like it used to happen earlier. But now it seemed to be a grand plan of LeT to strike Mumbai at multiple locations with multiple attackers,” Headley told NIA. He also briefed Rana about developments, including his videog­raphy of the residential colony at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Mumbai, prompting his friend to observe that India and Pakistan are signatories to a treaty excluding attacks on one another’s nuclear establishments.

Around June 2008 both Major Iqbal and Rana asked Headley to shut down the Mumbai office of the immigration firm. Some time on November 26, 2008, when he was in Pakistan, Headley received an SMS from Sajid’s mobile to switch on the TV—the 26/11 attacks were unfolding. Later Sajid played record­ings of the attack that had voices of Lashkar controllers monitoring and instructing the terror squad. Still later, Sajid called Rana to thank him for his help in the 26/11 attack. By then discussions on Jyllands-Posten were in progress. Such was Headley’s confidence—and the extent of the failure of Indian agencies—that he visited New Delhi in March 2009 and shot videos of the National Defence College (NDC) and the Israeli em­bassy and even claims to have called Rana from outside NDC. In June 2009, after a visit to Pakistan where he met Major Iqbal for the last time and then caught up with Ilyas Kashmiri in Miranshah, Headley met Rana in the US and told him about the meetings and his extensive surveillance work in New Delhi, Pushkar, Goa and Mumbai.

As Indian agencies began to unearth reams of evidence on Headley’s seven visits to India that included stays at Mumbai’s Taj hotel between March 28-30 and May 2-7, 2007, they found Rana had checked out of a Mumbai guest house just five days before 26/11. The prosecution in the US named Kashmiri, Rehman and Major Iqbal as co-accused. Kashmiri reportedly died in a US drone strike on an Al Qaida compound in 2011 while the Lashkar lead­ers—some of whom were in a ‘control room’ in Karachi while the terror squad attacked the Taj, Oberoi Trident, Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST), Leopold Café and the Nariman Chabad House—were never brought to justice despite some detentions. It would be fair to say, as an American official put it, no one was looking for them in Pakistan.

The US Department of Justice statement on April 10 says Rana’s extradition to India is a critical step towards seeking jus­tice for six Americans and other victims who died in the attacks. The 64-year-old former Pakistani army doctor is charged with offences that include conspiracy, murder, terrorist acts and forg­ery related to 26/11. “On two separate occasions, Rana allegedly helped Headley prepare and submit visa applications to Indian authorities that contained information Rana knew to be false… Over the course of two years, Headley allegedly repeatedly met with Rana in Chicago and described his surveillance activities on behalf of LeT, Lashkar’s responses to Headley’s activities and Lashkar’s potential plans for attacking Mumbai,” the statement said. Having received a 14-year sentence in the Denmark case, Rana might have thought he has escaped the worst when he was found not guilty in the Mumbai conspiracy. But just as he was released on compassionate grounds in 2020, India filed for his extradition and Rana spent the next four years in a facility in Los Angeles fighting legal battles to remain in the US.

THE NIA SPECIAL COURT before which Rana was produced on April 12 after a special flight carrying him reached New Delhi noted the transnational nature of the crimes he is accused of and agreed there is enough material that relates to national security. “The conspiracy in question travels beyond the geographical border of India and multiple targets in the form of various places in multiple cities of India including national Capital were sought to be identified,” the court said. The fact is that Rana is a very important catch for Indian agencies as his role was far more complex than Kasab’s, the Lashkar foot soldier captured during the attack and only person put on trial in India.

Although he was let off in the Mumbai case, the evidence at his trial and conviction for the Denmark plot showed he knew he was assisting a terrorist organisation and played an essential role in its plans. “He knew the goal of Lashkar was to retaliate and influence the Indian and Danish governments and intended the support he provided—enabling Headley’s activities—would be used towards that purpose,” the FBI said after Rana was convicted. He was aware that Headley had received instructions to travel to India to conduct surveillance for terror strikes. “Rana directed [a staffer] at his firm to prepare documents supporting Headley’s cover story and advised how to obtain a visa for India, according to Headley’s testimony, as well as e-mails and other documents to corroborate his account,” the FBI said.

As NIA questions Rana, it will look to piece together all the links that tie ISI, Lashkar, Rana and Headley to the Mumbai plot. In her closing arguments seeking Rana’s conviction for the Mumbai at­tack, assistant US attorney Victoria Peters led jurors through e-mails and recorded conversations that include exchanges between Rana and ISI officer Major Iqbal. Peters said Rana had knowledge of all the plots and those involved and asked jurors to apply their common sense. In the trials of Headley and Rana, the FBI submitted tran­scripts of a conversation it recorded between Headley and Rana in September 2009 on a long drive where Rana admits to being told of the imminence of the attacks in a meeting with a former Lashkar figure in Dubai. Both men are admiring of the Lashkar squad’s “tac­tical brilliance” and Rana says the nine dead gunmen be honoured by Pakistan’s highest bravery award Nishan-e-Haider.

In his legal manoeuvres to prevent extradition to India, Rana took recourse to several arguments such as the alleged bias against Muslims in India, the threat of torture, a long list of ailments and the unsafe condition of Indian jails. He also claimed that under laws pertaining to double jeopardy, he could not be tried for an offence he was let off for—the Mumbai attack. His lawyers argued that in assessing Rana’s case the issue of whether he can be tried in relation to the “conduct” regarding the Mumbai attack needs to be considered rather than the test “elements”. Legally, the latter argument prevailed as the US courts held that none of the Indian charges has the same “elements” as the charges on which Rana was tried in Chicago. Rana’s lawyers claimed the US government repudiated its position that “offence” refers to the underlying conduct and adopted a different position where “offence” refers to elements of crimes which prejudiced Rana’s case. In the end, his crimes caught up with him and he now looks at a long trial and a sentence that could mean going to the scaffold.

9/11 attacksDavid Coleman HeadleyextraditionNational Investigation AgencyNIATahawwur RanaTaj Mahal Palace Hotelterrorism