The Best American Crime Writing (22 page)

By August 2001, Sheikh’s activities had come to the attention of British intelligence, who asked their Indian counterparts to help apprehend him.

Then came 9/11. Tracing the hijackers’ funding, investigators discovered that in the weeks before the Trade Center attack someone
using the alias Mustafa Muhammad Ahmad had wired more than $100,000 to hijacking ringleader Mohammed Atta. On October 6, CNN reported that the U.S. had decided that Mustafa Muhammad Ahmad and Sheikh were one and the same. Not much later the U.S. asked Pakistan to extradite him for the 1994 kidnapping.

With recruits picked up from other jihadi groups, Sheikh and Ansari, meanwhile, were mounting their first big operation, the October 1 suicide truck-bomb attack on the Kashmir assembly, which left 38 dead. On December 13 they struck again, with a shooting and grenade assault on the Parliament building in New Delhi. That incident—which India charged was staged at the direction of the ISI—claimed fourteen lives and prompted India to mass half a million troops on the Pakistan border. Sheikh was in the midst of planning yet another operation—a drive-by shoot-up of the American Center in Calcutta on January 22, in which five guards were killed—when Danny Pearl dropped into his lap.

“We had nothing personal against Daniel,” Sheikh would later say. “Because of his hyperactivity, he caught our interest.”

Danny had been here, there, and everywhere, an American Jewish reporter who lived in India, asking inconvenient questions. But his quest for a big score finally seemed within reach. Come to Room 411 of the Akbar International Hotel in Rawalpindi on January 11, he was told; “Bashir” would be waiting.

They talked for three hours. “It was a great meeting,” said Sheikh, who shaved his beard and donned sunglasses for the occasion. “We ordered cold coffee and club sandwiches and had great chitchat.”

But chitchat is all it was. Not wanting to seem too eager, Sheikh stressed that Gilani was a busy man; he’d have to weigh the question carefully. “I never asked Daniel to do anything,” Sheikh later told
his interrogators. “It was always him insisting.” At the end of the meeting, Danny said he’d send along some examples of his work, and “Bashir” promised to keep him updated via e-mail.

Danny and Mariane then departed for Peshawar—Dodge City, except with Kalashnikovs instead of six-guns. But, according to Rahimullah Yusufzai, the local stringer for the BBC and
Time
, the only thing that bothered Danny was the difficulty in gathering information.

“He said he would be keen to meet anybody from Taliban or Al Qaeda,” Yusufzai recalls. “I said, ‘They may be here, but [it] is impossible for you to meet them or me to meet them. They are all wanted and they would like to stay quiet. Especially they won’t be meeting an American journalist.’

“I told him, ‘If you try too hard, it could be risky.’ But he was very focused. He was so persistent in meeting everybody who could have helped him in the story. He was after something and he wanted it.”

A
Journal
reporter’s need for a replacement computer gave Danny more reason than ever to get it.

The reporter, Moscow correspondent Alan Cullison, had had his smashed in late November, when his car rolled over while crossing the Hindu Kush. On his arrival in Kabul, a shopkeeper offered to sell him a used IBM desktop and a Compaq laptop for $4,000. Too steep, New York said; bargain him down. Cullison did, and paid $1,100 for two machines that—in a billion-to-one shot—turned out to have been recovered from the bombed headquarters of Mohammed Atef, Osama bin Laden’s abruptly deceased military strategist.

Cullison couldn’t get past the Compaq’s encryption scheme, but on the IBM’s hard drive he found a treasure trove of Al Qaeda materials—at least 1,750 files, recording four years’ worth of terrorist doings.

Fearing lives might be at stake, the
Journal
turned over the material to the Defense Department and the CIA for review. The spooks
did their screening, and the first
Journal
report about the documents from the IBM machine appeared December 31. But the Compaq laptop was much harder to crack, and it wasn’t until January 16 that the
Journal
was able to publish the results. For Danny, it was worth the wait. On the hard drive was the itinerary of a target-scouting expedition by a terrorist referred to as “brother Abdul Ra’uff.” It matched to a T the pre-9/11 travels of Richard C. Reid.

There was more good news the same day, with the arrival of an e-mail from Bashir, using an address that showed Sheikh’s sense of humor:
[email protected]
—Urdu for “no rascality.”

He reported that he’d forwarded Danny’s articles to Gilani and apologized for not having contacted him sooner. “I was preoccupied with looking after my wife who has been ill,” Sheikh said. “[She] is back from the hospital and the whole experience was a real eye-opener. Poor people who fall ill here and have to go to hospital have a really miserable and harassing time. Please pray for her health.”

Having tugged at Danny’s heartstrings with a phony story about his wife, Sheikh set the hook deeper three days later with an e-mail saying that Gilani was looking forward to a get-together. However, he was currently in Karachi and wouldn’t be returning for “a number of days.” Bashir gave Danny a choice: Wait for Gilani’s return, or send e-mail questions, which he’d relay to Gilani’s secretary. “If Karachi is your program,” Sheikh said, “you are welcome to meet him there.”

Danny chose the Karachi meeting, as Sheikh—who understood reporters—must have known he would. Before catching the Pakistan International Airlines flight south, Danny e-mailed him his plans, along with something that Sheikh didn’t know: On January 24, he and Mariane would be leaving Dubai and from there transiting to Bombay.

Friends had been urging Danny to take a break, and though another tour of Pakistan was planned, it wouldn’t be for an indefinite while. If Danny was going to get Gilani, he had to get him now.

There was another story he wanted to try to cram in: a piece on Karachi underworld boss Dawood Ibrahim, an Indian-born Muslim terrorist who enjoyed the patronage and protection of the ISI. In mid-January, while waiting for Bashir’s next missive, Danny called Ikram Sehgal for leads.

“I hadn’t heard from him in weeks,” Sehgal recalls, sipping tea in his cluttered office. “I think Danny got more and more confident. This was the biggest thing that hit him. He was suddenly having access and chasing down an area where he had no expertise.” He stirs the heat from his cup. “I mean, Danny just didn’t have it.

“He asked if I had any contacts with the local Mafia. I said, ‘Danny, the Mafia head here doesn’t function the way you think Mafias do. This is not something out of
The Godfather
. I know the direction you’re going in. Don’t do this! Forget it! If you want to know something, come over and we’ll talk, not on the telephone.’“

Sehgal’s phone rings, as it has constantly since March 17, when militants attacked a church in Islamabad, killing U.S. embassy employee Barbara Green and her 17-year-old daughter, Kristen Wormsley. Sehgal is now providing protection for every Christian church in the country gratis.

“I found him a little naive,” Sehgal goes on. “I would tell him, ‘Danny, stick by the rules. Anybody you want to meet, meet him in a public place. Don’t get into cars. Anyone could pick you up.’ He would always say, ‘Yes, you’re right, Ikram, I ought to do that.’ But you always had the feeling that what he was saying was perfunctory.”

Bashir checked in again on Sunday, January 20, saying that Gilani would be available that coming Tuesday or Wednesday. Sheikh said he’d forward the phone number of a Gilani
mureed
(follower), who would escort him to the meeting.

“It is sad that you are leaving Pakistan so soon,” Sheikh wrote. “I hope you have enjoyed your stay.”

The next day, Danny and Mariane learned that their baby would be a boy. They decided to call him Adam, a name that resonates with both Muslim and Jew.

Wednesday, January 23, was going to be busy for Danny. Asra was hosting a farewell dinner party for him that night; he wanted to check out a cyber cafe to see if it was where a message was sent to Richard Reid instructing him to board the next Paris-Miami flight; he had an appointment to see Randall Bennett, the U.S. consulate’s regional security officer, at 2:30, and another to see Jamil Yusuf, head of Karachi’s Citizens Police Liaison Committee, at 5:45. And then there was Gilani. Bashir by now had told him that Imtiaz Siddiqi was the
mureed
who’d lead him to Gilani. But Danny had yet to hear from him. Nor did he know that Siddiqi’s real name was Mansur Hasnain and that he’d been one of the Indian Airlines hijackers who’d freed Sheikh in 1999.

He had a good session with Bennett at the consulate, but the cyber cafe was a bust; it didn’t have the technology to trace who’d sent the e-mail to Reid. On the way to Yusuf’s office, Danny called the Dow Jones bureau to ask the resident correspondent, Saaed Azhari, to set up a final appointment for him the next morning. Azhari, who couldn’t fathom why Danny chanced taking cabs everywhere, rather than using a hired car and regular driver, like other correspondents, said there was something Danny ought to know: Ghulam Hasnain, the Karachi
Time
stringer, had gone missing
the day before. Guessing was, the ISI had picked him up because of an expose he had written on Dawood Ibrahim for a Pakistani monthly.

Danny seemed unworried, and a few minutes later he was at the Citizens Police Liaison Committee building, talking to Yusuf, a former businessman who’d become a renowned crime-fighter.

On the afternoon I catch up to him, Yusuf—who played a key role in catching Danny’s killers—is bemoaning his trouble in getting warrants for cyber searches. “Judges do not understand Yahoo is not a human being,” he says, shaking his head. He then describes his last meeting with a reporter of whom he was very fond.

“He asked me about Gilani, and I said, ‘I never heard of him. I don’t think a lot of people have heard of him in this country.’ Then he told me about this Richard Reid thing. I joked with him: I said, ‘Danny, do something else. The guy is caught. He is with the FBI. Why waste time?’

“[When] he was sitting here, he got two phone calls. He said, Yes, he was coming there at seven o’clock, somewhere close by. I did not know what was happening. He did not tell me who he was going to meet ….

“I advised him, ‘You cannot go and meet strangers.’ It’s just like me going into New York and trying to meet the Mafia, then complaining to the world I got abducted. You don’t do those things.

“He was a very docile person, quiet, humble. Not a person who would go out and take risks in reporting. That is what surprised me …. [How] he came and sat here for an hour and then went to that stupid appointment of his without telling us.”

Yusuf looks out the window down to where the security car he has had to hire to trail him is waiting.

“Kidnapping a journalist is the easiest thing you can do,” he says. “They are hungry for information …. Anybody could do it.”

Danny’s caller was the
mureed
he knew as Siddiqi, saying to meet him at the Village Garden Restaurant, next to the Metropole Hotel, a mile or so away. In the cab on the way over, Danny phoned Mariane, telling her where he was going and to start the party without him. He’d be back around eight.

The hour came and went without any sign of Danny, but initially his absence wasn’t cause for concern. Pakistanis are famously sociable—Gilani may have insisted on serving dinner, and the talk may have run on, as interviews with Muslim militants tended to. But midnight passed with no word from Danny, who also wasn’t answering his cell phone.

Now truly worried, Asra phoned Danny’s boss, foreign editor John Bussey, at the
Journal’s
headquarters in South Brunswick, New Jersey, where it was late afternoon. Bussey told her that he’d alert the State Department.

Asra phoned Khawaja, thinking he would know whether Danny actually had a meeting. But Khawaja said he’d never heard of any meeting with Gilani.

The police arrived shortly thereafter, and Asra phoned Khawaja again, this time with an officer on the line. He asked that Khawaja put them in touch with Gilani as soon as possible. Then Asra read off Bashir and Siddiqi’s cell phone numbers. Khawaja didn’t recognize either of them.

By the time the flight to Dubai left the next afternoon, the story of Danny Pearl’s disappearance was moving over the wires. No one was using the word “kidnapping” yet, but that was the suspicion. It was confirmed early Sunday morning, local time, by e-mails to
The New York Times, The Washington Post
, the
Los Angeles Times
, and two Pakistani news organizations. Attached were four photographs of Danny in captivity, one showing a 9-millimeter pistol pointed at his head and a message in English and Urdu announcing the capture
of “CIA officer Daniel Pearl who was posing as a journalist for
The Wall Street Journal.”

The note demanded that the U.S. hand over F-16 aircraft, whose delivery to Pakistan had been frozen by 1990 nuclear sanctions; that Pakistanis detained for questioning by the FBI over the 9/11 attacks be given access to lawyers and allowed to see their families; that Pakistani nationals held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, be returned to their homeland to stand trial; and that the Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan, now held in Afghanistan, be returned to Pakistan.

Of Danny, the note said, “Unfortunately, he is at present being kept in very inhuman circumstances quite similar in fact to the way that Pakistanis and nationals of other sovereign countries are being kept in Cuba by the American Army. If the Americans keep our countrymen in better conditions we will better the conditions of Mr. Pearl and the other Americans that we capture.”

Sent on the account of
[email protected]
, the message was signed, “The National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty.”