The Best American Crime Writing (20 page)

Following their trial in Los Angeles, Marjorie Knoller and her husband Robert Noel were each convicted of manslaughter for their roles in the mauling death of Diane Whipple, and each is serving the maximum four years. Knoller was also convicted of second-degree murder in connection with Whipple’s death, but this was thrown out in a San Francisco court by Judge James Warren in July 2003 on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence of Knoller’s intent to commit murder. When fudge Warren offered Knoller the opportunity to apologize to the friends and loved ones of Diane Whipple in court, Knoller remained silent
.

Knoller and Noel’s adopted son, Pelican Bay inmate Paul “Cornfed” Schneider, has pleaded not guilty to federal racketeering charges that in his role as an Aryan Brotherhood gang leader he ordered eight murders from behind bars. As bizarre as the killer dog story might seem to readers unfamiliar with the California corrections system, those who’ve experienced it well know its corrosive influence on all who come into contact with it, no matter which side of the bars they are on. The California corrections system remains as former inmate and author Edward Bunker described it, an animal factory. May everyone who reads “Mad Dogs and Lawyers” say a prayer for the victim, Diane Whipple, and the people who loved her
.

T
he reporter who comes to Karachi, Pakistan, is given certain cautions.

Do not take a taxi from the airport; arrange for the hotel to send a car and confirm the driver’s identity before getting in.

Do not stay in a room that faces the street.

Do not interview sources over the phone.

Do not discuss subjects such as Islam or the Pakistani nuclear program in the presence of hotel staff.

Do not leave notes or tape recordings in your room.

Do not discard work papers in the wastebasket; flush them down the toilet.

Do not use public transportation or accept rides from strangers. Do not go into markets, movie theaters, parks, or crowds. Do not go anywhere without telling a trustworthy someone the destination and expected time of return. And, above all, do not go alone. Ever.

The Marriott in Karachi satisfies lodging guidelines. Metal detectors flank the entrances, guards with sawed-off shotguns patrol the premises, and the shopping arcade leads directly to the U.S. consulate—which seemed a plus until a car bomb killed twelve people there on June 14. My room, per instruction, is on the Marriott’s backside, and offers a fine view of the nearby Sheraton, where a bus containing eleven French nationals was blown up by a suicide bomber in May. It is also where, according to a U.S. official, FBI
agents recovered a videotape showing an American journalist having his head cut off. His name was Daniel Pearl, he was 38 years old, a father-to-be, and South Asia bureau chief for
The Wall Street Journal.
He got the same security briefing I did.

By now, the horror that befell Danny Pearl is deeply engraved. A handsome young man, loved by everyone—“Sweetest guy in the world,” friends call him—goes to a rendezvous he believes will lead him to a scoop. Instead, terrorists are waiting to snatch him from the street. They issue photographs of Danny in chains, a pistol held to his head, and charge that he is a spy and will be executed unless demands are met. Danny’s French wife, Mariane—six months pregnant with their first child—appears on television to appeal for his life. But there is only silence. Then, just when things are at their darkest, the terrorist ringleader, a former British public-school boy named Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, is arrested and says Danny is alive. Hopes soar as Pakistan’s president, General Pervez Musharraf, predicts his imminent freedom. But all that is released is the videotape. “My father’s Jewish, my mother’s Jewish, I’m Jewish,” it records Daniel Pearl saying. Then he is butchered.

We’ve been told that Danny was not only a great reporter, with an eye for the offbeat and the absurd, but a cautious one—not the sort who’d look for trouble. We’ve heard how he grew up in suburban Los Angeles, went to Stanford, and landed at the
Journal
which sent him to Atlanta, Washington, London, Paris, and, finally, Bombay, a posting he accepted after confirming that there were venues where Mariane could exercise her passion for salsa dancing. We’ve had described how he was skeptical in the best sense of the word, questioning things taken for granted, unearthing stories others overlooked.

He was working that way on his last story, an investigation of the connections between the “shoe bomber,” Richard C. Reid, and a virulently anti-Semitic Muslim militant, Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani, tracing an unbeaten path that led to who knows where.

The who, what, when, and where have been laid out. Everything except the why. Why did Danny Pearl die? Because he was a Jew? A journalist? An American? Or was he simply in the wrong place at the wrong time?

The why is always the hardest question for a journalist to answer, and it’s what brought Danny Pearl to Pakistan. “I want to know why they hate us so much,” he said. Why he died trying to find out brought me.

My qualification is having been in a similar circumstance a long time ago—August 1970, in Cambodia, to be precise. I was 25 years old then, covering the war for
Time
and feeling invulnerable, a frequent, sometimes fatal journalist’s malady. The short of it is that I drove alone to somewhere I shouldn’t have, and wound up in a hole with the barrel of an AK-47 pressed to my forehead. I was presumed dead for several weeks, and the conviction of my fellows back in Phnom Penh—just as it is among many today about Danny Pearl—was that I’d asked for it. The difference is, I came back.

There is a lot else about Danny and the people who picked him up that is dissimilar, but every reporter has got to start somewhere. And the place Danny Pearl began, shortly after 9/11, was with a phone call to a number in Manhattan.

On the line that morning was Mansoor Ijaz, founder and chairman of Crescent Investment Management, LLC, and a U.S.-born-and-bred Pakistani-American with unusual friends and interests. His business partner is Lieutenant General James Abrahamson, former director of Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars program; the vice-chairman of his board, R. James Woolsey, director of the Central Intelligence Agency under Bill Clinton. For a time Ijaz was also chums with Clinton and his national security adviser Samuel Berger. This came in handy in April 1997, when, as a private citizen, Ijaz negotiated Sudan’s counterterrorism offer to the United States, and
again in August 2000, when Ijaz had Pakistan and India on the seeming verge of cooling the Kashmir cauldron. The deal broke down, as did the relationship with the White House. But soon enough Ijaz was back, as tight with George W. and Condie as he’d been with Bill and Sandy.

Danny called on a tip from Indian intelligence, which said Ijaz was wired with leading jihadis. Figuring that a prominent Pakistani-American who came recommended by Indian spooks to get to Muslim militants must have been a gold mine for Danny, I did the same nine months later.

Ijaz confirmed my figuring.

“He said he wanted to try to understand the psychology behind the jihadi groups,” Ijaz recalls. “He wanted to try to get into the mind of the people running the show …. He wanted me to introduce him to people who could open doors for him.”

Danny’s religion also came up.

“I said to him at one point, ‘I presume from your name that you are Jewish. Is that correct?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Well, you have to understand that this is going to be a huge stumbling block for you. Because [the militants] are going to pick up on that very quickly, and
The Wall Street Journal
is not viewed as the voice of the Muslim people.”

Danny, who’d reported from Iran and Sudan without difficulty, did not seem concerned, and Ijaz made introductions to three sources: Shaheen Sehbai, editor of
The News
, Pakistan’s largest English-language daily; a jihadi activist he declines to name; and—most fatefully—Khalid Khawaja, a Muslim militant and a onetime agent with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) who counts among his very best friends Osama bin Laden.

In late September 2001, Danny flew to Karachi, a sprawling port city of 15 million that is Pakistan’s commercial center. Mariane, who is a freelance journalist and frequently accompanied him on interviews, went too.

“We didn’t choose a profession,” said Mariane, a strong-minded Buddhist who has been likened to Yoko Ono. “We didn’t choose it for ego purposes; we chose it because we wanted to change the world.”

They checked into the Pearl Continental, where reservations had been made for them by Ikram Sehgal, proprietor of Pakistan’s largest security company. Danny had called him before departing from Bombay to see if it was safe to bring Mariane, who they’d recently learned was pregnant. Sehgal delivered a sobering lecture about security precautions, and offered to provide them with an armed guard free of charge. Danny accepted.

I empathized. Compared with Karachi, Cambodia seemed a walk in the park.

For a time in the early 1990s, violence in Karachi was so endemic that the army took over for the cops. When the troops pulled out, killings started averaging eight per day—and those were merely the ones involving political and criminal gangs. No one bothered to count the shootings, bombings, garrotings, and throat slittings between ethnic and religious groups, much less the toll racked up in quotidian armed robberies, home invasions, and just-for-the-hell-of-it sniper slayings.

Americans were special targets. In March 1995 two U.S. consular personnel on their way to work were mowed down by automatic weapons in an ambush at a busy intersection. Two years later, in November 1997, four employees of an American oil company were shot dead in a carbon-copy replay a few blocks from the Sheraton.

Karachi was somewhat quieter when the Pearls arrived—at least, a local magazine was no longer publishing a foldout, color-coded guide to where one was likeliest to be bumped off. Americans hadn’t been murdered in a while (Shia Muslim physicians were the victims du jour), but the U.S. consulate was taking no chances. Its
staff members were ferried around in armor-plated Chevy Suburbans driven by U.S. Marines.

Journalists acquainting themselves with Pakistan usually come to Karachi last or don’t come, period. I’d resolved to be among the latter category, after Benazir Bhutto advised that Karachi was “so dangerous.” I changed my mind after several weeks testing calmer Pakistani waters and convincing myself that former prime ministers don’t know anything—typical journalist thinking, when a story’s good. Danny, however, came here first. He was after Muslim militants, and Karachi is their Rome. Besides, an old friend from the
Journal
was soon to arrive. Her name was Asra Nomani.

Asra, who’d been at the
Journal
since 1988, was a Dow Jones original. For starters, she was an Indian-born Muslim from Morgan-town, West Virginia, where her father helped found the first mosque. And corporate America, Asra wasn’t: in January 2000 she took a leave to write a book about Tantra.

She’d been conducting her research from India. Shortly after 9/11, however,
Salon.com
appointed her its Central Asia correspondent and she later took a house in Karachi, a fact that almost certainly did not go unnoticed by Pakistan’s ISI, which keeps tabs on foreign journalists, particularly those from India, who are presumed, ipso facto, spies.

Initially, the Pearls’ time in Karachi was unremarkable. They lunched with
News
editor Shaheen Sehbai, who found Danny “very keen to do work” but with “no clue how to go about it,” and called on Ikram Sehgal, who arranged several appointments to get Danny grounded. “I liked him,” says Sehgal. “He was very inquisitive and intense, you know.”

It showed. Hardly had Danny cleared customs than he was quoting Sehgal in a
Journal
assessment of Musharraf’s future (bleak, Sehgal judged). Within weeks, Danny had dispensed with his gun-toting chaperon—“this shadow,” he said—and was in the capital,
Islamabad, 700 miles to the north, for a several-hour session with Khalid Khawaja.

Khawaja was always good for a provocative quote, which made him a journalist favorite. “America is a very vulnerable country,” he’d told CBS in July 2001. “Your White House is the most vulnerable target. It’s very simple to just get it.” After the U.S. began bombing Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, Asra got a zinger, too: “No American is safe now …. This is a lifelong war.”

Some dismissed Khawaja as a P.R. man. But when it came to Muslim militancy, he was the real deal, having acquired his credentials during the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, where, as an air force squadron leader, Khawaja was serving with the ISI, which was distributing CIA-purchased munitions to mujahedeen. The more radically Islamist the fighter, the more weapons he got, including Osama bin Laden, who formed an instant bond with Khawaja. It deepened when Khawaja was forced out of the ISI in 1988 after criticizing military strongman Zia ul-Haq for not doing enough to Islamize Pakistan—equivalent to questioning the piety of the Pope.

But despite his talk of bin Laden’s being “a man like an angel,” Khawaja was sufficiently broad-minded in his allegiances that he got the Taliban to agree to receive Ijaz and ex-CIA director Woolsey.

Khawaja, in short, was a source to kill for, and Danny charmed him. Describing the reporter to Ijaz as “competent, straightforward,” and not given to asking “inappropriate questions,” Khawaja agreed to steer Danny to leading jihadis and to be a sounding board during his time in-country.

Danny made another valuable acquaintance in Hamid Mir, editor of Islamabad’s Urdu-language
Daily Ausaf
and self-proclaimed “official biographer” of Osama bin Laden. In their last chat, in early November, bin Laden had boasted of possessing chemical and
nuclear weapons. But, according to Mir, the real reason for his summons was remarks he’d made on a U.S. TV show, saying that bin Laden couldn’t back his beliefs with Islamic teachings. “I watched you on
Larry King,”
Osama said. “I want to tell you my position.”

When I call on Mir he extracts Danny’s business card from his wallet with a flourish.

“This is his memory,” he says. “I was aware he’s a Jew and that he works for
The Wall Street Journal
… but I can say that he was a very good friend of mine.”

He fondles the card, which is worn from showings. “Some people accused him that he was a spy, because the kind of assignment he was doing and his way of meeting with people and going after the story …. I came on CNN and I said, ‘No, he was a journalist … like me. We journalists take these kinds of risks.’ ”

Mir, a Taliban enthusiast, was wary of Danny until they attended an anti-American street demonstration in November. Several hundred were on hand, chanting denunciations of the U.S. and fealty to bin Laden, Danny in the midst of them.

“People were burning the flag of the United States of America … and I was real careful that I should not become a victim of that fire,” says Mir. “But he was standing right under the flag. I said, ‘Danny, you should be careful!’ He said, ‘I want to see in their eyes why they hate us.’ I said, ‘At least there is one American journalist who wants to find out the reasons.’”

For all Danny’s great contacts, his stories weren’t leaping off the
Journals
front page. While he was writing about trading in Afghan currency, other correspondents were packing up to cover the war next door. But by late November, seven journalists had been killed there. “It’s too dangerous,” Danny said at a meal with other reporters before Thanksgiving. “I just got married, my wife is pregnant, I’m just not going to do it.”