Who Killed Daniel Pearl (40 page)

Then comes the attack on the World Trade Center. The announcement of reprisals against Afghanistan. Omar is fired up again. He says: “These are my brothers, the greatest power in the world threatens attack on my brothers—my place is at their side, I'm going.” He continues, “Each man, the Koran teaches, comes into the world to accomplish a mission. Some missions are humble, others are great, mine is to serve in the great army of Allah.” So here he is, in the first week of October, back in the house for foreigners in Kandahar, where preparing for holy war.

He is seen at Mullah Omar's headquarters.

He is again received by bin Laden, who, it seems, puts him in charge of new financial duties (notably, contact with a counterfeit money workshop in Muzzafarabad, in “occupied Kashmir” that Omar knows better than anyone, and where he still has solid ties). He brings books purchased from “Mr. Books” that are, I think, perhaps gifts for the al-Qaida leader or his principle aides (an anthology in four volumes, edited in Beirut,
The Strategies of Arab Conquests
; a book by Rifaat Sayed Ahmed on the war in Palestine, published in Cairo; and economics texts).

He is in contact with Tajmin Jawad, bureau chief of information for Mullah Omar, who in the beginning of November is named liaison officer to bin Laden, and is also linked to the ISI.

He sees Mulla Akhtar Usmani, commander in chief of the Taliban armed forces in the region, who puts him in charge of an accelerated training program for a group of newly arrived young recruits from Pakistan.

He sees Qari Saifullah Akhtar, the leader of Harkat al-Jahad el-Islami, one of Mullah Omar's close advisors, who will soon join him in escaping the country, but who looks askance at this strange, cultivated man so different from the saber-rattlers who make up most of his troops.

He drives a Toyota. He has his personal guard. He lives surrounded by mobile phones, computers, and other gadgets.

He has become, concludes Amine, one of the most high-profile characters of the small clan of foreigners in Kandahar, and he knows it. So much so that, in October, when the Americans unleash their offensive, he is there at the front with a few thousand combatants from the whole region, but especially from Pakistan. It doesn't appear that he actually participated in the battles, but he's there. He shares the fate of his “Afghan brothers.” And he might be among those who negotiate, in certain surrounded areas, and notably in the face the battalion led by the future president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, the surrender of Taliban forces.

Omar, as Robert Sam Anson (
Vanity Fair
) and Jon Stock (
The Times
of London) say, is now called by bin Laden “my favorite son” or “my special son.”

The future kidnapper of Daniel Pearl has become, in a very short time, an active apostle of the clash of civilizations, al-Qaida style.

I don't know how he gets out of Afghanistan.

The fact that he reappears in early December in Lahore, ready for the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl, proves that his exit was relatively easy and that he didn't belong to the roughneck rank and file who had to go through Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and in some cases Chechnya, pursued by American Special Forces and having to hide in Waziristan and Buner, the Pakistani tribal zones, before returning.

The fact that the adventure is resolved so quickly and so well, the fact that he obviously escapes this Afghan Rigadoon, this rout, this deluge of fire, and the flight that was the fate of most of the combatants caught like he was, in the rat-trap of Kandahar, the complicities implied by all that system of connivance that had to be put into action so that he could find himself from one day to the next, as if by enchantment, in his garden in Lahore—it all proves what we already knew, which is, his very particular status: inside this LVF, this collaborationist's militia, that is the Pakistani battalion in the Taliban army and, now, in the State of Pakistan itself and its intelligence services.

What we didn't know about, however, was his place in al-Qaida.

What I couldn't figure out, even after Dubai and the discovery of his possible role in the financing of September 11, was his position in bin Laden's entourage.

I don't need to go back and see Gul Aga, I know enough.

Daniel Pearl's killer is not just linked to al-Qaida. He is not one of the innumerable Muslims around the world in vague allegiance to it. He is the “favored son” of its Chief. He is a man with responsibilities in the organization's command cell. He is a crucial character in the “arm wrestling match” that the new barbarians have started against the democracies of the world. And this is how the Pearl affair takes on its full dimension.

CHAPTER 6
BAD OMENS FOR THE INVESTIGATOR

After Dubaï and Kandahar, back again to Karachi.

The coolness of the air, salty and bracing as at the beginning of a storm, that reminds me, as always, of the presence of the sea.

The breathing of the city, under my windows, children crying, car horns, plaintive cries mixed with sounds of joy, right near the Village Garden—strange, the way I am drawn back to this place as though it were a magnet.

Tomorrow is Christmas.

It will be 328 days since Daniel Pearl was murdered.

And for the first time since the beginning of the investigation, I feel the atmosphere getting heavy.

The other morning, Grasset, my French publisher, told me the Pakistani embassy in Paris had requested a copy of my first book,
Indes
Rouges
, which came out at the beginning of the '70s.

“So, what did you tell them?”

“Nothing, we were waiting for the green light from you.”

“Well, no, no, of course not. Drag things out. Tell them the book is out of print. Tell the distributor to pretend they're out of stock in case they try to order it directly. I think it's better if they don't have this book in their hands while I'm still in Pakistan.”

I sense them wondering, at the other end of the line, if I'm not getting paranoid. But I know this country is crazy and lives under the watch of the secret services, which really
are
paranoid.

Being a Jew is already less than an asset.

Being interested in Daniel Pearl doesn't earn you any friends here, either.

But worse still would be if these people knew that I am the author of a book you can't read for five minutes without realizing it is scarcely sympathetic to Pakistani policy; even if it was written in my long-ago youth, it would complicate things considerably.

That said, the information is there.

And the call from the embassy is no accident.

In Karachi and in Islamabad, there are naturally people who inevitably ask questions and find the answers.

Ikram Seghal, Danny's friend, proprietor of one of the largest private security companies in the country, welcomed me the other day and told me his mother is Bengali and he is happy to shake the hand of a Frenchman who, in his youth, knew this magnificent country . . .

Another person, the evening before, at a dinner in the home of a judge, suddenly leaning toward me as we were getting up from the table, to whisper, “I'm glad to meet you, I've been told you fought for Bangladesh when you were young . . . ”

He is—like Seghal—a good man.

He's an industrialist from Lahore, pro-Western, liberal.

But in this country, how can one possibly know who is who?

How can you be certain people aren't double or triple-dealing?

The friendliest faces suddenly become suspect . . . The journalist who inspires your confidence and who, you discover through conversation, is married to the daughter of a general . . . Another guest at another dinner, who, comes on as a rational man, holding forth to explain to the assembled company that the second wife of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan, was a non-Muslim—“So our friends mustn't bother us too much with their Islamist zeal, hmm?” Still another guest, insistent and kind, who took the trouble to ask me if I had thought of encrypting my computer, of not leaving compromising notes in my wastebasket. “For example,” he said, in the tone of a new friend initiating you to the mysteries of a dangerous country, “you must never write ‘the services' on your personal papers, never. Write ‘the bad guys' or ‘Islamabad,' or ‘the creeps'—anything you like, but never ‘the services' . . . ” The next day, Abdul tells me that this free spirit that I had listened to in all confidence holds a high position in the services!

You'd have to be an agent yourself to find your way in this labyrinth.

You'd have to be a specialist in semiotics or hermeneutics, in this country where everything is done in signs.

For now, the truth is that I have just received a clear message: my Bangladesh file, something I thought was buried in the depths of the ISI's memory, has resurfaced.

The day before, at my hotel—which no one should know since I change it nearly every night—there was another weird call.

“Hello, Mr. Lévy? I'm downstairs in the lobby. I'm a journalist from
Zarb e-Momin
, the English version. I'd like to see you—I'll be right up.”

Amazed, I ask him to repeat himself: “
Zarb e-Momin
, really? the jihadist paper?”—and, as he confirms, I prefer to go down, quickly, the hotel is so small, two stories only, and I don't want to give him the time to come up.

The man is weird, with a shifty stare, a sugary voice, and a recently clean-shaven chin covered with nicks and razor burns.

His newspaper, English version, spread open on the table, is itself a revelation: on the left, the photo of a fallen “martyr” in Kashmir, with a letter from his mother saying how proud and happy her son's gesture has made her; on the right, a photo supposedly illustrating the “bloodbath” in Palestine, the “genocide” perpetrated by Israel—along with an editorial declaring the murder of Jews, all Jews, throughout the world, a “sacred duty” that “pleases Allah.”

An old tape recorder is already running.

Several cassettes, all different kinds, normal and micro, which is absurd.

A leather bag slung over his shoulder bandolier-style, with a strap he hugs tightly.

Who are you? I ask. How did you know I was here? An interview? You really want an interview for the cultural section of
Zarb e-Momin
? Is this a joke? An error? What can the “cultural section” of a newspaper devoted to spreading the jihadist vision of the world be like?

Yes, he replies. He knows who I am. Pakistanis aren't idiots, you know. They read the international press. Why are you surprised? This paper is not what you think! Could you by chance be confusing it with
Voice of Islam
, which is the Lashkar monthly? Don't you know that the
Zarb
has a wide public, and that this public is interested in French thought?

He explains all this and adds, with a look of complicity: “The only thing is, not here, we can't do the interview here, because the police are prowling around, and unfortunately, they make no distinction between the
Voice of Islam
and the
Zarb.
Oh! What ever happened to the good old days of the ‘Military-Mulla-Market Alliance'? I came, in fact, to take you to a safe house where we won't be bothered and where, given what you're looking for, you will learn a number of fascinating things.”

“No thanks,” I reply. “It's here or not at all—and if that's the case, why is this tape recorder on for no reason? That's stupid.”

And he, then: “Well then, it's not at all, which is too bad, because I'm not allowed here. I really was told to bring you back.”

And he packs up his tape recorder and his newspaper (in a plastic sack, not in the leather bag he doesn't open and holds so closely) and gets up with a knowing smile which expresses either sincere disappointment, or provocation that fell flat, or something else—but what?

I've been spotted again, there's no doubt about it.

The day before that, in Lahore, a strange conversation, to say the least, with Irfam Ali, the “Additional Home Secretary” of the State of Punjab . . .

Knowing I've been found out and, this time, having only innocent projects in mind (like going to Dokha Mandi, where Omar's family is from; going to see his house in the old city; and perhaps to see the grand mosque he used to attend), I prefer to be frank. As soon as I arrive I introduce myself officially to the man who is the boss of the police in the region, in his modest, slightly dirty office with metal shelves full of dusty files. All the sensitive files end up here.

I give him my usual speech.

I tell him, as I have the others: a novel, Pearl and Omar, the two characters who complement each other, day and night . . .

I add, especially for him: I am here to breathe in the atmosphere of Omar's father's birthplace . . . It's so interesting, isn't it, the story of this captivating and diabolical individual, endearing and criminal, who passed the most significant years of his adolescence in this city that, personally, I like so well, with its flowers and greenery, its colonial houses, so full of charm . . .

And he, with his beady eyes in a square face, his enormous, plump hands incessantly clenching—as though crushing a nut—while I'm talking to him, and, now and then, when his irritation is more than he can stand, he rakes a long lock of hair back over his bald crown: It's practically a braid, reaching the nape of his neck and then falling back down almost as soon as he's arranged it. Then he interrupts me and starts a long, defensive speech along the lines of “I don't see how you can say that—Omar is still charming, Omar is always charming . . . people don't change just like that, Mr. Lévy. Here is a man who does what he says and says what he does, who fights for his principles and remains faithful to his ideas, have you no respect for that? Is that criminal?” All of this is accompanied by an incredible, almost grotesque, and extremely insistent anti-Semitic diatribe I just can't believe is spontaneous and unrelated to who I am and how I might react (unless that homonym that helped me that very first day—the famous and providential “Levy Malakind”—works again . . . )