Sex, Drugs & Jihad
Inside the secret world of David Headley, the man who plotted the 26/11 terror attack
Sandeep Unnithan February 7, 2013 | UPDATED 16:55 IST
Hours after ten terrorists struck Mumbai in November 26, 2008, Shazia Gilani sent husband David Coleman Headley a coded email. "I am watching cartoons," wrote the Chicago-based homemaker. "Congratulations on your graduation." For two years, Headley had extensively planned and recceed for the attack in which 166 people were massacred. On January 24 this year, he was sentenced to 35 years in a US prison for plotting terror attacks on Copenhagen in Denmark and the 26/11 attack in Mumbai, two worlds he had lived in and effortlessly segued between. The life of the US-born son of a Pakistani poet-diplomat and an American mother was a heady cocktail of drugs, sex and money. The man who frequented the world's largest drug zone, the Golden Crescent in the Af-Pak region, as a drug pusher in the 1980s was later involved in its second biggest export: Terrorism.
Headley is wanted not only for his role in plotting the 26/11 attack but also for planning a strike at the National Defence University in Delhi that trains senior armed forces officers and bureaucrats as well as at tourist spots in Pune and Goa in March 2009. The home ministry has sought the extradition of both Headley and his Pakistani-Canadian co-conspirator Tahawwur Rana (sentenced to 14 years in Chicago) under a second case registered against them by the National Investigation Agency (NIA).
"Headley is one link that connects all the missing pieces of 26/11," says an NIA official. "He establishes the complicity of the Pakistan Army and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and also indicts Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) supremo Hafiz Muhammad Saeed," he says. Pakistani courts let Saeed off in 2009 for insufficient evidence.
Expanding Mission Mumbai
Four NIA officials granted week-long access to him for 34 hours between June 3 and June 9, 2010, in an underground US federal prison, say Headley was unlike any terrorist or criminal they had encountered. Not just because of his heterochromatic eyes-a blue right eye and a dark brown left eye-but also because of his soaring ambition. George S. Patton's favourite line, 'No guts, no glory', was his motto. As he led the agency into the Pakistani deep state where the ISI ran the LeT as a strategic asset in its war against India, they discovered that Headley was the agent provocateur who had expanded the scale of 26/11. "The germ of the idea to attack Mumbai existed," an intelligence official says, "Headley's meticulous inputs gave the ISI and the LeT the confidence to make it much bigger." The Mumbai attack is, to date, the world's only hybrid terror strike that combined all the elements of modern terrorism: Seaborne infiltration, suicide commandos and vehicle-borne explosives.
Until September 2007, the LeT had planned only a hit-and-run raid on guests at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai. Two gunmen would infiltrate into Mumbai via the porous Indo-Nepal or Indo-Bangladesh border, carry out their deadly task and then flee north towards Kashmir. Headley's meticulous, hostile recces over nine trips to India between 2006 and 2009 obtained target videos and precise Global Positioning System coordinates which would allow gunmen who had never travelled out of Pakistan before to steer themselves to the five pre-selected targets with ease. He ruled out a strike against Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray's home, Matoshree: The terrorists could not travel 15 km from Colaba to his Bandra home, he reasoned.
There was something else that investigators noted about him. He had a voracious appetite for women. By the time he was finally arrested in 2009, he had had three wives and six girlfriends, some of whom like Pakistani-born Shazia Gilani, may have known about his deadly machinations. India has sent a request to the US for access to Shazia; and for access to two girlfriends-Portia Peter and another, unnamed woman; as well as to Morocco for access to his third wife, Faiza Outalha. Morocco is yet to respond to the request.
Headley's mother Serill, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia family, had an overwhelming influence on his life. She left the infant, born Daood Gilani, with her former husband but brought him back to the US in 1977. He lived with his mother in an apartment above a nightclub "Khyber Pass" that she ran in Philadelphia with her Afghan-born husband. Headley worked as a manager in the club.
Descent into drug trade
Headley returned to Pakistan in the early 1980s. US investigative website ProPublica notes that in 1984, Headley was caught trying to smuggle heroin out of Pakistan's tribal areas. He used his friend Tahawwur Rana, then studying to be a Pakistani military doctor, as cover. The ruse failed. He was imprisoned but broke out of prison. In 1988, he was caught trying to smuggle 2 kg heroin into the US from Frankfurt airport. He was tried, served four years in a US prison and then cut a deal with the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). He agreed to work for them as an informant. He used his deep links with drug gangs in the Af-Pak region to uncover drug smugglers in the US.
Post-9/11, when US intelligence agencies scrambled for information on al Qaeda that operated from Afghanistan and later Pakistan's lawless tribal regions, Headley was a vital asset. In Lahore, however, Headley was slowly drawn towards the violent, virulent India-hating ideology of the LeT and its potbellied founder and chief ideologue, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed. The drifter found his ideological moorings within an organisation determined to bleed India.
By 2002, the DEA double agent had became a triple agent. Headley was now being trained as a militant separately by both the ISI and LeT. He was almost unrecognisable in the salwar kameez, a traditional Afghan 'pakol' cap and a beard that touched his chest. Only his eyes gave him away. He was trained in camps first in the LeT headquarters in Muridke outside Lahore and then in gruelling sessions in the mountains of Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. He was coached in unarmed combat, intelligence-gathering techniques and the fine art of cultivating agents. He volunteered to fight in Kashmir, but at 40, was rejected for being too old. The LeT and the ISI evidently had a bigger, more important role for him in mind.
The smooth operator
In September 2006, he arrived in Mumbai as David Coleman Headley, carrying a brand new US passport and $25,000 given to him by the ISI's Major Iqbal for scouting targets in Mumbai. Headley was clean-shaven and wore western attire. Sources say his New York-based make-up artist girlfriend helped him change his look. He quickly discovered that a tall, well-built, English-speaking, white Caucasian male could operate with impunity in India. His suave foreign accent was irresistible to women.
But the ageing Lothario evidently had another secret. S. Hussain Zaidi, journalist and author of a new book Headley and I, attributes his sexual drive to a banned anabolic steroid, Insulin-like Growth Factor (IGF). Used by bodybuilders to gain muscle, IGF 1 and IGF 2 are also marketed as anti-ageing pills and cost over $100 (
Rs.5,400) per mg. "Headley was a womaniser and wife-beater who consumed these drugs to keep in shape," writes Zaidi.
To all those he met and befriended in Mumbai, Headley was a US businessman who ran the Mumbai branch of his friend Rana's Chicago-based firm, Immigration Law Centre. Headley ran an office in Tardeo's AC market in South Mumbai, lived as paying guest within walking distance in Breach Candy and frequented Moksh, an upmarket gym in the locality. Here, he met and befriended Mahesh Bhatt's fitness freak son, Rahul. Between his workouts-5 km treadmill runs in 25 minutes, 50 push-ups and 14 pull-ups-the six-foot tall, 90 kg Headley would stare obsessively at a shapely young starlet who worked out in the gym, sparking talk of a romantic dalliance. He would often remark how then rising star Kangna Ranaut resembled his mother. But Headley's affections were reserved for a restaurant owner who he wooed with flowers and from whose shop in Colaba he would buy cakes. The affair died a few months later when her father objected. He never smoked or drank but sipped the occasional Dom Perignon and earned the sobriquet 'David Armani' for his passion for good clothes.
Bhatt, 31, recalls his one-time friend with a sense of bitterness. "Headley is a criminal motivated by 3 Ws-wine, women and wealth," Bhatt told India Today. "He is narcissistic, self-obsessed and manipulative." He was also cautious. He used code words like 'Mickey Mouse project' to refer to potential terror plots and spoke with Rana in English, not his usual Punjabi, during his long distance calls to mask his origins. He was always checking on possible targets. "Does it work?" he once asked a policeman armed with a 9 mm carbine at Siddhivinayak temple, turning to tell his trainer Vilas Warak that it was a World War II weapon. He bristled when Bhatt called him 'Agent Headley' in jest.
He couldn't help his serial philandering. In February 2007, during one of his nine trips between Mumbai and Pakistan to meet his LeT and ISI handlers, he met an attractive Moroccan national Faiza at a mutual friend's home in Lahore. Sparks flew between the spy and the medical student. They were married that month. Headley hid the marriage from Shazia, whom he married in 1999 and had four children with. In March 2007, he brought Faiza to Mumbai where they extensively recceed the Taj Mahal Hotel, which was then the only target of the strike. Headley always carried a Sony Ericsson phone given to him by the ISI with which he filmed elaborate videos of the interiors and the rooms.
There was a tearful spat at the hotel over Headley's first wife and in December 2007, Faiza got into an altercation outside Headley's house in Lahore. He spent eight days in jail for assault. Faiza later breezed into the American Embassy in Islamabad and told the US State Department's security bureau that her husband was an international drug peddler and a terror spy who had been going to India on a secret mission. She said the agents already had a file on Headley when she spoke to them. Crucially, none of this intelligence was ever shared with Indian agencies. This has led to anger within the Indian security establishment.
The Faiza-Headley relationship was rocky, violent and ended in 2008. However, in 2007, Headley's thoughts were focused elsewhere. Both the ISI and its cat's paw, the LeT, were under pressure. The ISI wanted to prevent its Kashmir-based jihadi organisations from mixing with the Taliban. The LeT was going through an internal crisis. Headley told the NIA that the group was breaking up, two important LeT militant leaders had broken away to fight inside Afghanistan, its military commander Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi had a serious problem in holding his restive flock together and convincing them to fight in Kashmir. "This compelled them to consider a 'spectacular' terrorist strike against India," Headley said, one which would shift the theatre of violence from Pakistani soil to India.
Even after 26/11, Headley moved freely in India, thinking of fresh terror plots as he criss-crossed Jaipur, Delhi, Goa and Pune in March 2009. The rush of being an undercover global terrorist was almost as addictive as the Afghan heroin he indulged in in the mid-1980s. Scouting locations at the behest of LeT's splinter group called the 'Jund-ul-Fida' based in Karachi, he planned that gunmen would break into the National Defence University in Delhi and massacre senior Indian armed forces officers there "more than any that have been killed in previous wars with Pakistan"-or so the Chicago-based Rana noted in a coded exchange with Headley. Together they plotted to slaughter Israeli tourists at a Chabad house in Goa and mow down Western tourists at Pune's Osho ashram.
Headley's role in the 26/11 attack earned him the respect and attention of other terrorist groups inside Pakistan. In May 2009 in Pakistan's FATA area, he met Ilyas Kashmiri, the one-eyed leader of the 313 Brigade, an al Qaeda-affiliated group. Kashmiri sought Headley's help to carry out an attack on the offices of Jyllands-Posten, a Danish newspaper in Copenhagen that had published a cartoon of Prophet Mohammed in 2005. He wanted al Qaeda to strike the newspaper office, behead journalists and throw their heads on the street. Headley was so enthused by the mission that he even volunteered to become a suicide attacker. His transformation into a jihadi was complete. But evidently, the al Qaeda affiliate wanted him to do what he did best: Study potential targets. In August 2009, Headley went on his last scout mission. He travelled through Sweden, Denmark and Germany and came on the scanner of British intelligence who reported him to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation that finally arrested him before he could carry out the Copenhagen attacks.
Desperately seeking Headley
Former CIA official Bruce Riedel, now director of the Brookings Intelligence Project at the Washington, DC think tank, says Headley's sentence, while it may cause dissatisfaction in India, is part of a process that gives intelligence agencies critical information. "From the standpoint of a professional intelligence officer trying to fight terrorism, securing (Headley's) cooperation to give information about who was involved, how it was done was invaluable. It gives us the best insights we have into the working of the LeT and its patron, the ISI," says Riedel.
Headley's Pakistani-Canadian co-conspirator Tahawwur Rana
Headley's extradition seems extremely unlikely no matter what is said in public. In a January 29 press conference, outgoing US secretary of state Hillary Clinton called justice for 26/11 victims "unfinished business". Union Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde is to reiterate the demand for his extradition with US authorities during a Homeland Security summit in early February.
The NIA hopes it will get the next best thing-extradition of his associate, Rana. "But who knows, tomorrow India might just get their hands on someone the US would want, then Headley could become the bargaining chip," says a senior Intelligence Bureau official.
On January 24, as he was sentenced, Headley shuffled uncomfortably and stared down at the floor of the Chicago courtroom as Linda Ragsdale, 53, spoke of being shot through the spine by terrorists at the Oberoi hotel in Mumbai on the night of November 26, 2008. "I know what a bullet can do to every part of the human body… these are things I never needed to know, never needed to experience," she said. The architect of the mayhem was silent. He had accomplished his mission.
with
Bhavna Vij-Aurora and Kiran Tare.
