The Best American Crime Writing (21 page)

Quietly, though, Danny was onto something much more compelling
than the daily bombing reports: He’d found links between the ISI and a “humanitarian” organization accused of leaking nuclear secrets to bin Laden.

The group—Ummah Tameer-e-Nau (UTN)—was headed by Dr. Bashiruddin Mahmood, former chief of Pakistan’s nuclear power program and a key player in the development of its atomic bomb. Mahmood—who’d been forced out of his job in 1998 after U.S. intelligence learned of his affection for Muslim extremists—acknowledged making trips to Afghanistan as well as meeting Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. But he claimed that all they’d discussed was the building of a flour mill in Afghanistan. As for bin Laden, Mahmood said he knew him only as someone who “was helping in different places, renovating schools, opening orphan houses, and [helping with] rehabilitation of widows.”

That’s not how the CIA saw it. According to the agency, Mahmood and another nuclear scientist, Chaudry Abdul Majid, met with bin Laden in Kabul a few weeks before 9/11—and not to talk about whole wheat bread. U.S. pressure got the scientists detained in late October, and they admitted having provided bin Laden with detailed information about weapons of mass destruction. But, for what was termed “the best interests of the nation,” they were released in mid-December.

All this had been reported. What no one had tumbled to, except for Danny and
Journal
correspondent Steve LeVine, were UTN’s connections to top levels of Pakistan’s ISI and its military. General Hamid Gul—a former ISI director with pronounced anti-American, radically Islamist views—identified himself as UTN’s “honorary patron” and said that he had seen Mahmood during his trip to brief bin Laden. Danny and LeVine also discovered that UTN listed as a director an active-duty brigadier general, and ran down a former ISI colonel who claimed that the agency was not only aware of Mahmood’s meeting with bin Laden months before his detention but had encouraged his Afghan trips.

“It could be a big scoop—like your scoop,” Danny told Mir. But the
Journal
played the story on Christmas Eve and it passed without impact.

A few days later Danny was back in the paper with another exclusive, datelined Bahawalpur, headquarters of Jaish-e-Mohammed (one of the most violent jihadi groups, as well as one of the best connected to the ISI). Jaish had been banned by Musharraf, its bank accounts frozen, and its founder, Maulana Masood Azhar, placed under house arrest. However, Danny later reported that the Jaish office in Bahawalpur was still up and running, as was the Jaish account at the local bank.

If Danny hadn’t been on the ISI’s radarscope before, he was now. But Danny wasn’t letting up; he now had his sights set on the “shoe bomber,” Richard C. Reid.

Interest in the British ex-con turned Muslim radical had tailed off since December 22, when he had tried to blow up an American Airlines Paris-to-Miami flight by touching a match to an explosive in his tennis sneakers. But there remained some dangling ends, none more intriguing than who was giving Reid orders.

A story in the January 6 edition of
The Boston Globe
got Danny on the case. It reported that U.S. officials believed Reid to be a follower of Sheikh Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani, a leader of an obscure Muslim militant group named Jamaat ul-Fuqra (“The Impoverished”). Described by the State Department’s 1995 report on terrorism as dedicated “to purifying Islam through violence,” ul-Fuqra recruited devotees from as far away as the Netherlands and had sent jihadis into battle in Kashmir, Chechnya, Bosnia, and Israel. Since the early 1980s, ul-Fuqra had also operated in the U.S., where, under the name Muslims of America, its largely black membership lived on rural communes in nineteen states, where they were linked to a
variety of activities, including—according to authorities—money-laundering, arson, murder, and the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Gilani—who was said to have had four wives, two of them African-American—was, for a time, himself based in the States, but now he was mostly to be found in a walled compound in Lahore, Pakistan, where a Pakistani official said that one of his visitors was Richard C. Reid.

The
Globe
quoted a Gilani “spokesman” and “friend” as denying any relationship between the sheikh and Reid, and warning that further such accusations were not advisable. “If you push him … he has no option but to declare jihad on America,” said Khalid Khawaja. “It will blow like a volcano.”

Danny had stayed in regular touch with friend Khawaja and, after seeing the
Globe
piece, asked if he could put him together with Gilani. Out of the question, Khawaja said: Gilani hadn’t granted an interview in nearly a decade, and he certainly wasn’t going to give one now to an American reporter. “Don’t try,” he warned. “You will not be able to do it.”

Undeterred, Danny asked his “fixer,” an Islamabad reporter named Asif Faruqi, for a way in.

Faruqi asked around, and a journalist friend told him about a man named “Arif,” who knew another man named “Chaudry Bashir,” who could lead them to Gilani. Turned out, Faruqi’s friend was mistaken. Arif’s real name was Hashim Qadeer, and he was a jihadi wanted by the police. As for Chaudry Bashir, his real name was Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh.

Like every reporter in Pakistan, I wanted to meet the fabled Sheikh, who’d been described as well educated, charming, arrogant, and a sociopath. But Sheikh wasn’t granting interviews just then; he was in solitary confinement in the Karachi Central Jail, a colonial institution
that would do well in a remake of
Midnight Express
. I had to settle for learning about Sheikh, and once I had, it was no mystery why Danny had trusted him. I would have in a heartbeat.

He was born on December 23, 1973, in Wanstead, an East London suburb. His parents had immigrated to the U.K. from a village outside Lahore five years before, and Sheikh was the eldest of their three children. His sister would study medicine at Oxford, his brother law at Cambridge. Sheikh’s father, Saeed Ahmed Sheikh, was a successful businessman who generated enough income to send Sheikh to the $12,000-a-year Forest School, where one of his classmates was Nasser Hussain, currently captain of the British cricket team.

In 1987 Saeed Ahmed Sheikh moved the family to Pakistan, and Sheikh, then 13 and on his way to being a burly-chested six feet two inches, was enrolled in Aitchison College, the subcontinent’s Eton.

He was a standout in his studies and popular with his classmates. The only problem was that once a month or so there’d be a scrap between an old boy and a new, with Sheikh in the middle, punching for the underdog.

Teachers admired his spunk and protected him from serious discipline. But one day late in his second year, the bully Sheikh took on happened to be the son of a most influential personage. Sheikh broke the boy’s nose, then presented himself to the headmaster. “Sir,” he said, “the chap was very disagreeable. I tried to control myself as much as possible and I have given him the thrashing of his life.”

This time, there was no saving Sheikh from expulsion. “He was a wonderful soul,” a teacher laments. “A gentleman of the highest order.”

Shipped back to the Forest School, Sheikh passed his A levels in 1991 and was admitted to the London School of Economics. He read math and statistics; made $1,500 a day peddling securities to his father’s customers; and, in 1992, the same year he received a
certificate of commendation for leaping to the rescue of a woman who’d fallen onto the tracks of the Underground, was a member of the British arm-wrestling team that competed in the world championships in Geneva. “A nice bloke,” his economics tutor, George Paynter, remembered him.

The first of several turning points came in November 1992, when, during the Islamic Society’s Bosnia Week, Sheikh saw
Destruction of a Nation
, a graphic, 45-minute documentary on Serb atrocities committed against Muslims. “[It] shook my heart,” he wrote.

During the next Easter holiday, Sheikh joined a “Caravan of Mercy,” taking relief supplies to Bosnia. But in Split, Croatia, he became seriously ill from the cold and was forced to remain behind. While he recuperated, bodies were carted in, one of a 13-year-old Muslim girl who’d been raped and murdered by Serbs. Years later, Sheikh would tremble at the memory.

On his return to London, Sheikh immersed himself in military theory, dropped out of the London School of Economics, and went to Pakistan with an elaborate plan for guerrilla operations in Kashmir, including—novel twist—kidnappings. A four-star general who examined his scheme was not impressed, but the jihadis were. Spotted as a comer, he was dispatched for four months of advanced schooling in the arts of ambush, explosives, surveillance, and disguise.

Again his skills were noticed, and in June 1994 he was invited to join a kidnapping plot in India, where his role would be sweet-talking foreign tourists into captivity. The hostages would then be traded for Maulana Masood Azhar, a Harkut ul-Ansar leader, and others who had been taken prisoner in India.

There were miscues from the start. Sheikh didn’t think much of his bosses, and they, in turn, didn’t appreciate his kibitzing. They liked even less the six-foot-three-inch Israeli tourist Sheikh brought
back to their hideout as a proposed first hostage. “You fool,” one of them hissed. “You’ll get us all killed. Take him back to his hotel at once and come back in the morning.”

Posing as a Hindu named Rohit, Sheikh by and by rounded up three Britishers and an American, and dropped off a ransom note with a “rather nice” receptionist at the BBC. “Tonight she’ll be telling the whole world that this big, monstrous, terrorist-looking chap came to her in person,” he wrote in his diary. “Tomorrow, I’ll ring her up and say, ‘Actually, my dear, I’m not like that at all.’”

He seemed equally blithe about his captives, challenging them to games of chess (at which Sheikh was expert) and assuring that he would kidnap only people whom he considered intelligent and wanted to spend time with.

At other moments, Sheikh joked about their prospective beheadings and rattled on about Jews running the British Cabinet and the truths to be had from reading
Mein Kampf
. He also rhapsodized about the pleasures of martyrdom, saying that holy warriors ejaculated at the moment of death, knowing that they had entered heaven.

The bizarre idyll climaxed in late October 1994, when Indian provincial police raided the kidnappers’ hideouts. In the ensuing gun battles, two officers and one of the kidnappers were killed, and Sheikh shot in the shoulder.

The ISI paid for a lawyer, but it didn’t do any good for Sheikh, who was held without trial for the next five years in a maximum security prison, where, he said, he had been beaten and urinated on. But it didn’t prevent Sheikh from smuggling out a note to a favorite Aitchison teacher:

I hope this letter finds you soaring the heights of happiness.

Living in the cold, hard world of criminals and the brutal echelons of state power, a world of self-interest and devious calculations … I often wander down memory lane, seeing with more experienced (hopefully wiser) eyes all those people who
gave me love—glowing, unselfish love. Yes, sir, you encouraged me so many times and you stood up for me when I was a hotheaded youngster. I feel indebted to you, and more than a little wistful.

Sir, if possible, please do jot a quick note telling me how you and your family have fared over the last few years …. My parents are in London, busy with the old garment business. Naturally, my case came as quite a shock to them, but Allah has given them the strength to cope. They understand that this is the path I’ve chosen. They have been tremendously supportive.

Sir, if you could put in the occasional prayer for me that would be wonderful. I’ll sign off now. Who knows, perhaps I’ll pop round to see you soon.

Yours with affectionate respect …

In a P.S., Sheikh added, “If there are some spare copies of the last few
Aitchisonians
[the school magazine], I’d be thrilled to have them.”

It didn’t look as if Sheikh was going to be “popping round” anywhere but his cell for the foreseeable future. But in late December 1999, Azhar’s terrorist outfit—now renamed Harkat ul-Mujahadeen—seized an Indian airliner with 155 passengers and crew aboard; slit the throat of a honeymooning Indian businessman; and demanded the release of Azhar, Sheikh, and another jihadi. After the plane sat six days on the Kandahar tarmac under the watchful eyes of the Taliban, the Indians gave in.

Azhar went to Karachi and, before 10,000 howling supporters, called for the destruction of the U.S. and India. Then, after a few weeks touring under the protection of the ISI, he announced the formation of Jaish-e-Mohammed, the terrorist group Danny would find thriving in Bahawalpur.

Sheikh, for his part, stayed at a Kandahar guesthouse for several days, conferring with Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar and—reports had it—Osama bin Laden, who was said to refer to him as “my special son.” When he crossed the Pakistan frontier in early January 2000, an ISI colonel was waiting to conduct him to a safe house in Islamabad. From there he proceeded to London, where he reunited with family.

Relaxing with friends on his return to Lahore, Sheikh showed off his wound (“This is the benefit of speaking good English,” he joked), talked about his forthcoming marriage (“My wife has an M.A.,” he bragged about his bride-to-be), and confessed to pangs about killing. Poison was his instrument of choice (he demonstrated how he secreted it in his wallet), though, according to a U.S. official, he slit a throat once to make his jihadi bones. As for the moral qualms, Sheikh said he resolved those by recalling images of Kashmir and Bosnia.

He went next to Afghanistan, and reportedly helped devise a secure, encrypted Web-based communications system for Al Qaeda. His future in the network seemed limitless; there was even talk of one day succeeding bin Laden.

But Sheikh kept running afoul of superiors. Azhar was said to have sidelined him from Jaish after getting fed up with his bragging about Indian exploits. Following further spats with two other terrorist groups, Sheikh joined up with Aftab Ansari, an Indian-born gangster.