The Man Behind Mumbai
by Sebastian Rotella
ProPublica,
Nov. 13, 2010
http://www.propublica.org/article/the-man-behind-mumbai
On a November night two years ago, a young American rabbi and his pregnant wife finished dinner at their home in the mega-city of Mumbai.
Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg had come to India on a religious mission. They had established India's first outpost of Chabad Lubavitch, the Orthodox Jewish organization, in a six-story tower overlooking a shantytown. The Holtzbergs' guests that evening were two American rabbis, an Israeli grandmother and a Mexican tourist.
Hundreds of miles away in Pakistan, a terrorist chief named Sajid Mir was preparing a different sort of religious mission. Mir had spent two years using a Pakistani-American operative named David Coleman Headley to conduct meticulous reconnaissance on Mumbai, according to investigators and court documents. He had selected iconic targets and the Chabad House, a seemingly obscure choice, but one that ensured that Jews and Americans would be casualties.
On Nov. 26, 2008, Mir sat among militant chiefs in a Pakistani safe house tracking an attack team as its dinghy approached the Mumbai waterfront. The Lashkar-i-Taiba terrorist group had made Mir the project manager of its biggest strike ever, the crowning achievement of his career as a holy warrior.
Sajid Mir
The 10 gunmen split into five teams. His voice crisp and steady, Mir directed the slaughter by phone, relaying detailed instructions to his fighters. About 10:25 p.m., gunmen stormed the Chabad House. They shot the Holtzbergs and the visiting rabbis, took the Israeli grandmother and Mexican tourist hostage and barricaded themselves on an upper floor.
Mir told his men to try to trade the hostages for a gunman who had been captured. Mir spoke directly to the Mexican hostage, 50-year-old Norma Rabinovich, who had been preparing to move to Israel to join her adult children.
Mir soothed the sobbing woman in accented but smooth English.
"Save your energy for good days," Mir told her during the call intercepted by Indian intelligence. "If they contact right now, maybe you gonna, you know, celebrate your Sabbath with your family."
The prisoner swap failed. Mir ordered the gunman to "get rid" of Rabinovich.
"Stand her up on this side of your door," he said. "Shoot her such that the bullet goes right through her head and out the other side . . . Do it. I'm listening. . . . Do it, in God's name."
The three-day siege of Mumbai left 166 dead and 308 wounded. Twenty-six of the dead were foreigners, including six Americans. The attacks inflamed tension between Pakistan and India at a time when the nuclear-armed foes were trying to improve their relationship. The repercussions complicated the U.S. battle against Islamic extremism in South Asia and thrust Lashkar into the global spotlight.
Two years later, Mir and his victims are at the center of a wrenching national security dilemma confronting the Obama administration. The question, simply put, is whether the larger interests of the United States in maintaining good relations with Pakistan will permit Mir and other suspects to get away with one of the most devastating terrorist attacks in recent history.
As President Obama's recent trip to India made clear, the Mumbai attack remains a pivotal and delicate issue in relations among the United States, India and Pakistan. Despite the diplomatic sensitivities, administration officials say they are pursuing those responsible.
"The U.S. government is completely determined to see justice done in the case," said a senior U.S. counterterrorism official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of pending prosecutions. "Sometimes it takes time."
For five months, ProPublica has examined the investigation of the attacks and previous cases documenting the rise of Lashkar. This account is based on interviews with more than two dozen law enforcement, intelligence and diplomatic officials from the United States, India, Pakistan, France, Britain, Australia and Israel, including front-line investigators. ProPublica also interviewed associates and relatives of suspects and victims who had not discussed the case with journalists and reviewed foreign and U.S. case files, some of them previously undisclosed.
These documents and interviews paint the fullest portrait yet of the mysterious Mir, whose global trail traces Lashkar's evolution. His name has surfaced in investigations on four continents, his web reaching as far as suburban Virginia. Fleeting glimpses of him appear in case files and communications intercepts. A French court even convicted him in absentia in 2007. But he remains free and dangerous, according to U.S. and Indian officials.
ProPublica's investigation leads to another disturbing revelation: Despite isolated voices of concern, for years the U.S. intelligence community was slow to focus on Lashkar and detect the extent of its determination to strike Western targets. Some officials admit that counterterrorism agencies grasped the dimensions of the threat only after the Mumbai attacks.
The FBI investigation into the killings of the Americans has focused on a half-dozen accused masterminds who are still at large: Mir, top Lashkar chiefs and a man thought to be a major in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI). U.S. officials say Washington has urged Islamabad to arrest the suspects.
"We put consistent pressure on the Pakistanis to deal with Lashkar and do so at the highest levels," said the senior U.S. counterterrorism official. "There has been no lack of clarity in our message."
But U.S. officials acknowledge that the response has been insufficient. The effort to bring to justice the masterminds — under a U.S. law that makes terrorist attacks against Americans overseas a crime — faces obstacles. A U.S. prosecution could implicate Pakistani military chiefs who, at minimum, have allowed Lashkar to operate freely. U.S. pressure on Pakistan to confront both the military and Lashkar could damage counterterrorism efforts.
"It's a balancing act," a high-ranking U.S. law enforcement official said. "We can only push so far. It's very political. Sajid Mir is too powerful for them to go after. Too well-connected. We need the Pakistanis to go after the Taliban and al-Qaeda."
Pakistani officials said they had no information on Mir. They denied allegations that the powerful ISI supports Lashkar.
"Allegations of ISI's cadres operating in connivance with the militants . . . are based on malicious intent," said a senior Pakistani official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity. ISI "remains top-to-bottom transparent and rests under the complete control of the civilian government . . . There is no question that the government thinks that all militants are enemies of the state."
A year ago, Pakistan charged Lashkar's military chief and six less-influential suspects in the Mumbai attacks. But the trial soon stalled over legal complications and conflict with India, raising fears among U.S. and Indian officials that the prosecution will collapse in a court system that rarely convicts accused extremists.
The U.S. investigation turned up 320 potential targets abroad — only 20 of them in India — including U.S., British and Indian embassies, government buildings, tourist sites and global financial centers, officials say.
"There should have been a recognition that Lashkar had the desire and the potential to attack the West and that we needed to get up to speed on this group," said Charles Faddis, a retired CIA chief of counterterrorist operations in South Asia and other hot spots. "It was a mistake to dismiss it as just a threat to India."
Today, Mir personifies Lashkar's evolving danger. The group's longtime ties to the security forces have made it more professional and potentially more menacing than al-Qaeda.
"Lashkar is not just a tool of the ISI, but an ally of al-Qaeda that participates in its global jihad," said Jean-Louis Bruguiere, a French judge who investigated Mir. "Today Pakistan is the heart of the terrorist threat. And it may be too late to do anything about it."
Lashkar's beginnings
For more than a decade, Sajid Mir has operated in a blurred underworld of spies, soldiers and terrorists.
An Interpol notice last month seeking his arrest illustrates confusion about basic facts of his life. The Indian warrant identifies him as Sajid Majid, not Mir, with a birthdate of Jan. 1, 1978, which would make him 32. But most investigators think he is older — in his mid- to late 30s. They still call him Sajid Mir, saying Majid may be his true name or one of several aliases.
Mir was born in Lahore, Pakistan's second-largest city and cultural capital. His family may have owned a manufacturing business, according to court testimony.
Mir was a teenager when a professor named Hafiz Saeed created Lashkar-i-Taiba (the Army of the Pure) in the late 1980s with Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian Islamist. Azzam had another claim to fame: He was an ideological mentor of Osama bin Laden and helped him found the organization that was the forerunner of al-Qaeda.
Lashkar joined the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan supported by the United States and Pakistan. Soon, Pakistani strategists built Lashkar into a proxy army against India in the disputed territory of Kashmir. The group won vast support with its mix of extremism and nationalism and its array of schools, hospitals and social programs, especially in the Punjab, Mir's home region. Indians called Lashkar "the government mujaheddin."
Mir joined Lashkar when he was about 16, investigators say. Some senior U.S., British and French anti-terrorism officials say he also spent time in the military, although that remains murky. For years, it was common for the Pakistani military to detail officers to Lashkar, according to investigators and court testimony.
Mir went into Lashkar's international operations wing, which embraced global jihad in the 1990s. Lashkar militants joined wars in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya and built global recruitment and financing networks. Those activities and Lashkar's anti-American and anti-Jewish propaganda showed an increasingly internationalist bent, according to U.S. congressional testimony and Pakistani and Western officials.
Yet the U.S. intelligence community still viewed the group as a regional player focused on India and Kashmir. Rep. Gary L. Ackerman (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, said he tried and failed to get Lashkar designated as a terrorist organization in the late 1990s.
"I said it had a huge potential for damage," Ackerman recalled. "People were not paying attention."
Lashkar trained tens of thousands of holy warriors. It was easier to join than al-Qaeda, operating openly from storefront offices across Pakistan. Some foreign Lashkar trainees went on to join al-Qaeda, and several led al-Qaeda plots against New York and London.
Mir became a deputy to the director of Lashkar's foreign operations unit. He had direct access to Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, Lashkar's military chief, and ties to al-Qaeda in neighboring Afghanistan, according to a French investigation. After the Sept. 11 attacks, Mir began grooming foreign volunteers who had come to Pakistan to wage war on the West.
The Class of 2001
Willie Brigitte became one of Mir's favorites. Born in Guadeloupe and radicalized in Paris, the Afro-Caribbean convert was dour, burly and nearsighted behind round-rimmed glasses. Fellow trainees called him "the Grouchy Frenchman."
Brigitte was part of an al-Qaeda connected group of militants in Europe involved in numerous plots. In September 2001, he set off for Pakistan hoping to reach the Afghan battleground.
Brigitte made his way to Lashkar headquarters in Muridke outside Lahore. The complex featured a mosque, a university, dormitories and houses for leaders. Brigitte briefly studied Arabic and the Koran and met Mir, the coordinator of foreign recruits, who carried himself like a rising star.
"He was in fact an important personage," Brigitte testified later in France. "He was a man of about 30, very cordial and pleasant, with whom I had a good relationship."
Of medium build, Mir had a dark complexion, black hair and a thick beard. He spoke English, Urdu, Hindi and Arabic. His nicknames were Abu Bara (Father of Bara), Uncle Bill and Sajid Bill. A Makarov pistol on his hip, he was accompanied by two bodyguards and a driver, according to Brigitte's testimony.
Mir's recruits included four militants from the Virginia suburbs. They were part of a multiethnic crew of college graduates, U.S. Army veterans and gun enthusiasts whose spiritual leader was Ali Al-Timimi, an Iraqi-American imam based in Falls Church.
Galvanized by the Sept. 11 attacks, the men quit their jobs and traveled to Pakistan to train with Lashkar. Another Virginia militant who had already trained in Pakistan called a Lashkar contact from the parking lot of a 7-Eleven to arrange the trip, according to federal court testimony of Yong-Ki Kwon, a Korean-American convert to Islam.
"It didn't matter why the war was going to happen," testified Kwon, a Virginia Tech graduate who had worked at Sprint. "The only thing that mattered is that our brothers and sisters in Afghanistan needs [sic] help against imminent attack."
The Virginia jihadis joined up in Lahore at a Lashkar office decorated with posters depicting the U.S. Capitol in flames and the slogan: "Yesterday we saw Russia disintegrate, then India, next we see America and Israel burning."
Mir soon cleared the volunteers to train for holy war.
The camps
To reach Lashkar's mountain training complex, recruits drove overnight past checkpoints manned by Pakistani soldiers, according to court testimony.
"They were deferential to us and let us pass without difficulty," Brigitte said. "There was no search and no verification of our passports, which were in the hands of the Lashkar bosses."
From a base camp, the recruits hiked to an altitude of 4,000 feet for nine days of firearms instruction, then climbed another 4,000 feet to a camp that taught covert warfare. The Pakistani army supplied crates of weapons with filed-off serial numbers, Brigitte testified.
The mountains teemed with more than 3,000 trainees. Although Pakistanis dominated the ranks, there were Americans, Arabs, Australians, Azeris, Britons, Chechens, Filipinos, Kurds, Singaporeans, Turks and Uzbeks.
"It was very impressive every morning when we would gather and shout 'Allah Ouallah Akbar,' " Brigitte testified. "The setting was imposing because you could see the outline of the Himalayas."
The Frenchman bunked with the Virginia trainees in a mud hut. His zeal and endurance impressed his instructors, who led drills in English and Arabic. Over tea, Brigitte befriended several instructors, who told him they were Pakistani Army officers on special assignment.
"The close relations between the Pakistani Army and Lashkar were clear," Brigitte testified.
Brigitte became convinced that Mir was also in the Pakistani military. During Mir's visits to check on training progress, everyone from the camp chief to army sentries treated him like a superior, Brigitte said. It was clear to him that Mir was a military officer, he said.
"He never told me formally, but I understood it because of many details," Brigitte testified. "He was very respected by the instructors who were themselves members of the Pakistani Army but also at the checkpoints where he was well-known. . . . Nonetheless, I never knew what unit Sajid belonged to or what his rank was."
U.S. and French anti-terror officials say Mir became an army major, although he may not have reached that rank in 2001. He eventually left the military, although it is not clear when or why, officials say. And some investigators are not convinced that he served in the military.
But Bruguiere, the French judge, said the case showed "that Sajid Mir was a high-ranking officer in the Pakistani Army and apparently also was in the ISI."
Other cases similarly describe Pakistani security forces in the camps. A Briton who trained with Lashkar and was later convicted as the ringleader of a foiled 2004 plot against London by al-Qaeda testified that ISI officers screened and trained foreign recruits in Lashkar camps in 2000.
While Mir's men drilled in the mountains, a U.S-led military operation toppled the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. The CIA focused on the Lashkar camps in Pakistan as well, asking Pakistani intelligence to help find foreign militants who might pose a threat to the West, according to court testimony. On four occasions, instructors temporarily evacuated foreign trainees before joint U.S.-Pakistani camp inspections, Brigitte testified.
"The instructors were informed by the Pakistani army because they were part of the army," Brigitte testified. "About 15 Pakistanis conducted these inspections with an equal number of Americans. . . . We were told they were CIA officers who were searching for the presence of foreign jihadis."
The trainees trekked back down from a hiding place after the CIA teams left, Brigitte and Kwon testified.
Talent-spotting
In November 2001, Mir gave the trainees disappointing news: Their dreams of martyrdom had been crushed.
Mir said Lashkar would not send them to fight in Afghanistan, because the U.S. military operation was almost over and had closed the border to aspiring foreign fighters, according to the testimony of Kwon and Brigitte.
Mir approached a handful of militants about operations in the West. First, he invited two of the Virginia militants — Kwon and Masoud Khan, a tough Pakistani-American — to dinner in Lahore.
At the restaurant, Mir introduced them to a Lashkar chief who wore "tight Western clothes" and a "nice trim beard," Kwon testified. The chief jokingly called himself "the Disco Mujahid." He asked them to undertake missions in the United States entailing "a lot of propaganda, information-gathering and e-mailing," said Kwon, who declined the proposal.
Khan later told FBI agents that the Lashkar bosses asked him to conduct surveillance of an unnamed chemical plant in Maryland. The request shows that Lashkar was gathering intelligence on U.S. targets as early as 2001.
About two months later, Mir told Brigitte to return to France as the group's "sector chief" there. Mir ordered him to keep quiet if arrested.
"He absolutely did not want it known that I had trained at a Lashkar camp," Brigitte testified.
The handling of Brigitte — veiled threats, secretive communications — would later intensify the suspicions of French investigators that Mir had ties to Pakistani intelligence. Their indictment described Mir as Brigitte's "case officer."
"Brigitte was told: Go back and wait," said a former top French intelligence official. "That's what intelligence services do. Brigitte was a clandestine operative. . . . He obeyed orders. But I don't think he realized that he had become an agent of an intelligence service."
Around the time Brigitte left, a Pakistani-American arrived. His name at the time was Daood Gilani, but he would become known to the world as David Coleman Headley.
Headley, now 50, differed from Mir's other proteges. He was older, a ladies' man, a globe-trotter. Born in Washington, he moved to Pakistan as an infant and attended a top military school. Returning to the United States at 17, he lived in Philadelphia and then New York and slid into heroin dealing. After a 1997 bust, he became a Drug Enforcement Administration informant, spying on drug traffickers in Pakistan.
Once casual about his Muslim faith, Headley radicalized in the late 1990s. U.S. officials say he was still a DEA informant when he began training in the Lashkar camps in early 2002. Although the Pakistani instructors thought he was too old and too slow for combat, the charming American hit it off with Mir.
Mir decided to cultivate this man of two worlds as a clandestine operative, according to documents and officials.
Unleashing the network
In December, 2001, Lashkar took part in a commando-style attack on the Indian Parliament that killed a dozen people and left India and Pakistan on the brink of war.
Washington designated Lashkar as a terrorist group. Pakistani authorities outlawed the group and briefly held Saeed, its spiritual leader, under house arrest. But in reality, investigators say, nothing much changed.
"Lashkar was the only major jihadi outfit to escape the Pakistani crackdown," wrote Stephen Tankel, author of the forthcoming book "Storming the World Stage: The Story of Lashkar-E-Taiba," in a recent academic report. "Lashkar served as a major provider of military training for jihadi actors in the region."
In early 2002, Mir led an overseas buying spree for military equipment. He sent his British quartermaster, Abu Khalid, on four trans-Atlantic trips. Abu Khalid reported to Mir via e-mail as he worked with three of the Virginia militants, including Khan. They helped the Briton buy an unmanned airborne vehicle and more paintballs than the U.S. Marine Corps needs for a year of drills.
The procurement ended when the FBI arrested 11 Virginia militants in mid-2003. A search of Khan's home turned up guns, a terrorist manual and photos of the White House and FBI headquarters.
Because the Virginia crew had played paintball war games as they radicalized, a somewhat skeptical news media dubbed them "The Paintball Jihadis." Lawyers and Muslim activists complained about over-zealous prosecution.
Nonetheless, the defendants were sentenced to long prison terms. At the trial, Mir's role in Lashkar surfaced publicly for the first time. But the group still wasn't of much interest to the public or law enforcement, anti-terrorism officials say.
The trial revealed evidence of Lashkar's dangerous alliance with al-Qaeda. Prosecutors cited a 2002 incident when U.S. and Pakistani forces captured a key al-Qaeda coordinator in a shootout at a Lashkar safe house in Faisalabad.
He had the phone number for Lashkar's chief of international operations — Mir's boss.
The Australian plot
As the FBI closed in on the Virginia contingent, Mir launched a plot on the other side of the world.
In calls and e-mails in 2002 and 2003, he prepared Brigitte, the Grouchy Frenchman, for a trip to Australia. Mir directed British operatives to send $5,000 to Brigitte, asking his quartermaster in an e-mail: "How is our French Connection Project going?"
Brigitte arrived in Australia in May 2003 and joined forces with Faheem Lodhi, a Pakistani-born architect and militant who had worked for Mir in the camps. With Lodhi's help, Brigitte settled into a new life in Sydney, quickly marrying a former Australian army intelligence officer who had converted to Islam.
At Mir's direction, Brigitte collected maps and photos of targets taken by his new wife, though she resisted his demands that she provide him with intellligence. Lodhi created an alias and a fictitious business to obtain bomb chemicals and maps of the electrical grid. He compiled a 15-page manual for making homemade poisons, explosives and detonators. Investigators believe the duo planned to bomb a military base or a nuclear plant.
The plot was foiled by French agents, who were hunting Brigitte as part of a larger investigation. They learned he was in Sydney and alerted Australian intelligence. Police deported him to France in October and captured Lodhi after watching him throw satellite photos of military bases in a dumpster and call Mir from a phone booth. Mir sent Lodhi an e-mail asking for "fresh news about our friend," according to court documents.
"Our friend has returned to his country and his government has him," the Australian operative responded.
Lodhi was sentenced to 20 years for preparing a terrorist act. Investigators think the plot was related to Australia's troop presence in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The judge's verdict noted Mir's role and called him a "shadowy figure" who deployed operatives for "terrorist actions in Australia."
Brigitte's deportation put Mir in the sights of Bruguiere, France's best-known terrorist hunter. Questioned by Bruguiere in November 2003, Brigitte discussed Mir in a tone of respect and fear. His account made French investigators suspect that Pakistani spies had played a role in the Australian plot.
"In the heart of Lashkar there are camps that train individuals for the mission of eliminating those who talk," Brigitte testified. "And you understand that the Pakistani army and Pakistani intelligence were stakeholders in these operations."
Bruguiere took advantage of French laws allowing him to pursue terrorist conspiracies across borders. He worked with investigators in Virginia, Australia and Britain. Mir's name, he said, popped up everywhere.
Preparing the masterpiece
In 2005, Mir joined a Lashkar unit dedicated to attacks in India and embarked on a secret mission. He crossed the border into India at its only land port of entry with Pakistan, blending with Pakistani cricket fans flocking to see their national team play in India, according to U.S. and Indian anti-terrorism officials.
Mir's movements for 15 days in India are unknown. But Indian investigators think he was part of an operation — spying, terrorist scouting or both — involving a dozen Pakistani "cricket fans" who went missing after crossing the border. Indian spy-hunters eventually caught one: a suspected ISI agent with a false identity whom they accused of espionage.
Later that year, Mir turned to Headley, his top American agent, who by now had completed five stints at Lashkar camps. Headley had also survived a close call in New York that summer, when his estranged third wife reported his activities with Lashkar to federal agents. His travels around the world continued, unimpeded.
Soon, Headley met with Mir and other Lashkar bosses who told him he had been chosen as lead scout for a big job. He went to Philadelphia in November on Mir's instructions and legally changed his name from Daood Gilani to David Coleman Headley to conceal his Pakistani origin.
Armed with his new identity, Headley returned to Pakistan. In July 2006 he received $25,000 for a new assignment. The money came from a man he knew only as Major Iqbal, according to officials and court documents.
U.S. and Indian anti-terrorism officials suspect Major Iqbal was a serving ISI officer and a liaison to Lashkar. According to anti-terrorism officials and U.S. court documents, Major Iqbal and Mir became Headley's handlers. They instructed him to use the money to open a front company and begin reconnaissance in the city that was their next target: Mumbai.
Mumbai: The Plot Unfolds, Lashkar Strikes and Investigators Scramble
by Sebastian Rotella
ProPublica, Nov. 13, 2010
http://www.propublica.org/article/mumbai-attacks-david-coleman-headley-part-2
This is the second part of our investigation into the plot behind the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Read the first part [1]. Both were co-published with the Washington Post.
David Coleman Headley seemed like a gregarious, high-rolling American businessman when he set up shop in Mumbai in September 2006.
He opened the office of an immigration consulting firm. He partied at swank locales such as the ornate Taj Mahal Hotel, a 1903 landmark favored by Westerners and the Indian elite. He joined an upscale gym, where he befriended a Bollywood actor. He roamed the booming, squalid city taking photos and shooting video.
But it was all a front. The tall, fast-talking Pakistani American with the slicked-back hair was a fierce extremist, a former drug dealer, a onetime Drug Enforcement Administration informant who became a double agent. He had spent three years refining his clandestine skills in the terrorist training camps of the Lashkar-i-Taiba militant group. As Headley confessed in a guilty plea in U.S. federal court this year, he was in Mumbai to begin undercover reconnaissance for a sophisticated attack that would take two years to plan.
In 2006, U.S. counterterrorism agencies still viewed Lashkar primarily as a threat to India. But Headley's mentor, Sajid Mir, had widened his sights to Western targets years earlier. Mir, a mysterious Lashkar chief with close ties to Pakistani security forces, had deployed operatives who had completed missions and attempted plots in Virginia, Europe and Australia before being captured, according to investigators and court documents.
Now Mir's experience in international operations and his skills as a handler of Western recruits were about to pay off. Lashkar had chosen him as project manager of its most ambitious, highly choreographed strike to date.
Mir's ally in the plot was a man known to Headley only as Maj. Iqbal, who investigators suspect was an officer of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) and a liaison to the Lashkar terrorist group. Iqbal is a common Pakistani last name, and investigators have not been able to fully identify him. Maj. Iqbal and Mir worked as handlers for Headley, their lead scout, during his missions in India, according to investigators and court documents.
The iconic Taj hotel was the centerpiece of the plan. When Headley returned to Pakistan after his first scouting trip to Mumbai, Mir told him he needed more images and also schedules for the hotel's conference rooms and ballroom, which often hosted high-powered events, according to investigators and court documents.
"They thought it would be a good place to get valuable hostages," an Indian anti-terrorism official said.
ProPublica has tracked the rise of Lashkar through Mir's career as a holy warrior. It is a story of a militant group that used political clout and support from Pakistani security forces to develop global reach and formidable tradecraft, according to investigators and court documents. It is also a story of how, despite a series of warning signs, anti-terrorism agencies were caught off-guard when Lashkar escalated its war on the West with a 2008 attack on Mumbai that targeted Americans, Europeans and Jews as well as Indians.
Mir convicted in Paris
As Mir and Headley plotted in 2006, French investigators were confronting the potential dimensions of the threat posed by Lashkar, a longtime al-Qaeda ally founded in the late 1980s and used by Pakistan as a proxy army in the fight against India for the Kashmir region.
France's top counterterrorism magistrate, Jean-Louis Bruguiere, had spent three years investigating Mir after one of Mir's French operatives, Willie Brigitte, was arrested in a foiled bomb plot in Australia. Brigitte gave a long confession identifying Mir as his Lashkar handler, describing him as a figure whose influential connections made him "untouchable in Pakistan." With the help of foreign investigators, Bruguiere built a case that Mir was a kingpin leading terrorist operations on four continents.
The evidence also convinced Bruguiere that Mir was an officer in the Pakistani army or the ISI, a branch of the military. This point is murky: Senior European and U.S. counterterrorism officials concur with the French judge, but some U.S. investigators do not think Mir was in the military. Pakistani officials say they have no information on Mir or Maj. Iqbal and deny any role of the security forces in terrorism.
In October 2006, two years before the Mumbai attacks, Bruguiere issued an arrest warrant for Mir that was circulated worldwide by Interpol. There was no response from Pakistan.
A Paris court convicted Mir in absentia and sentenced him to 10 years in prison in 2007. Nonetheless, Bruguiere says most Western investigators he dealt with continued to view Lashkar as a regional actor confined to South Asia.
"For me it was a crucial case, a turning point," Bruguiere said, "because of what it revealed about the role played by Pakistani groups in the global jihad and about the role of the Pakistani security forces in terrorism. We had the impression that Mir was protected at the highest levels of the state."
In summer 2007, Bruguiere met at the White House with a top security adviser to President George W. Bush. The French judge shared his fears about Lashkar and his suspicion that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf was playing a "double game." (Musharraf has asserted publicly that he was a staunch ally in the fight against terrorism.)
Bruguiere said the White House official, whom he declined to identify publicly, did not seem convinced.
"The U.S. government is a huge machine," said Bruguiere, who is now the European Union's envoy to Washington in efforts against terrorism financing. "It's difficult to make it change course."
Warning signs
In 2007, Headley carried out two more reconnaissance missions.
Before and after each trip, he met with Mir and Maj. Iqbal in Pakistani safe houses, turning over photos, videos and notes, according to investigators and U.S. court documents. At one point, Mir showed Headley a plastic-foam model of the Taj that had been built using the information Headley had gathered, according to investigators and documents.
Mir focused Headley on terrorism targets around India. Maj. Iqbal directed him to also collect military intelligence, according to officials and documents.
Headley's work was complicated by a tangled personal life that got him in trouble again in December 2007. His estranged fourth wife, a Moroccan, told officials at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad that she believed he was a terrorist. She made references to training and suicide bombings and described his frequent travel to Mumbai, including her stays with him at the Taj hotel, U.S. law enforcement officials say.
But U.S. agents at the embassy decided the woman's account lacked specifics. Headley continued to roam free.
As the plot took shape in 2008, the FBI and CIA began hearing chatter about Lashkar. The agencies warned India at least three times about threats to Mumbai. The intelligence may have come from communications intercepts or sources in Pakistan. But privately, some U.S and Indian anti-terrorism officials express suspicion that U.S. agencies were tracking Headley's movements and picking up bits and pieces about the plot without realizing he was deeply involved.
U.S. intelligence officials say they did not warn the Indians about Headley because they did not connect him to terrorism until months after the attacks. Although they say Headley was no longer working as a DEA informant by early 2008, it isn't clear when that relationship ended or whether it evolved into intelligence-gathering. The CIA and the FBI say Headley never worked for them.
In April 2008, Headley's Moroccan wife returned to the embassy in Islamabad with another tip. She warned that her husband was on "a special mission." She also linked him to a 2007 train bombing in India that had killed 68 people and that India and the United States blamed on Lashkar, U.S. officials say. Authorities have not implicated Headley in that still-unsolved attack, however.
It is not known how the U.S. Embassy personnel responded to the wife's allegations, but a federal official said the FBI did not receive the information until after the attack. Headley returned to Mumbai on a fourth scouting mission in May. He went on boat tours, using a GPS device that Mir gave him to assess landing sites for an amphibious attack, court documents say.
That same month, U.S. agencies alerted India that intelligence suggested Lashkar was planning to attack the Taj and other sites frequented by foreigners and Americans, according to U.S. and Indian anti-terrorism officials.
The group also considered hitting the U.S. Consulate in Mumbai. Indian and U.S. investigators say another accused Lashkar scout had a map identifying the consulate along with other targets that were ultimately attacked.
Mir and the other Pakistani masterminds decided on a classic Lashkar "fedayeen raid" in which fighters take hostages to inflict maximum chaos and casualties. (Fedayeen is an Arabic word for guerrilla fighters and means "one who sacrifices himself.") Mir oversaw a veteran Lashkar trainer who prepared 32 recruits during months of drills in mountain camps and at the group's headquarters outside Lahore, according to investigators and court documents.
The plan called for a team of fighters to infiltrate Mumbai by boat. Fifteen candidates were sent to Karachi for swimming and nautical instruction. But the youthful country boys had little experience with water. Some got seasick. Some ran away from swim training. Trainers had to bring in eight replacements, Indian and U.S. anti-terrorism officials say.
In July, Headley began his final scouting trip. In September, the anti-terrorism chief of the Mumbai police visited the Taj hotel to discuss new U.S. warnings. Hotel management beefed up security, Indian officials say.
The plotters isolated the 10-man attack team in a safe house in Karachi in mid-September and outlined their mission, using videos, photos and maps. In November Headley also headed for Karachi, where he met again with Mir but had no contact with the attack team, according to documents and officials.
On Nov. 18, eight days before the attacks, American officials told Indian intelligence that a suspicious ship might be en route to Mumbai. The Indians requested more information, the Indian anti-terrorism official said.
The strike
The attack squad left Karachi at 8 a.m. on Nov. 22.
The gunmen hijacked an Indian fishing trawler, killed the crew and sailed to about five miles off the shores of Mumbai. On the evening of Nov. 26, the squad transferred to an 11-seat dinghy and landed in a slum where lights, phones and police were scarce.
Lashkar had set up a remote command post in a safe house or a hotel that U.S. and Indian officials believe was in Lahore or Karachi. The room was stocked with computers, televisions, voice-over-Internet phones from a New Jersey company and satellite phones that were manned by Mir and five other handlers, according to U.S. and Indian officials and a report prepared by Indian intelligence.
The assault began about 9:30 p.m. Two-man teams hit four of the targets within a half-hour. Assault rifles chattered; time bombs exploded in taxis; panic engulfed the city. Despite the U.S. warnings, Indian security forces were caught off-guard. Elite National Security Guard commandos did not fly in from Delhi until the next morning, according to the Indian intelligence report.
Indian intelligence officers frantically checked known phone numbers associated with Lashkar and were able to intercept and record nearly 300 calls. Mir's voice dominated the conversations, according to officials and documents. Thanks to Headley, he knew the targets inside-out.
Using the alias Wassi, Mir oversaw the assault on the Taj hotel, the prime target, where 32 people died. The phone hand lers in Pakistan made the attack interactive, relaying reports about television coverage to the gunmen and even searching the Internet for the name of a banker they had taken hostage. After killing 10 people at the historic Leopold Cafe, a second assault team joined the two gunmen at the Taj.
"They wanted to see the Taj Mahal burn," a senior U.S. law enforcement official said. "It was all choreographed with the media in mind."
Mir chided a gunman who grew distracted by the luxuries of a suite instead of setting the hotel ablaze, according to one intercepted call.
"We can't watch if there aren't any flames," said Mir, who was viewing the action on live television. "Where are they?"
"It's amazing," the gunman exclaimed. "The windows are huge. It's got two kitchens, a bath and a little shop."
"Start the fire, my brother," Mir insisted. "Start a proper fire, that's the important thing."
At the nearby Oberoi Hotel, two attackers hunted Americans and Britons, demanding passports at gunpoint, according to U.S. investigators. They stormed the restaurant and shot Sandeep "Sam" Jeswani, 43, an Indian American customer relations director for a radiation therapy company in Wisconsin. At another table, they executed Alan Scherr, 58, and his daughter Naomi, 13. The former art professor from Virginia had taken his daughter on a spiritual pilgrimage to India.
The gunmen killed 33 people at the Oberoi, then took refuge in Room 1856. Their handlers instructed them to divide ammunition magazines and keep their weapons on burst mode to conserve bullets. After one gunman was killed, Mir encouraged the other to go out in a blaze of glory.
"For your mission to end successfully, you must be killed," Mir said in one of the intercepted calls. "God is waiting for you in heaven. . . . Fight bravely, and put your phone in your pocket, but leave it on. We like to know what's going on."
Another team rampaged through Mumbai's central train station, killing 58 and wounding 104. Their tactics reflected Lashkar's expert training. They avoided running, which is tiring and churns up emotions. They stayed within arm's length in a "buddy pair" combat formation, a Lashkar signature technique that enabled them to support one another psychologically, sustain fire and exchange ammunition.
Unlike the others, however, the duo at the train station failed to call the command post. Instead of barricading themselves with hostages as ordered, they left the station. It was a dramatic error that underscored the crucial role of the hand lers' round-the-clock phone instructions, their ingenious method of compensating for the limitations of their fighters.
In the running gunfights that followed, the chief of Mumbai's anti-terrorist unit was killed along with an attacker. The other gunman, a diminutive 21-year-old with a fourth-grade education, was captured. The confession of the lone surviving attacker proved vital to the investigation.
Death calls at Chabad House
The six-story Jewish center known as the Chabad House was attacked about an hour after the assault began.
Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, the red-bearded, 29-year-old director, and his pregnant wife, Rivka, 28, had entertained visitors in the second-floor dining room that night. Two rabbis from New York, Aryeh Leibish Teitelbaum and Ben-Zion Chroman, had stopped in to say goodbye as they wrapped up a trip to India to certify kosher food products.
When Holtzberg heard shots and screams, he grabbed his cellphone and called a security officer at the Israeli consulate.
"The situation is bad," he said.
Then the line went dead.
The gunmen shot the Holtzbergs and the visiting rabbis. The Holtzbergs' son, 2-year-old Moishele, wandered among corpses and debris until the next day, when his Indian nanny crept upstairs, grabbed him and escaped.
News that one of his men had been captured reached Mir in the command post. Mir decided to try to win his release by using the two female hostages who were still alive at Chabad House: Yocheved Orpaz, an Israeli grandmother, and Norma Rabinovich, a Mexican tourist.
Mir told a gunman to hand Rabinovich the phone. He ordered her to propose a prisoner exchange to Israeli diplomats. She reported back to him after her conversation with the Israelis, addressing him as "sir."
"I was talking to the consulate a few minutes ago," she said, her voice shaking. "They are calling the prime minister and the army in India from the embassy in Delhi."
Mir's serene tone made him sound like a helpful bureaucrat.
"Don't worry then, ah, just sit back and relax and don't worry and just wait for them to make contact," he told her.
Hours later, Mir gave the order to kill her. A gunman named Akasha sounded reluctant. Mir turned icy when he learned the two women were still alive. He demanded: "Have you done the job or not?"
Akasha executed the women as Mir listened, according to the transcript. The gunfire echoed over the phone.
The next morning, helicopter-borne commandos swooped onto the roof. Mir gave real-time orders as he watched the gunfight on television. Akasha reported in a hoarse, strangled voice that he had been wounded in the arm and leg.
"God protect you," Mir said. "Did you manage to hit any of their guys?"
"We got one commando. Pray that God will accept my martyrdom."
"Praise God. Praise God. God keep you."
The aftermath
The three-day siege of Mumbai triggered international outrage.
The United Nations put Lashkar chiefs on a blacklist. Pakistan detained Hafiz Saeed, the group's founder, for another in a series of short-lived house arrests. Western authorities scrambled to reassess the threat from Lashkar.
Unruffled, Mir and Headley were already at work on their next target: a Danish newspaper that in 2005 had published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. In November, Mir gave his scout a thumb drive with information about Denmark and the Jyllands Posten newspaper, according to documents and officials. They christened the new plot "The Mickey Mouse Project."
In December, Mir met Headley again, even though the other handler, Maj. Iqbal, had cut off contact with the American. Headley suggested narrowing the scope of the newspaper plot and killing only the cartoonist and an editor. Mir disagreed. Despite the uproar over Mumbai, he seemed eager to take an audacious terrorism campaign into Europe, according to documents and investigators.
"All Danes are responsible," Mir declared, according to U.S. officials and documents.
About the same time, the FBI was pursuing yet another tip about Headley. A friend of his mother in Philadelphia had come forward after seeing the news about the Mumbai attacks. She told agents that she believed Headley had been fighting alongside Pakistani militants for years. Agents conducted an inquiry but then put it on hold because they thought he was out of the country, U.S. officials said.
In January 2009, Headley traveled from Chicago to Denmark. Using his business cover, he visited the newspaper's offices and inquired about advertising his immigration firm. He shot video of the area and — because Mir mistakenly believed the editor was Jewish — of a nearby synagogue, documents say.
But a few weeks later, Mir put the plan on hold, according to documents and investigators. Pakistani authorities had finally arrested a big fish: Lashkar's military chief. They also arrested a Lashkar boss who had allegedly worked the phones with Mir at the command post for the Mumbai attacks, and some low-level henchmen.
In March, Mir sent Headley to India to scout more targets. But Headley was fixated on Denmark. For help, he turned to IIyas Kashmiri, an al-Qaeda boss. Kashmiri offered to provide Headley with militants in Europe for the attack. He envisioned attackers decapitating hostages and throwing heads out of the newspaper office windows, documents say.
Headley accepted the offer. Still, he kept urging Mir to return to the Mickey Mouse Project, according to documents and officials. In an e-mail in August, Headley described another reconnaissance trip to Copenhagen. He jokingly complimented Mir about his "music videos" — code for a TV program about Mumbai that had featured Mir's voice directing the attacks.
With affectionate exasperation, Mir warned his operative to be careful, according to documents and officials.
"Your skin is dear to me, more than my own," Mir wrote.
In September 2009, documents show, Headley again discussed joining forces with Mir for the Denmark attack, a sign that Mir was operating freely. But Headley wasn't so lucky. His contact with two known al-Qaeda suspects in Britain had put him on the radar of British intelligence, who alerted their U.S. counterparts. In October, the FBI arrested Headley in Chicago, where he had a Pakistani wife and children.
The FBI had been working the Mumbai case ever since a team of agents from Los Angeles rushed to India after the attacks. Their leads — phone analysis, forensics, money trails — had been instrumental to the Indian and Pakistani investigations.
Headley's cooperation gave the FBI a treasure trove of evidence and intelligence. In March he pleaded guilty to helping organize the Mumbai attacks and the Denmark plot. His confession and the contents of his computer showed he had scouted scores of targets, including American ones, around the world, officials say. Investigators say he did not do reconnaissance in the United States, but they noted a chilling detail: His immigration consulting firm had offices in the Empire State Building.
Headley helped U.S. investigators overcome a basic problem they had run into on the Mumbai case. American agencies lacked data on Lashkar: photo books, organizational charts, profiles.
"The intelligence was very thin before Mumbai," said Rep. Gary L. Ackerman (D-N.Y.), whose House Foreign Affairs subcommittee held hearings on Lashkar this year.
Charles Faddis, a former CIA counterterrorism chief, contends the intelligence community did not dedicate enough resources to Lashkar.
"It's a classic problem in the U.S. intelligence community: failing to anticipate new threats and focusing completely on the one that already hit us," Faddis said.
A U.S. counterterrorism official disagreed, saying: "It's simply wrong to suggest that we've underestimated [Lashkar]."
It seems clear the government did underestimate Headley. A review this month by the director of national intelligence found that U.S. agencies had received six warnings about Headley from his wives and associates from October 2001 to December 2008. Yet federal agents didn't place him on a terrorist watch list or open a full investigation until July 2009, eight months after the Mumbai attacks. The office of the intelligence director has said nothing publicly about Headley's work as a U.S. informant.
Quest for justice
The Mumbai case could put Washington and Islamabad on a collision course. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has vowed to prosecute the killings of the six Americans as required by law. The prosecutions of the Mumbai and Denmark plots are being led by U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald in Chicago. But it's unlikely Pakistan would extradite the suspects to the United States, officials say. And Pakistani courts tend not to convict accused radical Islamists.
The evidence against at least half a dozen suspected masterminds of Mumbai who are still at large includes Headley's statements implicating officers in Pakistan's ISI along with Lashkar, officials say. There are also physical clues. The FBI identified a phone number that is believed to connect Mir, Headley and Pakistani intelligence officials. Headley called Pakistani military officers at the number while working for Lashkar; the number was also called by an accused ISI spy who went on a secret mission with Mir in India in 2005, investigators say.
The Pakistani government publicly denies any official link to the 2008 attacks.
"Why should there have been involvement of the Pakistani government in the Mumbai attacks at a time when Pakistan and India were dealing seriously with issues between them?" said a senior Pakistani official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic. "The Mumbai incident provided a pretext for India to shy away from settling the contentious issues between the two countries."
The question of Pakistani government involvement drives a high-stakes debate. Some Western anti-terrorism officials think that, at most, Pakistani officials provided limited state support for the Mumbai attacks. A senior U.S. counterterrorism official believes a few mid-level Pakistani officials had an inkling of the plot but that its dimensions surprised them. Others speculate that the government of President Asif Ali Zardari may even have been a secondary target because of his overtures to India and his opposition to extremism.
"Perhaps it was done by people who didn't like the way the ISI and the army were moving, particularly in Kashmir," a European official said. "Maybe it was a rogue operation destabilizing the Pakistanis as well as the Indians."
In contrast, a number of Western and Indian anti-terrorism officials cite the in-depth scouting, amphibious landing and sophisticated communications as signs of Pakistan's involvement. Headley's disclosures and Lashkar's history make it hard to believe that military leaders were unaware of the plan, they say. Indian leaders go as far as accusing the ISI of planning and executing the attacks alongside Lashkar.
"It was not just a peripheral role," Indian Home Secretary G.K. Pillai said publicly in July. "They were literally controlling and coordinating it from the beginning till the end."
Mir and Maj. Iqbal are keys to the mystery because they allegedly connect Lashkar and the government. Western and Indian investigators suspect that Mir is a former military or ISI officer, or at least had close links to the security forces. They believe that Maj. Iqbal was an ISI officer using a code name. A recent Interpol notice of an Indian arrest warrant gives only his rank and last name.
It remains to be seen whether Mir, Maj. Iqbal and other suspected plotters will be successfully prosecuted. An Indian court convicted the lone surviving gunman in June. But U.S. officials say the Pakistani trial of the Lashkar military chief and six lower-level suspects captured last year seems hopelessly stalled.
Pakistani leaders say they have gotten tougher on Lashkar, freezing its assets and appointing an administrator at its headquarters.
"The government is working to prevent the preaching of extremism, bring them into the mainstream and implement curriculum changes," the senior Pakistani official said.
Critics call the crackdown largely symbolic, however. Lashkar camps, a longtime magnet for Western extremists attracted by slick English-language propaganda, still train aspiring fighters, a senior U.S. counterterrorism official said last week. And Pakistani leaders seem reluctant to confront the group and risk backlash from its trained fighters and the vast support base it has built through its charities and social programs.
Unlike al-Qaeda and other militant groups, Lashkar has not attacked the Pakistani government. But its professionalism, global networks and increasing focus on Western targets have made it one of the most dangerous forces in terrorism, many investigators say. Recent warnings of Mumbai-style plots by al-Qaeda in Europe reflect Lashkar's influence in the convergence of militant groups that a British official calls "the jihadist soup in Pakistan."
"The American side is telling us that Lashkar is as much of a threat as al-Qaeda or the Taliban," the senior Pakistani official said.
As the second anniversary of Mumbai approaches, the families of the victims are waiting for authorities to keep their promises of justice.
"We are not going to give up," said Moshe Holtzberg, a brother of the slain rabbi. "The families want to see full justice being done for all those organizations and individuals involved in the Mumbai attacks."
ProPublica reporter Sharona Coutts and researchers Lisa Schwartz and Nicholas Kusnetz contributed to this report.
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