My brain had shut down. Oh god, what was I going to do? I felt very alone. It was only a matter of time before they figured out who the mysterious Rahul was, and then the knives would be out for me, the media would bare its fangs and god knows whether the police would believe me.
Before they came for me, I had to do something. Damn. I could tell my mother, but I knew what she would say. I knew we would have to bring Mr Mahesh Bhatt, my so-called father, into the picture. Damn, damn, damn!
She was in the kitchen, cooking. ‘Mom?’ I said, standing at the entrance to the kitchen. ‘There is something you should know.’
‘What is it?’ she said, and turned. She must have seen something in my expression, because her face became grave at once. ‘What is it, what has happened?’
I told her everything: what I’d seen on TV, David’s arrest, that they were saying he was a terrorist. I left out the fact that David had spoken to the LeT about me, it would serve no purpose but to make her panic. I told her that they were looking for a ‘Rahul’, but they didn’t know who it was.
Mom’s face grew more and more worried as I told her. Finally, when I stopped, she laid a hand on my arm and said, ‘Beta, this is too big for us now. You know you have to go the police with it. And you have to call your dad.’
I shook off her hand. ‘No! Why do I have to call him? I’ll go to the cops myself, there is no need to involve him in all this. He will hog the limelight and revel in the publicity.’
‘He is your father, Rahul. He must know. If there is anyone in the world who can help you now, it is your father. Regardless of what you think of him, he is the only one who can save you.’
I realized she was right. I knew that I would have to call him sooner or later. But I hated it. I hated having to call Mahesh Bhatt. Why did God always throw me at the mercy of the man whom I hated the most in this world?
TWO
‘David, would you like some coffee?’
‘Yes, please. Thank you.’
One of the two CIA men signalled to the camera. Within twenty seconds, there was a faint buzz outside the room, and the door opened. A man walked in with a cup of coffee in a styrofoam cup, steam rising from it. He deposited the cup in front of Headley and walked out again, closing the door behind him.
The three men from the NIA watched everything with interest. It was the same formula everywhere when it came to important prisoners. No intimidation here, no threat of a beating or a ‘good cop–bad cop’ routine. Those were reserved for the smaller fish and for the silver screen. It was almost as if Headley was king here, as if he was doing these men a favour by telling them what he knew. Things were no different back in his country, thought NIA chief Loknath Behera, not a little cynically.
Headley made a show of picking up the paper cup gingerly, taking care not to spill the scalding liquid, and took a sip. He closed his eyes and appeared to savour the taste of the coffee, swirling it around in his mouth. Finally, he put the cup back down, opened his eyes and looked at the three NIA men.
‘So, gentlemen, what were you asking me?’ he said, crossing his arms in front of his chest.
‘We want to hear in your own words a little bit about your background,’ said Behera, leaning forward slightly and resting his arms on the table. He looked almost hungry for the information he knew and hoped would come his way.
‘Ah, yes, yes. Well, what would you like to know?’
‘Everything.’
My name is Daood Gilani. Although everyone here knows me as David Coleman Headley, I acquired this name later, because it suited me and helped me in what I was doing. But I was born Daood Gilani, and that is the person I have always been.
I was born in Washington DC on 30 June 1960. My father, Sayed Salim Gilani, was a Pakistani diplomat and had been posted, at various times, in various parts of the country. His last posting was with the Voice of America in Washington. My father was not a hard man, but he believed in discipline and morality and had a strong sense of what was right and what wasn’t.
My mother is Serrill Headley. She is from Maryland, and is an extraordinarily resourceful person. She is the daughter of L. Coleman Headley, a former football star. Mom was working as a secretary at the Pakistani embassy in Washington, where my father was a diplomat and her boss. That’s where they met, fell in love, and got married.
But ours was not an idyllic family. Far from it. My parents slowly became disillusioned with each other, and finally, in 1966, they filed for divorce. My father then remarried, and Syeda Begum became my mother.
I have three siblings—two brothers, Hamza and Daanyal, and a sister, Sherzad.
Daanyal, my half brother, is an important man. He used to work in the public relations office of Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani as a spokesperson for him. He is now Pakistan’s press attaché in Beijing. And before anyone asks me, I can tell you that he had no idea of what I was doing. He was not privy to information about me; he had no inkling about my missions in Pakistan or my operations in India or other places. He really was in the dark about everything that I was doing or trying to accomplish. But we know each other well, and I have often met him during my trips to Pakistan—well, stays, as you might like to call them. He is a proud person, and a good man. Leave him out of this; he has nothing to do with this.
My sister Sherzad is a doctor. She is settled in Baltimore in the US, and is quite happily married.
I have been married four times myself. My first wife was a Canadian national and we were married in 1985. We soon divorced as we couldn’t get along due to cultural differences. I married a Pakistani woman next. Shazia Gilani is my second wife. She comes from an elite Pakistani family. For more reasons than one, I shall not disclose their identities. All I shall tell you is that her father’s name is Javed Ahmed. Shazia and her family have no connection with me or my activities; they never have. My third marriage was to my girlfriend of eight years—I married her in New York. Finally, I married Faiza. I don’t see any reason why any of them should be dragged into this affair.
Behera clicked his tongue in exasperation and looked at one of the two CIA men, raising an eyebrow quizzically. With deliberate slowness, one of them shook his head. Damn, thought the NIA team leader, we can’t even force Headley to give us more information because of these two idiots sitting here! He noticed that Headley too had observed the unemphatic but unmistakable denial, but he chose to ignore it and continue speaking.
Shazia was an exemplary woman. She gave me two sons, Hyder and Osama, and two daughters, Somaiya and Hafsa. Yes, I did name my son Osama. You may ask why, and the answer is simple. Amir Osama bin Laden is my hero. He always was and always will be, both for the person he was and for what he accomplished. Naturally, I named my son Osama.
It certainly didn’t surprise any of my handlers. Oh, yes, I didn’t have just one handler, I had three: one from the LeT, one from the ISI and one from the Pakistan Army.
Sajid Mir was the one from the LeT. He was an amazing man and physically one of the fittest people I have ever met. He was also a well-read person, with a razor-sharp mind and an equally sharp wit. Except once, after a very minor incident at Dubai International Airport, Sajid has never been arrested. After that incident he stopped flying internationally, even though he has several passports, one of which is actually in the name of a Christian called Masih. In fact, Sajid is one of the very few LeT people who has avoided arrest for any significant length of time.
You might have heard of jehadis who are single-mindedly focused on war against anti-Islamic elements. Sajid was not like that. His mind was like a computer, and his memory seemed inexhaustible. He soaked in information like a sponge and never forgot a thing. He knew about all that was going on in the world, and kept tabs on all international incidents. He was also frighteningly efficient when it came to thinking up strategies for an operation, and could come up with various tactics for a mission almost within minutes, sometimes even on the spur of the moment. I interacted with many people across the ra
nks of the LeT but I met very few who were as intelligent as Sajid. The most disconcerting thing about Sajid was that he was one of the youngest in his rank; he was far younger than me and was probably in his thirties. It says a lot about the man that he achieved what he did at such a young age.
My second handler was a retired officer from the Pakistan Army—Major Abdur Rehman Hashim, alias Pasha. He belonged to the 6th Baloch. This man was a veritable encyclopaedia when it came to explosives. He was brilliant. Like Sajid, he too was extraordinary at formulating strategies and setting up operations. And he was an expert at crafting and using explosives. I soon realized that, unlike Sajid, Pasha believed in a far more radical ideology, so much so that he didn’t even mind blowing up his own countrymen. Remember all those bombings in Pakistan, in Karachi and Lahore, where hundreds of Shia Muslims perished? They were all designed and orchestrated by Pasha.
During my time with Pasha, I was introduced to another army man—Major Haroon Islam. He belonged to the 10th Punjab Regiment of the Pakistan Army.
My third handler was Major Iqbal, who was from Pakistan’s secret service, the ISI. He introduced me to two other ISI officers, Major Samir Ali and Lieutenant Colonel Hamzah. However, I never found out what these two were involved in. Throughout my time in Pakistan, the only man from the ISI to whom I reported on my operations was Major Iqbal.
So, at least for me, these three—Sajid Mir, Pasha and Major Iqbal—formed the triumvirate of jehadi power in Pakistan. Of course, there were others whom I met, who were higher up in their respective groups. Some of the LeT men I met were Hafiz Saeed, Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi and Abu Kahafa. They were not my handlers, but I did interact with them extensively. In fact, part of my training was under Abu Kahafa, who trained many others, including several like me, who were devoted to the cause of jehad. And Kahafa was one of the few in the top echelons who planned and coordinated attacks in India.
Now, I have no idea how much you people know, but I can tell you that if you are concentrating all your efforts on the LeT, you will be wasting your time. Although the LeT is the most visible jehadi group, there are many others, of whom three are the most prominent. Actually, they all conform to the LeT in one way or another; they are all arteries of the mother group Lashkar. I will give you the lowdown on these three groups, all of which were set up with the sole intent of attacking and somehow destabilizing India. And let me tell you something: they operate in such a smart and cunning manner that, try as you might, you will never be able to completely eliminate them.
The first of these three is called the 313 Brigade. It was set up by Ilyas Kashmiri in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) region. This group swears by the Salafi/Takfiri ideology, one of the most radical wings of Islam. They believe that they are the only genuine, pure Muslims, while the rest are all kafirs. So, if someone says that he is a born Muslim, this group will refuse to accept it and continue to treat the person as a kafir, until and unless he believes in their ideology. The 313 Brigade was named after the 313 brave Muslims whom Prophet Muhammad led to war against the infidels of Mecca. These 313 men emerged victorious in the war, and the group named themselves in their memory, as they believed that such a symbolic name would ensure victory against their enemies.
The second group is one that I think all of you will be very interested in. It is called the Jund al-Fida: the word jund in Arabic means army, and fida means sacrifice. This name was chosen by Osama bin Laden, who formed this group with the sole objective of carrying out terror operations against India and other non-Muslim countries. The group was harboured and nurtured very carefully by the Taliban and the LeT, as it was the brainchild of Osama bin Laden. I remember that throughout the eight years of my training in Pakistan, everyone treated the members and volunteers of Jund al-Fida with a lot of respect.
The third highly prominent group was code-named the Karachi Setup or the Karachi Project, and it was formed specifically to train Indian Muslim youth to attack India—I am sure you must have heard of it. The Karachi Project was the brainchild of Abdur Rehman Pasha and Colonel Shah, who was Pasha’s handler in the ISI. Actually, this was something I always found intriguing—I kept wondering who these Muslim youth were. During the entire period of my training and my meetings and coordination with my Pakistani jehadi bosses, I met only one Muslim youth, Abu Azmal, who was from Maharashtra. He was twenty-eight years old, and was my partner at all the major training camps that I participated in. I heard, much later, that he had been arrested by the Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) of the Maharashtra government sometime in 2006 or 2007.
All these Muslim youth would be brought from India after some indoctrination or they would come to Pakistan of their own free will to join the fight against India. They would come to Pakistan via Iran or Dubai and undergo extensive training so that they could go back afterwards and fight the tyranny of the Indian government. The Karachi Project, which was a special group formed within the LeT, was entirely controlled by Sajid Mir and its operations were handled by Abu Yaqoob, who was also in charge of Lashkar’s naval setup. In fact, the Karachi Project launches boys from Maharashtra and Gujarat back into India by the sea route, with the assistance of a network of fishermen. I believe it was this group that trained the ten men who attacked Mumbai on 26 November. I also heard that India’s National Defence College (NDC) and Raksha Bhavan were potential targets of Pasha’s setup. In fact, after a conversation with Pasha in April 2009, I realized that he was planning an attack on the NDC soon.
There was an even more specialized group within the LeT, codenamed the Indian Wing. Those who made it to this group had lost a loved one—a brother or a father or a son or some other family member—to the Indian Army in Kashmir. Their motive was vengeance, and the LeT stoked their anger regularly, making sure that the fire never died in them, and that their fervour to exact revenge on the Indian military never palled.
Why did I have three handlers? That is something my interrogators will have to figure out. It is a fact that the intelligence agencies of Pakistan are far superior, better organized and coordinated than their Indian counterparts. Together, my three handlers from three different sectors could provide me with everything I might require in any situation. If I needed cash, recruits, GPS equipment, etc., it was taken care of by the ISI. If I needed any specific training, the LeT would train me. And finally, the army provided me with all the information that I needed, including charting different routes for my missions. Everybody operated on a need-to-know basis. Never, at any point in time, did the left hand know what the right hand was doing. Nobody ever knew everything.
There was something else I discovered, although I never let my handlers know that I had found out something I was probably not supposed to. The longer I interacted with my handlers, the clearer it became that each of my handlers had a handler in the ISI—which meant that the ISI was taking care of everything. All the LeT bosses that I met and worked with—Sajid, Pasha, Major Iqbal, Lakhvi—had a handler in the ISI. And I noticed that none of the LeT men liked this fact. They hated being controlled and ordered about by the government’s lackeys who, they felt, did not understand or appreciate the depth of Islam. They resented the idea of having to report to someone who did not know anything about the compulsions of jehad, but they were forced to accept this arrangement as the ISI gave them the protection they needed.
THREE
My father wanted to name me Mohammed Bhatt. He actually did name me Mohammed. For a little while after I was born, that’s who I was—Mohammed Bhatt.
I am a bastard child.
Let me introduce my father, Mr Mahesh Bhatt. Mr Bhatt is very proud to call himself a bastard child. Of course, he is justified in doing so, as his mother and father never got married. But despite the fact that my mother and Mr Bhatt were legally married, I have always felt like an illegitimate child. The reason is simple. Though Mr Bhatt fathered me, he never fulfilled the paternal responsibilities that come with having a child. That makes me a super bastard child.
/> As I grew up, my mother Kiran introduced me to the man I was supposed to call Papa. Apparently, she met my father when she was fifteen and he seventeen. It was the quintessential teenage love story.
It is said that children are able to sense where they truly belong, who truly loves them, at a very early age. I was never very attached to Mr Bhatt. And by the time I realized that the man I called Father was the man who begot me, we had drifted apart.
I realized at a very young age, maybe when I was around three or four, that my father put in only a weekly appearance in my life. By the time I turned seven and was going to school regularly, his presence was even rarer, as he became busy with his own life. Later, when I had grown up, my mother told me that my father had started drifting away from her even before I was born. One reason for this was the success he was enjoying. The other was Parveen Babi.
In the days when he was still making his mark in the Hindi film industry, Mr Bhatt had many unholy alliances, all of which my mother disapproved of. For instance, he had a raging, passionate, almost public affair with Parveen Babi, one of the most beautiful women I have ever met. Though my mother was no less good-looking, after having borne a child—my sister Pooja Bhatt—and approaching middle age, it is quite possible that her charm and good looks had started to wane for Mr Bhatt. Parveen and my father clearly got on very well, which is why he started spending most of his time with her instead of with my mother.
My mother also told me that most of the time, Mr Bhatt came home drunk. My parents used to fight a lot, because of which my mother couldn’t bear my father’s visits, irregular as they were. She would throw him out of the house when she realized that an argument was getting out of hand. Sometimes their fights would get so completely of control that they would actually run after each other with a fork or a knife, even a spoon, enraged enough to kill each other.