The Mind of a Terrorist Page 13

  Later, he returned to 8 Kongens Nytorv to make a series of video recordings. He paid attention to the building’s entrances and exits and imagined how the workers might try to escape in the event of an attack. He couldn’t leave that sort of thing to chance.

  In Copenhagen, Headley also met with an attractive young Danish woman whose email address he had obtained. She was a student and lived in the Nørrebro district, northwest of the city center. Headley hadn’t yet decided what he would do with the woman, but he might be able to use her as a secretary at the fictional immigration office he planned to open as part of his preparations for the attack.

  When the woman said she had plans to go on vacation in the States that summer, Headley promised he would find a place in New York where she could stay for two weeks in June. He asked Rana if she could stay with a mutual acquaintance or perhaps with Rana’s brother in Newark, close to New York. Nothing ever became of the trip, though.

  The woman had no idea that Headley was in the process of planning a terrorist attack.

  Headley told Rana that Denmark was full of attractive women.

  “The girls are hot. You and I should come here without our girlfriends and have a good time,” he wrote one evening.

  While he was in Copenhagen, Headley shot several videos from Copenhagen Central Station and explored the city. He also worked to track down Flemming Rose, among other things trying to discover Rose’s home address, but was unsuccessful.

  He couldn’t know that the two of them had already been just feet away from one another. While Headley had been speaking with the advertising salesman close to the front desk, Rose was sitting just a few floors up in the same building, being interviewed by a German journalist about the backstory for the Muhammad cartoons.

  They could easily have crossed paths in the doorway.

  In an email to Rana, Headley attempted to make his next move appear random.

  “I will leave this hotel Thursday morning and go to another city in this country for my vacation. I haven’t decided which one, maybe Aarhus.”

  The trip to Aarhus was anything but random. Just outside the city, at the top of a small hill in the Viby district, is Jyllands-Posten’s headquarters. When Headley arrived, he explored the area: out onto Skanderborg Street, right onto Ravnsbjerg Street, and then to the main entrance on Grøndals Street. He thought the building looked like connected train cars, almost like a labyrinth.

  On at least eight occasions throughout the day, Headley walked around the perimeter of the building with his video camera, researching conditions of access, parking, and the vulnerabilities for an attack.

  Late Friday morning, Kurt Westergaard sat in the headquarters as usual, working on a drawing. The threats hadn’t stopped him from coming to work.

  Headley went to the main entrance. Here, too, he introduced himself as a lawyer. He explained that he was interested in running an ad but would like to get some pricing first.

  Headley was brought to the front desk, where an advertising saleswoman responded to his questions. He listened to the different options and thanked her for her help. Nobody in the advertising department would have noticed that the same man had shown up with the same questions in the same week at two different offices within 150 miles of each other.

  That evening, Headley wrote to Rana again:

  “Ok Doc … I checked for our office ad in Aarhus as well. You might be receiving price quotes in your other email address. Did the Copenhagen guy send you any mail yet? I think our company has a really bright future here. We will become rich or should I say richer?”

  By rich, Headley meant rich in a religious sense—not a stack of money. There was great glory and a place in Paradise waiting for the two men if the mission could be carried out successfully, he thought. He was satisfied with his trip.

  After his visit, Headley concluded that the building in Aarhus wasn’t “suited” to a terrorist attack. It was too long, too flat, and had far too many exits, which would offer journalists and others in the building the means to escape.

  Copenhagen was another story entirely. The building on Kongens Nytorv was easy to attack. And the Danish police suspected nothing of Headley’s activities in Denmark.

  Everything was going according to plan.

  * * *

  The next day, Headley drove to Frankfurt. Saturday evening, he got on a plane to the United Arab Emirates, and from there, on to Pakistan.

  Not realizing that she had fallen into the trap, one of the employees at Jyllands-Posten’s office in Viby wrote to the email address for First World Immigration.

  She began her email, “Dear David C. Headley. Thank you for your visit at Jyllands-Posten Friday last week concerning advertising in our newspaper.” The consultant offered Headley a 20 percent discount on an advertisement for 6,670 Danish kroner before VAT, if he bought a run of four weeks.

  In Chicago, Rana wrote back, pretending to be Headley.

  “Thank you for your reply. I will be in touch soon. I am trying to coordinate with a local attorney in Denmark for taking care of our clients locally. I intend to visit you in the coming spring. Sincerely, Dave.”

  Neither Headley nor First World Immigration ever ran an advertisement in Jyllands-Posten or any other Danish newspaper.

  Headley had brought a little present to his friends in Pakistan: a stack of funny hats with the word “Copenhagen” on them.

  Sajid Mir and Pasha got the point.

  Headley had decided: the attack would take place in Copenhagen, and Sajid Mir would soon know if the Jyllands-Posten offices were arranged in such a way that, as in Mumbai, they were suitable for an assault in which the perpetrators fought to the death and took numerous lives with them.

  Headley thought it was certainly possible. He showed his videos from Denmark, and they quickly started getting new ideas. Headley had made a recording of the Royal Life Guards in Copenhagen, and Sajid Mir suggested that the young men throw grenades at the soldiers and steal their weapons. They discussed the attack for several days. During this time Headley saw, among other things, the draft of a plan for the attack that Sajid Mir had developed.

  For his efforts, Headley received a DVD of one of the potent propaganda films targeting Denmark that had been produced by al-Qaeda’s press division, known as As-Sahab Media.

  The DVD, The Word Is the Word of the Swords, contained recordings from the assault on the Danish embassy in Islamabad barely one year earlier. That attack came in June 2008 as revenge for the reprinting of the Muhammad cartoons by several Danish newspapers.

  A car bomb—hidden in a white Toyota Corolla—was driven up in front of the Danish embassy. First, there was a loud bang. Then, flames, and then a cloud of smoke that could be seen over most of the city. The windows of all the nearby cars were blown out by the shock wave, glass shards and bricks flew like projectiles through the air, and about twenty-four people were injured in a split second by the bomb.

  That was especially true for local guards, who were knocked down. Six people were killed. Among them were a Danish citizen, a child, and several local employees.

  The car containing the bomb shot up about a hundred feet in the air and landed in a neighboring yard. The car’s motor was found even farther away.

  “We’ve been afraid of this since the printing of the caricatures. But when you think about what they did to your religion, they deserve it,” said an anonymous neighbor in the embassy district to journalists who gathered after the explosion.

  The foreign ministry issued a warning with immediate effect against any and all travel to Pakistan, while the attack was condemned by Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary-General, as well as American president George W. Bush.

  “We condemn the terrorist attack; there is no justification for it. The president has been briefed. He offers his condolences to the victims of violence and their families,” said Bush’s spokeswoman, Dana Perino.

  “I consider the bombing an attack on both Denmark and Pakistan, and condemn the operatio
n in the strongest terms. At the same time, I want to express my deepest sympathy for the victims and their families. We don’t yet know who was behind the attack, as nobody has taken responsibility for it. It’s important to show calm and levelheadedness in the current situation,” said Danish foreign minister Per Stig Møller.

  The Pakistani president, Pervez Musharraf, wrote personally to Queen Margrethe and promised to find the perpetrators: “We strongly condemn this terrorist act, which has affected our whole nation deeply.”

  The As-Sahab film ran for fifty-four minutes and, besides shots of the burning building, also contained a tribute to a man named Kamaal Saleem Atiyyah al-Fudli al-Hadhli. He was in the white Toyota for the suicide attack.

  Al-Qaeda leader Mustafa Abu al-Yazid intoned: “What you have seen and experienced in the Danish embassy and prior operation is but the beginning, God willing, if you don’t end your errant ways and aggression.”

  Fifty-four-year-old al-Yazid was a veteran of jihad and was considered number three in al-Qaeda at this time. He had earlier been imprisoned for assisting in the murder of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981 and was responsible for the group’s operations in Afghanistan.

  “We have warned previously—and we warn once more—the Crusader states which insult, mock and defame our Prophet and Quran in their media and occupy our lands, steal our treasure and kill our brothers that we will exact revenge at the appropriate time and place,” said al-Yazid.

  In the recordings, he encouraged every young Muslim in Europe to take an active role in the fight. “There is no excuse for your remaining among the unbelievers unless you join the caravan of jihad and discharge your duty to Islam and Muslims by fighting and killing the enemies of Allah and His Messenger (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him). It’s time to stand up for your religion and kill the blasphemers and mockers of your Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him).”

  In the summer of 2008, the rumor spread that Mustafa Abu al-Yazid had been killed in a firefight with the Pakistani military on the border with Afghanistan, and everyone considered him dead.

  Later, he reappeared, and it wasn’t until nearly two years later, May 21, 2010, that American authorities could confirm that al-Yazid, his wife, and his three daughters as well as a grandchild had died in a drone attack carried out in Pakistani territory.

  On the DVD, you could also see the suicide bomber al-Hadhli in the process of packing the white Toyota with explosives. A voice said that he “screamed with joy” and “threw himself on the ground” when he learned that he had been chosen for the suicide mission against the Danish embassy.

  “My final message to the worshippers of the cross in Denmark is that, God permitting, this is not the first nor the last act of revenge,” said al-Hadhli.

  “Sheik Osama bin Laden won’t abandon you, nor will the mujahideen abandon you. Allah willing, we will wipe you from the face of the earth,” said the man, who was originally from Saudi Arabia.

  Finally, al-Hadhli was filmed by the car. Surrounded by dancing red flames that had been added to the image later on, he told his mother good-bye.

  “I dedicate this song to my precious mother, who will—Allah willing—be the first one I intercede for on the Day of Resurrection, if Allah accepts me as a martyr,” he said, singing:

  “Mother, I can’t let this humiliation go on. And I can’t let a cursed infidel disgrace my sister. I don’t want the women of this world. I want the women of Paradise.”

  With that, Kamaal al-Hadhli calmly got into the car, which was idling with its hazard lights flashing.

  “Salaam alaikum,” said a voice from behind the camera. Peace be with you.

  Next a short sequence showed the attack in a simple but violent 3-D animation. Then, some pictures from the destroyed embassy, before the camera finally zoomed in on a sign that read KONGELIG DANSK AMBASSADE.*

  Headley was excited to see the film, and when he later returned to the United States, he made sure Rana got a copy too. The DVD captured what he’d felt with his entire being after his first visit: it was time for the Danes to feel pain.

  * Royal Danish Embassy.

  9

  THE WOMEN

  United States

  2001

  Osama bin Laden’s father, Mohammed bin Laden, had at least fifty-four children with twenty-two different wives. So while Osama was attending college, he and a friend decided they would each also take several wives and have large families. For many of his peers, though, polygamy had acquired a bad rep because it had gotten so out of hand with their parents’ generation.

  Osama bin Laden later developed a theory on the advantages of having several women in one’s life. Four was the optimal number, prescribed by the prophet Muhammad himself.

  “One is okay, like walking. Two is like riding a bicycle: it’s fast but a little unstable. Three is a tricycle, stable but slow. And when we come to four, ah! This is the ideal. Now you can pass everyone!”

  Headley was, as usual, very excited about Osama bin Laden’s thoughts, including those on women.

  Headley himself loved women. And he had many of them.

  He bragged to a group of friends that he had been with more black women than his entire class at the military academy combined. That was about one hundred students.

  But he found Pakistani women to be cumbersome. They’d all seen too many Bollywood movies with big, dramatic romance scenes, and they didn’t want to live their lives as the third or fourth wife in a complicated marriage.

  “Arab women are much more understanding and open to it. They only ask that you be fair,” Headley wrote to his friends.

  Headley’s many women were also his Achilles heel.

  He could manage the American narcotics authorities; connections to the drug trade; heroin smugglers in Pakistan; Major Iqbal from the intelligence service; and Pasha, Sajid Mir, and the others in Lashkar, and he could juggle all his roles and opportunities at once—without everything coming crashing down to the ground.

  But when it came to women—wives, girlfriends, friends, and his own mother—everything went wrong. He revealed too much. And there was always one who talked.

  In the period after September 11, 2001, Americans were encouraged to report strangers, friends, or family members if they showed even the slightest signs of connections to radical groups. The war on terror had to also be fought on American soil, so the authorities asked citizens for help.

  IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING signs in the New York subway read just days after the terrorist attack.

  The message was directed particularly at unattended bags and suspicious behavior, but it was clear: if you know something, yell loudly.

  In New York, one of Headley’s female acquaintances—a bartender—confided to a colleague that she had heard Headley talking about being ready to fight in Pakistan and about how the United States had hurt Pakistan’s interests. He openly supported some suspicious groups in Pakistan, and she wondered whether they might be terrorists. The colleague called the FBI.

  This led to a conversation between Headley and the authorities on October 4, 2001. Two agents from the Department of Defense and Headley’s DEA contact questioned him about his connections in Pakistan, but he plainly denied that he was connected in any way to, or interested in, Islamist terrorism. He was an American deep at heart, he said.

  Three people in all were questioned in connection with the report, among them Headley’s mother, Serrill. And then the FBI closed the case. They bought Headley’s story.

  A few months later, in 2002, the FBI’s tip hotline was ringing in Philadelphia. On the other end was Phyllis Keith, the owner of the Morning Glories café, often visited by Headley’s mother.

  In a confidential conversation, Serrill Headley had described her son as “an increasingly fanatical extremist,” and, according to Phyllis Keith, Serrill said that Headley had taken part in military training with sixteen-year-old boys who were later killed in armed conflicts.

 
Phyllis Keith had also met Headley himself at least once, and she felt that he definitely seemed suspicious. That was why she had decided to contact the FBI.

  The conversation lasted five minutes. The FBI apparently checked up on Headley because of the call, but after they didn’t find anything immediately suspicious, they closed the case again.

  The reports were dismissed as the kind that come from jilted lovers and crazy neighbors.

  Since the mid-1990s, Headley had been in a steady relationship with a Canadian woman living in New York. He proposed to her with a diamond ring, and they got married in Jamaica near the end of 2002. Headley said nothing about having already been married to Shazia in Pakistan, having several children, and being deeply involved with Lashkar. He maintained the lie without any problems for a few years, and he frequently stayed with wife number two in New York.

  But the threads of his double life couldn’t hold together in the long run. At one point in 2005, Headley hadn’t been in touch with the Canadian wife for months, and she contacted Headley’s father in Lahore. Suddenly, she knew everything.

  She quickly declared that she wanted a divorce, which led to an altercation in front of Headley’s video store in Manhattan on August 25, 2005. According to the police report following the incident, the Canadian woman claimed that Headley struck her several times in the head.

  The day after, she called the Joint Terrorism Task Force, JTTF, in New York and told them everything she knew:

  When Headley was “at home” in New York, he bought unusual things—rope, sturdy hiking boots, and books about war and conflict—which he took with him when he traveled to the Middle East. He had also researched the prices of infrared goggles. And that wasn’t all.

  Throughout the course of three meetings in total with the JTTF agents, Headley’s Canadian wife said she was convinced he was a member of Lashkar and was active in raising money for the organization. She showed the agents some cassette tapes with speeches and other ideological material from the group. She also explained that Headley often received emails and telephone calls from suspicious people in Pakistan. She even offered to retrieve some of Headley’s private emails for them, which the agents presumably declined.