The Mind of a Terrorist Read online

Headley calmed down again, exhaled, and the flock surrounding him dispersed. The reasons for Headley’s anger that day aren’t clear, but the result was that Rana began to speak to him.

  From that point on, the two sat next to each other during prayers in the mosque. They chatted and laughed openly. They drank evening tea in the mess. They ran laps in the yard, practiced cricket together—in white V-neck T-shirts with short, white shorts. Headley was one of the best bowlers at the academy, though he was pretty wild when it came to basketball—a rather curious sport to be good at in Pakistan in the mid-seventies.

  As so often happens, it was a pairing of opposites: Rana was ambitious, disciplined, and received the highest grades at the academy. It wasn’t a walk in the park, either: he worked for it, which made him one of the strongest candidates among the applicants to the school in his year.

  Headley, on the other hand, was a disappointment at school. He was uninterested, never opened his books of his own free will, and was one of the very last of the ninety-six to be admitted to his year; he took his place as the one with the lowest or almost-lowest grades throughout the years. Headley’s time at Hasan Abdal taught him, above all else, how to smoke on the sly and how to perform forty push-ups at lightning speed—the typical punishment for breaking the school’s rules.

  One day, Headley woke all the cadets early in the morning and yelled that they were to gather in full dress in the yard. The groggy cadets ran about confused, pulling down clothes from the shelves, stepping into their boots, and finding their way out to the yard in their school uniforms.

  In the morning sun, there were no officers or instructors waiting. The cadets looked around at each other in confusion.

  For his part, Headley had crawled back under his comforter, where he lay smiling. Soon enough they’d discover that he was the one who tricked them, but that didn’t mean anything. It was still funny.

  Headley’s father was something of a celebrity.

  As an employee of Radio Pakistan, the national public service radio station, Syed Saleem Gilani took part in the search for musicians to give voice to Pakistan’s clamorings for a real national identity after becoming independent from British India in 1947.

  A young Muslim nation needed storytellers, thought Syed Saleem Gilani.

  Saleem Gilani asked the songwriters to make their messages more obvious. Their songs couldn’t just sound good; they needed first and foremost to tell a story and shape a nation.

  He was a man of his times, always wearing a suit, and he quickly understood that Pakistan was about to open itself to the rest of the world. In the late 1950s, he was stationed in America, where he worked as a diplomat at the Pakistani embassy in Washington, DC, and for the radio station Voice of America.

  Alice Serrill Headley was a strong-willed woman with black hair and snow-white skin. Her women friends often compared her to Rosalind Russell, an attractive American actress who was known for her record number of Golden Globe awards and for playing proud women who didn’t take “no” as an answer to anything. That was Serrill.

  Serrill was born on her father’s farm in a Catholic family in the state of Maryland and grew up around Main Line, home to the nicer citizenry of neighboring Pennsylvania. As a fifteen-year-old, she had more or less left home to come out and see the world, and as a nineteen-year-old that adventurousness took her to Washington, DC, where she had a job as a secretary at the Pakistani embassy.

  Serrill dreamed of seeing the world on the other side of the Atlantic, a place her coworker Saleem Gilani, ten years her senior, was no stranger to. A nice, charming man from a mystical land.

  Naturally, the two got married.

  And in June of 1960, Serrill gave birth to a son in a hospital in Washington, DC. He was named Daood Syed Gilani. The name he would change many years later to David Coleman Headley.

  From birth, Headley was both Pakistani and American. Both Daood and David.

  Saleem Gilani’s tour at the embassy ended, and when Headley was just a few months old, the family traveled from the United States to England and soon thereafter to Lahore in the Punjab province of what was then West Pakistan, where Saleem himself had grown up.

  In Lahore, Headley was joined in short order by a little sister, and the children received a traditional Muslim upbringing in a large house filled with domestic servants.

  Serrill loved wild Pakistan. The many crooked streets and houses, quirky people in colorful clothes, and certainly not least the exotic spiced food, which had yet to make its way to America, a place that now seemed so far away.

  But the adventure wasn’t over yet. Serrill had a hard time with all the traditions and prohibitions in everyday Pakistan, and she felt that she could be doing more than taking care of the family. She wanted to be where things were happening. Not just sitting somewhere nearby, talking about children and food.

  After some years, she and Saleem were divorced—an extremely untraditional choice in Pakistan in the mid-1960s. And Serrill was separated from her two children, whom she was allowed to visit only once a month, and always under the supervision of Saleem or other men in the family.

  “In Pakistan, men own the children. There are no rights for women,” as Serrill later explained.

  Serrill Headley initially stayed in Pakistan to be close to her children, and she wrote home to family and friends in the US that she had married an “Afghan prince.” Shahzada Muslehuddin was his name, and in reality, he was an insurance agent more than anything else. But for Serrill, that was yet another part of her adventure.

  When her Afghan man was shot and killed—perhaps the victim of his first wife’s jealousy—Serrill married the film director Akhtar J. Kardar, thirteen years her senior, who was known as “AJ.” Things became stormy almost immediately, and already a few months later the marriage was over.

  In tears, Serrill left her daughter, son, and Pakistan behind, and traveled back to America.

  Headley grew up with his father in a relatively strict religious environment. His father made it abundantly clear that Allah had created the world as it was. And that it was not the job of men to doubt.

  This conviction was supported by Headley’s first school year in one of Pakistan’s best boarding schools, Habib Public School in the large city of Karachi. Here, the students began studying the Qur’an in third grade, and by seventh grade at the latest they had finished reading the whole thing. Those who showed promise then started all over again, memorizing the most important parts.

  When Headley was eleven years old, Pakistan attacked eleven air force bases in India in an attempt to stop a potential Indian invasion. The attack, which took place on the evening of December 3, 1971, was well coordinated, and the mission, in which a total of fifty fighter planes took part, was kept secret until the very last moment. Pakistan was proud of the surprise attack, and the media spoke excitedly of the nation’s impending victory over the wretched Indians.

  The pleasure was short-lived.

  The then-prime minister of India, Indira Gandhi, replied in a direct speech to the nation with a declaration of war on Pakistan, and before midnight that night the first Indian planes were already in the process of bombing targets in Pakistan.

  These events marked the beginning of the Indo-Pakistani War, considered one of the shortest wars in world history between two sovereign nations. At least 8,000 Pakistani soldiers lost their lives in the thirteen-day war, many thousands were badly wounded, and more than 90,000 were taken captive by the Indians, who easily crushed the Pakistani military’s tanks, planes, and ships. With the signing of the peace treaty, Pakistan lost populous East Pakistan, which became Bangladesh. All at once, Pakistan’s population was cut in half, and West Pakistan became the entire Pakistan. The country was devastated by the loss.

  At one point during the intense conflict, two Indian missiles were fired toward Karachi. They struck Headley’s school, where one person was killed by shrapnel and several others were wounded. One of the school’s buildings was so badly damaged
that it had to be torn down.

  The attack on the school had been in error, said the Indians, but Pakistan’s defeat and the explosion at the school made lifelong impressions on Headley. He wasn’t even a teenager yet, but he no longer had any doubt who his enemy was.

  He learned to spit on the street when he saw an Indian.

  As Pakistan attempted to stand back up with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as its new president, Saleem Gilani made sure that his son went to Hasan Abdal Cadet College. And while Headley and Rana were cadets on course toward a career in the Pakistani military, spending their hours in school studying the great battles of history, Pakistan made a serious entry into the nuclear arms race with India. Bhutto had made this promise many years earlier with the words: “If India builds the bomb, we will eat grass or leaves, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own. We have no other choice.”

  Bhutto won the March 1977 election but was accused of having cheated his way to victory. Under the code name Operation Fair Play, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq took over in a military coup d’état in the summer of the same year.

  Times in Pakistan were not peaceful, and when Headley was home from boarding school with his family in Lahore, he fell out with his father’s new wife repeatedly. Serrill had a suggestion: she would travel to Pakistan and bring Headley to America, his birth country but also a land he hadn’t seen since he was a baby. He would be safe there, and he could always return to Pakistan when peace returned, Serrill explained.

  Headley accepted.

  In the summer of 1977, he landed in America.

  Headley’s mother had paid for his ticket, and she also offered to fly Rana with him, so Headley wouldn’t be alone. There was a future in the United States for anyone who had the right skills or the right passport. Rana had the former, but Headley was lucky enough to have the latter. Serrill also offered to pay for Rana’s high school.

  Rana’s family said no thank-you, and the two friends said good-bye to each other.

  For more than one hundred years, there’s been a bar at 56 South 2nd Street in Philadelphia. Even during Prohibition, it was filled with cheap bootleg alcohol, men, and women who sometimes went home with each other when the bar ran out of alcohol, or when the police shut the party down. In 1977, not much had changed.

  The regulars showed up faithfully to the dimly lit hole sometime around breakfast and didn’t leave until late at night, when they had forgotten their worries.

  Behind the bar stood Headley’s mother. And she was the bar’s biggest attraction.

  Serrill had bought the place a few years back and renamed it to the Khyber Pass Pub—after the mountain range that separates Pakistan and Afghanistan. The American burgers disappeared from the menu, and instead Serrill served light Afghan food and arranged Pakistani weddings in the bar. The regulars would stay and watch in awe as their meeting place became a decidedly alcohol-fueled version of entertainment in the Arabian Nights.

  Everything was new to the young Pakistani. Here, there was free-flowing beer and TV screens with sports and other shows. In Pakistan he’d never been alone with a girl at any time, apart from his sister and sometimes the maids that worked for his family. Outside of his family, he had never seen women without veils. He’d never had a girlfriend.

  Now, Headley lived above a noisy bar in the Christians’ land, spending his evenings watching the TV series Happy Days and, as a server, pouring wine at Miss Headley’s Wine Bar, which Serrill had opened on the second floor, above the first floor’s more beer-centric establishment.

  It’s difficult to determine what thoughts went through the young man’s head in those first weeks after his arrival in America, but it’s a fact that after just a few weeks, he was having a glass, too, when his mom served her regulars. It also appears that it wasn’t long before Headley experimented with drugs, and from there began the young Muslim’s fall from grace with the women from Serrill’s bar, whom he learned to entice with stories from Pakistan, a place that most people in Philadelphia at the time likely knew only by name but couldn’t locate on a map.

  The women in the bar called him “the Prince.”

  The following year, Rana visited Headley in Philadelphia briefly while on vacation and witnessed his new life. He returned to Pakistan shaken. Without having tried alcohol, drugs, or girls.

  A few years later, Headley returned to Pakistan.

  He’d gotten a fantastic idea for a trip, he told Rana, and asked his old friend to visit northwestern Pakistan with him.

  The two had kept in touch by mail and the occasional phone call, but they hadn’t seen each other in the intervening years. Rana had naturally done what one would expect of a cadet at a military academy, and he was now about to study to become a military doctor, while Headley in America tried in vain to find a middle road between his Pakistani and American DNA. No part of this went right for him. For a short time, he attended the Valley Forge Military Academy just outside Philadelphia, but he was soon expelled for using drugs. He also tried to get an accounting degree at a university in Philadelphia, but he never finished the program.

  His father in Pakistan ought to have been severely disappointed: Headley had stopped praying, he drank, he took drugs, and he was with women even though he didn’t marry any of them. He had lost all contact with Islam.

  From the early 1980s, he more or less took over the Khyber Pass Bar from his mother, while he himself took more and more heroin and made questionable friends. And then he got the idea for the trip up north in his other home country. Together with Rana.

  They were all too happy to see each other. Together with a mutual friend from their time at Hasan Abdal and one of Headley’s other friends, they drove off, first on a multilane highway and then on small, winding mountain roads up north.

  The men, all in their mid-twenties, enjoyed the freedom and the adventure. As they approached their destination in the tribal areas near the border with Afghanistan, Headley disappeared for a short time, but he returned without anybody really thinking much about the fact that he had been absent.

  But this short detour was the entire purpose of the trip and had been since the beginning. Now Headley had a bag filled with heroin that he hid in the car. None of the many border guards in the unrest-filled area would search a car with a combat medic on board, Headley guessed. They’d be too busy and have too much respect.

  At any rate, he was nervous when they later drove south and the car was stopped again at the border, where they had to show their identity documents. If Headley was wrong, the four men would instantly end up in a Pakistani prison, and they wouldn’t be getting out quite as quickly. But Headley was not wrong, the car was never searched, and Rana never suspected that he had been exploited.

  Several days later, Headley was arrested in Lahore for possession of heroin. For unknown reasons, he managed to escape a conviction.

  One Tuesday in the summer of 1988, Headley stopped over in Frankfurt in West Germany. He was tired after the long flight from Pakistan and looked forward to coming back to America after a vacation. He would drive from the airport in Philadelphia and head down South 2nd Street in the historic part of town. He’d say hello to his mother and friends and maybe grab a bite to eat.

  And then he’d empty the books and clothes from his suitcase, remove the false bottom, and pull out the nearly five pounds of pure heroin and hide it in the apartment. The bags would be worth a whopping five million dollars on the street.

  He was twenty-seven years old and soon on his way to becoming a millionaire. He already had the suit and the lifestyle. Now he just needed to fill up his bank account.

  But in customs in Frankfurt, Headley was asked to follow the officers to an area off to the side. His suitcase was slowly emptied, book after book, one piece of clothing after another. In the end, they found the heroin in the bottom of his luggage.

  The narcotics authorities gave Headley a simple choice: a comprehensive police investigation that would most likely end with new discoveries of his crimi
nal activities, and subsequently, imprisonment. Or, alternatively: Headley would turn in his friends and help the authorities to catch more.

  That day, Headley could look back on a life in America that was a car wreck from the very beginning. In 1985, he married an American woman he had met in his mother’s bar. But the marriage was a short-lived idyll, and the two were divorced two years later. New Year’s Eve that same year, the bar closed. The local paper wrote in its obituary that the Khyber Pass Pub, with its 180 different beers, had revolutionized the city’s nightlife. It had also been a place where unknown artists could come and perform, but that made little difference for its bottom line.

  Officially, Serrill claimed that the failure was the result of a tax debt and her bad health. In reality, there was another very important element: Headley had run the bar into the ground.

  After a full day in Frankfurt, Headley had admitted everything, turned over the names of most of his drug contacts, and was sent on a plane back to Philadelphia with agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration—the DEA.

  Two days later, he showed up at an apartment on 4th Street near the intersection with New Street, where thirty-nine-year-old Darryl H. Scoggins and thirty-four-year-old Gary Roundtree were waiting for the goods from Pakistan. The apartment had been equipped in advance by the DEA with hidden microphones and video cameras.

  “Is this all ours?” asked Scoggins in surprise when he saw all the heroin laid out on the table.

  He gave Headley two thumbs up.

  And then, all three were arrested as the police broke in through the doors.

  Headley’s unconditional cooperation with the authorities and an otherwise clean criminal record meant that he got away with four years in prison, while the two others got ten and eight years, respectively. At the conclusion of the trial, Judge James McGirr Kelly gave Headley a stern look and said that it was now up to him what he would do with the rest of his life.

  “You are still a young man,” said the judge.