The Longest August (52 page)

In Pakistan LeT leaders found their cadres defecting to join such organizations as Al Qaida with an agenda for global jihad. This caused concern among the top officials of not only the LeT but also the ISI. Focused on destabilizing Indian Kashmir, the ISI leadership did not want the Kashmiri-based groups integrating with the wider jihad-based factions, thereby weakening its Kashmir campaign.
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That was how the aims of the LeT and the ISI converged. Mounting a gigantic operation against India was expected to enhance the radical image of the LeT and stem the outflow from its ranks.

The LeT-ISI plan was unaffected by the new civilian coalition government in Islamabad in April 2008. The PPP had emerged as the largest group in the National Assembly after a general election in which Asif Ali Zardari rode the sympathy wave generated by the assassination of his wife, Benazir Bhutto, by militant jihadists. Zardari succeeded Musharraf as president.

LeT leaders realized that in their ranks they had one Pakistani-American whose dedication to the cause was equaled by the training he had received at LeT camps. He was Daood Sayed Gilani, born in 1960 in Washington to Sayed Salim Gilani, a Pakistani diplomat, and Serrill Headley, a Pennsylvania-born secretary at the Pakistani embassy.

After his education at an elite military school near Islamabad, Gilani went to live with his divorced mother in Philadelphia to help her run a bar. He carried two passports, one American and the other Pakistani. His drug smuggling took him to Pakistan and led to his arrests, first in 1987 and then in 1998, when he became an undercover agent for the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Soon after 9/11, the DEA sent him to Pakistan, even though it had been informed of his pro-Islamist views. In December 2001, attracted by the LeT's banner advertisement at a mosque in Lahore where he prayed, he joined the organization. Between 2002 and 2005 he received training in small arms and countersurveillance at the camps run by the LeT. He was intent on participating actively in jihad and awaited a move by LeT leaders. When that failed to materialize, he set out for the Pakistan-Afghan border on his own and crossed into
tribal territory without an official permit for entry. He was arrested by an ISI officer.

Once Gilani established his LeT bona fides, the officer handed him over to “Major Iqbal” (aka Mazhar Iqbal) of the ISI in Lahore. Major Iqbal became his minder. Taking his advice, Gilani changed his name to David Coleman Headley in 2006 during his stay in the United States. Through one of his LeT trainers, Abdur Rahman Hashim (aka Pasha), a retired officer of the Sixth Baluch Regiment, Headley established contact with Ilyas Kashmiri, who was linked to Al Qaida. The ISI gave him $25,000 to open a US visa facilitation office in Mumbai as a front. After scouting for targets in the city, he handed over flash drives to the LeT and the ISI. He went through the images with Zaki ur Rahman Lakhvi, the LeT's military operations chief. In 2007 Headley made six trips to Mumbai, two of them with his Moroccan wife, Faiza Outalha, when they stayed at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. In September 2007 his LeT minder instructed him to focus on that hotel.

In April 2008 Headley hired boats to scout landing sites and passed on GPS coordinates to the LeT high command. Major Iqbal, working as the LeT's planner, supervised the model of the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel and arranged the communications system for the attack. Between June and August 2008, the LeT high command upgraded the operation from an assault on the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, with the two or three attackers escaping, to a mission involving several targets and the operatives' role changed to suicide bombers. These were to be the attacks by the
fidayeen
(Arabic: self-sacrificing volunteers), with the overarching aim of highlighting the suffering of the Kashmiri Muslims under the Indian yoke as a step toward liberating them.

Ten LeT recruits, selected from a group of twenty-five, were then indoctrinated for this holy task by Lakhvi. (After being proscribed in January 2002, the LeT functioned under its political arm, the Jamaat ud Dawa.) Among them was Muhammad Ajmal Amir Kasab, a short, chubby, baby-faced man of twenty-one, from Faridkot village near Deepalpur in eastern Punjab. During his trip to Rawalpindi, he had joined the LeT in December 2007 and ended up at the organization's base camp near Lahore. His subsequent training was at a camp near Muzaffarabad in Pakistani-administered Kashmir. It included learning Hindi. During the visit to Faridkot in May 2008, he sought the blessing of his mother after telling her that he was going to engage in jihad to liberate Kashmir.
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In October 2008 the LeT
fidayeen
were ensconced in a safe house in Azizabad near Karachi airport, where they were taught how to navigate an inflatable boat. Their first foray by boat from Karachi failed because of choppy waters. It was their second attempt that succeeded and made a spectacular mark in the history of global terrorism.

The Most Documented Sixty Hours Ever

Dressed in navy-blue T-shirts and jeans, and armed with revolvers, AK-47 assault rifles, ammunition, hand grenades, explosives, mobile and satellite phones, and dried fruit, the LeT attackers left Karachi on an inflatable dinghy on a 310-mile voyage to Mumbai. During their journey, once past the Indian port of Porbandar, they seized an Indian fishing trawler,
MV Kuber
. After killing its crew of four, they forced the captain, Amar Singh Solanki, to sail to Mumbai, the commercial capital of India. As they neared their destination, they murdered Solanki.

Guided by the GPS coordinates on their “old used Garmin set,”
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they landed safely at the Gateway of India in South Mumbai on a rubber dinghy. It was eight
pm
on November 26. Their main targets were the Chhatrapati Shivaji Railway Terminus (CSRT)—popularly called VT, the acronym for Victoria Terminus named after Queen Victoria—the landmark Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, the Oberoi-Trident Hotel, and the Nariman House, a Jewish community center. LeT planners wanted to hit the commercial elite of India staying at the most prestigious hotels of Mumbai and the visiting Israelis using the Nariman House, and create mass panic and confusion by slaughtering ordinary Indians at a busy railway terminus. They had instructed their charges to familiarize themselves with the locations of their targets by using Google Earth maps.

At the crowded passenger hall of the CSRT, while Kasab sprayed his submachine gun, his companion, the twenty-five-year-old Abu Dera Ismail Khan, threw hand grenades. They killed 58 people, including 22 Muslims, and injured 104 in fifteen minutes. They then hijacked a car and went on a shooting spree. When they encountered a police barricade near the beach, they tried to turn around. In the subsequent gun battle, Khan was killed, and Kasab was apprehended alive. This proved to be an invaluable asset for the Indian authorities. Eager to save his life and limb, Kasab readily provided vital information, including the fate of the fishing trawler, which proved authentic.

Armed with the layouts of their respective targets, the remaining eight terrorists split up, with four assaulting the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Apollo Bunder with its 560 rooms and 44 suites. Once there, they fired their AK-47s in marble hallways and broke down doors, mowing down those hiding behind them. The remainder of the terrorist gang headed for the luxury Oberoi-Trident Hotel and the Nariman House. According to radio transmissions picked up by Indian intelligence, the terrorists were told by their handlers based in the LeT office in Karachi that the lives of Jews were worth fifty times those of non-Jews.
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The gunmen were directed by their handlers from inside Pakistan via mobile phones and Voice over Internet Protocol. “Inflict maximum damage,” a controller in Pakistan urged the attackers at the Oberoi-Trident Hotel. “Keep fighting. Don't be taken alive.”
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As the Indian intelligence agents managed to listen and record the conversations between the terrorists and their handlers in Pakistan, they realized that the attackers were monitoring broadcasts by Indian and foreign television channels and garnering vital information. So the Indian authorities blocked the TV feeds to the Taj Mahal and Oberoi-Trident Hotels. But that still left their handlers in Karachi free to monitor telecast news and inform the gunmen.

Taken by surprise, the state and central governments stumbled badly before mobilizing the local police, the National Security Guard (NSG), and Marine commandos, as well as the Rapid Action Force troops. By the morning of November 27, the NSG secured the Nariman House and the Oberoi-Trident Hotel.

After a briefing to the media by Home Minister Shivraj Patil at eleven
am
on November 27, describing the attacks as “very disturbing,” there was no official announcement until a TV broadcast by Prime Minister Singh at seven thirty
pm
, which had been originally scheduled for four thirty
pm
. The delay of three hours ratcheted up public anxiety; people were eager to know how the authorities were reacting to the events being telecast by droves of Indian and foreign TV channels. Singh was measured in his address, which lacked a strong message and failed to reassure the people that their government was in control of the situation.

As it was, ending the siege of the Taj Mahal Hotel, where the terrorists had resorted to lining up the guests to single out the Americans and Israelis as their quarry, proved far more arduous. The captors, stunned by the opulence of the luxury hotel, bracketed the suffering of Kashmiri Muslims with that of the Palestinians at the hands of Israel. Yelling at
his frightened captives, a terrorist yelled, “Did you know that a Zionist general [Avi Mizrahi] visited Kashmir two months ago?”
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The prime minister rushed to Mumbai on November 28 and spent the day presiding over a meeting of top state officials and visiting the injured in hospitals.

At the Taj Mahal Hotel, a denouement was reached when the attackers set off six explosions—one in the lobby, two in the elevators, and three in the restaurant. This led to the NSG mounting its Operation Black Tornado to flush out the attackers. They all ended up dead, either as victims of the security forces' fire or as suicides. The extraordinarily savage episode ended at eight
am
on November 29.

Blood tests on the terrorists showed they had taken cocaine and LSD to help them sustain their energy and stay awake for two-and-a-half days. Police claimed to have found syringes at the scenes of the carnage.

By the time the sixty-hour outrage ended, 166 people, including 28 foreigners, including 6 Americans, were killed. Of the 293 injured, all but 37 were Indian. The military-style terrorist attack in Mumbai became known as 26/11 in India.

An unprecedented feature of 26/11 was the widespread use of social networks to communicate information about the violent act being televised nonstop. It became the most well-documented terrorist attack to date. In diplomatic terms, it wiped out the trust and confidence the two neighbors had built up in stages since 2004. Indo-Pakistan relations became inextricably tied to the progress made by Pakistan to bring the perpetrators of the 26/11 attack to justice.

Delhi-Islamabad Relations in Deep Freeze

The bloody Mumbai saga set off a cascade of diplomatic activity, with telephone lines between Delhi, Washington, and Islamabad buzzing, and US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice acting as the key player. The frantic conversations between the top officials in these capitals resulted in crossed wires and confusion, which raised the prospect of a hot war between the nuclear-armed neighbors.

Acting on the cumulative evidence provided by Kasab and intercepts of the conversations between the terrorists and their handlers in Karachi, Singh called his Pakistani counterpart, Gilani, on November 28. He suggested the dispatch of ISI chief Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja
Pasha to Delhi to see India's evidence of the LeT's links with the terrorists. Gilani agreed. But when he approached Pasha's superior, COAS General Kayani, and President Zardari, they overruled sending the ISI director-general to Delhi. A compromise followed. Gilani settled for dispatching a lesser representative of the ISI instead.

Islamabad maintained that the LeT had nothing to do with the Mumbai outrage, which the Pakistani media, briefed by officials, attributed to Bangladeshi and Indian criminals. When the Indian authorities revealed that the arrested suspect was a son of Amir Shahban Kasab from Faridkot, the Islamabad government insisted that such a person did not exist in Pakistan. In stark contrast, investigative journalist Saeed Shah traveled to Faridkot to try to track down Ajmal Amir Kasab's family.
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Shah then consulted the electoral rolls for Faridkot and found the names and national identity card numbers of Kasab Senior and his wife, Noor Illahi. Several other reporters followed his lead. On the night of December 3 the Kasab couple would disappear mysteriously.

On November 29 Singh chaired a meeting of the military high command and intelligence chiefs. Air Chief Marshal Fali Homi Major strongly advocated surgical strikes at the terrorist training camps in Pakistani Kashmir. The prime minister promised to discuss this option at the next meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Security, which tilted toward hitting the camps. Armed with a clandestine report on this high-level debate, the CIA station chief in Delhi concluded that India was about to attack Pakistan. He instantly reported this to the CIA director, General Michael Hayden, who conveyed this information to President George W. Bush.

The previous day, India's foreign minister, Pranab Mukherjee, and his Pakistani counterpart, Mukhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi, who happened to be in Delhi during the Mumbai attacks, had a heated telephone conversation. After stating that “all options” were open to India to avenge the Mumbai carnage, Mukherjee added that “they [Pakistanis] were leaving us no choice but to go to war.”
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Qureshi interpreted Mukherjee's words as a warning of an upcoming war and informed Prime Minister Gilani.