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The American Behind India’s 9/11—And How U.S. Botched Chances to Stop Him

Headley, meanwhile, wrapped up his mission. The targets were chosen by Major Iqbal, an officer in a military that has received billions of dollars from the United States. Iqbal wanted to ensure that Americans and Jews would die.

Responding to dissent in Lashkar and defections to al Qaeda and other groups, the ISI and Lashkar designed the attack to fortify the group’s global image, according to Headley and other sources. There are also suspicions that hard-line ISI officers and militants wanted to torpedo attempts at rapprochement between India and Pakistan.

The dimensions and duration of the plot, which could have caused a war, make it hard to believe high-ranking ISI officials were not aware of it, U.S. counterterror experts say.

“The way the ISI is structured and the way things function in that part of the world, this is not a couple of guys,” said Charles Faddis, a former CIA counterterror chief who worked in South Asia. “This is not a couple of junior or mid-level individuals who have the capacity to put together this level of an operation and escape detection. That’s just not credible. So whether that translates to a decision by ISI formally as an institution from the top down or not, I can’t say. … But it’s going to have to be sanctioned at a pretty senior level.”

The final targets were the Taj hotel, the Leopold Café, the Chabad House Jewish community center, the CST train station and the Oberoi-Trident Hotel. The Oberoi had not been on Headley’s reconnaissance list, but he scouted it anyway.

“I was in the area, and I was going to watch a movie in a nearby theater, and I had about an hour left,” he testified. “So I went there, and I just made the video.”

Thirty-three people died at the Oberoi because of his whim. They included Naomi Scherr, a 13-year-old from Virginia who was shot in the head as she ate dinner with her father, who also died.

Chapter 7: “Congrats On Your Graduation”

On the night of Nov. 26, 2008, Headley was at home in Lahore when Mir sent him a text message. It said: “Turn on your television.”

The siege of Mumbai lasted three excruciating days. The 10-man attack team arrived by sea, landing at a fishermen’s slum chosen by Headley for its strategic location. The young gunmen had never been to India. They were guided by Headley’s videos and written reports, his provision of GPS coordinates and his work with a Pakistani Navy frogman on the maritime approach.

Mir and other Lashkar bosses directed the slaughter by phone from a command post in Karachi. Their calls were intercepted by Indian intelligence and have been subsequently broadcast in international television reports.

Headley watched the coverage with his Moroccan wife; they had reconciled weeks earlier. He got a celebratory email from his Pakistani wife, whom he had moved with their children to Chicago in September. The wife knew about his reconnaissance and praised him in an email using coded language, according to court testimony.

“Congrats on your graduation,” the wife wrote on Nov. 28, according to court documents. “Graduation ceremony is really great. Watched the movie the whole day.”

Headley was already thinking about his next mission.

In October, Major Iqbal and Mir had visited him at home, the first time he had seen his ISI and Lashkar handlers together, according to Headley’s testimony. They wanted to take their holy war to Europe. They assigned him to scout the Jyllands-Posten newspaper of Denmark, a terrorist target because it had published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

Headley visited his family in Chicago over the Christmas holiday. He learned that yet another tipster had gone to the FBI, according to his testimony. It was a female friend of his mother, who had died earlier in the year. Apparently motivated by news of the Mumbai attacks, the woman contacted the Wilmington, Del., FBI office, which passed the lead to the Philadelphia field office.

Interviewed on Dec. 1, the tipster said Headley’s mother had told her years earlier that her son was fighting alongside militants in Pakistan. The tipster said she believed he was still involved in militant activity. FBI agents reviewed records and found “most or all” of the warnings dating back to 2001, according to a senior U.S. law enforcement official.

On Dec. 21, agents interviewed Farid Gilani, Headley’s cousin in Philadelphia. He deceived them by saying Headley was in Pakistan, according to testimony. The cousin called Headley in Chicago to alert him, according to testimony. In an email to a militant in Pakistan, Headley speculated that the FBI’s interest was related to the allegations months earlier at the U.S. embassy by his Moroccan wife, whom he called “M2.”

“So I think that it is OK, just routine, because of what M2 said before,” Headley wrote on Dec. 24.

Lashkar had just pulled off a terror spectacular, killing six Americans. Headley was an American. Half a dozen leads over seven years painted a picture connecting him to Lashkar and the Taj hotel.

Yet, the FBI did not go find him in Chicago. Agents put the inquiry on hold because they thought he was out of the country, officials say.