Chicago Trial's Explosive Revelations (The Daily Beast)

NEW YORK – The verdict is in: David Headley's accomplice is found guilty. Sebastian Rotella reports on the unprecedented glimpse into the terrorist mindset the case offered-and the fallout for U.S.-Pakistan relations.

The terrorism trial of Tahawwur Rana, a minor accomplice whose trial ended Thursday in a guilty verdict on two of three counts, offered an extraordinary look into the underworld of terrorism and espionage in South Asia and had repercussions much closer to home.

The five days of testimony of confessed American terrorist and Pakistani spy David Coleman Headley were unprecedented in a U.S. courtroom. Headley delivered explosive revelations about how officers in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) funded, supported and directed the 2008 Mumbai attacks along with the Lashkar-i-Taiba militant group.

Because of his mix of front-line experience and high-level contacts, Headley's testimony was like a seminar in how terrorists communicate in code, do surveillance on targets and assemble plots while spies oversee the operations from the shadows like puppeteers. The case also showed how a growing number of serving and former Pakistani military officers have put their lethal talents at the service of Lashkar, al Qaeda and other groups. It revealed the impunity with which ISI officers and terrorists alike operate in Pakistan even when they target Americans and other Westerners. (See our readers' guide to the trial.)

The evidence combined with the indictment of Headley's ISI handler in the murders of six American victims of the Mumbai attacks has worsened the already troubled U.S. Pakistani-relationship. "The trial has been yet another bump in the road for U.S.-Pakistan relations," said Stephen Tankel, author of a forthcoming book titled Storming the World Stage: the Story of Lashkar-e-Taiba.

At the same time, the trial left enduring mysteries.

It did not answer questions about whether Sajid Mir, a Lashkar mastermind caught on tape directing the slaughter in Mumbai by phone, was once a Pakistani military officer. It did not explore the extent to which ISI chiefs beyond Headley's handler, known only as Major Iqbal, were aware of the Mumbai plot, which ultimately killed 166 people. Headley testified that he believed top ISI leadership was not aware, but he also said he thought Iqbal's commanding officer and his unit of the spy agency knew about the operation.

Finally, prosecutors managed to skirt two delicate and interconnected issues that the U.S. government refuses to discuss: Headley's role as a U.S. informant and the failure of the FBI to stop his terrorist activity despite at least six warnings during seven years. Headley revealed that he was simultaneously an extremist and an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration for at least two years, and that he gathered counterterror intelligence as well as doing anti-drug work.

Headley testified that he stopped working for the DEA in September 2002, but that did not change contradictions and gaps in the U.S. government's official version. The DEA has stated that he was deactivated in early 2002, while other agencies have said he remained an informant until as late as 2005.

"The lack of clarity reinforces suspicions that the U.S. government knew more about Headley than it has revealed."

The lack of clarity reinforces suspicions that the U.S. government knew more about Headley than it has revealed and that his role as an informant shielded him from more aggressive scrutiny in the years before his arrest in October 2009.

"I don't feel we got the whole story about Headley as an informant from the Americans," said a European counterterror official involved in the investigation. "I believe he was a drug informant and also some other kind of informant."

The jury did not get the whole story either. Headley had already pleaded guilty to doing reconnaissance in Mumbai and for a plot in Denmark. The official focus of the trial was the narrower issue of charges of material support of terrorism against Rana, who owns an immigration consulting firm in Chicago. He was accused of supporting Headley's reconnaissance for the Mumbai and Denmark attacks and of overall support for Lashkar. Prosecutors charged that Rana let Headley open an office of the firm in Mumbai and use the business as cover for his surveillance in India and Denmark.

The verdict suggested a common-sense analysis by the jury. Headley testified that the Mumbai plot was a joint operation in which he was directed by Major Iqbal of the ISI and the Lashkar handler named Mir. The defense established that Rana communicated with Major Iqbal, but not any Lashkar masterminds. Rana's lawyers argued that Headley, Rana's boyhood friend, was a skilled manipulator who convinced Rana that he was doing intelligence for the ISI against India, Pakistan's arch-enemy, and kept him in the dark about the Mumbai plot.

The acquittal on the charge of supporting the Mumbai plot indicates that the jury accepted that argument. But they apparently rejected the idea that Rana remained a dupe once the carnage in India had happened. Headley soon enlisted Rana to assist his reconnaissance on a newspaper in Denmark that has become an internationally known target of terrorists after publishing caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad in 2005. Because Rana was a devout Muslim, it seems hard to believe he did not suspect anything at that point.

Rana's conviction is a small victory. Washington has been pressing Pakistan for more than a year to arrest Major Iqbal as well as Mir and a half-a-dozen other Lashkar chiefs who have been implicated as masterminds. Despite abundant evidence and the U.S. federal indictment, the Pakistani government has not pursued those fugitives. They are not in hiding and continue to be involved in terrorist plotting, U.S. investigators say.

Lashkar is simply too powerful and too close to the Pakistani security forces, according to Western and Indian counterterror officials. Pakistani officials fear that arresting major figures in Lashkar, which has not attacked the Pakistani state, could result in violent backlash and further instability.

"They think they have to leave these Lashkar cadres free to control the organization," an Indian anti-terror official said. "They are worried that if they move against them, it could be a civil-war situation."

An award-winning foreign correspondent and investigative reporter, Sebastian worked for almost 23 years for the Los Angeles Times, covering everything from terrorism to arts to the Mexican border. He served most recently as a national security correspondent in Washington, D.C., and his previous posts include international investigative correspondent and bureau chief in Paris and Buenos Aires, with assignments in the Middle East and North Africa.

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Testimony of a Betrayer: A Terrorist Operative in Chicago (Time.com)

David Headley is not on trial in Chicago's Everett McKinley Dirksen federal courthouse. But he is the star of the proceedings, the chief witness against a man who was once his friend. There is nothing ordinary about the case: it kicks off from Headley's confessed and key role as a perpetrator of one horrific terrorist attack - the three-day November 2008 assault on Mumbai - and details his part in planning another incident in Denmark, all in the quest to convict a former boarding school classmate, in part, for abetting Headley's own criminal actions.

For someone so tall and apparently sturdy, Headley, 50, speaks in a surprisingly soft voice, so soft that at several points during his testimony the court clerk and attorneys have asked him to speak up. But the testimony, when it is audible or read out loud from exhibits, is chilling, sending tremors halfway around the world and roiling the already unfriendly relations of nuclear-armed neighbors India and Pakistan. (See photos of the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks.)

Headley says he cased Mumbai for the Army of the Righteous - Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) - the banned Pakistani extremist group accused of plotting the attack on India's financial capital. Under oath, he said that Pakistan's spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), provided financial and military guidance for Lashkar and other militant groups. "I assumed these groups were under the same umbrella," Headley said in court, identifying at least one ISI operative as an overseer of the Mumbai plot.

The original assault plan had focused on Mumbai's central train station, a Jewish community center that Headley believed was an outlet for Israel's secret service, a popular tourist cafe, a movie house, a school, a police station, a hospital and the landmark Taj Mahal Palace and Tower hotel. Lashkar leaders initially did not put Mumbai's upscale Oberoi Trident hotel on its list. But on a whim, Headley decided to take video and photographs of it and the hotel ultimately wound up on a target. Of the 160 people killed in the three-day Mumbai massacre, 32 were staff and guests at the Oberoi.

On his second day of testimony, Headley said that one of his ISI handlers, identified as "Major Iqbal," expressed disappointment that Mumbai's airport was not included among the targets. As for the attack on Mumbai's Jewish community center, Chabad House, the operative allegedly told Headley it "would be revenge" for Israeli actions against Palestinians. (See photos of the 2008 Mumbai attack.)

On the day the Mumbai attacks began, Headley was in Lahore, Pakistan, and received a text message that read: "Turn on the television." As he watched the initial reports, Headley recalls thinking, "I was pleased." By December 2008, he'd returned to the U.S. and said that he detailed to an alleged co-conspirator how the Mumbai attacks transpired, declaring, "We're even with India." That alleged co-plotter was Tahawwur Hussain Rana, 50, the man now on trial in Chicago, who looked blankly into the jury box as his former friend testified against him. In exchange for his cooperation with the U.S. government, Headley, who has confessed to his participation in the Mumbai and Danish plots, will not be extradited to India, Pakistan or Denmark for trial; federal prosecutors will also not seek the death penalty against him when he is sentenced. As for Rana, if he is convicted of conspiring to help Headley and other planners of terrorist attacks in Mumbai and Copenhagen, he could be sentenced to life in prison.

Rana first met Headley at a Pakistani military boarding school. At that time, Headley was called Daood Sayed Gilani, a transplant to Pakistan from his birthplace in Washington D.C., his father a Pakistani diplomat and his mother the daughter of a prominent American football player. It was the first of his many identities, which would shift through the years as he chose to collaborate with shadowy figures of his American and Pakistani existences.

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After his parents divorced, Headley was brought back to Pakistan by his father. At 17, he moved back to the U.S. to live with his mother in Philadelphia, apparently above a bar she owned called the Khyber Pass. Not much is known about Headley's early 20s in the U.S. but by the time he was 27 he would be arrested on his first drug charge - which would lead to the first time he cooperated with authorities to get a lesser sentence. He was 37 when he was arrested for smuggling heroin into the U.S. from Pakistan. Again, he chose to cooperate with the U.S. in exchange for a lenience, becoming a paid informant working in Pakistan for the federal government. At the same time, he may have begun his association with Lashkar-e-Toiba in Pakistan. In fact, during altercations with the women he lived with in the U.S., law enforcement officials were told by the "wives" that Headley had terrorist ties. But even after 9/11, this apparently did not raise alarms in the U.S.

It was about 2006, that Headley officially dropped the name Daood Gilani and reconnected with Rana. As Rana's chief lawyer, Charlie Swift, would portray it, the rekindled friendship was a case of "the bad boy and the good boy" - with his client being the latter. Indeed, Rana's life had been one of striving and enterprise. Trained as a military doctor, he served with coalition forces in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf war against Saddam Hussein. He later chose to move to Canada where he became a citizen before finding his way to Chicago's large, prosperous South Asian community. Unable to get relicensed to practice medicine in the U.S., he became the business partner of an American and opened First World Immigration Service, an outfit which helped scientists, doctors and other professionals navigate through the U.S. immigration process. Tall, lean, professorial and pious, Rana would buy a farm in Kinsman, Illinois, about 80 miles southwest of Chicago, to grow and slaughter goats for halal markets across the Midwest. (Read "Alleged Chicago Jihadi: Key Role in the Mumbai Attacks?")

For Headley, Rana was a practical connection: his immigration business would provide cover for him to conduct surveillance trips into South Asia and other parts of the world. Headley testified that Rana "could be convinced to help us out." For Pakistan, India has always been the primal enemy, with the chief battleground the disputed region of Kashmir. The two countries have gone to war a number of times, with the Pakistani military coming off the worse for the most part. It is easy to believe that Headley and Rana, former classmates at a military academy, would have bonded over Pakistan's quest for Kashmir - cemented by the militant piety that Headley had been inculcated with by the LeT. Indeed, Headley testified that, apart from a focus on Kashmir, one of the goals of LeT was to wage jihad in retaliation against India's failure to protect its Muslim minority from violence.

Headley testified that he told Rana of nearly every aspect of his weeks-long combat training camps in Pakistan with the LeT, including why he changed his name - "Nobody would be able to tell I'm a Muslim or Pakistani." He said he played on Rana's guilt for having abandoned Pakistan's military and moving to Canada and the U.S. in order to win him over to waging the LeT's vision of jihad. Headley testified that Rana once believed that a military jihad could only truly be declared by a head of state, not a religious figure or any ordinary Muslim. Headley said he dismissed that belief and convinced Rana that jihad was a religious duty.

David Headley's declarations have so far taken center stage in this trial. They are explosive, but hardly unexpected. Indians do not need to be convinced that Pakistan was behind the Mumbai massacre. The Pakistani government, for its part, has consistently denied Headley's testimony, much of which has been familiar since he started cooperating with the U.S. after his arrest in October 2009. In the struggle between the two enemy nations, David Headley embodies certain truisms that either country would be loath to give up - and now appear to have the imprimatur of sworn testimony in a U.S. court of law.

But the legal procedures in Chicago, in the end, will not be about Headley but about the guilt or innocence of Tahawwur Hussain Rana. And if defense lawyers play it right, a jury may not need much help to puncture the claims of a prosecution star witness who has been willing to collaborate again and again with anyone willing to offer him an escape clause - in this specific instance, betraying a friend that he set up as an accomplice. Charlie Swift, Rana's chief defense attorney, knows there's one thing he must ultimately prove: "Rana was totally unaware of what he was getting into."

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Mumbai attacks plotter fingers Pakistan at Chicago trial (AFP)

CHICAGO (AFP) – The Pakistani-American who spent months casing out Mumbai ahead of the 2008 attacks told a Chicago jury Monday that Pakistan's spy service supports terrorist group he worked with on the deadly siege.

David Coleman Headley testified that Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) provided financial, military and moral support to banned militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).

"I assumed these groups operated under the same umbrella -- they coordinated with each other," Headley told the jury as he described his path to terrorism and the bloody 60-hour siege of India's largest city that left 166 people dead.

Headley described his relationship with an ISI handler identified as "Major Iqbal" who gave him $25,000 to help cover the cost of his surveillance work.

"I told him what kind of (terrorist) training I did and he mentioned he was part of Lashkar" Headley said.

Headley testified that after he told Iqbal of a plot he was working on in 2003, Iqbal asked him "to do something that was more important, which was intelligence work for the ISI."

Headley formally admitted to 12 terrorism charges in March 2010 after prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty or to allow him to be extradited to either India, Pakistan or Denmark to face related charges.

He was testifying at the trial of an old friend from military school in Pakistan -- Chicago businessman Tahawwur Hussain Rana -- who stands accused of providing Headley with a cover and acting as a messenger.

The proceedings are likely to add fuel to a diplomatic crisis over suspicions of official Pakistani complicity with terrorism after US commandos killed ex-Al-QOsama bin Laden on May 2 in a garrison city just 55 kilometers (35 miles) from Islamabad.

However, while US prosecutors named ISI officers as co-conspirators in the Mumbai attacks, it is not yet clear whether they were acting independently or with the approval and aid of senior officials.

The Washington-born son of a former Pakistani diplomat and an American woman, Headley admitted to spending months scoping out sites for the Mumbai siege and plotting to kill a Danish cartoonist.

In a plot that reads like a movie thriller, Headley spent two years scouting Mumbai, even taking boat tours around the city's harbor to identify landing sites for the attackers and befriending Bollywood stars as part of his cover.

The attacks stalled a fragile four-year peace process between the two South Asian neighbors and nuclear-armed rivals which was only resumed in February.

Rana -- who holds Canadian citizenship -- insisted after his 2009 arrest that he was a pacifist "duped" into letting his old friend use his immigration services company as a cover.

In opening statements Monday, his lawyers tried to undermine Headley's credibility and insisted that Rana thought he was helping the ISI, not terrorists.

"Headley is a master manipulator who made a fool of Dr. Rana," defense attorney Charlie Swift told jurors.

"The question is that at the end of this case will David Headley make a fool out of all us. I'm confident he won't."

But prosecutors said Rana knew exactly what he was doing, and told jurors they would hear secret recordings in which Rana praised the Mumbai attackers.

"The defendant knew what Headley was doing and he helped him," said US Attorney Sarah Streicker.

"In a complicated and sophisticated attack, not everyone carries a weapon. But support people are just as important."

None of the other co-conspirators are in US custody and a spokesman for the US Attorney's Office declined to say whether the US government would be seeking their extradition or even knows their whereabouts.

Headley -- who changed his name from Daood Gilani so he could hide his Pakistani heritage -- joined LeT in 2002, attending training camps five times over the next three years.

He began working with an Al-Qaeda-linked group in Pakistan called Harakat-ul-Jihad al-Islami on the Danish plot after LeT became preoccupied with the final planning for the Mumbai attack.

Headley was arrested at Chicago's O'Hare airport on his way to deliver 13 surveillance videos he obtained after pretending to be interested in buying ads in Jyllands-Posten, Denmark's highest circulation daily.

The newspaper triggered a furor in the Muslim world by publishing 12 cartoons of Prophet Mohammed in 2005.

Rana's trial is expected to last about four weeks.

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Mumbai terror trial gets under way in Chicago (AP)

CHICAGO – A Chicago courtroom could become the unlikely venue for revealing alleged connections between the terrorist group blamed for the 2008 rampage that killed more than 160 people in Mumbai and Pakistan's main intelligence agency, which has come under increased scrutiny following Osama bin Laden's killing.

Jury selection began Monday in the case against Chicago businessman Tahawwur Rana, who is accused of helping a former boarding school friend serve as a scout for the militant group that carried out the three-day attack in India's largest city. Though the accusations against Rana are fairly straightforward, the trial's implications could be enormous.

To make their case, federal prosecutors may lay out alleged ties between Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group blamed for the attacks, and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, known as the ISI. The trial comes amid growing suspicion that the ISI was complicit in harboring bin Laden, who was killed by Navy SEALs during a May 2 raid, and could lead to further strains in the already frayed relations between Pakistan and the U.S.

The key government witness could be David Coleman Headley, a Pakistani-American with a troubled past who pleaded guilty last year to laying the groundwork for the Mumbai attack by Lashkar-e-Taiba. Headley, who is cooperating with U.S. officials, told interrogators that the ISI provided training and funds for the attack against India, Pakistan's long nemesis.

Headley told authorities that Rana provided him with cover for a series of scouting missions he conducted in Mumbai. Headley also told interrogators that he was in contact with another militant, who has ties to al-Qaida, as part of a separate plot to bomb a Danish newspaper that printed cartoons that offended Muslims.

"What you'll have now in Chicago is a trial which will undoubtedly demonstrate links between Pakistan government agencies and one of the most competent terrorist organizations operating in South Asia — Lashkar-e-Taiba," said Seth Jones, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corp. The trial "just adds more fuel to an already tense situation."

Nearly 100 potential jurors showed up Monday at the downtown Chicago courthouse and were asked to fill out forms with a range of questions, from their views on Islam to knowledge of Pakistani militant groups. Jury selection is expected to last several days.

Rana, who has been in custody since his arrest in 2009, wore a gray suit and told potential jurors "Good morning" when they entered the courtroom. One of his attorneys, Charles Swift, told reporters he was encouraged by the diversity of the jury pool and was confident they would find his client not guilty.

Experts say Lashkar-e-Taiba, which means "Army of the Pure," was created with the ISI's help in the 1980s as a proxy fighting force to battle with India over the disputed territory of Kashmir. Counterterrorism officials say the group has gained strength with the help of the ISI since then, possibly with the help of retired officers. Pakistani officials have denied any ties with the group.

Lashkar-e-Taiba is accused of carrying out the three-day siege in Mumbai in which 10 gunmen attacked two luxury hotels, a Jewish center and a busy train station in India's financial capital, killing 166 people, including six Americans.

Rana, a Canadian national who has lived in Chicago for years, owns a Chicago-based First World Immigration Services, in the city's South Asian enclave. Prosecutors say Rana provided cover for Headley by letting him open a First World office in Mumbai and travel as a supposed representative for the agency. He also allegedly helped Headley make travel arrangements as part of the plot against the Danish newspaper that in 2005 printed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, which angered many Muslims worldwide.

Rana is charged with providing material support for terrorism in India and Denmark. In court documents, Rana's attorneys have said he believed Headley was working for Pakistani intelligence. Headley also told authorities that he told Rana he "had been asked to perform espionage work for the ISI," according to a court filing.

Rana's attorneys have said part of their defense will be to show that Headley used his connections with the ISI to explain what he was doing. But U.S. District Court Judge Harry Leinenweber has ruled that that proposed defense was "objectively unreasonable."

Prosecutors have declined to comment ahead of the trial. A senior Pakistani intelligence official said he hasn't been following the trial and didn't have comment on it.

Some experts doubt the trial will reveal much, saying federal prosecutors may work hard to keep sensitive information from surfacing, and Headley is not the most credible witness. Headley reached a plea deal with prosecutors in the terrorism case in exchange for avoiding the death penalty and previously had been an informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration after a drug conviction.

Details of Headley's possible testimony were revealed last year in an Indian government report detailing what he had allegedly told Indian investigators during questioning in Chicago.

In the report, Headley is cited describing how the ISI was deeply involved in planning the Mumbai attacks and how he reported to a man known only as "Major Iqbal," whom he called his Lashkar "handler." But some experts have suggested Iqbal could be a retired ISI officer, or that he may not even exist. In the indictment, his name is listed as unknown, and he's referred to only under the alias "Major Iqbal."

Rana is actually the seventh name on the indictment, and the only defendant in custody. Among the six others charged in absentia are "Major Iqbal" and Sajid Mir, allegedly another Lashkar-e-Taiba supervisor who also "handled" Headley.

Also indicted is Ilyas Kashmiri, who also is believed by Western intelligence to be al-Qaida's operational chief in Pakistan. During his travels for spying and training, Headley allegedly met with Kashmiri in Pakistan, and Kashmiri gave him instructions on how to carry out the Danish newspaper bombing, which ultimately never occurred.

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Associated Press senior television producer Tracy Brown in Washington and AP writer Sebastian Abbott in Islamabad contributed to this report.

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