Who Killed Daniel Pearl Read online

  WHO KILLED DANIEL PEARL?

  Bernard-Henri Lévy is France’s leading philosopher and one of the most esteemed and bestselling writers in Europe. He has also served on diplomatic missions for the French government—most recently, to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. He first wrote about the region in 1971, as a war correspondent covering the conflict between India and Pakistan over Bangladesh. The first of his 30 books, Red India, was about that conflict.

  James X. Mitchell is a screenwriter and translator living in Paris.

  BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY

  WHO KILLED DANIEL PEARL?

  TRANSLATED BY JAMES X. MITCHELL

  First published in 2003

  by Hardie Grant Books

  12 Claremont Street

  South Yarra, Victoria 3141, Australia

  www.hardiegrant.com.au

  This edition published in 2004

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means,

  electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without

  the prior written permission of the publishers and copyright holders.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Copyright text © Bernard-Henri Lévy 2003

  Originally published in the French by Editions Grasset & Fasquelle 2003

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication Data:

  Lévy, Bernard-Henri.

  [Qui a tué Daniel Pearl. English].

  Who killed Daniel Pearl?

  ISBN 1 74066 206 7

  1. Pearl, Daniel, 1963 – Assassination. 2. Journalists – Crimes

  against – United States. I. Title.

  070.92.

  Typeset by Pauline Haas, Girl’s Own Graphics

  Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  FOR ADAM PEARL

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  FOREWORD

  PART ONE DANNY

  CHAPTER 1 A NIGHT IN KARACHI

  CHAPTER 2 HOUSE OF TORMENT

  CHAPTER 3 A MYSTERIOUS SMILE

  CHAPTER 4 MISE À MORT

  CHAPTER 5 WITH THE PEARLS

  CHAPTER 6 DANNY’S FACE

  PART TWO OMAR

  CHAPTER 1 IN THE EYE OF THE ASSASSIN

  CHAPTER 2 A PERFECT ENGLISHMAN

  CHAPTER 3 WHY BOSNIA?

  CHAPTER 4 RETURN TO SARAJEVO

  CHAPTER 5 FROM ONE PORTRAIT, ANOTHER

  CHAPTER 6 RECONSTITUTION OF A CRIME

  PART THREE CRIME OF STATE

  CHAPTER 1 MYSTERIES OF KARACHI

  CHAPTER 2 PRESS REVIEW

  CHAPTER 3 A SHADOWY AFFAIR

  CHAPTER 4 THE DOUBLE LIFE OF OMAR

  CHAPTER 5 WHEN THE KILLER CONFESSES

  CHAPTER 6 IN THE DEMON’S LAIR

  PART FOUR AL-QAIDA

  CHAPTER 1 RETURN TO THE HOUSE OF THE CRIME

  CHAPTER 2 THE MOSQUE OF THE TALIBAN

  CHAPTER 3 JIHAD MONEY

  CHAPTER 4 AT THE HEART OF DARKNESS

  CHAPTER 5 BIN LADEN’S FAVORED SON

  CHAPTER 6 BAD OMENS FOR THE INVESTIGATOR

  PART FIVE “OVER INTRUSIVE”

  CHAPTER 1 A FELLOW OF NO COLLECTIVE IMPORTANCE

  CHAPTER 2 THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH

  CHAPTER 3 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF DANIEL PEARL

  CHAPTER 4 THE ASSASSINS ARE AMONG US

  CHAPTER 5 THE BOMB FOR BIN LADEN?

  CHAPTER 6 GENTLE ISLAM

  FOREWORD

  This book begins 31 January 2002, the day of the death of Daniel Pearl, the American journalist kidnapped, then decapitated, in Karachi, by a gang of religious madmen.

  I will say, when the time comes, where, and in what circumstances, I was when I saw for the first time the image of his decapitation.

  I will tell how and why I decided that day, though I didn’t know the man, to take the time necessary to grasp the mystery of his death.

  The investigation lasted one year.

  It took me from Karachi to Kandahar, New Delhi, Washington, London, and back to Karachi.

  This is the story.

  It is the account of his investigation, of his search for the truth, that is the material of this work: as raw as possible; as close as I can to what I saw and experienced; the role of doubt and that of conviction; the dead-ends and small steps forward; the true and false witnesses; those who talk because they know you know; the hidden actors who confide their part of the secret or, on the contrary, mislead you; the moments when the hunter, the investigator, has the impression of being the hunted; fear like an ominous feeling or fair warning—the fear without which the report fails to convey the atmosphere of the gray areas, of shadows in stark light, typical of dubious places; the facts, only the facts, and, when the real was not available, some involuntary part of the imaginary looms.

  The first subject of this investigation was, of course, Pearl himself.

  The enigma of those “gentle men” of whom Dostoyevski speaks.

  The life of this fine journalist, an American and a Jew, but who was many other things as well: a citizen of the planet, a man curious about other men, at home in the world, friend to the forgotten, living life to the fullest, standing in solidarity with the downtrodden, detached and engaged, generous and irresistibly optimistic; a luminous character who made it his duty, if needed, to think counter to himself; he was a man who had chosen to answer evil with good and, above all, to understand.

  His death, then.

  A chronicle of this death.

  Who he saw.

  What he did.

  If there was enough in the investigation he was conducting to explain that they should want him silenced and killed.

  So, an investigation of the investigation.

  Begin again, from the evidence he left, and in a sense in his place, the investigation that cost him his life.

  Retrace his steps. Find, from Islamabad to Karachi, the trail of this man who unwittingly entered a world of darkness. Walk like him. Observe like him. Try to think like him, to feel what he felt, and so to the very end, the instant of death and what he lived in that instant—one year to try to reconstruct the instant of the death of a man I have never met.

  Then, there are the others, those who assassinated him, and one in particular, the brains behind the crime, Omar Sheikh.

  The dread this individual inspires.

  The horror of his hatred of everything humane.

  But also, as with his victim, my stubborn will to understand—the will to enter, not into his reasons, but into his passion, his glacial delirium, the way he lives and reacts, the way he wanted and prepared his crime.

  Physics of bloody passions.

  Chemistry of a murderous vocation.

  Not the devil in the mind, but in the mind of the devil, to try to fathom something of this assassin’s torment of which others before Pearl were victims—and which others after him, alas, will be.

  How does it work, in this day and age, the demonic?

  What happens in the soul of a man who, without reason, in cold blood, chooses to espouse evil, to aim for the absolute crime?

  What is it that, in the start of this century, makes the abject become desire and destiny?

  Who are these new possessed who think anything is permitted, not because God doesn’t exist, but precisely because He exists and this existence drives them to madness?

  Distance and proximity.

  Extreme disgust and the will to understand.

  Omar, the laboratory.

  And then, finally, their world.

  This world which is also ours and in which
the atrocious death of Daniel Pearl was possible.

  This unknown world, without points of reference, whose gestation I have never, for the past ten years, tired of observing, between forgotten wars, the Bosnia engagement and the Rapport Afghan; a world whose new compartments the Pearl affair, with all it implies and everything it puts into play, with its unexpected ramifications, has allowed me to discover.

  This world of radical Islam with its codes and passwords, its secret territories, its nightmare mullahs breathing madness into souls, its minions, its field marshals.

  The universe of the new terrorism and, in particular, bin Laden, who we shall see had his place in this story and whose shadow, dark mystery, weapons of subtle or mass destruction, comings and goings, necessarily haunt these pages.

  And then these questions: the clash or not of cultures; one Islam or two; how can the Islam of light triumph over this cadaver-hungry God, grinding bodies and souls in the crucible of a distorted law; are the cold monsters of today still States? What response to hatred when it is the cement of a country adrift? What defense against theological politics fired white-hot? Is the spirit of crusade and the combat against the “Axis of Evil” the appropriate response? Must we resign ourselves to the fact that the failure of the Universal, the global will for vengeance, the regression, are the only echo to the affliction of the soul?

  A final word.

  If this book began at the beginning of the year 2002, the fact is that it ended in April 2003, in the middle of the Anglo-American war in Iraq.

  Completing it, I understand better why this war, from its initial premises, inspired in me such a feeling of malaise.

  It is certainly not that I am a pacifist.

  It is not that I am less sensitive than others to the idea of seeing the Iraqi people, who were dying a slow death forgotten by the world, delivered from their tyrant.

  But there I was, returning from that other world. During the entire time of the debate over the question of the priority of overthrowing Saddam and whether the planet’s fate was at stake in Baghdad, I was in the black hole of Karachi. And I couldn’t, and still can’t, help imagine that this war in Iraq—beyond its human and political costs, beyond the civilian deaths and the new spin it will give to the wicked wheel of the war between civilizations—attests to a singular error of historical calculation.

  A regime already largely disarmed while in the depths of Pakistan’s cities, nuclear secrets were traded.

  A tyrant in his autumn, a phantom of 20th century history, while, back there in Karachi, tomorrow’s barbarous configurations were being concocted.

  One of the last political dictators being consigned to ancient bestiaries— and, on the other side, beasts of unknown species rising up, with limitless ambitions, for whom politics is at best a useful fiction.

  And against this dictator, supporting this circus of a war served up to feed world opinion, a makeshift coalition where—supreme joke—we pretended to enlist this same Pakistan that I saw turning into the Devil’s own home.

  That also is the Pearl case.

  An invitation not to mistake this century for another.

  An opportunity to explore this silent hell, full of the living damned, where our next tragedies are hatching.

  PART ONE

  DANNY

  CHAPTER 1 A NIGHT IN KARACHI

  Arrival in Karachi.

  The first thing that hits you, even inside the airport, is the complete absence of Westerners.

  There was an Englishman on the plane, doubtless a diplomat, who embarked with me in Islamabad. But a bullet-proof car was waiting for him at the end of the tarmac and whisked him away, across the runways, before the other passengers had even begun to leave the plane.

  And then, the closed faces and the calls to prayer mixed with announcements of arrivals and departures. From the customs officer to the porter, from the beggars to the taxi drivers swooping down on me amid the helmeted soldiers patrolling the perimeter, a harsh, hostile expression lights up their eyes as I pass, an air of surprise also, or of incredulous curiosity, which says much about the incongruous nature of the presence here, in this spring of 2002, of a Western traveller. No women. This is striking, this impression of a world entirely devoid of women. And, lost in the crowd, eyes lined with kohl, hair the color of dark honey, a dark blue, stained and rumpled double-breasted suit, the pockets crammed with improbable papers—but with a carnationlike blossom at the lapel, as a sign of welcome, I suppose—the driver sent by the Marriott, who leads me to his car on the other side of the airport. Traffic is snarled. The police just found a bomb and took it outside near the parking lot to detonate it, forcing a massive gridlock of vehicles to one side.

  “American?” he asks after a long moment, observing me in the rearview mirror.

  “No, French.”

  He seems relieved. France’s stance on Iraq, perhaps. France’s policy in the Arab world.

  “First time in Karachi?”

  “First time.”

  I am lying, of course. But I am not about to tell him that yes, I know Pakistan. I am not about to tell him he wasn’t even born the first time I was here, in 1971, when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in all his majesty and glory, was on the very threshold of power. His style, his allure, the cultured air of a colonial Pakistani, product of the finest British public schools, who in his indomitable optimism never imagined he could end up at the end of a rope eight years later . . . Giscard fascinated him . . . and Servan Schrieber, whom he wondered if people my age in France were reading. This culture, the unveiled women in the party meetings . . . Ayub Khan, Yayha Khan, the ruling military . . . Those brutes, you’ll see, it won’t last. The war over Bangladesh, and then, supporting the oppressed Bengalis seceding from increasingly Westernised Pakistan. Entering Dacca with the Indian army . . . President Mujibur Rahman, and his big glasses gleaming with irony . . . my first job, as a policy consultant, my first book, in other words, my first involvement with what was, for me, a war of national liberation but remains, for the Pakistanis, the ultimate trauma— the carving up of their country, an irrevocable Alsace-Lorraine. I know that one of the most significant entries on Pearl’s résumé was his posting in India before coming to Karachi. Worse still, in the minds of the Islamists, and perhaps of the Pakistani intelligence services, was the fact that he “kept an apartment in Bombay.” In the crazy logic where the smallest sign is transformed into proof or confession, this confirmed him as an enemy of the country, the agent of a foreign power and, therefore, a man to eliminate. So, I say nothing. I am not about to reveal that in another life, thirty years ago, I was an active, militant adversary of the Pakistani regime. He seems once again relieved.

  “And your religion? What is your religion?”

  This I was not expecting. Or, in any case, not like that, not so fast, nor with such assurance.

  Again, I think about Pearl and his last words, fixed on the video taken by his captors: “My father’s Jewish. My mother’s Jewish. I’m Jewish.”

  I think about the incredible story I read on the “Reporters Without Borders” website just before leaving. Aftab Ahmed, editor of a Peshawar newspaper, had published a letter to the editor mildly critical of the anti-Semitic wave engulfing the country, a suggestion to let up on the constant publication of article after article dragging Jews through the mud. Scandal! Trial for blasphemy! Huge demonstrations by religious leaders and Islamists before the courthouse. Newspaper shut down. Printing press burned down. Kill him! Hang him! Get rid of this infidel, we can hate whomever we want and for whatever reasons we deem appropriate. The editor, narrowly escaped the death penalty and, after fifty-four days, was released from jail, but only after writing a “letter of apology to the Muslim people.” Publication was suspended for five months, and his colleague, editorial page editor Munawar Hasan, is still in jail a year later.

  In fact, I think about all I have been told about the virulent anti-Semitism of the Pakistanis and about this second piece of advice: “Don’t spe
ak about it. Ever. There are anti-Semites who, as is often the case, have never seen a Jew in their lives and will not put two and two together when they hear your name. So silence, OK? Never respond to questions or provocations. With India in your past and, on top of that, being Jewish—it’s a lot for one man, so don’t mention either, no matter what.”

  The taboo subjects in Pakistan: India; Kashmir, which must be “liberated” from Indian domination and which they perceive as a modern-day Bangladesh, bleeding but still dormant; and of course, Judaism.

  “Atheist,” I finally say. “My religion is atheism.”

  The answer surprises him. I see his incredulous glance as he scrutinizes me in the rear-view. Atheist, really? Is that possible, to be of the atheist religion? Indeed it seems possible, since I don’t appear to be joking, and so I suppose he concludes his passenger is a Western eccentric. That’s better than a Jew, a Catholic, or a Hindu. He extracts an old cigarette, gone limp with sweat, from his pocket and offers it to me as a sign of friendship.

  “No thanks,” I say, “I don’t smoke.”

  And now it’s my turn to question him about his religion, his life, his children, about the beggars at the airport exit, the post card vendors selling photos of Bin Laden, the man perched on the scaffolding painting “Bush=Butcher” in black letters on a wall, and another man, his beard neatly tucked into a hair net, who offers to sell me some heroin as we stop at a red light. Are there as many drug addicts as they say in Pakistan? And bin Laden? Is bin Laden alive? I hear he’s a hero for most people here in Karachi, is it true? I read that in the city there are two million Afghans, Bengalis, Arabs, Sudanese, Somalis, Egyptians, Chechens, in short, foreigners without papers forming an army of natural candidates for al-Qaida recruiting agents—what does he think? And those old men there, half naked, sooty with the years and dust, shaggy, hoisting bundles of sticks, appearing from a side street like a column of ants? And this other man, crouched by the side of the road, an apron around his waist, a straw hat crushed on his head, patiently rummaging in the ruins of a house? And this one with the scabby face and a crutch raised like a weapon menacing the cars? And that one, rigid, his arms outstretched like a scarecrow that the wind will blow away? I thought Karachi was a rich city, I didn’t imagine there was so much misery, rubble, vagabonds . . . I couldn’t imagine these faces of the half-dead, their backs bent like teetering specters in the dying light of the coming night—do you know, my friend, they look like a pack of wolves? And that one, scratching his leprosy, do you know what he reminds me of? And this squatting skeleton? In short, I ask him everything, all the questions possible and imaginable rather than allow him his, the one I know is coming, the one that asks what an atheist Frenchman on his “first trip to Pakistan” is doing here, in this city, at a time he knows to be on the edge of apocalypse: whether I’m here as a “tourist” or on “business,” and, if that’s the case, why?