Suspect said he briefed spy agency before his own militant bosses
London: Late in the evening of November 26, 2008, David Headley, a 48-year-old American living in Lahore, received a text from a man he knew as Sajjid, a senior militant in the banned Lashkar-e-Taiba organisation. "Turn on the television," it said.
Headley, a member of the group since 2002, did so and saw footage of carnage in Mumbai. He forwarded the text to another militant. Then he watched the scenes of mayhem and swapped emails with his wife.
Headley, of mixed Pakistani and US parentage, had played a central role in preparing the operation he was watching. Over the previous two years, he had made nine trips to India to scout out targets. The tall, pony-tailed, multilingual US graduate was the perfect spy for the militant organisation, particularly after changing his name from Daood Gilani.
On one trip, he had stayed with his Moroccan third wife at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, where 31 would die. On another he had videoed the Chhatrapati Shivaji train station, where 58 would be gunned down.
Boat trips
In April, he had spent five days taking boat trips off Mumbai, bringing back fish for his landlady and finding the perfect location for the attackers to put ashore before fanning out across the city. On his final trip, in July, he had looked over a Jewish centre, and a cafe popular with tourists.
On his return to Pakistan he had met his militant associates in a safe house and handed them a memory stick with images and photographs of the targets. But this was not the only post-mission debrief the smooth-talking former video shop owner from Philadelphia had.
According to the 106-page transcript of Indian investigators' interviews with Headley earlier this year, even before meeting Lashkar-e-Taiba commanders, Headley had sat down with "Major Iqbal", an officer in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), the main military intelligence agency.
Nor was this the first meeting with the man he called his handler. Before and after almost every visit to India, Headley told his questioners, he had met Iqbal to receive instructions or brief him.
On mission
When on a mission, Headley said, he usually recorded images of potential targets on two memory sticks, one for Lashkar-e-Taiba, the other for the ISI. And one reason that he had been able to avoid detection was because in 2007 Iqbal had trained him in clandestine techniques.
The skills learned on the streets of Lahore and put to use in Mumbai, Delhi, Pune and other cities across India only took Headley so far, however.
Eleven months after the attacks, now involved in plots for attacks in the west, he was arrested in Chicago on his way back to Pakistan.
Headley's testimony, recorded in 34 hours of interviews with Indian investigators in the presence of FBI officials in June this year, does not just detail relations between the ISI and the perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks. It also provides a glimpse of the workings of one of the world's most secretive militant organisations.
The attacks, his testimony suggests, grew out of pressure on commanders of Lashkar-e-Taiba to wage a wider war against the west.
The ISI denied any links to the Mumbai attacks yesterday. Lashkar-e-Taiba was formed in the 1990s to send Islamist militants across the de-facto border which separates Indian from Pakistani-administered Kashmir.
Since 2005, Headley says, splinter groups had been breaking away from the group, the biggest militant organisation in Pakistan and the closest to the security establishment.
Sign up for the Daily Briefing
Get the latest news and updates straight to your inbox