BOOK REVIEW

WHO KILLED DANIEL PEARL?

Qui a tue Daniel Pearl? by Bernard-Henri Levy

Reviewed by Pepe Escobar

The subject was not breached when "courageous leader" Pakistani President General
Pervez Musharraf was received by George W Bush at Camp David this week. They
talked of the Hizb-i-Islami leading the anti-American jihad in Afghanistan, they talked of
jihadis not crossing the Line of Control in Kashmir, they talked of Osama bin Laden
hiding in the tribal areas. "Indispensable ally" Musharraf received a promise of US$3
billion - but no F-16s. But had Bush asked Musharraf who killed American journalist
Daniel Pearl, one wonders whether Musharraf would have come up with a proper answer.

Bernard-Henri Levy's Qui a tue Daniel Pearl? (Grasset) is guaranteed to shake the
foundations of neo-conservative land when an English translation is released before the
end of the year. The book has become a best-seller in France, and subject to considerable
media frenzy. No wonder: since his debut as a nouveau philosophe in the 1970s, BHL - a
trademark signature - has meticulously fashioned himself to the status of dandy and
arbiter supreme of the Parisian Left Bank intelligentsia. A brilliant, prolific writer coupled
with shameless self-promotion, BHL always switched at ease from essay to film making,
from Jean Paul Sartre to the gulag, from Bosnia to Charles Baudelaire, from trophy wife
to a holiday palace in Marrakesh. Inevitably, he had to confront the top subject of the
times - political Islam.

BHL starts his book on January 31, 2002, when Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl
was tortured and decapitated in Karachi, Pakistan, after being kidnapped by a bunch of
jihadis. BHL describes his book as a romanquete - an investigative novel. It's in fact a
variation on Tom Wolfe's and Guy Talese's new journalism: investigative journalism
turbocharged by literature - sprinkled with a chic dash of metaphysical self-doubt. The
literary influences are clear: Fyodor Dostoyevski and Baudelaire. BHL is fascinated by
two main themes: the flower of evil (personified by Omar Sheikh, the intellectual
mastermind of Pearl's ordeal); and the double (Omar the killer as the double of the
sacrificial lamb Pearl). Most of all, BHL is fascinated by Pearl as his own double. Pearl
was an American Jewish journalist trying to come to grips with radical Islam. BHL is an
French Jewish writer trying to deconstruct radical Islam.
BHL had one year, plenty of time and resources and at least four trips to Pakistan to
weave his plot. The agenda couldn't be more ambitious: BHL asks rhetorically "what, in
the beginning of a new century, turns abjection into desire and destiny?" He tries to
decode radical Islam, Osama bin Laden's "new terrorism", the "shock or non-shock" of
cultures and civilizations; he wants to know whether "the crusader spirit and the combat
against the 'axis of evil' are the adequate response to the current theological-political
madness".
This all makes for gripping reading. BHL himself had already defined the best journalism
as a mix of "urgency and exigence". He is a hell of a writer. But his whole journalistic-
literary voyage - as fascinating as it turns out to be - ends up undermined by a fatal flaw.
Stripped of ethnic, historical and political prejudice, BHL simply didn't get what Pakistan
is all about. Something's wrong when a sophisticated philosopher and thinker tells us that
Pakistan is nothing less than "the house of the devil".

Maybe this had something to do with his fixers. Every journalist working in Karachi,
Islamabad and Peshawar since the heady days of the anti-USSR jihad in the 1980s knows
that a good fixer is the key to open Pakistan's multilayered Pandora's boxes. Alternatively,
maybe this had something to do with BHL psychedelically identifying himself so much
with his double Pearl ("my equal, my brother" - Baudelaire once again) that his
hallucinations took over the narrative. For BHL, Pearl is a sublime martyr - while for
many in South Asia he was little else than a Jewish American writer for the Wall Street
Journal who landed in Muslim Pakistan from a spell in India without carefully assessing
his new role.

BHL's first hypothesis is that between "the jihadis and the great liberal journalist,
tolerant, open to the cultures of the world and a friend of Islam, there was a relationship
of trust, almost of bonding". During the first part of the investigation, BHL tries to enter
the mind of the sacrificial lamb; the next part is flowers of evil territory, BHL trying to
understand Omar Sheikh's motives. BHL meticulously reconstitutes the last days and
minutes of Daniel Pearl before he was beheaded by three subcontracted Yemenites in a
desolate Karachi suburb. Omar Sheikh was to arrange the interview Daniel Pearl was so
obsessed with: the interviewee would be Sheikh Mubarak Gilani, the leader of the al-
Fuqrah subsect to which belonged the notorious shoe bomber Richard Reid.

From a literary point of view, the complex, secretive, tortured Omar character is infinitely
more appealing than golden boy Pearl. But BHL chooses to interpret Omar as the Western
double of Pearl: Omar himself was a Westernized Muslim, born in England and having
received a perfectly English education. Omar's "master of terrorism" was Masoud Azhar,
the leader of the Pakistani jihadi group Jaish e-Mohammed, "a mix of saint and serial
killer", a definition that could also be applied to Omar himself.

In perfect Oscar Wilde mode ("Each man kills the thing he loves"), one of BHL's best
intuitions is when he tells us where Omar - the personification of "evil" radical Islam - is
coming from: "This enemy of the West is a product of the West. This ardent jihadi was
formed in the school of the enlightenment and progress. This Islamist who will yell at his
trial that he kidnapped Daniel Pearl because he could not stand the hairdressers of
Guantanamo shaving the skulls of Arab prisoners ... is the product of the best English
education ... So might terrorism be a natural son of a diabolical couple - Islam and
Europe?
As Omar Sheikh is painted as a villain of anti-Christ proportions, there is also a sexual
explanation for his rage: "Islamism and women ... This fear and sometimes this vertigo
facing the female sex, I always thought they were the very basis of the fundamentalist
desire ... the proof by Omar." BHL amplifies the sexual trauma of Islamists by probing
Omar's "secret": he suffers because he is caught in a double culture, switching from
Pakistan in England to England in Pakistan. His desire is to belong. One thinks of the
Saudis who lived quietly for years in the West and a few hours before September 11,
2001, were going to a sex shop, flirting with a Mexican whore and window-shopping
lingerie.
The book picks up speed when BHL starts making the inevitable connections between
jihadis and the Pakistani intelligence services. An example is the famous September 11,
2002 raid by a "Pakistani power in panic that a "satanic interview" about to be broadcast
by al-Jazeera proved that there was an al-Qaeda cell in the heart of Karachi. Khalid
Shaikh Muhammad, the all-important al-Qaeda operations chief, was not there at the
moment and once again evaded capture. The operation against the alleged brains behind
September 11, again on a September 11, was supposed to be a "birthday gift" from the
Pakistani government to the US. This leads BHL to proclaim that the kidnapping, then the
murder of Daniel Pearl was an initial response from dissatisfied sectors of the Pakistani
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to an America-accommodating Musharraf: "Omar
Sheikh, the Londoner who became a warrior of Allah, was instrumentalized by a branch
of the ISI hostile to the evolution of Musharraf." A few pages later, we're entitled to a
little more nuance: "Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and then murdered by Islamist groups
manipulated, yes, by a faction of the services - the most radical, the most violent, the
most anti-American ... This faction, from the beginning to the end of the affair, behaved
itself as if it was very much at home in Musharraf's Pakistan."
The next step could only be the inevitable connection between ISI and al-Qaeda. An
informant tells BHL "how everything started by the dismantling ... of a cell making fake
papers for al-Qaeda clandestines"; and how the investigation led to "a trafficker
specialized not only in fake papers but in the export of clandestine workers to Riyadh, 11
or 12-year-old kids selected in Karachi and Dacca to work as jockeys in camel races on
the beaches of Dubai and, last but not least, al-Qaeda combatants exported, through the
Oman Straits, to the Emirates, Yemen and other Middle East countries". This man, the
real target of the anti-terrorist operation of September 11, 2002, was not Ramzi bin al-
Shibh (who was arrested) or alleged September mastermind Khalid Shaikh (who was not
there), but Saud Memon, the owner of the lot where Pearl was kept captive, tortured,
executed and buried. BHL describes it as "a house belonging to a fake welfare
organization which served as a front for bin Laden". He is referring to the Islamic NGO
al-Rashid Trust, which after September 11 made it to the US list of terrorist organizations.

For BHL, the "house of the devil" - or "the terrorist Vatican" - par excellence is the
legendary Binori town mosque in Karachi, which has educated many a Taliban. He takes
us on a guided tour. The mosque is where Masoud Azhar, Omar Sheikh's mentor, founded
Jaish e-Mohammed in the beginning of 2000, an "organization that would lend its elite
battalions to al-Qaeda". The famous audio cassette of November 2002 where bin Laden
talks about the attacks in Yemen, Kuwait, Bali and Moscow and renews his calls for jihad
against the West, came from Binori town. For American, Indian and British intelligence,
as well as for BHL, probably a raid on Binori town would be enough to dismantle most of
radical Islam in Pakistan.

It will come as no surprise to anyone covering and following the "war on terror" that the
best of BHL's sources reveals himself to be a Saudi lawyer in Dubai - the Arab capital of
big money and privileged Oriental crossroads. The lawyer paints a striking picture of
Islamism as pure business: after all "we draft the papers. We establish the contracts. And I
can tell you that most of them don't give a damn about Allah. They enter Islamism
because, especially in Pakistan, it's nothing other than a source of power and wealth." The
Saudi lawyer confirms that "very few people in Pakistan become Islamists by conviction
or fanaticism. They are just looking for a family, a mafia, capable of protecting them
from hard times."

BHL is scandalized by these "jihad golden boys". And there's no doubt these Islamist
golden boys are very much aware of Omar Sheikh when he leaves Indian jails - as he was
one of the three militants exchanged for the passengers of an Indian Airlines jet that was
hijacked and landed in Kandahar in Afghanistan in December 1999.

When BHL starts to follow the money, his investigation really takes off. It all starts with
the famous $100,000 wired to September 11's chief operative Mohammed Atta's account
in the US by one Ahmad Umar Sheikh, following instructions by Pakistani General
Ahmad Mehmoud - the ISI director general at the time. General Mehmoud was removed
by Musharraf less than a month after September 11. The Pakistani press reported at the
time that Mehmoud was removed because US investigations had proved a liaison
between himself and none other than Omar Sheikh. So BHL then arrives at an even
juicier hypothesis: "Not only an Omar linked to al-Qaeda through its most spectacular
terrorist operation - but of a collusion ... between al-Qaeda and ISI working together to
destroy the Towers. For the Indian services, there's no doubt about the association."

Neo-conservatives may eventually be tortured by self-doubt, but Indian and Israeli

intelligence will certainly love the fact that the information they shared led BHL to an
explosive conclusion: "The possible Pakistani responsibility in the September 11 attack
remains the great unsaid in George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld's America ... to admit that
Ahmad is Omar and he wired the money ... wouldn't it be to question the whole foreign
policy which, already at the time, made Iraq as the enemy and Pakistan as an ally?"

Not only because of Saud Memon - the murder scene was on his property - and Binori
town - the "terrorist Vatican" - BHL slowly becomes convinced that Daniel Pearl's
murder was ordered by al-Qaeda. It may be no more than fascinating literature, but BHL
is persuasive. Omar, an unknown jihadi, is freed against the passengers of the hijacked
Indian Airlines jet. He arrives in Kandahar as a hero - and is received by Taliban leader
Mullah Omar himself, who presents him to none other than bin Laden. Bin Laden is
vividly impressed by "this rare mix of faith and culture, of fanaticism and competence".
So bin Laden starts thinking how he can profit from "an ardent jihadi who doubles as an
unrivalled financier, an expert in electronics and the Internet, as well as a connoisseur of
the West and its mechanisms".

One of BHL's sources - as well as, he admits, Indian intelligence - tells him that Omar
successively enters the Majlis al-Shura, al-Qaeda's political council; conceives and
operates al-Qaeda's web sites; and in the role of a hungry trader installs a computer
terminal in a Kandahar house permanently linked to the world's major financial capitals:
so the short selling that al-Qaeda profited from - and paid for - September 11 might have
been the brainchild not of bin Laden, but Omar. BHL's conclusions: "Omar liberated by
al-Qaeda and the ISI; Omar as an agent, very soon, of both al-Qaeda and the ISI; Omar as
a precocious link between both organizations." No one has ever been able to verify it, but
according to one of BHL's sources, bin Laden called Omar "my favored son". So here we
have Omar - the flower of evil who masterminded the killing of Daniel Pearl - as the
spiritual son of bin Laden.

What about Daniel Pearl himself? The truth about his death may be much less heroic and
more pedestrian than BHL claims. If we analyze what happened from a journalistic point
of view, Pearl may have been merely a victim of media wars - of information treated as
merchandise. He was a reporter unfamiliar with such an extremely complex beat as
Pakistan, under pressure from the Wall Street Journal main office to find scoops capable
of beating the New York Times or the Washington Post. What led him to his fate was a
story in a rival American paper about the obscure Sheikh Gilani, leader of the Al-Fuqrah
sect and alleged mentor of shoe bomber Richard Reid.

Pearl may have thought that he got a break to build a story on banned Islamist groups.
For Asia Times Online's own Pakistan-based Syed Saleem Shahzad, as well as for this
correspondent, it is easy to see what happened next. He asked his fixer to try to get a
meeting or an interview with Gilani. The fixer calls a journalist friend with close contacts
with jihadi groups acting in Afghanistan and Kashmir. The journalist remembers a
contact he saw a few times. He calls and sets up a meeting. Pearl and his fixer go to the
meeting. Then they go to a house to see somebody who can lead them to Gilani. But the
house is empty. They have to keep trying other leads. Then one day they call the same
contact again and he says that he knows somebody who can take Pearl to Gilani. Pearl
goes to yet another meeting and he finds the enigmatic Omar. It's in the course of this
tortuous process that a Western journalist operating in an Islamic hothouse has to proceed
with ultimate care. If anything feels remotely weird, the whole enterprise has to be called
off. Pearl was doing anything to get his scoop. When Omar saw him he immediately
knew that he had found the perfect, gullible sacrificial lamb.

Gilani may not have been worth so much trouble. He was indeed the leader of al-Fuqrah -
almost a subsect, with nothing to do with the big jihadi organizations. Even Moinuddin
Haider, Pakistan's Interior Minister, had never heard of al-Fuqrah before the Pearl affair -
although some sources say that Gilani was Osama's most committed follower in Pakistan.
Al-Qaeda is a purely Arab organization. The International Islamic Front is an
international organization - a de-territorialized federation of groups linked to emir bin
Laden. Gilani was a member of neither. But according to some sources, he had spiritual
ascendancy - maybe even ideological - over bin Laden: he is a pir, "venerated master" in
urdu. Anyone familiar with Pakistan knows that a pir would never discuss such matters
with an unknown, unchecked Western journalist.

BHL also advances the hypothesis that Daniel Pearl was investigating al-Qaeda's
American network - based on the fact that Gilani was linked to the ISI, but maybe also to
the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA): "Could the key to the mystery of his death be
found in the hard disks of agencies in Washington?" What then: a nosy Pearl eliminated
by an ISI-CIA tandem?

BHL writes that he was against Bush's war on Iraq - but at the same time he blamed the
world's masses who claimed that "it's better to live as a slave under Saddam than to be
free thanks to Bush". This basic misunderstanding from his part will endear him to neo-
conservatives, Americans or otherwise, as much as it will discredit him to anybody
around the world whose principles opposed an illegal war.

BHL is certain that "Pakistan is the roguest of all of today's rogue states". He is certain
that "between Islamabad and Karachi, a real black void is being formed, compared to
which the Baghdad of Saddam Hussein was just a depot of out-of-date weapons". BHL is
dead sure that Pakistan is Apocalypse Now. This configures BHL as a Western darling of
Indian intelligence. But one wonders how will this all be played out when the book is
published in the US. Preemptive war against a nuclear Islamabad, anyone? Maybe
Washington should wait to read an investigative novel by the flower of evil himself, the
spiritual son of Osama bin Laden, the unfathomable Omar Sheikh.

Qui a tue Daniel Pearl? by Bernard-Henri Levy, Grasset et Fasquelle April, 2003. ISBN:
2246650518, Price: US$25, 538 pages.