How much did the US know about the Mumbai attack ?

HOW MUCH did the DEA know about the Mumbai conspiracy? According to sources, an FBI officer who had been seconded to the Special Operations Division of the Drug Enforcement Administration was reviewing the case notes after a Headley mission where he had been wired up with recording equipment.

Inadvertently perhaps, Headley also recorded conversations between himself and LeT members and Pakistani military officers.

Conversations on a fidayeen assault on Mumbai were recorded and the Taj Hotel was specifically mentioned, as well as the sea landing. So the FBI man alerted his own agency.

This was the basis of the September 2008 warning that the US gave to India.

Reportedly, the Indian side failed to gauge the import of the warning.

Headley was drawn deeper into the LeT operations and made a trip to North Waziristan, the heart of the al Qaeda and Pakistani Taliban territory.

Colonel Syed put him in touch with al Qaeda members for the conspiracy to attack Jyllands Posten , the Danish paper, by Ilyas Kashmiri.

It was only in February 2009, more than two months after the Mumbai attacks, that the FBI began to contemplate arresting Headley. In May, he made another trip to North Waziristan and was told that the al Qaeda bosses had agreed to proceed on an attack in Denmark.

Given the fact that six Americans died in the attacks, there should be questions raised about the DEA’s actions. However, as of now, everything has been suppressed.

But there is a great deal that Headley could have told the Indian officials.

Even today, all aspects of the Mumbai case are not clear. We do not know whether there were other helpers who assisted the terrorists to move around with such ease, or the identities of those that planned the attack.

Why David Coleman Headley is not talking

SO, DAVID Coleman Headley is not talking. Sources have told Headlines Today that the Indian interrogation team in Chicago is “ feeling frustrated” in the two days that it has questioned the man convicted for providing the key logistical inputs for the Mumbai carnage of November 26, 2008.

According to sources, Headley’s repeated response to questions fielded by the three- member National Investigation Agency ( NIA) team is: “ Following the advice of my lawyer, I am invoking, with respect, my right to the Fifth Amendment and say no further in this matter.” This amendment, part of the original Bill of Rights, guarantees that no person in a criminal case, including non- citizens, can be compelled to be a witness against themselves.

On March 18, 2010, Headley was spared the death penalty in exchange for pleading guilty to 12 counts of terror charges, including plotting the 26/ 11 Mumbai attacks at the behest of Pakistan- based Lashkar- e- Tayyeba ( LeT) and conspiring to target a Danish newspaper. The plea agreement between Headley and the US Attorney for Northern District of Illinois, Patrick Fitzgerald, carefully outlined his rights to get a fair sentence, in exchange for his cooperation with the US officials, as well as to “ fully and truthfully testify in any foreign judicial proceedings held in the US by way of deposition, videoconferencing or letters rogatory.” Indeed, Headley agreed to have his sentencing postponed till after the cooperation had concluded.

Sources in New Delhi said there was never any chance that Headley would cooperate with India. According to them, the unexplained aspects of the case and the plea bargain that got Headley off the hook can all be attributed to his relationship with the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s ( DEA) Special Operations Division.

The DEA is a major department of the US government, with extensive powers of arrest and detention and maintains its own intelligence capabilities, though it cooperates extensively with the Federal Bureau of Investigation ( FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency.

The SOD- Headley relationship began in 1988 when a German customs agent at Frankfurt asked a young Pakistani- American, Daood Gilani, to step aside and be searched while transiting to Pakistan. The customs agent found 2- kg of heroin under a false bottom. The DEA agent, Derek Maltz, who was stationed there was called in and he took the decision to recruit Headley.

Over the next few years, though he was in and out of jail and drug rehabilitation, Headley was in touch with Agent Maltz and the DEA. In 2002, in one of his numerous trips to Pakistan he came in touch with the LeT and according to his interrogation reports, he attended LeT camps in February and August 2002 and thrice in 2003. In February 2006, he changed his name from Daood Gilani to Headley.

The DEA claims that the relationship ended in 2003. But according to what the FBI has told their Indian counterparts, their relationship with Headley continued right up to March 2008, when he was already neckdeep in the Mumbai conspiracy.

The FBI began to panic when in 2008- 09, Headley made two trips to North Waziristan and established contacts with Ilyas Kashmiri, al Qaeda’s point man there. He was put up to this by Abdur Rehman Hashim Syed, a colonel in the Pakistan Army who is either serving or retired, or claims to be so.

The al Qaeda’s aim was to use Headley to organise the attack on Jyllands Posten newspaper offices in Denmark for their alleged crime of publishing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

After he was arrested in October 2009, Headley threatened to reveal his links with the DEA and this is the reason why the entire US system from the Attorney General Eric Holder downwards have worked to sweep all the muck under the carpet.

Mail Today June 6, 2006

The Spy Who Never Was

A malevolent Delhi Police and a turf- hungry Intelligence Bureau ganged up to force Naval Commander Mukesh Saini, one of India’s brightest brains in cyber security, to spend the last 42 months in Tihar Jail on cooked- up charges. Saini’s case is a horrific instance of the impunity with which our custodians of the law act. And his fight back is a testimony to the redeeming power of the Right to Information Act.

LIFE was looking rosy for Commander Mukesh Saini in the summer of 2006. He had just taken premature retirement from the Indian Navy, where he had worked as computer security specialist on deputation to the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS) in New Delhi. A week after he retired at the age of 43, he cruised into a dream job with Microsoft in New Delhi. But on the night of June 11 his world came crashing down. His house in Delhi Cantonment was searched by a police party while he was away in the US. Then, when he returned post haste, he was detained for interrogation for two days, and finally arrested and charged with giving information to Rosanna Minchew, a third secretary at the US Embassy.

Saini spent three and a half years behind bars at Tihar Jail trying to understand what happened. He, along with two other persons —NSCS systems officer Shib Shankar Paul and the Research & Analysis Wing (RAW) director of computers, Ujjal Dasgupta — have spent more time in jail than each one of them would have if convicted for their ‘crime’ of passing information to Minchew. Saini finally got bail in the middle of last month, but the other two remain incarcerated at Tihar.

As of this date, four years after their arrest, their trial has yet to begin. How could Indian citizens, protected by its laws and judicial process, be treated as denizens of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq? The story that Saini himself pieced together through his diligent use of the Right to Information (RTI) Act is a shocking tale of illegal use of authority and vindictiveness on the part of the police and the intelligence services. Even the Pakistani terrorist and sole surviving 26/11 foot soldier, Ajmal Qasab, got a fairer deal from the government and the judicial system.

Commander (Retd) Mukesh Saini one of the three people who have been railroaded by the Delhi Police and IB in the so-called NSCS spy scandal

Saini was accused of leaking four documents to Minchew, of which two were hard copies. These were the draft of the nuclear doctrine and the impact of a possible ‘Kra Canal’ on India. And there were two other documents contained in two hard disks that the police had seized from Saini’s house. These were SIDE, or a proposal for an intelligence agencies’ network and the minutes of the Indo-US Cyber Security Forum on January 28, 2003.

The charges relating to the first two documents are patently absurd. One was a public document released to the media by the BJPled NDA government in 1999. The other is an analysis of possible consequences on India of a canal on the Kra Isthmus that links Thailand to Malaysia. This was Saini’s own paper sent out to various agencies in the government.

It never received official status, leave alone a classification. The story of the other two documents is interesting. On filing an RTI application with the Central Forensic Research Laboratory (CFSL), Chandigarh, Saini obtained the forensic log of the two documents. Both showed they had been accessed June 3, 2004 and August 27, 2004. The CFSL analysis showed the disk itself had been accessed last in June 2005 and its last access to the Internet through the disk had taken place on June 15, 2005.

These dates are important. Through another RTI application, this time to the Indian Embassy in Washington, D.C., Saini has shown that Minchew, the alleged agent to whom he was supposed to have passed on the information, was issued a visa only on August 3, 2005. There is a terrible irony here. Saini says that he was scrapping his old computer and being conscious of the fact that no deletion programme was effective, he removed and kept the hard disks with him while selling the rest of the machine as scrap.

Everything about the case — from Saini’s arrest and the search in his house to the collection of evidence allegedly nailing his guilt — is mired in a trail of illegalities, which includes tampering of records, misrepresenting issues to the courts and other wrongdoing on the part of the Delhi Police.

The shadowy hand of the Intelligence Bureau is also apparent, but only just. There should be no doubt, though, that it is the key driver in the operation to railroad Saini, Paul and Dasgupta.

Take the arrests. Saini was arrested on the night of June 30/July 1, 2006. Paul had already been arrested earlier on June 11, 2006, and Saini and Dasgupta were now in the police/Intelligence Bureau’s cross-hairs. Sub- Inspector Sajjan Singh of the Delhi Police Special Cell sent a letter to the NSCS chairman asking whether the two documents that related to the nuclear doctrine and the Kra Canal were classified.

The reply of the NSCS, which was issued on the letterhead of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), whose director Vinod Mall was an IB officer on deputation, wrote to say that neither of the two documents was classified. ( At the time, the NSCS had no chairman and the head of a subsidiary outfit, the JIC, Dr S. D. Pradhan, was looking after it.) O N June 30 ( in a typed letter where all the dates are conveniently written by hand), the Special Cell wrote again to say that the previous reply “ was not in the required format” and that they wanted the NSCS to comment on the Kra Canal and nuclear doctrine documents, as well as on the two other documents recovered from the hard drive.

The replies were again from Mall.

The letters were not dated and their file numbers were written by hand, and they claimed that the minutes of the cyber security forum was a classified document, as was the document on SIDE. Both, as we have shown, these could not have been transmitted by Saini to Minchew.

Mall has written three letters in response to the Delhi Police’s search for information — one had its letter number and date typed, but the other two had the letter references written in hand, and neither were they dated. Sloppy work? No, this was deliberately done to fudge the record.

Saini’s RTI search shows why this is so and his suspicion is that they were probably “ manufactured” following his arrest. It became evident soon enough when an RTI request was put to the NSCS. The reply was that the NSCS central registry had not received the letter of the Special Cell. Yet it acknowledged that a reply had been sent out by Mall. Though there was no record of the dispatch of letters from the NSCS, the claim was that they had been “ personally” received by Sajjan Singh on June 30. On appeal, the NSCS also acknowledged that they “ do not possess any file or document on which opinion was formed” on the Delhi Police’s request. So, there is no record as to why a letter purporting to be NSCS’s reply said what it did.

As an officer of the Armed Forces, Saini should have been protected by the Criminal Procedure Code’s Section 197 requiring sanction of the government for his prosecution. But even here, the system failed. The police sought sanction first from the NSCS. By this time, the NSCS had a fulltime head, former diplomat Vijay Nambiar, and he refused to give the sanction.

The police should now have logically gone to the Indian Navy.

Instead, they went to the civilian section of the Ministry of Defence — it had had no real link to Saini.

They attached a draft sanction order and the ministry, without applying its mind, gave the goahead on April 17, 2008. By this time, Saini had already been in jail for 22 months.

There are many abiding mysteries about the case, primarily as to why the police have been so vindictive.

All the evidence suggests that the case is a fabricated one.

At most, Paul is guilty of keeping some documents at home and being infatuated by Minchew. Dasgupta, who seems to be peripherally involved, is 66 years old and suffers from cardiac problems, has been denied bail along with Paul.

The bigger mystery is Minchew.

If she’s the Mata Hari made out by the IB, why does the charge- sheet not make any mention of her? If three people can be accused of transmitting intelligence to a “ foreign agent” why was that agent allowed to get away? And why’s there no Interpol red corner notice out for her? Perhaps Minchew did belong to the US intelligence service, but that should not be surprising.

Saini, Paul and Dasgupta, too, were from an intelligence- related agency and the purpose of the Indo- US Cyber Security Forum was to operationalise official cooperation between Indian and American intelligence services on cyber security.

Saini has had a lot of time to reflect on the monstrous injustice that has been done to him. But, remarkably, he is not a bitter man.

Stoic may be the best word to describe him. He is happy, he is out of jail, that his college going daughter and school- going son have managed to keep their head above water. “ My wife bore the brunt,” is all he is willing to say of the travails of his family.

BUT the obstacle race of the trial still looms and his financial situation is “ pathetic”. He says his savings will hold out for another six or seven months, “ After that, who knows ?” He is a highly qualified man — with Master’s degrees in management and computer sciences and a great deal of expertise in cyber security, the reason why Microsoft was willing to hire him in the first place.

“ But now who’ll give me a job?” he says with a resigned smile.

Despite his bitter experience, Saini hesitates to accuse the government for his predicament. This writer has followed this case from the beginning and it is apparent to him that the real reason why three people who knew each other professionally have been the target of this brazen frame- up is turf. That simple four- letter word so dear to our bureaucracy sums up the motive for the IB’s witch hunt.

All three persons in their own way were specialists in software that could network intelligence.

This is something the IB did not want because it believes that it alone can safeguard sensitive information. This is the reason why it had to destroy the Indo- US Cyber Security Forum, which would have led to greater interaction with the US, and this is the reason why it destroyed the lives of three people who represented organisations who had other proposals for sharing intelligence.

What is disturbing is the pattern of impunity in the functioning of the police and the intelligence services, one that does not bode well for the country. If three men, two of who were senior officers in the armed forces, can be treated this way, what hope is there for the poor tribal of Dantewada who is declared a Maoist, or the young Muslim accused of terrorism ? It is no secret that one of the main reasons why the Mumbai carnage took place was that the bits and pieces of information floating around with various agencies were not available in a collated form for analysis. Ironically, it is Mumbai that has helped IB win that battle and the entire intelligence networking has now been taken over by the Ministry of Home Affairs. Whether the IB can also win the war against terrorism through such sectarian tactics remains a moot question.

Mail Today June 6, 2010

Media helped PM take low road in press meet

The Prime Minister alone cannot be blamed for the lacklustre national press conference he held on Monday. True, he did not articulate an overarching vision for his government, nor for the country, for what is being touted as our decade of opportunity. The media in equal measure failed to extract that vision from him. It got distracted in trivial issues like his retirement or relations with Sonia, things on which you are unlikely to get an honest answer through the medium of a press conference anyway, especially from a person who is notoriously reticent.
By its very nature, the media has a short take on events and developments. Even so, in a national press conference, perhaps the third held by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, their viewers and readers deserved better. They needed to be informed about the government’s longer-term perspective on relations with China, the energy crisis, how the Right to Education or Food Security Bill would work, what would happen if the monsoon failed the second time around and so on.

Europe
You would really have to wrack your mind to recall whether or not the word “China” was even uttered in the Prime Minister’s 75 minute press conference on Monday, or for that matter, “Nepal” or “Bangladesh.” Considering that foreign policy is a major thrust area for the Prime Minister, their absence was as puzzling as the decision to ignore the large foreign press corps which was present at the press conference.
The reason why it is so important to articulate a vision of the coming decade is because objective circumstances are shaping it to be one major window of opportunity for India. It’s not just about the demographic dividend or India’s high rate of economic growth. That remains a given. It is about what is happening in the rest of the world. Despite their enormous strengths, both the US and Europe are undergoing a transition. Russia remains moribund. It is here that the opportunity presents itself to India to move up a notch or two in the world order, not as a grant or boon from some superpower, but by the hard work of its people and the skill of its leaders. But the government is mired in internal incoherence where there seems to be a lack of consensus on everything.
Sadly, barring the Indian business elite, no one is looking at the opportunities that are presenting themselves before the country. This is manifest from the interest that is being shown by Indian IT majors like Infosys and Wipro in making European acquisitions. Europe is certainly a new area of opportunity. The economic crisis has only hit home now to the core states of Germany and France after the Greek fiasco. European states are reeling with the prospect of massive budget cuts, Germany has already led the way and France is contemplating raising its hallowed retirement age as part of the austerity programme and is getting set to also reform its pension schemes, considered the most generous in Europe. These developments provide opportunities for India to take strategic steps that will help deepen our ties with emerging Europe, not individual countries like France and Germany.
The political integration of Europe had been proceeding apace and meandering between various referenda. But the current crisis has concentrated minds like never before. Europe now confronts its existential moment. It either goes forward faster, or it comes apart. Just as India was created out of the 560 princely states and the provinces of British India because of the crisis of Partition and the precipitate departure of UK, the new Europe is likely to emerge from the somewhat belated decision of Germany and France to accept that either they hang together or they hang separately.

China
The challenge is not just with regard to Europe, but the opportunity that this crisis presents to push institutional changes in world bodies, be they the United Nations, or the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation. Arvind Subramanian has, for example, argued that a strong and solvent Asia must force a weakened Europe to agree to reforming the IMF which has been dominated by the Europeans till now.
Beyond Europe, there is need to re-examine approaches to the United States and China. In India, at least, the US does get the attention it deserves. Indeed, at the press conference, the Prime Minister had to go on the backfoot to explain that he was not serving the American agenda, but that of this nation. That China was the actual absence in the press conference was a surprise because of all the external affairs challenges that India confronts, China is the most dynamic. This is not necessarily so in a negative sense, but to enable the Sino-Indian interaction to be positive and mutually beneficial requires some hard thinking and hard work on the part of the government.
Watch the emerging Sino-US relationship. The two countries are witnessing a reconciliation in their political and economic relationship. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner have been in China this week to participate in the annual Strategic and Economic Dialogue and as a Wall Street Journal report noted, “The most wide-ranging dialogue in the history of modern U.S.-China relations ended with some accord on contentious issues of currency and trade, but underlined a fundamental shift in the relationship between Washington and a newly assertive Beijing.”
Though analysts discount the notion of the rise of a new global order of the Group of Two (G-2) — the US and China—the texture of the Sino-US interaction suggests that this is indeed the direction in which the global balance is moving. It remains to be seen what the strategic dialogue that India will have with the US early next month will yield.

Pakistan
And finally, of course, our most important relationship—Pakistan. The Prime Minister was, if anything, circumspect. He is right in noting India’s “obligation” to have good relations with our neighbours and that we cannot reach out full potential as a nation unless we resolve our differences with our neighbours. Rising India may have a Pakistan problem, but it cannot be resolved by obfuscating its causes. The PM believes that some “trust deficit” is the reason why we are finding it difficult to improve ties with Islamabad. There are some issues where obfuscation is not a good idea. Terrorism is one of them and putting it under the rubric of “trust deficit” serves both India and Pakistan ill. India needs to be far more blunt with Islamabad on this issue. The government, too, must ponder on what the consequences (very real) would be of another major terrorist strike whose foot-prints lead back to Pakistan.
Surely the problems between India and Pakistan are more complex, and, alarmingly, less amenable to resolution than Manmohan Singh believes. It is not just a matter of Kashmir, or that India is interfering in Balochistan, or even that it was historically responsible for the loss of Pakistan’s eastern wing.
The first year of a new government is usually a “honeymoon” period. In the case of UPA-II this was aided by the fact that after the Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Arunachal assembly polls in November-December 2009, the Congress-led government had a clear window till the Bihar polls later this year to act on a pressing agenda of restructuring and reforming the government and its policies. This opportunity has been lost. Will this negative achievement set the tone for the rest of the decade as well? If so, you can say goodbye to India’s decade of opportunity.
This piece appeared in Mail Today May 27, 2010

First official pix of Arihant, India's nuclear propelled submarine

In the government the right hand often doesn't know what the left hand does. That is the reason I suspect that this first ever public picture of the Arihant at the time of its launch in the covered dockyard in Vishakapatnam has surfaced in the report of the United Progressive Alliance II's first year of government. Check page 58. A first look will suggest that there have been innovations to the suspected Charlie II design such as the two sail planes coming out of the conning tower.
The credit for this goes to Manu Pubby of Indian Express who found the picture in the "Security" section of the report.

He is the Trust Deficit

If someone can give an answer as to how we can deal with Hafiz Saeed, we'll get an answer as to how we can reduce the "trust deficit" between India and Pakistan

The Mumbai attack of November 2008 brought the attention of the world on the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba (the army of the righteous), termed as “the most dangerous terrorist outfit on the planet.”

Hafiz Saeed single-handedly constitutes the trust deficit himself

Most scholars accept the view that the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba was mid-wifed by the Pakistan Army’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate and is still nurtured by it. Among its original founders was Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian who along with Osama bin Laden founded the Afghan Services Bureau, the forerunner of the Al Qaeda. Azzam was assassinated in 1989. The only surviving leaders going back to its origins are military commander Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, currently jailed in Pakistan for complicity in the Mumbai attack of 2008 and its chief Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the case for whose detention was thrown out by the Pakistan Supreme Court last week.
American scholar Murray Weinbaum accurately summed up the outfit’s contemporary relevance when he told a US Congressional Committee in April: “The Lashkar-e-Tayyeba has evolved from being a government-sponsored Pakistani jihadi group dedicated to the insurgency in Indian Kashmir, into a terrorist organisation with regional and global ambitions and reach.”
India has been and remains the original target of this outfit. Though the Lashkar has been around in Jammu & Kashmir since the early 1990s, it came to prominence with its “fedayeen” or suicide attack on a BSF camp at Baramullah that led to the death of six BSF personnel in 1999. The attack came with its now familiar tactic of a frontal assault on the gates of the camp, its penetration and its “fedayeen” fighting there till death.
In the period 1999-2002, the fedayeen type strikes were carried out against some 55 police and security forces camps, in addition to public buildings and market places. In this period, suicide attacks led to the deaths of 161 personnel, mainly from the Indian Army. Subsequently, the security forces in Kashmir learnt how to prevent and counter such attacks and by 2006 or so, such attacks died down in the Valley. The military impact of these attacks was inconsequential even. Their main value was to generate propaganda. That is the reason the Lashkar attack on the Red Fort figures so prominently in
its publications.
Propaganda is an important means in the Lashkar’s recruitment strategy which in any case focuses on semi-literate youth of Pakistan’s sprawling Punjab province. In real life, however, there is always a huge discrepancy between its own description of an attack and the actual event. In the 2001 attack in Srinagar airport, the Lashkar paper Al Dawa claimed that six mujahideen created mayhem in the airport, penetrated to the runway, damaged a jumbo jet and killed 18 army personnel including an officer.
The truth was somewhat different. The Lashkar group was contained in the gate area itself and killed after a three-hour standoff. A total of three CRPF men were killed — all in the initial assault.
Though the Lashkar claims that it never attacks civilians, it has from the outset targeted them. The Wandhama massacre of Kashmiri Pandits in 1998 was its handiwork, as were several subsequent massacres of Hindus and Sikhs in the Valley. The 2002 attack on the Akshardham temple, too, targeted civilians. And, of course, there is Mumbai where the targets were exclusively civilian.
The sophistication of the Mumbai attack and the Headley revelations have shaken western officials. According to one report, Pakistani intelligence officials recovered a laptop with 320 potential targets from Zarrar Shah, the communications specialist of the Lashkar who was arrested along with Lakhvi for the Mumbai massacre. Most of the targets were in Europe.
The Jammat-ud-Dawa, the front for the LET, has spread its tentacles across Pakistan, where it disburses charity, and runs schools and hospitals. It was recently associated with the Pakistan Army in providing relief in Swat after it was recaptured from the Taliban. Its principal funding comes from rich businessmen in Pakistan and the Gulf countries, as well as from the ISI and Saudi charities.
While gunmen and fighters of the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba have struck terror across the world, its chief, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed has led a peaceable life in Pakistan. Even when imprisoned, he has been kept in house arrests or in guest houses. Saeed and his colleagues have managed to bypass the abhorrence of suicide in Islam by terming their suicide attackers as “fedayeen”. As another hafiz noted in Al Dawa, that if an attack involving certain death demoralised the kafir (apostates) and gave courage to Muslims, it would be condoned by God. The other “innovation”, fostered by Saeed, is that individuals, too, can fight the jehad, which in classical terms could only be undertaken by state sanction.
There is nothing in recent actions of the Pakistani state to show that it wants to, or even whether it can, contain the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba. Neither are there any indications to show that the organisation’s growth trajectory has slowed in any way. In these circumstances it is difficult to understand just how the so-called trust deficit between India and Pakistan can be bridged.
This item appeared in Mail Today May 30, 2010