In Chicago, a Mumbai Attack Plotter Testifies against his Friend

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Tom Gianni / AP

In this courtroom sketch, David Coleman Headley is shown in federal court Monday, May 23, 2011, in Chicago.

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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.

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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