Free The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel by Adrian Levy

everyone nervous and the meeting ended without any firm commitment.
    It was a month before the Major was in touch. Daood’s family connections had checked out and he had good news, offering to pay for Daood to return to the US and apply for a passport with an anglicized name. Daood chose David Coleman Headley, borrowing the last two parts from his American grandfather, who had died so tragically at the age of thirty-seven. He formalized the documents that month, telling his American relatives that he was tired of being stopped at immigration because of his Pakistani name. One, who was in the US military, became suspicious. ‘I had a really bad feeling and considered reporting him to my superiors.’ But he did not and Daood’s actions alerted none of the US authorities that might normally have been expected to challenge an application from someone with a criminalrecord who had been investigated several times for supporting terrorism. This was an aberration or the authorities were a party to the move, as they had been to so many other things in Daood’s chequered career as a US government agent provocateur and super-grass.
    On Daood’s return to Pakistan, Major Iqbal assigned an army officer to train the freshly minted ‘David Headley’ in a condensed version of the ISI’s two-year field course on surveillance and counter-intelligence. If he was to scout Mumbai, he would need to know how to record his findings, what to look out for and how to ensure that he was not being observed. Major Iqbal gave him what he described as ‘classified Indian files’ that he said had been obtained from within the Indian police and army and which ‘revealed their training and limitations’. The Major boasted they had a super-agent at work in New Delhi who was known as ‘Honey Bee’. The Major revealed that while he would guide Headley, the Mumbai operation was to be run by Lashkar.
    Headley was in. Within days he received a message to meet his newly appointed Lashkar handler at the remote House of the Holy Warriors camp. He travelled on the hairpin road to Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-administered Kashmir, and walked up into the densely forested Chelabandi hills, 7,500 feet above sea level. The camp sat in a bowl-shaped plain and consisted of a large mosque, several hostels and a well-stocked munitions store. Recruits in khaki shalwar kameez could be seen exercising on three sandy parade grounds, Uhad, Tabook and Qadisiya (all of them named after legendary Islamic battles from the epoch of the Prophet). Sajid Mir, Lashkar’s deputy chief of foreign operations, greeted Headley and took him to his office, which was clinically clean, fiercely air-conditioned and filled with computers, satellite phones and maps. Camp comrades had nicknamed it the ‘Ice Box’. Mir’s brood of children spent so much time in there trying to avoid the summer heat that everyone referred to them as the ‘polar bear cubs’.
    Mir told Headley they would call his plan Operation Bombay. He was to scout for targets that Lashkar commandos would then assault. He would need a cover story. Headley immediately came up with a suggestion from his drug-dealing days. He could use his old friend Tahawwur Rana, who had left the Pakistani army and now lived inChicago, where he had established a thriving immigration business helping South Asians migrate to America. In June 2006, the ISI paid for David Headley to fly back to the US to meet up with Rana. Without explaining the back-story, Headley asked if he could set up a branch of Rana’s immigration business in Mumbai. Friends and family were commodities in Headley’s mind, to be cashed in and exploited. ‘He could persuade just about anyone to do whatever he wanted,’ said one. Arranging the paperwork, Rana, who would later claim that he suspected nothing, went to the Indian consulate with Headley’s new passport and applied for a one-year business visa, while Portia, Headley’s estranged wife, applied