About the David HeadIey saga: I HAD TOLD YOU SO RIGHT AWAY! The truth only now coming to light : the U.S., i.e. OBAMA, as well as international intelligence, directly implicated in the gruesome Mumbai massacre; what should we do about it?

For the original story, see here:

http://www.propublica.org/article/mumbai-plot-fbi-was-warned-years-in-advance

 The New York Times version here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/world/asia/17headley.html

U.S. Had Warnings on Plotter of Mumbai Attack

By JANE PERLEZ, ERIC SCHMITT and GINGER THOMPSON

Less than a year before terrorists killed at least 163 people in Mumbai, India, a young Moroccan woman went to American authorities in Pakistan to warn them that she believed her husband, David C. Headley, was plotting an attack.
It was not the first time American law enforcement authorities were warned about Mr. Headley, a longtime informer in Pakistan for the United States Drug Enforcement Administration whose roots in Pakistan and the United States allowed him to move easily in both worlds.
Two years earlier, in 2005, an American woman who was also married to the 50-year-old Mr. Headley told federal investigators in New York that she believed he was a member of the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba created and sponsored by Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency.
Despite those warnings by two of his three wives Mr. Headley roamed far and wide on Lashkar’s behalf between 2002 and 2009, receiving training in small-caliber weapons and countersurveillance, scouting targets for attack, and building a network of connections that extended from Chicago to Pakistan’s lawless northwestern frontier.
Then in 2008, it was his handiwork as chief reconnaissance scout that set the stage for Lashkar’s strike against Mumbai, an assault intended to provoke a conflict between nuclear-armed adversaries, Pakistan and India.
An examination of Mr. Headley’s movements in the years before the bombing, based on interviews in Washington, Pakistan, India and Morocco, shows that he had overlapping, even baffling, contacts among seemingly disparate groups — Pakistani intelligence, terrorists, and American drug investigators.
Those ties are rekindling concerns that the Mumbai bombings represent another communications breakdown in the fight against terrorism, and are raising the question of whether United States officials were reluctant to dig deeper into Mr. Headley’s movements because he had been an informant for the D.E.A.
More significantly, they may indicate American wariness to pursue evidence that some officials in Pakistan, its major ally in the war against Al Qaeda, were involved in planning an attack that killed six Americans.

The Pakistani government has insisted that its spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, a close partner of the C.I.A., did not know of the attack. The United States says it has no evidence to counter this, though officials acknowledge that some current or retired ISI officers probably played some role.

It is unclear what United States officials did with the warnings they had gotten about Mr. Headley — who has pleaded guilty to the crimes and is cooperating with authorities — or whether they saw them as complaints from wives whose motives might be colored by their strained relations with their husband.
Federal officials say that the State Department and the F.B.I. investigated the warnings they received about Mr. Headley at the time, but that they could not confirm any connections between him and Lashkar-e-Taiba. D.E.A. officials have said they ended their association with him at the end of 2001, at least two months before Mr. Headley reportedly attended his first terrorist training. But some Indian officials say they suspect that Mr. Headley’s contacts with the American drug agency lasted much longer.
The investigative news organization ProPublica reported the 2005 warning from Mr. Headley’s American ex-wife on its Web site and in the Saturday issue of The Washington Post. By ProPublica’s account, she told authorities that Mr. Headley boasted about working as an American informant while he trained with Lashkar.
On Saturday, Mike Hammer, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said in a statement, “The United States regularly provided threat information to Indian officials in 2008 before the attacks in Mumbai.” He also said, “Had we known about the timing and other specifics related to the Mumbai attacks, we would have immediately shared those details with the government of India.”
Mr. Headley’s American wife was not the only one to come forward. The Moroccan wife described her separate warnings in an interview with The New York Times. Other interviews illustrate his longstanding connections to American law enforcement and the ISI.
Among the findings:
¶ An officer of the Pakistani spy agency handed Mr. Headley $25,000 in early 2006 to open an office and set up a house in Mumbai to be used as a front during his scouting trips, according to Mr. Headley’s testimony to Indian investigators in Chicago in June. As part of Mr. Headley’s plea agreement, Indian investigators were allowed to interview him in Chicago, where he was arrested in October 2009. ¶ The ISI officer who gave Mr. Headley the cash, known as Major Iqbal, served as the supervisor of Lashkar’s planning, helping to arrange a communications system for the attack, and overseeing a model of the Taj Mahal Hotel, so that gunmen could find their way around, according to Mr. Headley’s testimony to the Indians.
¶ While working for Lashkar, which has close ties to the ISI, Mr. Headley was also enlisted by the Pakistani spy agency to recruit Indian agents to monitor Indian troop levels and movements, an American official said.
Besides Mr. Headley’s guilty plea in a United States court, seven Pakistani suspects have been charged there. American investigators say a critical player who has not been charged is Sajid Mir, a Lashkar operative who became close to Mr. Headley as the plans for the Mumbai operation unfolded. The investigators fear he is still working on other plots.
Mr. Headley was known both to Pakistani and American security officials long before his arrest as a terrorist. He went to an elite military high school in Pakistan, whose graduates went on to become high-ranking military officers and intelligence operatives. After arrests in 1988 and 1997 on drug-trafficking charges, Mr. Headley became such a valued D.E.A. informant that the drug agency sent him back and forth between Pakistan and the United States. In several interviews in her home, Mr. Headley’s Moroccan wife, Faiza Outalha, described the warnings she gave to American officials less than a year before gunmen attacked several popular tourist attractions in Mumbai. She claims she even showed the embassy officials a photo of Mr. Headley and herself in the Taj Mahal Hotel where they stayed twice in April and May 2007. Hotel records confirm their stay.
Ms. Outalha, 27, said that in two meetings with American officials at the United States Embassy in Islamabad, she told the authorities that her husband had many friends who were known members of Lashkar-e-Taiba. She said she told them that he was passionately anti-Indian, but that he traveled to India all the time for business deals that never seemed to amount to much.
And she said she told them Mr. Headley assumed different identities: as a devout Muslim who went by the name Daood when he was in Pakistan, and as an American playboy named David, when he was in India.
“I told them, he’s either a terrorist, or he’s working for you,” she recalled saying to American officials at the United States Embassy in Islamabad. “Indirectly, they told me, to get lost.”
Though there are lots of gaping holes left in Mr. Headley’s public profile, the one thing that is clear is he assumed multiple personas.
He was born in the United States, the son of a Pakistani diplomat and a socialite from Philadelphia’s Main Line. When he was about a year old, his parents took him to Pakistan, where he attended the Hasan Abdal Cadet College, the country’s oldest military boarding school, just outside of Islamabad.
Mr. Headley’s parents divorced. And before he finished high school, he moved to Philadelphia to help his American mother run a bar, called the Khyber Pass. Later he opened a couple of video rental stores.
But at the same time he was involved in a life of crime. Each time he was arrested on drug trafficking charges, he used his roots in the United States and Pakistan to make himself as valuable an asset to law enforcement as he was to the traffickers; one with the looks and passports to move easily across borders, and the charisma to penetrate secretive organizations.
He was married at least three times. For one period he was married to all three wives — Ms. Outalha, who is a medical student half his age, a New York makeup artist, and a conservative Pakistani Muslim — at the same time.
Those relationships, however, caused him trouble. In 2005, his American wife filed domestic abuse charges against Mr. Headley, according to federal investigators in New York, and reported his ties to Lashkar-e-Taiba. The investigators said the tip was passed on to the F.B.I.’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Then in December 2007, Ms. Outalha talked her way into the heavily guarded American Embassy in Islamabad. She went back a month later with more information. A senior administration official acknowledged that Ms. Outalha met twice with an assistant regional security officer and an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer at the embassy. However, the administration official said Ms. Outalha offered almost no details to give credibility to her warnings.
“The texture of the meeting was that her husband involved with bad people, and they were planning jihad,” the official said. “But she gave no details about who was involved, or what they planned to target.”
Given that she had been jilted, Ms. Outalha acknowledged she may not have been composed. “I wanted him in Guantánamo,” she said.
More than that, however, Ms. Outalha says, she went to American authorities looking for answers to questions about Mr. Headley’s real identity. In public he criticized the United States for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. But at night he loved watching “Seinfeld” and Jay Leno.
Sipping tea in a cafe overlooking a plaza in Morocco, Ms. Outalha said that in hindsight, she is convinced that he is both men. She claims to be puzzled that American officials did not heed her warning.
“I told them anything I could to get their attention,” she said of the American authorities at the embassy in Islamabad. “It was as if I was shouting, ‘This guy was a terrorist! You have to do something.’ ”



  The Debkafile version here:

Why the US leak now hinting al Qaeda's Headley was a double agent?
DEBKAfile Special Report October 16, 2010

David Coleman Headley, Chicago-based Al Qaeda executive

Saturday, Oct. 16, apparently out of the blue, the powers-that-be in Washington released a new revelation to the local media (first to the Washington Post): Five years ago, David Coleman Headley's wife informed the FBI that her Chicago-based husband was a key figure in the planning and preparation of the terrorist plot that killed 174 people in Mumbai, including six Israelis, in 2008.
Her tip preceded the attack by three years.
She was revealed as having given three interviews to FBI agents in which she related that Pakistan-born Headley was an active operative in Al Qaeda's most effective affiliate, the Pakistani Lashkar-e-Taibe, had trained in its Pakistan camps and shopped for night-vision goggles and other equipment.
His wife came forward, according to the reports, after a domestic dispute that resulted in Headley's arrest in 2005. She described him as bragging of working as a paid informant for the US Drug Enforcement Agency while he trained with terrorists in Pakistan.
Federal officials did not deny this suggestion. They were quoted as saying the FBI looked into the tip but declined to say if any action was taken.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly has followed the Headley case from its outset.
On Nov. 22, 2009, on the first anniversary of the Mumbai outrage, DEBKA-Net-Weekly 422 reported under the caption: Al Qaeda in America:  A Chicago Master-Cell Plots Attacks in India and Denmark:
An undoubtedly authentic al Qaeda-linked terror cell has been uncovered in Chicago. Approximately five years after 9/11, a group of former Pakistani Islamists, some of them US citizens, set up shop in a Chicago grocery store. The FBI discovered the group had been working for at least three or four years with one of al Qaeda's operational arms, Lashkhar-e-Taibe, as master planners of overseas operations - though not so far in their adopted homeland. 
From this headquarters they mapped out a series of plots against overseas targets in conjunction with the Pakistan-based terrorist organization. Their latest target was to have been the Danish newspaper which ran a series of cartoons of Prophet Mohammed in 2005 which enraged Muslims worldwide.
This year, on April 2, DEBKA-Net-Weekly 439 discussed the possibility of Headley's employ by the US as an undercover double agent:
India finds it hard to believe that US terror experts were ignorant of Headley's role as key man in the planning and selection of targets for the attack [in Mumbai] and the dispatch of the Lashkar-e-Taibe terrorists for its execution.
These suspicions have led New Delhi to the supposition that Headley was a double or triple agent working for US intelligence, Pakistani's Inter-Services (military) Intelligence - ISI and also al Qaeda.
While Washington did indeed tip off Indian intelligence to the impending Mumbai attack two months in advance, the Indians now suspect that it withheld information which could have prevented the attack so as not to expose Headley.
debkafile's counter-terror sources wonder what the motivation was behind the release of a supposition that was widely aired in Israel and India at the time. Two possible answers are suggested here:
One:  The federal authorities are anxious to distract American public attention from the court procedures beginning last week in the case of the Palestinian-American Major Nidal Malik Hasan accused of murdering 13 US servicemen at Fort Hood base on Nov. 5, 2009 and responsibility for the most deadly Islamist terrorist attack every staged in a US military installation.
Several of the soldiers wounded in the attack, some very seriously, disclosed that their US base commanders had ordered them then and there to hold back testimony of jihadi terror and erase video photos of the attack recorded on their cell phones. No visual evidence of the attack has therefore survived - only the testimony of witnesses, one of whom confirmed that throughout his shooting rampage, Nidal never stopped shouting Allah is Great!
Our sources also confirm that the emergence of a Palestinian terrorist willing to carry out a massacre inside the United States is highly embarrassing for the Obama administration at a time when its diplomats are working hard to revive peace diplomacy in the Middle East.
2.  The US administration came under heavy fire for the unspecific, imprecise terror alert the State Department issued the whole of Europe on Oct. 3 against Mumbai-style multiple terror attacks. Three weeks later, most counter-terror agencies in Europe are certain the alert was unfounded and hurt Washington's credibility.
By releasing new data on the Headley case, the Americans hope to prove to the Europeans that they have learned their lesson from the Mumbai atrocity and were no longer repeating the mistake of disregarding incoming tips.
Their warning to Europe was based on information garnered from the jailed German al Qaeda operative Ahmad Wali Siddiqui. This time it was taken seriously.

More info here:

...And my article about the story two years ago, exposing the role of  international intelligence and the CIA here ( sorry about the poor presentation: for some reason I am unable to edit anything on this post, I wonder why...):

 http://israeltruthtimes.blogspot.com/2008/12/now-watch-out-this-is-very-very-long.html

 And see other interesting related links on the blog here:

http://israeltruthtimes.blogspot.com/2007/12/one-more-fascinating-article-that.html

http://israeltruthtimes.blogspot.com/2007/12/re-al-qaida-i-have-received-important.html