Multiple personalities are prone to committing crime and when they get sucked into religious indoctrination of a morbid kind, they end up becoming terrorists. Kaare Sorensen, author of The Mind of a Terrorist: The Strange Case of David Headley, finds Headley to be one such individual.
According to him, Headley smuggled, consumed drugs, smoked, drank, cheated on his wives, slept with dozens of women, lied at will, and betrayed his friends and accomplices without qualms. At other times, he accepted supremacy of the Allah and readily subjected himself to the rigours of a believer. He watched videos of butchery of Kafirs with joy, believed in ‘not just killing, but making it savage’ and claimed that those who did not accept righteousness of Allah’s cause were ‘destined for Hell’. He defined terrorism as ‘a necessity to achieve holy justice, both in heaven and on earth’, and justified ‘beheading’ as ‘respectful to the victim.’
The author traces Headley’s hatred for India to an explosion in his Lahore school by grenades of the Indian Army, stories that he heard of killing of Muslims in Kashmir and to his indoctrination in Jihad by India baiters Hafiz Saeed (the Lashkar chief), Sajid Mir aka Wasi (Lashkar’s military commander), Ilyas Kashmiri (one-eyed Huji commander who beheaded an Indian soldier) and the elusive ISI major Iqbal. Headley’s abhorrence was so intense that he would ‘spit on the street when he saw an Indian walking’ and single-mindedly masterminded the Mumbai mayhem along with the Lashkar, ISI and Pakistan Army.
The author finds the ease with which Headley selected targets in Mumbai and terrorists landed on the beach, stormed hotels and walked around the streets of the city with weapons raised, killing people merrily, incomprehensible. He opines that Delhi’s grasp of the actual situation was throughout incomplete, its security response was woefully delayed, slow, inadequate and its hesitation to act was pathetic, due to the incompetence of intelligence agencies and a lumbering political leadership. No wonder, Headley dismissed ‘600 Indian commandoes and 2,000 security officers taking on 10 kids as pieces of shit’ and felt encouraged to repeat Mumbai again. But, he had to drop the idea as Sajid Mir and ISI, which came under severe international scrutiny, developed cold feet. Sorensen avers that it is not just India that failed to pick up Headley’s terrorist plans during his reconnaissance missions. Both US narcotics’ authorities, which operated him as a contact for busting drug smugglers, and FBI repeatedly botched up leads and blundered in correctly assessing data on his terrorist forays.
The book fails to significantly improve on evidences that are already known to Indian investigators on the Mumbai terror attacks, thanks to FBI’s refusal to share Headley’s critical disclosures. Nevertheless, it is a good read to understand what it takes a Headley to turn into a terrorist, likes of whom we see mushrooming daily in India and its backyard. Sorensen also wants Delhi to be realistic and quotes Headley to claim that Pakistan will never turn him over or his accomplices to India for trial.
The other incident that Sorensen dwells upon is Headley’s abortive attempts to blast the building of Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in Copenhagen to avenge the publication of a cartoon of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban by Kurt Westergaard in 2005. It eventually turned out to be Headley’s nemesis, as he left too many footprints for FBI to prosecute him.