End Game
On January 22, 2002, a terror attack was launched on the American Cultural Center in Calcutta (which was eventually linked to Omar Saeed). The next day, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl disappeared off the streets of Karachi, Pakistan. As the mainstream media reported it, Pearl was investigating Pakistani links to Richard Reid, otherwise known as "the shoe bomber." Yet as Tariq Ali of The Guardian reported on April 5, 2002: "Those [Pearl] was in touch with say he was working to uncover links between the intelligence services and terrorism. His newspaper has been remarkably coy, refusing to disclose the leads Pearl was pursuing."

Whether Pearl's leads had anything to do with the laptop hard drive that the Wall Street Journal passed on to the Defense Department sometime in December 2001 is a question that some have parsed. The story, according to Wall Street Journal reporters Alan Cullison and Andrew Higgins, of "how a computer apparently stuffed with al-Qaida secrets came to light, involves a combination of happenstance and the opportunism of war..."

As reported by Dan Kennedy of The Boston Phoenix: "The Journal's foreign editor, John Bussey, says that Cullison had been covering the Northern Alliance for about a month and a half when his computer was destroyed." In one of those fortuitous examples of happenstance, as Cullison went computer shopping in Kabul, he was informed that a local computer merchant had on sale a genuine al-Qaida computer, certified by the looter himself, who claimed to have filched it from the bombed-out headquarters of bin Laden lieutenant Mohammed Atef. Among the incriminating hard drive documents that basically confirmed everything ever told to us by every counterterrorism expert throughout the '90's, Cullison - who was on the Northern Alliance beat - was lucky enough to find the smoking gun implicating al-Qaida in the assassination of Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was mortally wounded just two days before September 11.

The smoking gun, as reported by Cullison and Higgins on December 31 2001, was a "letter, written in clumsy French in the name of an obscure, London-based Islamic information agency." The letter - carrying the name of Yasser Al-Siri - involved an interview request of Massoud. The Northern Alliance leader, as it turned out, was killed by "two men who posed as journalists to interview Massoud Sept. 9, both French-speaking Arabs, [who] carried stolen Belgian passports." As luck would have it, the incriminating letter also happened to confirm the hunch of Her Majesty's Government, which had already arrested one Yasser Al-Siri in London in October, charging him with conspiring to assassinate Massoud. London. Al-Siri. Clumsy French. Stolen Belgian passports - to any aspiring Sherlock Holmes or Perry Mason, al-Qaida is the gift that keeps on giving.

So where was the Pearl angle in all this? In the July/August 2002 issue of The Columbia Journalism Review, the former president of NBC News, Lawrence K. Grossman, presented the possibility that Pearl was kidnapped due to the Wall Street Journal's decision to publish the laptop documents. He quoted James Goodale, a former lawyer for the New York Times, as saying, "No matter what, they should not have published that they cooperated with the government...I will say flat out what the WSJ did is detrimental to the safety of U.S. journalists abroad."

Columbia Journalism students take note: what Grossman has authored is a superbly crafted exercise in disinformation (for an article that runs barely 1,000 words). You can almost feel the directed implications cresting over your brain as you read Grossman's account of what those al-Qaida computer files contained: "... a remarkably detailed account of its agent Abdul Ra'uff's travels in Israel and Egypt in search of terrorist targets. Ra'uff's itinerary matched that of the would-be shoe bomber, Richard C. Reid...U.S. officials who reviewed the files are convinced that Ra'uff and Reid are the same person."

Implication #1: The contents of those computer files might have sent Pearl on his purported quest for the shoe bomber. His quote of Goodale leads us to Implication #2: The Wall Street Journal's admitted assistance to the government may have led Pearl's captors to conclude that Pearl was a CIA agent. Most importantly, Grossman establishes his bona fides with this little anecdote:
"...The late William Colby, a CIA director, once confided to a reporter friend of mine, Stanley Karnow, that several major news organizations actually were complicit in helping the CIA plant agents posing as reporters in their overseas bureaus. To this day, the CIA has refused to make clear that it no longer uses reporters as agents or agents posing as reporters..."
All of which leads us to Implication #3: He is shocked - shocked! - that propaganda happens here because - take his word as a media insider - it's not the norm.

Note to aspiring investigators: Be careful as to which facts you "ingest" in constructing your theories. Some stories - like The Al-Qaida Computer Tale - serve as nothing more than a red herring "cluster bomb", meant to forever obscure the truth by forcing an accommodation with a "well-known fact" - a sort of modern update on the "Oswald In Mexico" gambit. Whichever lead Daniel Pearl was pursuing - which we may never know - the important fact to keep in mind is the man who would eventually be tagged for his murder - Omar Saeed Sheikh.

Only four days after the disappearance of Daniel Pearl, Omar Saeed once more bobbed up into the world's headlines after staying submerged for more than four months. As reported by Rajeev Syal and Chris Hastings for The Telegraph on January 27:
"The London School of Economics...has been host to at least three al-Qa'eda-linked terrorists, The Telegraph has been told. An intelligence report says that the trio studied or lectured at the London University college between 1990 and 1993, when it became a breeding ground for Islamic extremism...The three - including one man called Ahmed Omar Sheikh [Omar Saeed] - have been revealed as having links with the LSE in an intelligence file seen by this newspaper and now being studied by police."
The reason for Omar Saeed's sudden reappearance in this article had nothing to do with Daniel Pearl. As Syal and Hastings reported:
"Omar [Saeed], 28, a former mathematics student at the LSE, is said to have been linked to last week's drive-by shooting in Calcutta that killed five policemen. He has also been named as one of the key financiers of Mohammed Atta, the pilot of one of the jets that hit the World Trade Centre on September 11."
Unfortunately, Syal and Hastings did not provide the names of the other two terrorists, but they did report that one of them "was arrested in Delhi last month for reported involvement in the recent attack on the Indian Parliament."

As we shall soon see, Omar Saeed's link to the largely forgotten money trail was now being carefully resurrected, leaving bin Laden's ever-marginalized brother-in-law off to the sidelines once more. What had changed in the interim? An October 1 attack on the provincial legislature in Kashmir, a December 13 attack on the parliament in Delhi, a January 22 attack in Calcutta, and - the coup de grace - the January 23 kidnapping of Daniel Pearl. If, after October 9, Omar Saeed had largely gone underground, he was purportedly a busy little mole in the months following.

While the average news reader would now care less about any arcane financial dealings, the money trail story was nevertheless "out there" and ultimately had to be accounted for in a definitive version. Somebody was playing for the history books. In the months following October 9, a working "legend" was being elaborated for Omar Saeed, one that would increasingly distance him from the implications of his relationship with the ISI chief.

Now, as the purported perpetrator of all sorts of al-Qaida-linked mischief - helped along by bin Laden's well-timed October 14 plug for Kashmir - Omar Saeed's link with the 9/11 hijackers could be obscured and/or minimized amid a veritable buffet of terrorist activity. By the time of Omar Saeed's debutante "outing" as a suspect in the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl on February 6, 2002, the Omar Saeed/Money Trail Story was now fully ripened for the Shrug Technique. On February 10, Time Magazine's Unmesh Kher offhandedly mentioned Omar Saeed's $100,000 link to 9/11. But more importantly, that very day, the Associated Press, courtesy of Kathy Gannon, would officially snub bin Laden's brother-in-law (and thereby refute itself) by reporting: "Western intelligence sources believe Saeed sent $100,000 to Mohamed Atta, the suspected ringleader of the Sept. 11 terrorist hijackings, through a money transfer system known as hawala that bypasses banks and official financial institutions." Alas, it appears in retrospect that bin Laden brother-in-law Sa'd al-Sharif (alias Shaykh Sai'id alias Mustafa Ahmad al-Hisawi) was merely a "temporary hide-out" for the money trail.

The February 10 article by Gannon, while making a redemptive stab at a limited hangout of the truth, nevertheless spoiled its record by grabbing at another juicy morsel of disinformation: "Kamal Shah, chief of police in Sindh province...said investigators were trying to track Saeed. 'We feel we are close,' he said. 'We can't give you a timeframe. But we don't think we are far off.'"

As far off as the upstairs bathroom, perhaps - for Saeed had already been in custody for five days by that time. Saeed "surrendered Feb.5 in the presence of Ejaz Shah, a former top ISI official now working as home secretary of Punjab province," reported Karl Vick and Kamran Khan of the Washington Post on May 3. On February 12, the Pakistani authorities finally decided to formally announce the arrest of Omar Saeed. So how did he spend his week-long secret hideaway with the Pakistani authorities? As reported by the Associated Press on July 1 2002, "Saeed said authorities illegally detained him and tortured two of his fellow defendants in order to give police more time to fabricate a case against him."

As the Washington Post framed it on May 3: "Officials acknowledge that Saeed remained in ISI custody for a week while Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, visited Washington and said he was 'relatively certain' Pearl was alive."

If Musharraf was being somewhat shifty, he ratcheted it up a notch on February 9, when he suggested that Indian intelligence played a hand in Pearl's kidnapping. His evidence, according to a February 9 Washington Post item by Kamran Khan:
"So far, investigators said, the suggestion of an Indian connection revolves around three phone calls to New Delhi placed from the same cell phone that was used to lure Pearl to a restaurant in Karachi on Jan. 23, the last time he was seen in public. Police sources say they have traced the calls, with the help of the FBI, to numbers for an Indian cabinet minister and two members of parliament. But the sources said they believe those phone calls were made to mislead investigators into concluding that India was involved."
In almost an exact mirror image of the October 9 Times of India allegations, Omar Saeed was now being pawned off on the Indians.

In the same article, on that very day, the disinformation was coming fast and furious:
"Police today also took the unusual step of turning for help to the jailed leader of Jaish-i-Muhammad, Masood Azhar. The sources said they persuaded Azhar to make a call from his prison cell to Saeed requesting Pearl's release."
More likely, he used string attached to two styrofoam cups to reach Saeed in the neighboring cell.

As the "official" story had it soon after Saeed's "official" arrest on February 12, the case was solved when the authorities successfully traced a series of e-mails back to one of Saeed's alleged accomplices, who then confessed that he was only acting under Saeed's orders. The government's case, as reported by Zarar Khan of the Associated Press on July 1, "rests heavily on technical FBI evidence, which traced the e-mails to fellow defendant Fahad Naseem."

End Part IV