CHAPTER 2 THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH

One initial explanation is obvious. Pearl was a journalist. Just a journalist, working in one of the countries of the world where it is least propitious to be a journalist, where all journalists are, as such, in permanent mortal danger. Because they are insubordinate? Free agents? Because of their annoying tendency to disobey, to refuse to toe the line? No. The real reason is that they are perceived, on the contrary, as not being free, not in the least independent—the real problem is that, in the imagination of the Pakistani military man with the low forehead, or the Islamist militant on fire with his saintly hatred, they are, by definition, spies, and nothing distinguishes a Wall Street Journal reporter from a CIA agent. A free journalist? Contradiction in terms. A journalist who is not linked to the intelligence agencies, the “three letters,” of his country? An oxymoron, unthinkable. I’ve seen what I’m talking about. I’ve felt it myself—the extraordinary difficulty of gathering information in Pakistan without giving the impression that you are an informer. I’ve observed it every time, these last few trips, when I tried to explain that, all right, perhaps this wasn’t a novel in the classic sense, but at least I was independent, investigating on my own and researching only the facts. Every time I met the officials, the chiefs, and deputy chiefs of this insane police force, I observed the eyelids heavy with suspicion, the tarantula-like stare, the ill-humored air of mistrust dripping with sly innuendos, that seemed to say: “Cut the crap, we know very well that an independent writer is a term that makes no sense . . . ” No one doubts that this is why Danny died. No one doubts that the bloodthirsty cretins who made him say he was a Jew actually believed he was also an agent of the Mossad or the CIA. From this standpoint, his death makes him a martyr for that grand cause which is freedom of the press. We have to add his name to the long list of journalists, Pakistani and non-Pakistani, imprisoned or dead so that the press, and its freedom, might live. To salute Daniel Pearl, to honor his memory and his courage, is to pay tribute to all those living who, after him, accepted the same risk as he had in going, whatever the cost, to do their jobs in Karachi: Elizabeth Rubin, Dexter Filkins, Michel Peyrard, Steve LeVine, Kathy Gannon, Didier François, David Rohde, Daniel Raunet, Françoise Chipaux, Rory McCarthy, and others whose names I am forgetting— the hot iron in the wound of Pakistan, the honor of this profession.

A second good explanation is that this entire event happened in a country—a region? a world?—where, since the Afghanistan war and in anticipation of the war in Iraq soon to come, Washington was generally looked upon as the capital of the Empire of Evil, the home of the Antichrist and Satan: Daniel Pearl was American. A good American? There are no good Americans, the sects of the assassins think and say. Opponent of Bush? Democrat? Appalled at the blunders of Dostom and of the American Special Forces at Mazar-e-Sharif? An American who, according to Danny Gill, his friend from Los Angeles, probably would have joined the clan of liberal minds who would have thought twice before supporting George Bush’s absurd war? “Exactly,” they insist. “That’s almost worse. It’s the Devil’s greatest ruse, the trick of the Demon. It’s the ploy they’ve found to disarm the Arab nation . . . ” Wasn’t he sympathetic to you? A friend of the dispossessed? Wasn’t Daniel Pearl one of those Americans who object to hateful stereotypes, reject chauvinism, and take the defense of the downtrodden? “Right, thanks, we know. During those eight days, we had plenty of time to see that this sap wasn’t even hostile towards us. But that’s not the question. We don’t care what an American does or doesn’t think, because the crime isn’t thought, the crime is America. We don’t give a damn about what your Danny did or didn’t do, because America isn’t a country but an idea, and it’s not even an idea but the very countenance of hell.” Pearl was killed less for what he thought or did than for what he was. If he was found guilty of anything at Gulzar e-Hijri, it was the singular, unique, ontological crime of simply having been born. Guilty of being, and of being born . . . Guilt without a crime, essential, metaphysical . . . Doesn’t that remind us of something? Can’t we hear, behind this kind of trial, the voice of another infamy? Pearl is dead because he was an American in a country where being American is a sin, stigmatized with a rhetoric that echoes the sin of being a Jew. Pearl was the victim of this other crap called anti-Americanism and which also makes you, in the neo-fascist eyes of the fundamentalists, the dregs, the scum, a subhuman to be eliminated. American, hence a son of a bitch. America, or Evil. The old, European anti-Americanism blended with that of the religious fanatics. The rancid hatred of our French Pétainists given a third-world damned-of-the-earth makeover. I finished this book at precisely this moment. In my ears, the planetary clamor, that made of America a region, not of the world, but of the spirit—and the blackest spirit, at that. Better to live as a serf under Saddam than free thanks to Bush, the global crowd proclaimed. One could, like me, refuse Bush’s war but, nonetheless, find this clamor despicable. Daniel Pearl died of this.

And then, finally, there’s a third reason. Pearl was a Jew. He was a Jew in a country where Judaism is not a religion, and even less an identity, but another crime, another sin. He was a positive Jew. He was a Jew in the way Philip Roth or Albert Cohen are Jews. He was proud of it. Affirmative. Didn’t one of his colleagues tell me the story of this scene in Peshawar, an Islamist fiefdom, where, in a group of journalists asked about their religion, he placidly replied “Jewish,” which turned the atmosphere glacial. He was a Jew like his father, like his mother. He was a Jew like one of his grandfathers, Chaïm Pearl, who gave his name to a street in B’nei Brak, Israel. He was this sort of Jew able, at the moment of supreme martyrdom, to proceed in the sanctification of the name of Jew. And he is most surely a victim of modern anti-Semitism, the anti-Semitism that starts, in fact, with B’nei Brak, ties the name of Jew to the name of Israel and, without renouncing any of its timeworn clichés, readapts them to a new set of charges, reintegrates the whole thing into a system where even the name of Israel has become a synonym for the worst of this world—making the figure of the actual Jew the very face of crime (Tsahal), of genocide (the theme, trotted out ever since Durban, and even before then, of the massacre of the Palestinians), of the desire to falsify history (the Shoah as a lie designed to conceal the reality of Jewish power). From Durban to B’nei Brak, the new clothing of hatred. From “one Jew, one bullet,” chanted by some NGO members in Durban, to the Yemeni knife that actually murdered Daniel Pearl, a sort of a sequence. Daniel Pearl is dead because he was a Jew. Daniel Pearl is dead, victim of neo–anti–Judaism that is blossoming before our eyes. I’ve been talking about this neo–anti–Judaism for the past twenty-five years. There are a few of us who have sensed that the processes of legitimization of this ancient hatred are being profoundly reworked, and who have written about this fact for the past quarter century. For a long time, the rabble said the Jews are hateful because they killed Christ (Christian anti-Semitism). For a long time because, on the contrary, they invented him (modern, anticlerical, pagan anti-Semitism). For a long time it was because they are supposed to be a race who will always be foreigners in any land and this race must be erased from the face of the earth (birth of modern biology, racism, Hitlerism). Well, my sense is that that’s all over. I have a feeling we will hear less and less that the Jews are hateful in the name of Christ, the anti-Christ, or racial purity. And what we see is a reformulation, a new means of justification for the worst which, as in France during the Dreyfus Affair, but on a more global scale this time, will associate hatred of Jews with the defense of the oppressed—a terrifying stratagem. That, against the backdrop of the religion of victimization, using this transformation of the Jew into executioner and the Jew-hater into the new Jew (that’s right, the rabble is intimidated by nothing, slander is nothing new to them, they can very well lift towards real Jews the pure image of a victimized “Jew” now embodied by others) will legitimize the murder of a Jew as the henchman of Bush and Sharon: “Busharon” as they would say. Again, Daniel Pearl died, of this.

So there are three explanations that might satisfy me.

Three reasons to kill Daniel Pearl, each one separately and all the more so together, are adequate to explain the outcome of this drama.

Except that it doesn’t work.

No, none of these reasons, however strong and solid they may be in and of themselves, manages to convince me.

None of them explains why it is this particular Jew, this journalist, this American, and not some other, whom al-Qaida, the secret services, and the entire syndicate decided to eliminate on the morning of 31 January 2002.

And that, because of a detail which, for the past year, has unceasingly intrigued me: Daniel Pearl was kidnapped on the 23rd; on the 23rd, the kidnappers know that he is a Jew, a journalist, an American; on that day, they are perfectly conscious of this hyperbolic triple guilt; and yet, they wait until the 31st, eight days after the kidnapping, to decide to punish him for being this triple culprit, which is bound to mean that something happened during those eight days—an element appeared that was not there on the 23rd but that would be there on the 31st and would make the ultimate decision to kill him inevitable.

I know what they say: The assassins didn’t discover that Danny was Jewish until the 30th, from an article by Kamran Khan in the News— that’s the new element, then, his Jewishness, that they weren’t aware of before. But it doesn’t jibe. Knowing Danny, knowing, through all those who knew him, especially in Pakistan, that he made a point of honor of never dissimulating his Judaism, I cannot for an instant imagine that he didn’t inform Omar of this during their initial meeting, at the Hotel Akbar. And isn’t that what Omar himself declared to the police? Isn’t it what Fazal and Bukhari also said, during their respective interrogations: “Omar called to tell us, there’s a man here who’s an American and a Jew . . . come quickly, we’re going to kidnap him”?

I know what they say: It’s the escape attempt that set everything off; when he tried, for the second time, to escape, his jailers lost patience and decided to put an end to this—that’s the new element, that’s where everything went haywire, right? Isn’t it, according to the FBI people, the absolute rule in these cases: “never try to escape! Never, never ever!” I don’t believe that either. First of all—as I said—these escape attempts are not confirmed, especially since the bullet in the knee hasn’t been found by any of the coroners’ teams that have examined the dismembered body. And, beyond that, because I can’t imagine Bukhari, Lahori, Farooqi and the others reasoning like this. We are talking about, I repeat, the Karachi chiefs of important groups, the best of jihadism, serious people, militants, the Pakistani representatives of al-Qaida—who could imagine they would follow such a puerile line of reasoning? Who could convince us that they said to themselves, “as punishment, we’ll kill him”? How could anyone suppose a murder of such importance, decided and committed by men of this caliber, could be decided on the reaction of an annoyed jailer?

It’s also been attributed, I’ve heard it said myself, to the passing of time: it’s just the time that elapsed . . . the lassitude . . . the impasse . . . here we have this guy on our hands, we don’t know what to do with him any more, so let’s kill him and cut him up into ten pieces and then put them all back together again, that will be the simplest thing to do . . . Right. Once again, anything is possible. Except that this scenario isn’t plausible either. Don’t forget, until otherwise informed, we have to assume these were Yemenis who killed him. But someone had to make the decision to send for them, these Yemenis. They had to be located, contacted, brought to Gulzar e-Hijri and, finally, ex-filtrated again. How could this have been done lightly? How could this succession of tasks have been the result of a fit of anger and impatience? Does one actually set in motion such forces and events, expend the necessary amount of energy, just like that, on a whim, by default, or out of sheer irritation?

No.

Anyway you look at it, you cannot avoid thinking that something else happened during those seven days of detention other than a wave of weariness, an aborted escape, or an article by so widely respected a journalist as Kamran Khan.

Better still: Since all of this is happening in seclusion, since they are all, captors and captive, living in total confinement, cut off from the world, since all they have to do for seven days is to talk and talk and talk, one can’t help but wonder if this other thing was something that was said rather than something that happened, and that it’s something Danny said that led his jailers to conclude that he could not walk out of Gulzar e-Hijri free.

Then what is it that was said? What could Pearl have said that would have prompted his captors to call for three professional murderers to come execute him? Since I can’t imagine it had anything to do with small talk, life in Los Angeles, his profession, or even his general perception of Pakistan, the United States, or the world, and since I think as well that Pearl took advantage of that time to continue his work, and advance his research into the Islamist milieu—in short, to pump these political and human specimens, which bad fortune had put in his way, once more, I can think of only one solution.

At the same time that he got them to talk, they, in turn, made him talk.

When he asked them questions, he revealed himself, through his way of questioning.

He thought he would get the truth from them, but they, in a sense, and without his necessarily being aware of it, verified what he knew and thus debriefed him.

Or else, another aspect of the hypothesis, slightly different but equally credible: given his extraordinary professionalism, he attracted confidences, confessions, details—it’s entirely possible that he succeeded beyond his expectations, and that his captors, without realizing it or at least without really wanting to, gave him sensitive information that, afterwards, they regretted having so blithely offered.

My feeling is that, during their conversations, during the long nights of collective solitude, in the heat of his exchanges, for example, with Fazal Karim, his guard, it became evident either that the prisoner of Gulzar e-Hijri already knew far too much, or else that he had succeeded in gleaning still more from his jailers—and that, in either case, there was no longer any question of letting him walk out of there, carrying his secrets.

Danny died of what he knew.

Danny, the man who knew too much.

I am convinced that his was a journalist’s death—dead not only because of what he was, but because of what he was looking for, and perhaps finding, and planning to write about.

Isn’t that, incidentally, what President Pervez Musharraf himself said when, the day after the murder, in an astounding, angry outburst, he exclaimed that Daniel Pearl had been “over intrusive”—too curious, sticking his nose in places he shouldn’t have?

Didn’t Musharraf give it away when, in a comment cited in the Washington Post (among others) on 23 February 2002, he dared to declare, “Perhaps Daniel Pearl was over inquisitive; a mediaperson should be aware of the dangers of getting into dangerous areas; unfortunately, he got over-involved in intelligence games.”

That’s my hypothesis.

That’s the conclusion I have come to.

So the question then becomes: Why? What had Pearl discovered, or what was he in the process of discovering, that condemned him to death? What is the stolen secret that, for his captors, was out of the question for him to walk away with?

The relationship between al-Qaida and the ISI, of course.

The tight web of relations between the two organizations, the two worlds.

This holy alliance that condemns and executes him—we can presume that, yes, he was on their trail, and that, precisely, was his fatal error.

But all of that is not saying much.

You don’t execute a man because he evokes in a general way the ties between an intelligence agency and a terrorist organization.

You don’t expend so much effort to kill him, you don’t send an entire syndicate into action because he might develop some thesis about the underbelly of an important country.

The real question, obviously, is what, precisely, had he discovered in all this that was new and that would have caused difficulties for all of them?

This is where the reign of the uncertain begins.

This is where witnesses are rare and, if they exist, they are silent, or out to disinform.

So, like a detective following his hunches, I move forward now, sifting through clues and speculations, for the over-riding truth.

I have two hypotheses, in fact.

Two distinct hypotheses, in no way contradictory.

But first of all—a question of method—one last detour. Daniel Pearl’s schedule in the weeks, the days, the hours preceding his kidnapping. Who he saw. What he read. The articles he wrote and those he was working on. This intrigue, in a word, woven with the threads of a life, where (as in a tapestry, is hidden the motive that secretly inspires it) lies, quite probably, the explanation for his death.