Chasing catastrophe, p.30
Chasing Catastrophe, page 30
I knew I couldn’t retract the story because it was the story, and it was already out there. What I could do was go back on TV and try to couch a few things, without quoting Erik.
Which I did: “Authorities believe,” “we’re being told,” “they suspect,” “unconfirmed,” and so on. I think the anchor might have been a bit confused as to why I had backed off from some key points. I didn’t change the facts, I just sounded slightly less sure of a few things, in an effort to appease and protect the guy I’d just burned.
Not long after, authorities held a news conference and confirmed everything I’d reported that Erik had given me. They also said Stack was killed in the crash along with an IRS manager working in the building. Thirteen others were hurt, two severely. I listened closely to see if I’d gotten any facts wrong. I hadn’t. I was first, and I wasn’t wrong on any of it, but I’d burned a really good bridge and felt awful about it.
It wasn’t who I was. I didn’t do stuff like that. But I did that day. Erik didn’t get fired, but I don’t know if he was disciplined in any way. In the long run, it didn’t hurt me, except that I never talked to Erik again, and I was never invited back to the NTSB Training Course.
In fact, I heard after what happened, that the NTSB decided to not invite any media again. I was the first (and possibly the last) reporter to take part in the conference. I also made sure from that day forward to confirm what any source told me, and what was reportable and what wasn’t, a refresher course I didn’t think I needed, but a lesson well learned.
CHAPTER 12
THE DECAPITATION OF DANIEL PEARL
In late January 2002, I flew to Islamabad to prep for another trip to Afghanistan. This time we planned to drive in with two pickup trucks full of gear and a bunch of local Pakistani guys as our security team.
We traveled down to Quetta, along the southwestern border where we planned to head toward Karachi and continue our coverage of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, this time without the restrictions the military had put on our movements when we were embedded with them the previous couple of months.
This would be a much more dangerous journey since we wouldn’t have the protection of the U.S. Marines. I was more than a bit nervous, but also excited at the prospect of doing more original reporting on the ground there.
We spent thousands of dollars on food and supplies, including sleeping bags and tents, ready to rough it wherever we happened to wind up. Our trucks were fully loaded, and we were within minutes of heading for the border when we got word from New York that our assignment was changing.
A reporter for The Wall Street Journal named Daniel Pearl had been kidnapped by terrorists he was trying to interview in Karachi, and my bosses wanted me to head down there immediately.
Pearl, thirty-eight, was based in Mumbair and had been covering the war in the region for several months. He was in Karachi pursuing a story about the shoe bomber Richard Reid, but failed to follow basic security protocols, heading off alone at night for a meeting he was told would be with Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani, suspected of being associated with the radical Islamic group Jamaat al Fuqra.
Pearl’s kidnapping was a really big story for Western news agencies and especially for Fox, since our parent company owned the Journal. Pearl was one of ours.
It was about a ten-hour drive from Quetta to Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city (and the twelfth largest in the world) with close to thirteen million residents at the time. The city wasn’t just bustling, it was like Manhattan on steroids, with ridiculously heavy traffic, packed sidewalks, lots of noise and grime, and a big crime problem.
We were told carjackings and smash-and-grab robberies were common. Many people got around on motorcycles and scooters, and they’d often be used to commit crimes because it was easy to escape on a bike, eluding police by weaving through traffic on the jammed roads.
We had a couple of local drivers and bodyguards, one of whom carried a pistol and a shotgun under his robe, so I felt relatively safe, but as a Jewish New York journalist, I couldn’t help but see similarities between myself and Pearl, and it was more than unsettling to think of the possibility that I might wind up in a similar predicament. I was constantly on edge, looking over my shoulder every time we left the hotel, often greeted with curious and hostile stares.
We got a bunch of rooms at a Marriott downtown and set up our gear (including a satellite dish on the roof) for what we expected could be a long stay. Our crew created a standup location on one of the hotel balconies, and we turned that room into a workspace where we could log in to our computers and track the latest developments in the story when we weren’t out on the streets conducting interviews and shooting B-roll, visiting Pearl’s last known locations before he was snatched.
I found the second reporter notebook I used during coverage of Pearl’s kidnapping, which has a live-shot script written out on the first page:
A dead witness, a possible India link to the case and still no sign of WSJ reporter Danny Pearl. The kidnappers’ deadline has come and gone with no new emails and no word on whether Pearl is alive or dead.
He was last seen nine days ago, just blocks away from us here in Karachi, reportedly dropped off by a taxi driver behind the Metropole Hotel where he planned to meet a source.
Pearl was working on a story about alleged shoe bomber Richard Reed, and one of the men Pearl talked to before he disappeared is now considered a prime suspect. Mubarak Gilani is a leader of the radical Islamic cult Jamaat al Fuqra.
Police picked him up Wednesday and have been questioning him ever since, and raided properties linked to his group across the country, seizing computers and other records. The FBI is involved as well, and President Bush is following the case very closely.
[Here, we included a sound bite from the President, and my track continued after.]
On Sunday, Pearl’s abductors sent out an email with pictures of Pearl and a list of demands, including freeing all Pakistanis held in Afghanistan and improving conditions for Taliban and Al-Qaeda detainees at Gitmo. Wednesday, they gave Pearl 24 hours to live. Thursday, they extended the deadline one more day and included this message:
“You cannot fool us and find us. We are inside seas, oceans, hills, graveyards, everywhere. We have given our demands and if you will not meet them, then we will act and the Americans will get what they deserve.”
Pakistani police say their investigation has been hampered because a key witness is believed to have been killed. They also say there is an Indian link…that Gilani’s cell phone records show the prime suspect had been in contact with three Indian government officials, people who hold important positions inside the Indian government.
A spokesman in New Delhi calls the charges “ridiculous.” In the meantime, Mariane Pearl waits here in Karachi, six months pregnant with the couple’s first child, not knowing if Danny is still alive. In Karachi, Rick Leventhal, Fox News.
Soon after Pearl’s kidnapping, a militant group calling itself the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty sent an email to officials in the U.S. claiming that Pearl was a spy. The group included a list of demands, including freeing all Pakistanis detained by America on terror charges, plus the delivery of a U.S. shipment of F-16 fighter jets to the Pakistani government that had been put on hold. The email also had a threat:
“We give you one more day. If America will not meet our demands, we will kill Daniel. Then this cycle will continue and no American journalist could enter Pakistan.”
There was also a series of phony demands sent by others, including a phone call to the U.S. consulate in Karachi, allegedly from the kidnappers, demanding $2 million ransom and the release of the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan.
We covered these potential updates in the story but qualified them as unconfirmed. Most days there would be silence from his captors and little news to share. Authorities were searching for Pearl and the men who took him with no success, so we watched the wires and tried to advance the story as best we could.
I saw Pearl’s wife in the coffee shop in the lobby of our hotel a few times. I think she was meeting with officials who were staying there. I said hello and asked if she wanted to do an interview as she waited for any positive news, but she politely declined. My notes said she was “composed” and “demonstrated patience and courage.” A Journal spokesperson later told me the government was providing her with medical care and other assistance and that she was staying with a friend and was “holding up pretty well.”
The FBI was involved in the case, working with local police and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the Pakistani intelligence service, but I’d heard from sources that there were concerns about leaks within that agency, which complicated matters, and that one of the prime suspects may have been an informant or double agent. The ISI couldn’t be trusted, I was told. One day we got word of a commando raid carried out the night before as part of the search for Pearl, but it was unconfirmed, and if it happened, they didn’t find him.
Then, on the second Friday after his disappearance, Fox News received an email from a group claiming to be the kidnappers. The email claimed Pearl had been killed and his body dumped in a Karachi graveyard. We shared the potential lead with authorities but didn’t report it because of skepticism regarding its legitimacy. Karachi had about three hundred graveyards, and, out of an abundance of caution, police told us they spent all night and much of the next morning searching all of the cemeteries, finding nothing.
After the searches ended that Saturday, I spent close to an hour with Karachi’s inspector general, the city’s chief of police, who told me in our exclusive interview his department had formed “various teams of specialists, working vigorously around the clock, reviewing progress three to four times a day,” with “technical assistance from the FBI, proceeding forward in the most scientific way we can.”
He said they’d taken numerous people into custody including several overnight but had no substantial updates on the search for Pearl or his captors. He told me a recent email and phone call to the U.S. embassy demanding ransom was probably bogus, and he also did some blaming of the victim, pointing out that “Pearl was keen to interview Gilani. The organization didn’t go looking for him, he looked for them.”
We were told the terror group “offered to have him email questions and they would write back” and that “it would have been more prudent for him to take more care.” He added that “there are more than three thousand journalists operating in this country and we have not experienced any such incident in the past.”
Near the end of our sit-down, he said that Karachi “is not a lawless city. Life is normal. One has to be a little more discreet,” he said, and added that in the eyes of law enforcement it was “technically not a kidnapping but an illegal detention.” He also said authorities were aggressively working the case under the assumption that Pearl was still alive, and the managing editor at the Journal said the staff of the paper believed it, too.
Meanwhile, Mariane Pearl sent a letter to an Urdu-language newspaper in Pakistan, asking the kidnappers to free her husband “as people inspired by Islam’s ethics. I ask them to be people who have the courage to actually take the first step to end this cycle of suffering,” she wrote. “Let real justice win.” Her letter also asked, “What will they get by torturing an innocent man, a sympathizer of all neglected people? I appeal to these people to release him.”
That night, police raided a house in Islamabad and detained a teenage boy who they say confessed to making the ransom call to the U.S. embassy a day earlier, demanding the $2 million ransom and prisoner release. Authorities told us the call was a hoax and the boy had no connection to the kidnappers. They also busted two others believed to be involved in sending the email to Fox falsely claiming Pearl’s body was dumped in a cemetery.
Eleven days in, we were told that Pakistani police had formed a new squad led by their top anti-terrorism expert who’d been trained in the states, and they were turning their attention to areas outside of Karachi where desert tribes were known for harboring criminals and offering protection. The new squad was also intended to fix the poor coordination being reported between the various agencies investigating the case. Pakistani Police told us they were focused on Islamic extremists and were looking for a couple of “primary suspects” including a follower of Gilani who helped to arrange Pearl’s interview that led to his abduction.
One night a body was found, and there were rumors it might be the missing journalist.
One of our camera crews and a producer went flying out the door to race to the scene near the main jail, but the victim had already been moved to the hospital. Our producer somehow got in and saw the body, describing it as an Arabic-looking man in jeans and Western clothes with short hair and a mustache. He said it wasn’t Pearl and that was confirmed by Karachi’s police chief, deputy chief, and a representative from the U.S. consulate who’d met Pearl several times. They were all at the hospital and confirmed it wasn’t him.
On the twelfth day, I reported that a top U.S. Treasury official had arrived in country to push for Pearl’s release, meeting with Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf, urging his government to do all it could. The country’s interior minister said they were pulling out all the stops, that efforts to find him were “massive in scale” and had “spread to all parts of Pakistan,” claiming they were “getting closer” to the men involved.
The night before there’d been another commando raid on a house where they suspected Pearl might be held, only to be frustrated yet again. It had been five days since anyone had heard from the kidnappers, who’d sent images of Pearl in chains to prove he was in their custody. Gilani was still being held and continued to maintain his innocence.
In an interview with French television, Pearl’s wife made another plea for his release, offering to take his place:
“If anyone’s going to give his life to save him, it’s me. Please make contact with me. I’m ready!” She also told the kidnappers that “using Daniel as a symbol is completely wrong.”
The next day I interviewed one of the last people to see Pearl before he was abducted. Jameel Yusuf, chief of the Citizens-Police Liaison Committee, who Danny interviewed for about an hour in the late afternoon of January 23. During the interview, Yusuf says Pearl got a couple phone calls about a later meeting, which turned out to be a trap. Yusuf had a lot of experience with previous kidnappings in Pakistan, saying he helped the police to solve most of them.
He said that most victims “usually don’t know their kidnappers, but in this case, he walked into their hands, forcing himself” on them, ignoring advice from others not to go on such a dangerous mission. Yusuf seemed to think there was a good chance Pearl would eventually be released, based on the tone of the email sent to authorities which was “not very aggressive.”
“They’re not fearsome, they’re not terrorizing,” he said of the kidnappers, and said he was also encouraged because Pearl had a “friendly rapport” with them. He also said “the pressure is definitely on” authorities to solve the case. “Everybody is concerned. We’ve never had such a high-profile kidnapping in this country, ever.”
My report that night also included an open letter from the WSJ’s managing editor at the time, Paul Steiger, written to Danny’s captors, hoping to start some kind of dialogue:
We could resolve this situation if we communicate more privately and more often. I suggest we use an email account of one of Danny’s close friends, such as either of the two best men at his wedding, or a private phone line of one of these friends, or even a letter mailed to such a person. This line of communication would show me that Danny is with you and would allow us one to one contact. We are eager to hear from you soon.
My next script offered some hopeful news from Pakistani authorities who said they “still believe Danny Pearl is alive and say they are now very close to solving his kidnapping. A top police official says they [the police] know who has Daniel, and predicts they may solve this case ‘sooner than you think.’”
The police were apparently more confident because of the arrest of two men, following two separate raids on apartments in Karachi. The men were believed to be responsible for sending the original two emails about Pearl’s kidnapping. Not the fake emails, but the legit ones that included photos of Pearl being held.
A source told me the men were considered to be “low on the totem pole,” and while there were no signs of Pearl at either location, the men did tell police they worked for Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who’d been linked to an Afghan plane hijacking in 1999. That hijacking was connected to a radical group known as Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, the same group that authorities believed all along was behind Pearl’s kidnapping. Connecting the dots to the possible mastermind meant they could refocus their efforts on all known members of the organization. Police would be tightening the net in their search with massive raids predicted, putting additional pressure on the kidnappers.
But their optimism was destroyed by the revelation that Pearl had been murdered nine days after his capture, confirmed with one of the most horrible and disturbing videos I’ve ever seen, which haunts me to this day.
The three-and-a-half-minute digital videotape was delivered to authorities in Karachi a few days after Pearl’s murder. It included several different scenes edited together, making it impossible to say exactly how, when, or where Pearl was killed. It began with Pearl reciting his biography and background, including his heritage.
He says, clearly under duress, “My name is Daniel Pearl. I’m a Jewish American from Encino, California, USA. I come from, uh, on my father’s side the family is Zionist. My father’s Jewish, my mother’s Jewish, I’m Jewish. My family follows Judaism. We’ve made numerous family visits to Israel.”
Which I did: “Authorities believe,” “we’re being told,” “they suspect,” “unconfirmed,” and so on. I think the anchor might have been a bit confused as to why I had backed off from some key points. I didn’t change the facts, I just sounded slightly less sure of a few things, in an effort to appease and protect the guy I’d just burned.
Not long after, authorities held a news conference and confirmed everything I’d reported that Erik had given me. They also said Stack was killed in the crash along with an IRS manager working in the building. Thirteen others were hurt, two severely. I listened closely to see if I’d gotten any facts wrong. I hadn’t. I was first, and I wasn’t wrong on any of it, but I’d burned a really good bridge and felt awful about it.
It wasn’t who I was. I didn’t do stuff like that. But I did that day. Erik didn’t get fired, but I don’t know if he was disciplined in any way. In the long run, it didn’t hurt me, except that I never talked to Erik again, and I was never invited back to the NTSB Training Course.
In fact, I heard after what happened, that the NTSB decided to not invite any media again. I was the first (and possibly the last) reporter to take part in the conference. I also made sure from that day forward to confirm what any source told me, and what was reportable and what wasn’t, a refresher course I didn’t think I needed, but a lesson well learned.
CHAPTER 12
THE DECAPITATION OF DANIEL PEARL
In late January 2002, I flew to Islamabad to prep for another trip to Afghanistan. This time we planned to drive in with two pickup trucks full of gear and a bunch of local Pakistani guys as our security team.
We traveled down to Quetta, along the southwestern border where we planned to head toward Karachi and continue our coverage of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, this time without the restrictions the military had put on our movements when we were embedded with them the previous couple of months.
This would be a much more dangerous journey since we wouldn’t have the protection of the U.S. Marines. I was more than a bit nervous, but also excited at the prospect of doing more original reporting on the ground there.
We spent thousands of dollars on food and supplies, including sleeping bags and tents, ready to rough it wherever we happened to wind up. Our trucks were fully loaded, and we were within minutes of heading for the border when we got word from New York that our assignment was changing.
A reporter for The Wall Street Journal named Daniel Pearl had been kidnapped by terrorists he was trying to interview in Karachi, and my bosses wanted me to head down there immediately.
Pearl, thirty-eight, was based in Mumbair and had been covering the war in the region for several months. He was in Karachi pursuing a story about the shoe bomber Richard Reid, but failed to follow basic security protocols, heading off alone at night for a meeting he was told would be with Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani, suspected of being associated with the radical Islamic group Jamaat al Fuqra.
Pearl’s kidnapping was a really big story for Western news agencies and especially for Fox, since our parent company owned the Journal. Pearl was one of ours.
It was about a ten-hour drive from Quetta to Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city (and the twelfth largest in the world) with close to thirteen million residents at the time. The city wasn’t just bustling, it was like Manhattan on steroids, with ridiculously heavy traffic, packed sidewalks, lots of noise and grime, and a big crime problem.
We were told carjackings and smash-and-grab robberies were common. Many people got around on motorcycles and scooters, and they’d often be used to commit crimes because it was easy to escape on a bike, eluding police by weaving through traffic on the jammed roads.
We had a couple of local drivers and bodyguards, one of whom carried a pistol and a shotgun under his robe, so I felt relatively safe, but as a Jewish New York journalist, I couldn’t help but see similarities between myself and Pearl, and it was more than unsettling to think of the possibility that I might wind up in a similar predicament. I was constantly on edge, looking over my shoulder every time we left the hotel, often greeted with curious and hostile stares.
We got a bunch of rooms at a Marriott downtown and set up our gear (including a satellite dish on the roof) for what we expected could be a long stay. Our crew created a standup location on one of the hotel balconies, and we turned that room into a workspace where we could log in to our computers and track the latest developments in the story when we weren’t out on the streets conducting interviews and shooting B-roll, visiting Pearl’s last known locations before he was snatched.
I found the second reporter notebook I used during coverage of Pearl’s kidnapping, which has a live-shot script written out on the first page:
A dead witness, a possible India link to the case and still no sign of WSJ reporter Danny Pearl. The kidnappers’ deadline has come and gone with no new emails and no word on whether Pearl is alive or dead.
He was last seen nine days ago, just blocks away from us here in Karachi, reportedly dropped off by a taxi driver behind the Metropole Hotel where he planned to meet a source.
Pearl was working on a story about alleged shoe bomber Richard Reed, and one of the men Pearl talked to before he disappeared is now considered a prime suspect. Mubarak Gilani is a leader of the radical Islamic cult Jamaat al Fuqra.
Police picked him up Wednesday and have been questioning him ever since, and raided properties linked to his group across the country, seizing computers and other records. The FBI is involved as well, and President Bush is following the case very closely.
[Here, we included a sound bite from the President, and my track continued after.]
On Sunday, Pearl’s abductors sent out an email with pictures of Pearl and a list of demands, including freeing all Pakistanis held in Afghanistan and improving conditions for Taliban and Al-Qaeda detainees at Gitmo. Wednesday, they gave Pearl 24 hours to live. Thursday, they extended the deadline one more day and included this message:
“You cannot fool us and find us. We are inside seas, oceans, hills, graveyards, everywhere. We have given our demands and if you will not meet them, then we will act and the Americans will get what they deserve.”
Pakistani police say their investigation has been hampered because a key witness is believed to have been killed. They also say there is an Indian link…that Gilani’s cell phone records show the prime suspect had been in contact with three Indian government officials, people who hold important positions inside the Indian government.
A spokesman in New Delhi calls the charges “ridiculous.” In the meantime, Mariane Pearl waits here in Karachi, six months pregnant with the couple’s first child, not knowing if Danny is still alive. In Karachi, Rick Leventhal, Fox News.
Soon after Pearl’s kidnapping, a militant group calling itself the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty sent an email to officials in the U.S. claiming that Pearl was a spy. The group included a list of demands, including freeing all Pakistanis detained by America on terror charges, plus the delivery of a U.S. shipment of F-16 fighter jets to the Pakistani government that had been put on hold. The email also had a threat:
“We give you one more day. If America will not meet our demands, we will kill Daniel. Then this cycle will continue and no American journalist could enter Pakistan.”
There was also a series of phony demands sent by others, including a phone call to the U.S. consulate in Karachi, allegedly from the kidnappers, demanding $2 million ransom and the release of the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan.
We covered these potential updates in the story but qualified them as unconfirmed. Most days there would be silence from his captors and little news to share. Authorities were searching for Pearl and the men who took him with no success, so we watched the wires and tried to advance the story as best we could.
I saw Pearl’s wife in the coffee shop in the lobby of our hotel a few times. I think she was meeting with officials who were staying there. I said hello and asked if she wanted to do an interview as she waited for any positive news, but she politely declined. My notes said she was “composed” and “demonstrated patience and courage.” A Journal spokesperson later told me the government was providing her with medical care and other assistance and that she was staying with a friend and was “holding up pretty well.”
The FBI was involved in the case, working with local police and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the Pakistani intelligence service, but I’d heard from sources that there were concerns about leaks within that agency, which complicated matters, and that one of the prime suspects may have been an informant or double agent. The ISI couldn’t be trusted, I was told. One day we got word of a commando raid carried out the night before as part of the search for Pearl, but it was unconfirmed, and if it happened, they didn’t find him.
Then, on the second Friday after his disappearance, Fox News received an email from a group claiming to be the kidnappers. The email claimed Pearl had been killed and his body dumped in a Karachi graveyard. We shared the potential lead with authorities but didn’t report it because of skepticism regarding its legitimacy. Karachi had about three hundred graveyards, and, out of an abundance of caution, police told us they spent all night and much of the next morning searching all of the cemeteries, finding nothing.
After the searches ended that Saturday, I spent close to an hour with Karachi’s inspector general, the city’s chief of police, who told me in our exclusive interview his department had formed “various teams of specialists, working vigorously around the clock, reviewing progress three to four times a day,” with “technical assistance from the FBI, proceeding forward in the most scientific way we can.”
He said they’d taken numerous people into custody including several overnight but had no substantial updates on the search for Pearl or his captors. He told me a recent email and phone call to the U.S. embassy demanding ransom was probably bogus, and he also did some blaming of the victim, pointing out that “Pearl was keen to interview Gilani. The organization didn’t go looking for him, he looked for them.”
We were told the terror group “offered to have him email questions and they would write back” and that “it would have been more prudent for him to take more care.” He added that “there are more than three thousand journalists operating in this country and we have not experienced any such incident in the past.”
Near the end of our sit-down, he said that Karachi “is not a lawless city. Life is normal. One has to be a little more discreet,” he said, and added that in the eyes of law enforcement it was “technically not a kidnapping but an illegal detention.” He also said authorities were aggressively working the case under the assumption that Pearl was still alive, and the managing editor at the Journal said the staff of the paper believed it, too.
Meanwhile, Mariane Pearl sent a letter to an Urdu-language newspaper in Pakistan, asking the kidnappers to free her husband “as people inspired by Islam’s ethics. I ask them to be people who have the courage to actually take the first step to end this cycle of suffering,” she wrote. “Let real justice win.” Her letter also asked, “What will they get by torturing an innocent man, a sympathizer of all neglected people? I appeal to these people to release him.”
That night, police raided a house in Islamabad and detained a teenage boy who they say confessed to making the ransom call to the U.S. embassy a day earlier, demanding the $2 million ransom and prisoner release. Authorities told us the call was a hoax and the boy had no connection to the kidnappers. They also busted two others believed to be involved in sending the email to Fox falsely claiming Pearl’s body was dumped in a cemetery.
Eleven days in, we were told that Pakistani police had formed a new squad led by their top anti-terrorism expert who’d been trained in the states, and they were turning their attention to areas outside of Karachi where desert tribes were known for harboring criminals and offering protection. The new squad was also intended to fix the poor coordination being reported between the various agencies investigating the case. Pakistani Police told us they were focused on Islamic extremists and were looking for a couple of “primary suspects” including a follower of Gilani who helped to arrange Pearl’s interview that led to his abduction.
One night a body was found, and there were rumors it might be the missing journalist.
One of our camera crews and a producer went flying out the door to race to the scene near the main jail, but the victim had already been moved to the hospital. Our producer somehow got in and saw the body, describing it as an Arabic-looking man in jeans and Western clothes with short hair and a mustache. He said it wasn’t Pearl and that was confirmed by Karachi’s police chief, deputy chief, and a representative from the U.S. consulate who’d met Pearl several times. They were all at the hospital and confirmed it wasn’t him.
On the twelfth day, I reported that a top U.S. Treasury official had arrived in country to push for Pearl’s release, meeting with Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf, urging his government to do all it could. The country’s interior minister said they were pulling out all the stops, that efforts to find him were “massive in scale” and had “spread to all parts of Pakistan,” claiming they were “getting closer” to the men involved.
The night before there’d been another commando raid on a house where they suspected Pearl might be held, only to be frustrated yet again. It had been five days since anyone had heard from the kidnappers, who’d sent images of Pearl in chains to prove he was in their custody. Gilani was still being held and continued to maintain his innocence.
In an interview with French television, Pearl’s wife made another plea for his release, offering to take his place:
“If anyone’s going to give his life to save him, it’s me. Please make contact with me. I’m ready!” She also told the kidnappers that “using Daniel as a symbol is completely wrong.”
The next day I interviewed one of the last people to see Pearl before he was abducted. Jameel Yusuf, chief of the Citizens-Police Liaison Committee, who Danny interviewed for about an hour in the late afternoon of January 23. During the interview, Yusuf says Pearl got a couple phone calls about a later meeting, which turned out to be a trap. Yusuf had a lot of experience with previous kidnappings in Pakistan, saying he helped the police to solve most of them.
He said that most victims “usually don’t know their kidnappers, but in this case, he walked into their hands, forcing himself” on them, ignoring advice from others not to go on such a dangerous mission. Yusuf seemed to think there was a good chance Pearl would eventually be released, based on the tone of the email sent to authorities which was “not very aggressive.”
“They’re not fearsome, they’re not terrorizing,” he said of the kidnappers, and said he was also encouraged because Pearl had a “friendly rapport” with them. He also said “the pressure is definitely on” authorities to solve the case. “Everybody is concerned. We’ve never had such a high-profile kidnapping in this country, ever.”
My report that night also included an open letter from the WSJ’s managing editor at the time, Paul Steiger, written to Danny’s captors, hoping to start some kind of dialogue:
We could resolve this situation if we communicate more privately and more often. I suggest we use an email account of one of Danny’s close friends, such as either of the two best men at his wedding, or a private phone line of one of these friends, or even a letter mailed to such a person. This line of communication would show me that Danny is with you and would allow us one to one contact. We are eager to hear from you soon.
My next script offered some hopeful news from Pakistani authorities who said they “still believe Danny Pearl is alive and say they are now very close to solving his kidnapping. A top police official says they [the police] know who has Daniel, and predicts they may solve this case ‘sooner than you think.’”
The police were apparently more confident because of the arrest of two men, following two separate raids on apartments in Karachi. The men were believed to be responsible for sending the original two emails about Pearl’s kidnapping. Not the fake emails, but the legit ones that included photos of Pearl being held.
A source told me the men were considered to be “low on the totem pole,” and while there were no signs of Pearl at either location, the men did tell police they worked for Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who’d been linked to an Afghan plane hijacking in 1999. That hijacking was connected to a radical group known as Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, the same group that authorities believed all along was behind Pearl’s kidnapping. Connecting the dots to the possible mastermind meant they could refocus their efforts on all known members of the organization. Police would be tightening the net in their search with massive raids predicted, putting additional pressure on the kidnappers.
But their optimism was destroyed by the revelation that Pearl had been murdered nine days after his capture, confirmed with one of the most horrible and disturbing videos I’ve ever seen, which haunts me to this day.
The three-and-a-half-minute digital videotape was delivered to authorities in Karachi a few days after Pearl’s murder. It included several different scenes edited together, making it impossible to say exactly how, when, or where Pearl was killed. It began with Pearl reciting his biography and background, including his heritage.
He says, clearly under duress, “My name is Daniel Pearl. I’m a Jewish American from Encino, California, USA. I come from, uh, on my father’s side the family is Zionist. My father’s Jewish, my mother’s Jewish, I’m Jewish. My family follows Judaism. We’ve made numerous family visits to Israel.”
