David Headley
David Coleman Headley is a Pakistani-American terrorist and the mastermind behind the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks. With the Pakistan-based Islamist terrorist organisation Lashkar-e-Taiba, Headley conducted extensive surveillance and reconnaissance missions throughout central Mumbai, providing critical information to facilitate planning and executing the attacks. Additionally, he, along with his accomplice Tahawwur Hussain Rana, was involved in an unsuccessful plot to carry out a terrorist attack in Copenhagen, targeting the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.
Born in Washington D.C., as an adult Headley became invoved with drugs and trafficking. He was recruited as a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration informant as part of his plea deal following conviction for multiple heroin-related offenses, including attempting to smuggle narcotics into the U.S. from Pakistan. After being placed on probation, he made frequent unauthorized visits to Pakistan. There he became involved in the local jihad movement through his introduction to Lashkar-e-Taiba. Under the direction of LeT representatives, Headley performed five surveillance missions in Mumbai to scout targets for the 2008 Mumbai attacks. The following year, he performed a similar mission in Copenhagen to help plot an attack against the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which had published cartoons of Muhammad. Headley was arrested in October 2009 at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago with co-conspirator Tahawwur Hussain Rana while on his way to Pakistan. On January 24, 2013, a U.S. federal court sentenced Headley to 35 years in prison for his role in Mumbai and Copenhagen.
In India, a Mumbai special court held a trial in absentia for Headley in early February 2016, via a video link from his prison cell in the United States.
Early life
David Coleman Headley was born Dawood Sayed Gilani on June 30, 1960, in Washington, D.C., to a Pakistani father and an American mother. His father Sayed Salim Gilani was a well-known Pakistani diplomat and broadcaster, while his mother Alice Serrill Headley worked as a secretary at the Pakistani embassy in Washington D.C., and hailed from Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Headley has a younger sister, Syedah, and a half-brother, Danyal. Danyal became the spokesman for Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani and served as Pakistan's press attaché in Beijing.Shortly after Headley was born, his family left the United States and settled in Lahore, Pakistan. Headley stood out because of his light skin color and the heterochromic coloration of his eyes. Headley's mother was unable to adapt to Pakistani culture and returned to the U.S. Due to Pakistani custody rules, she was forced to leave her children with their father in Lahore. After getting a divorce, she went through four more marriages and spent time in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan.
Headley was raised in a political environment steeped in Pakistani nationalism and Islamic conservatism, both of which were amplified by Pakistani tensions with India. During the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, bombs hit Headley's elementary school in Karachi and killed two people. Headley went on to attend the elite Cadet College Hasan Abdal, a boys' international military prep school; while there, he befriended co-conspirator Tahawwur Hussain Rana.
In 1977, at the age of seventeen Headley left Pakistan following a difficult relationship with his Pakistani stepmother, and moved in with his biological mother in Philadelphia, where he helped her manage pubs such as the Khyber Pass Pub and the adjacent Miss Headley's Wine Bar. Employees at the pub nicknamed him "The Prince." Headley enrolled at Valley Forge Military Academy but dropped out after one semester. He was a student at the Community College of Philadelphia but dropped out without a degree in the 1990s. In 1985, he married a Pennsylvania State University student, but they divorced two years later due to cultural differences. He eventually moved to New York City and opened a video rental business in Manhattan.
Drug Convictions and DEA Deal
During his frequent trips to Pakistan, Headley associated himself with heroin users and started using the drug himself. He became involved in Pakistani drug trafficking. When he was twenty-four, Headley smuggled half a kilogram of heroin out of Pakistani tribal areas and used Tahawwur Hussain Rana, a Pakistani army doctor who Headley knew from military school, as an unwitting shield. Several days later, police in Lahore arrested Headley for drug possession, but he was released. Rana continued to be used by Headley over the course of his career as a drug trafficker; in the late 1990s, after Rana had emigrated to the U.S., Headley used Rana's legitimate immigration consulting company in Chicago to smuggle drugs.In 1988, while he was traveling to Philadelphia from Pakistan, Headley was arrested by police in Frankfurt, West Germany after two kilos of heroin were found hidden in a false bottom in his suitcase. Headley quickly made a plea deal when his case was handed over to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, agreeing to surrender his partners in Philadelphia in exchange for a lighter sentence. Headley's cooperation earned him four years in prison while his two associates were sentenced to eight and ten years. At his sentencing hearing, the judge made the following statement: "It's up to you, Mr. , to do what you can with the rest of your life. You are still a young man. You can either take advantage of this opportunity. Your mother, your lawyer, people said some nice things about you, but what you did, not only to yourself, but to perhaps thousands, hundreds of victims, heroin users in this country is a terrible thing."
Headley managed to overcome his addiction to heroin, but was still involved in the drug trade. In early 1997, Headley was arrested with another man in a DEA sting operation when he tried to smuggle heroin into the country from Pakistan. Headley quickly offered his services as a confidential informant to the DEA. In January 1998, the agency sent him to Pakistan to dispel suspicions amongst his partners about his prior absence, and to gain intelligence on the country's heroin trafficking networks. According to the DEA, Headley's participation led to five arrests and the seizure of 2½ kilos of heroin. The DEA has insisted that Headley's 1998 trip to Pakistan was the only one paid for by the agency.
While the DEA seemingly made great gains from Headley's intelligence, there is ample evidence that Headley abused his status as an informant. He allegedly tried to set up heroin dealers with jailhouse phone calls that were not monitored by DEA agents. A mentally impaired Pakistani immigrant, Ikram Haq, was found to have been tricked into making a drug deal by Headley, and was subsequently acquitted on the grounds of entrapment when brought to trial. Despite this result, Headley was released from prison and put on probation for his contribution to the case. One anonymous former associate of Headley later suggested that he was exploiting his rapport with the DEA, saying, "The DEA agents liked him. He would brag about it. He was manipulating them. He said he had them in his pocket."
Involvement in terrorism
In exchange for information about Pakistani drug contacts, Headley received a considerably lighter sentence than his co-defendant from the 1997 arrest: fifteen months in jail and five years of supervised release. In November 1998, he was delivered to the low-security Federal Correctional Institution, Fort Dix. There, he became an increasingly devout Muslim. In July 1999, only months into Headley's sentence, his attorney, Howard Leader, requested permission for him to be given a supervised early release from prison so he could travel to Pakistan to be wed in an arranged marriage. Judge Carol Amon granted the unusual request. Headley married a Pakistani woman named Shazia and fathered two children with her.While visiting Lahore, Headley was introduced to Lashkar-e-Taiba, a terrorist organization. Headley made further trips to Pakistan without the knowledge of U.S. authorities, immersing himself in LeT ideology. He befriended LeT's spiritual leader, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, and committed himself to the group's struggle against India, which was supported by the Directorate for Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence
At the same time this was happening, Headley resumed work as a DEA informant in New York City and participated in an undercover operation that reportedly led to the seizure of one kilo of heroin. Despite working for a U.S. government agency, Headley actively raised money and recruited new members for LeT, a group that swore allegiance with Al-Qaeda. Headley would later testify that he discussed his views regarding Kashmir—the focus of LeT's terrorist activities—with his DEA handlers. The DEA has insisted that it was unaware of Headley's political and religious radicalization.
Post-9/11 activities
A day after the attacks on September 11, 2001, Headley's DEA handlers tasked him with collecting counter-intelligence on terrorists through his sources in the drug trade. However, a New York City bartender named Terry O'Donnell reported Headley to an FBI task force after Headley's ex-girlfriend told him that Headley had praised the 9/11 hijackers and "got off on watching the news over and over again" in the weeks following the attacks. Under questioning by two Defense Department agents, in the presence of his DEA handlers, Headley denied the accusations and cited his work for the DEA as proof of his loyalty to the U.S. Headley was cleared, and the DEA did not write a report on his interrogation.On November 16, 2001, six weeks after his interrogation, Leader and Assistant U.S. Attorney Loan Hong made a joint application to Judge Amon asking for Headley's supervised release to be terminated three years early. Amon agreed to their request and discharged Headley from any further probation. Leader has claimed that the DEA was involved in the drive to end Headley's probation, which would have kept him from traveling to Pakistan to continue his intelligence work on terrorists. However, the DEA has claimed that Headley wanted his probation lifted so he could travel to Pakistan for family reasons. DEA officials also claim that the agency officially deactivated Headley as an informant on March 27, 2002. Headley himself has claimed that he ended his work for the DEA in September 2002; other agencies claim that he remained a DEA operative as late as 2005. In February 2002, Headley went to a LeT training camp and attended a three-week introductory course on LeT ideology and jihad. That summer, Serrill Headley, who by then had moved to the town of Oxford, Pennsylvania with her brother, confided to friends that her son had become a religious fanatic and had been to terrorist training camps. While Headley was on a catering visit to his mother's house, one of her friends, Phyllis Keith, noticed that he parked his car behind her residence as if he was trying to hide it. Keith reported Headley to the FBI office in Philadelphia, which apparently did not follow through with an investigation.
In August 2002, Headley returned to Pakistan and began a second stint at the LeT training camp, spending his spare time with Shazia in Lahore. Despite already being married in Pakistan, Headley embarked on a series of affairs in the U.S. and had become engaged to a long-time Canadian girlfriend in New York City the month before. After landing in New York City in December 2002, Headley was briefly detained by border inspectors who had been on the lookout for unusual travel patterns to hubs of terrorism such as Pakistan. However, the border inspectors found nothing amiss and soon released him. Headley married her at a Jamaican resort a few days later.
In the summer of 2005, she confronted him after learning about his other marriages, and about his trips to the LeT training camps in Pakistan, Headley then proceeded to hit her during an argument at his Manhattan video store. After Headley was arrested for assault, his wife called a government hotline and disclosed his terrorist activities. She was subsequently interviewed three times by the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force. The FBI, citing Headley's work for the DEA, did not consider him a threat despite the accusations leveled against him in 2001 and 2002. The FBI agent investigating the matter speculated that Headley's wife made her accusations because she had "an axe to grind" regarding his other marriage. Headley was never questioned, and the assault charge was eventually dropped. Headley later closed his video store.
In June 2006, Headley's Canadian wife applied for a green card under the Violence Against Women Act which allows those in abusive relationships with United States citizens to proceed with their immigration intent, without relying on their initial spousal petitioners. During her immigration interview she made reference to Headley's radicalization and terrorist training; his anti-Semitic and anti-Hindu prejudices; and his praise for suicide bombers. USCIS granted her a green card, but did not alert law enforcement about Headley because of strict privacy laws governing immigration cases which involve spousal abuse.