Disturbing account of Mumbai terror attack

The Siege

68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel

nolead begins By Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark

Viking. 352 pages. $12.35 nolead ends nolead begins

Reviewed by Madhusree Mukerjee

On an upper floor of the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai, as a fire he had set roared along the corridor and the dead and dying lay in rooms all around, the terrorist Umer was in high spirits.

One of his five hostages, Adil Irani, was a lowly member of the hotel staff. "A waiter!" Umer quipped. "The only thing you are waiting for is your death." The mobile phone line to Umer's mentor in Karachi was live, and, listening in, Inspector Kadam of Mumbai's police force heard "a strange sound like a lollipop being sucked." It was Umer's handler, Qahafa, laughing at the joke.

This surreal scene is one of many with which acclaimed British journalists Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark pack The Siege, a gunshot-by-gunshot recounting of three days in 2008 during which 10 young men rained ashes and gore on Mumbai. Just as riveting, however, is the authors' account of how an American double agent named David Headley worked with Lashkar-e-Taiba, a terrorist group based in Pakistan, and unidentified members of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to plan the attack.

Aided by a bungling Indian bureaucracy, which took half a day to scramble an antiterrorist force, the operation ran with clockwork precision. The handlers were viewing live TV footage from Mumbai, for instance, using Google Earth to identify the locations of security forces, and directing the terrorists to fire accordingly. More than 160 people perished.

And in an afterword dismaying enough to recall John le Carré, even the plethora of leads disgorged by a captured jihadi, Ajmal Kasab, failed to reveal to investigators who some of his puppet-masters were. Headley is in a U.S. prison, serving a 35-year sentence. But in Pakistan, an investigator was assassinated, allowing most of the others to roam free.

The Siege provides glimpses of unimaginable horror, as well as of heartbreaking courage and heroism. Jharna Narang, who had gone to the Taj to attend a wedding, was shot several times through the torso and became "conscious of someone flipping bodies and finishing the job." A practicing Buddhist, Narang willed herself into a meditative trance, "erasing all external signs of life" and thereby saving hers.

And surely it was beyond the call of duty for headwaiter Thomas Varghese or engineer Rajan Kamble, both of the Taj, to run straight at the shooters, shielding the hotel guests with their bodies. They paid with their lives, as did a policeman, Tukuram Omble, who grabbed Kasab's AK-47 even as the terrorist pumped bullets into his stomach - enabling his capture.

By far the most arresting character, however, is Headley, a 6-foot-2 pony-tailed blond with mismatched eyes (one blue, one brown) and a violent streak. Born Daood Saleem Gilani in Washington to Main Line socialite Serrill Headley and Pakistani broadcaster Syed Saleem Gilani, he spent his childhood in Pakistan and moved at age 16 to the United States. Within a decade, he was selling drugs, bought along the lawless Pakistan-Afghanistan border, out of his video store in Manhattan.

Gilani was "charismatic and charming," his American cousins would later report, but "only ever interested in himself."

Caught by customs officials, he became a paid informer for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. After a second bust, with 15 kilograms of heroin, he returned to Pakistan with the mandate of penetrating terrorist outfits. The next time U.S. authorities questioned him - one of his three wives had complained that he was an aspiring terrorist - Headley upped the stakes, claiming his best friend in Pakistan "knew Osama bin Laden."

Arrested in Pakistan for drug-running, he came up with his boldest offer yet, this time to an unidentified ISI official: "Why not use a clean skin to do the reconnaissance for a spectacular attack on a great Indian commercial hub like Mumbai?" Back in the States, Gilani changed his name to David Coleman Headley, the better to enter India and mingle with the rich and famous in the Taj.

Over several trips, Headley shot video footage of the labyrinthine corridors of the century-old hotel and plotted routes along Mumbai's streets that would prove vital to the smooth running of the operation. Another wife informed U.S. consular officials in Islamabad about his inordinate interest in Mumbai, even showing them pictures he'd taken inside the Taj.

"I told them, he's either a terrorist, or he is working for you," she wrote in her diary. "They pretty much told me to get lost."

In the afterword, as well as in a follow-up article in the Times of India in November, Levy and Scott-Clark charge that the CIA had let the Mumbai plot play out because Headley was at the time the only potential lead to bin Laden. Indian intelligence officials had earlier made a similar accusation, they write, upon which their U.S. counterparts retorted that they had provided at least 25 detailed warnings of an impending attack on which India had failed to act.

True enough. And yet the evidence the authors lay out is so disturbing the question lingers: Was the worst terror attack since 9/11 collateral damage in the war on terror?