Travels of a terrorist

NY Times:

An American charged with helping plan the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, moved effortlessly between the United States, Pakistan and India for nearly seven years, training at a militant camp in Pakistan on five occasions, according to a plea agreement released by the Justice Department last week.

The odyssey of David C. Headley, 49, included scouting targets in several cities in India and meeting with a senior operative of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas. These and other new details of Mr. Headley’s activities, contained in the plea agreement, raise troubling questions about how an American citizen could travel for so long undetected from his home base in Chicago to well-established terrorist training camps in Pakistan.

The document shows that Mr. Headley made two trips to North Waziristan, the heart of Qaeda operations in the tribal area where the United States is still pushing Pakistan for a military offensive to clear out militants. His handlers, the document reveals, included a former Pakistani military commander with ties to a Pakistani extremist group and even Al Qaeda.

From there, Mr. Headley not only helped plan the Mumbai attack, it says, but he was put in contact with a Qaeda cell in Europe that may still be operative. The document shows the cell was well supplied with weapons and money and primed for an attack until the moment Mr. Headley was arrested by the F.B.I. at O’Hare airport last October.

Mr. Headley divulged details of his life as a spy and militant as part of a plea agreement that will spare him the death penalty, his lawyer, John T. Theis, said this week. Mr. Headley’s maximum sentence would be life imprisonment, he said. As part of his plea, Mr. Headley has volunteered to talk to the authorities in India, Pakistan and Denmark, where he was plotting with a Qaeda cell to attack the Copenhagen offices of the newspaper that had printed derisive cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, the agreement says.

The revelations around the European cell were particularly disturbing, said Bruce Riedel, who was a member of the National Security Council in the Clinton administration and is now at the Brookings Institution. They showed that “Al Qaeda still has a significant operational infrastructure somewhere in Europe,” he said. Mr. Headley’s story also showed in clear contours the close relationship between Al Qaeda and the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, he said.

Mr. Headley was able to use his Pakistani and American heritage to great advantage, playing up his American descent on his mother’s side in India, and then behaving as a Pakistani in Pakistan, where his father was born.

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There is much more.

The last quoted paragraph points out his value to the terrorist as someone who could fit in outside the terrorist sanctuaries and was free to travel without restrictions. It was the plan to attack the cartoonist in Denmark that gave him away. Those guys have become terror magnets, but their attraction has wound up tripping up several plotters including this one. If the terror groups were smart they would leave them alone, but it could be the attraction is to great.

In going after the cartoonist they are making a fundamental error. Attacks like this only work when there is ambiguity as to the time and place of an attack. When the target is fixed, it is much easier for counter terrorist to keep and eye on those wishing them harm. By doing so they can gather information as to the planned time of the attack and snare the plotters.