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Who Killed Daniel Pearl?
Who Killed Daniel Pearl? by James X. Mitchell Melville House, 2003 454 pp. $35 |
We already knew, before this book, the grisly details of the murder of Daniel Pearl. We just didn't know what to do with them.
Until the last day of January, 2002, Daniel Pearl was the Wall Street Journal's man in Pakistan. Sent the previous October by the Journal to cover the impact of the American war on the Taliban, the 38-year-old Pearl was already a veteran of alarums and excursions around the globe. He had taught himself enough Arabic and Urdu to get by, and had even written the Journal's handbook on the safety precautions journalists need to take in unsafe places—like Pakistan. In December 2001, Pearl turned his attention to a fresh investigation, on "the risks of the transfer of nuclear know-how from Pakistan to Afghanistan and the Taliban."
Pakistan exploded a nuclear device in 1998, and for some time now the unstable borders between Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the onetime Soviet-stans to the north have been darkly populated with rumors of suitcase bombs for sale by ex-Soviet scientists. (Someone offered to sell Pearl some nuclear stuff bootlegged from Ukraine, but the deal turned out to be bogus.) In December, Pearl published a preliminary article in the Journal on the possibility of nuclear transfers, and then turned his attention to investigating a list of Islamist groups newly outlawed by Pakistan's president, Perez Musharraf. Pearl was delighted to make contact with an intermediary named Bashir, who promised to arrange a meeting for Pearl with Sheikh Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani, the head of the radical sect Al Fuqrah and the mentor of the aerial "shoe-bomber," Richard Reid. Bashir met Pearl at a restaurant in Karachi on January 23, and they drove off to meet Gilani.
But there was no meeting. Instead, Bashir disappeared with Pearl, and the next news was a demand for his ransom, relayed by e-mail from the anonymity of a Karachi cyber-café.
But there was no ransom, either. On the morning of January 31, Pearl was executed—decapitated—by a knife-wielding Yemeni who slit the reporter's throat before a video camera.1 Or tried to, since Pearl bucked violently half-way through the throat-cutting, bursting out of the grip of a Pakistani mujahideen and collapsing on the floor, so that the camera had to be stopped and refocused before the Yemeni could pull the lolling, half-severed head back, re-insert his knife, crack the vertebrae, and finish the job with a triumphant flourish, swinging Pearl's head like a toy.
On February 13, Pakistani officials arrested Omar Sheikh, the pseudonymous Bashir, under suspicion of Pearl's kidnapping, and a week later, the video of Pearl's murder was delivered to Pakistani police. Not until May 17 was Pearl's body, chopped into ten pieces, found buried in the garden of a house in Karachi.
Bernard-Henri Lévy first heard of the Pearl murder while on a mission of his own to Kabul, representing the president of France to the new postwar president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai. It is typical of Lévy's headlong impulsiveness that he dropped his mission to Karzai and threw himself instead into what became a year-long investigation of Pearl's murder, despite never even having known the man.
Pearl, however, had probably heard of Lévy. In France, it's hard to imagine anyone who hasn't. Born in Algiers in 1948 and raised in France, Lévy was a student of Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser at the Ecole Normale Superieure when the great student revolt of 1968 blew the lid off Paris. The spell of 1968 enthralled, and then repelled, Lévy, and when the first volume of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago appeared in 1973, the Marxist scales fell from Lévy's eyes. In 1977, he published Barbarism with a Human Face, a hideous play on the short-lived hopefulness of Alexander Dubcek and the "socialism with a human face" that perished in the Prague Spring. He became one of the stars of a generation of French anti-Marxists that included Jean-Francois Revel and Pascal Bruckner. More than that, with his rock-star good looks and a voracious appetite for journalistic headline-catching, Lévy became a celebrity, known simply as "BHL."
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