WAS AMERICAN TERROR SUSPECT WORKING FOR THE CIA?

That question is being asked by Indian investigators looking into the key role allegedly played by an American, David Coleman Headley, in the Mumbai terror attacks that killed 166 people in November 2008.
So far, the CIA and the Pakistani intelligence services have denied he worked for them but it is known he was recruited as an informant by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency after he was caught smuggling heroin through New York in 1997. Back then, he was called Daood Gilani.
He was born in Washington in 1960 to a Pakistani father and an American mother but moved with his father to Pakistan after his parents divorced. He was raised a strict Muslim and attended a preparatory school run by Pakistan’s military. In1977, he flew to Philadelphia to live with his mother and enlisted as a student at Philadelphia Community College. Before long, he began displaying a rebellious streak and exchanged his studies for a life on the streets where he was recruited as a courier for a Pakistani cartel. In 1977, when he came to the attention of the DEA, he was living with a wife and two children in Chicago, masquerading as a lawful businessman.
From the moment the DEA recruited him, until he was charged in a U.S. court on December 8. 2009, with plotting the Mumbai attacks on behalf of the Muslim terror group Laskar-e-Toiba, much of his life was led in the shadows. It is now known, however, that one of the first things the DEA did was send him into Pakistan as part of an undercover drugs operation. That meant his existence became known to the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies.
By 2002, still using his Pakistani birth name, Daood Gilani, was in contact with Laskar-e-Toiba. The group’s name can be translated as the Army of the Pure and its stated goal is to drive India out of Kashmir, the disputed region that borders India and Pakistan. Kashmir is a throwback to a time when the British divided the Indian sub-continent into India and Pakistan, leaving Kashmir isolated between the two new states yet claimed by both. Laskar has sometimes been described as a puppet of the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service, which has been known to use it to carry out attacks against Indian targets in Kashmir and in India itself. It receives much of its funding from Pakistani ex-pats in Britain. Indian intelligence sources claim Gilani’s presence in Laskar terror training camps in 2002 and 2003 was known to U.S. intelligence. The Indians say that raises the possibility he had been transferred from DEA control to the CIA, whose targets were terrorists and not drug cartels? Indian investigators have also posed the theory that, while working for the DEA, he became radicalized and went rogue. India would like to know the truth.
If he went rogue, the DEA was unaware of it. In 2006, he formally changed his name from Daood Gilani to David Coleman Headley and continued to make trips from the U.S. to Pakistan and India. His name change implied he was a Westerner instead of someone of Pakistani or Muslim origins. That would have gave him ideal cover on trips he also made to Denmark where he is accused of plotting a range of attacks on Indian targets there.
In August 2009, he was questioned at Chicago’s O’Hare airport as he was about to board a flight to India. It is not known if he was stopped as a result of a routine check, or on the orders of U.S. intelligence. It is said that, while being questioned by airport police, he gave confusing answers to questions about his travels. He claimed he worked for the First World Immigration Service but a search of his luggage offered no evidence to support that. The FBI was contacted and its agents checked his tax record and discovered he had received no income from such a company. He was finally arrested on October 3, 2009 and three weeks later unsealed indictments accused him of travelling to Denmark to plot attacks against a newspaper and a Jewish temple. It took another two months before he was charged with the Mumbai atrocity.
Indian authorities would like to get their hands on him, or at the very least on the files U.S. intelligence have on him, as well as copies of U.S. interrogators’ notes. So far that has not happened and Indian intelligence sources allege the U.S. is hiding details about his past. They claim the U.S. knows he had contact with Pakistani army officers, al Qaeda and possibly members of Pakistan’s intelligence community.
In a strange twist to the story, the lawyer for one of the Mumbai terrorists held by India filed a motion on behalf of his client claiming Headley was one of a number of foreign interrogators who questioned his client after he was arrested. The lawyer said that his client had originally informed him he was interrogated and threatened by a Col. Headley but it was not until David Headley was arrested in the U.S. that it became clear the two Headleys were one and the same person. That claim was dismissed by the Indian prosecutor in the case but the matter will be presented to a magistrate. It is believed India may make a formal request for Headley’s extradition but all signs indicate the U.S. will not release him. Any case against him in the U.S. may well lead to most of the evidence about his past being heard in secret on the basis that to do otherwise would jeopardize national security. That legal tactic has often employed by the Federal government. It would effectively hide any links Gilani might have had to the U.S. intelligence community and its Pakistani allies.