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This is the story behind The Journalist and the Jihadi, a feature-length documentary on the kidnapping and murder of Bombay-based Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl, which has been taken by HBO of America and had its world premiere in New York last week. By and by, the documentary will be seen all over the world. I have had a personal involvement on this project since it was my job to persuade Daniel’s brave widow, Mariane, and his grief-stricken parents, Judea and Ruth Pearl, as well as his colleagues on the Wall Street Journal to agree to participate in the documentary and then interview them, hours at a time, on what was an unimaginably painful subject. What I know about filmmaking is less than zero, so it’s worth stating at the outset that were it not for the collaboration between the brilliant director Ahmed Jamal in London and the incredibly hardworking and talented Ramesh Sharma in India, this documentary wouldn’t have got done.
Farrukh Dhondy, in between writing the screenplay for Kisna and The Rising: The Ballad of Mangal Pandey, helped a lot, too, with “management of the narrative”. My script was greatly improved and rendered US-friendly by Danny Schechter, a consultant from America. Later on, Anant Singh, the South African-based producer, provided much-needed funds to complete the film and brought in very helpful people at HBO whose touch, at all times, was both light and very supportive. And the heavyweight Christina Amanpour of CNN was brought in to be the narrator. Our main cameraman was Kabir Khan, who has gone on to direct his own feature film, Kabul Express.
Following last summer’s suicide bombings in London and the recent uncovering of the alleged plot simultaneously to blow up 10 trans-Atlantic aircraft, Britain is agonising over why some of its Muslim youth has been so radicalised as to choose the path of terrorism to avenge what they see as the wrongs being done to Islam. The mastermind behind 38-year-old Daniel Pearl’s kidnapping turned out to be one Omar Sheikh, a young British Pakistani but much better educated than any of the recent lot who have followed him into jihad. Omar was in a class of his own, almost a Professor Moriarty in the world of brainwashed jihadis. He began his career as a jihadi in India with the botched-up kidnapping of four Westerners near Delhi but graduated to bigger things when he got to Pakistan. How he got to Pakistan is a story in itself — he was released from Tihar jail in exchange of passengers of the hijacked Indian Airlines flight IC814 in December, 1999. Omar, 32, is now in prison in Pakistan, having been sentenced to death, but he is pretty confident that President Pervez Musharraf will not allow him to be hanged because he reckons he will be protected by his powerful friends in the ISI and various other militant organisations for whom he had worked.
Omar’s path and mine had crossed a long time ago, in a manner of speaking. I was probably the first journalist to write about him in 1994 when he ended up in an Indian prison hospital after the shootout with police — Ramesh has performed superbly in obtaining chilling footage of Omar’s first interview. Asked whether he had any regrets about the kidnappings, Omar thinks about it and says, “No.”
What made me want to write about Omar, the son of a Pakistani businessman, was his background. Born in London, he had been to Forest School, a public school which had also produced England cricket captain Nasser Hussain. I suggested to Channel 4 television then that perhaps there would be interest in a documentary about a British public school boy who had become a terrorist. His field of operation was only India — so there wasn’t.
At school, Omar was a champion chess player, took up arm-wrestling and often protected little boys from older bullies. His teacher described him to me as an old-fashioned “English gent”. His brother and sister had gone to Oxbridge. With a string of good ‘A’ levels, Omar went to the London School of Economics in 1992 to study mathematics and statistics. But he left the LSE a year later after learning of the slaughter of innocent Muslims in Bosnia and meeting Arab guerrillas who convinced him that he ought to go to Pakistan and become a jihadi. There was no interest in making a documentary even after Omar was sprung from Tihar in 1999 with the hijacking of IC814. This was seen as a “ghar ka jhagda” between Pakistan and India. The really key figure who was freed from Tihar with Omar was Maulana Masood Azhar, who founded Jaish-e-Mohammad — we have footage of him making fiery speeches in Pakistan. The Pakistan section of our documentary is all down to the director, Ahmed Jamal.
I first met Mariane in the autumn of 2003 when she came to London after the publication of her book, A Mighty Heart: The brave life and death of my husband Daniel Pearl. She was the daughter of a Dutch father and a Cuban mother and her first language was French. At that time, I interviewed her only for a newspaper interview. I was impressed and moved by her determination not to be crushed by the terrorists who had so brutally ended her husband’s life. We talked a little about Mumbai where Daniel, an enthusiastic musician, had played at two well-known restaurants, Indigo and Soul Fry.
The idea of a documentary evolved in early 2004. It was to be a British production, done by First Take, Ahmed’s company in London, in collaboration with Ramesh’s Moving Picture Company of India which provided the initial funds to start the project. I asked Mariane if she would be interviewed. She said ‘yes’, when she had said ‘no’ to many documentary producers and directors in America. In America her book had already been optioned to Brad Pitt’s company which hoped to make a feature film — this is now going ahead with Angelina Jolie cast as Mariane.
After Mariane agreed to be interviewed, Ahmed and I flew from London to her home in New York. Kabir came from Bombay (he told me of his dreams of making Kabul Express). I had to take Mariane through the whole sequence of events, starting with the evening when Daniel didn’t return from an interview in Karachi to the point she learnt he had been beheaded and that later his body had been chopped into 10 parts and buried in a garden on the outskirts of the city. The son that Daniel would never see was born in a Paris hospital. As I was interviewing Mariane, Adam would climb into his mother’s lap — like any other toddler. At the heart of the tragic events, there is a love story. Mariane told me that although the marriage was cut off abruptly, she and Daniel had known real love. Mariane is a Buddhist, a warm, wonderful woman who has now become a friend. I have made her a promise that, one day, I would like to take her back to Mumbai, where she and Daniel began their married life after he was posted there in 2000 as the Wall Street Journal’s South Asia bureau chief. Perhaps, it is to demonstrate that our part of the world isn’t all bad. After Daniel’s death, she received letters full of remorse from ordinary Pakistanis. For our documentary, she gave us intimate photographs and wedding videos — and not one second’s nakhra.
From New York, Ahmed and I went to Morgantown in West Virginia to interview a key witness in the drama — Asra Nomani, who had been Daniel’s colleague at the Wall Street Journal. Her family were Indian Muslims who had settled in America. Asra (who is to be played by Archie Panjabi, one of Britain’s best young actresses, in the movie) was in Karachi writing a book, when Daniel and Mariane arrived to stay at her rented bungalow. She said that among the stories Daniel had been working on was the funding of Al Quaeda — were its operatives receiving money sent from organisations in Pakistan? As reporters on the Wall Street Journal, America’s premier financial newspaper, she and Daniel had been taught a basic rule: “Always follow the money.”
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| Omar Sheikh (centre) when in Forest School, London |
Ahmed and I flew to LA to see Daniel’s parents, our passage eased by Dennis Johnson, the publisher who had brought out Bernard-Henri Levy’s book, Who Killed Daniel Pearl? (I later interviewed the French author and philosopher in London.) How do you ask a mother the equivalent of: “So, how did you feel when you heard your son had been beheaded?” The thought struck me that my late mother, a typical Bengali mother if ever there was one, would have reacted extremely badly to such a question. It so happened that Daniel was especially fond of Iran, which he had visited no fewer than 13 times (his father told me). Iran is also a country where I have spent even more time — in many ways, I found ordinary Iranians to be like ordinary Indians.
It was Daniel’s father, Judea, a university professor, who raised the matter himself when I talked to him and his wife at their home in Los Angeles. That evening their part of the great city had been plunged into darkness. There had been a power cut and it could be hours before the electricity was restored. I risked a bad joke. In the Third World, we were used to loadshedding — “I know you are Third World, too.” Judea Pearl laughed and the ice was broken. Ahmed and Kabir took Mr and Mrs Pearl to a hotel where I interviewed them, as they sat side by side. Afterwards, we were the ones who cried.
I have Judea Pearl’s transcript before me: “My first question on the phone to the American Consul in Karachi, ‘Are you sure he’s dead?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ ‘How can you be sure?’ He said, ‘I can tell you that it’s sure, don’t ask how.’ And I said, ‘You mean they cut his head?’ He said, ‘Yes, that’s the only way we can be sure.’ ” Judea wanted two assurances. One was that we would not use the video of the beheading which his killers had put on the Internet. There was never any question we would — in fact, I have made a point of not seeing the video myself. The other was that they did not want the documentary to be “negative”. With their two daughters, Tamara and Michelle, the Pearls have set up a Daniel Pearl Foundation to foster understanding between different religions and cultures through music and journalism. Judea wants to be like Shiva — a destroyer of evil.
Others I interviewed include Randall Bennett, the US regional security officer in Karachi who headed the hunt for Daniel’s kidnappers, and Kathy Diskin, of the FBI, who was drafted in to join the investigating team. It took a second trip to New York, following weeks of negotiation, before I met Paul Steiger, the utterly civilised managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, and Robert Frank, a charming man and one of Daniel’s closest friends on the paper. This was familiar territory to me. Some people had questioned the paper’s wisdom in sending Daniel, who happened to be Jewish, to Pakistan. But such critics have no understanding of how newspapers work or deploy their foreign correspondents. The fact of the matter is that many Jewish journalists have reported safely from Islamic countries, including Pakistan. Given a whiff of a big exclusive — and Daniel was chasing an interview with Sheikh Gilani, said to be the spiritual heir of “shoe bomber” Richard Reid — most reporters would take risks (in search of a scoop I once had to agree to being blindfolded in Teheran but I got the story). Daniel was lured into a trap by Omar Sheikh, who had taken on the persona of a helpful fix-it man called “Bashir” whose email ID was nobadmashi@yahoo.com.
Once the interviews were done began the really challenging task, masterminded by Ahmed and Ramesh and two editors, of turning hours and hours of raw footage into the finished 79-minute documentary. Ramesh had the excellent idea of commissioning a late interview with John Bussey, Daniel’s foreign editor, who had given a live television commentary as the Twin Towers — opposite the Journal’s offices in New York — were coming down. That’s where our documentary begins. In her interview, Mariane told me she and Daniel, who were at that moment on some other story in Patna, were told by a friend to switch to CNN and shortly afterwards made for Karachi. The obvious questions are the most difficult to answer. Why was Daniel killed? Was it because he was Jewish? Was it because he had found out too much and had to be silenced? And who actually wielded the butcher’s knife? Beyond these questions are even more intractable philosophical ones. Today, we hear of vulnerable young Muslims being brainwashed by mullahs but Omar Sheikh, a very clever and educated young man with a background not so different from that of Daniel Pearl, hardly fell into that category.
Perhaps, I am overstating Omar’s abilities but it has been claimed that Osama bin Laden, partly impressed with his perfect English and public school education, saw the Briton as a possible successor. I was reminded of the section in The Final Problem where Sherlock Holmes describes Professor Moriarty to Dr Watson: “He is a man of good birth and excellent education, endowed by Nature with a phenomenal mathematical ability.... But the man had criminal tendencies of the most diabolical kind. A criminal strain ran in his blood, which, instead of being modified, was increased and rendered infinitely more dangerous by his extraordinary mental powers…. He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson.”
The world premiere of The Journalist and the Jihadi was in New York, September 27, followed by screenings and after-show discussions in other American cities. The documentary will be telecast on HBO, October 10, on the Daniel Pearl Music Day to coincide with what would have been his 43rd birthday
