The Odd Ordeal Of Daniel Pearl

By Unmesh Kher

Journalism, like any other investigative profession, has its share of thrill seekers. Daniel Pearl is not one of them. Colleagues and friends describe the Wall Street Journal's South Asia bureau chief as a seasoned correspondent who never fails to put safety first when reporting in dangerous places. So when Pearl--who had traveled between Pakistan and India over the past four months on the trail of a variety of terror-related stories--didn't check in as expected on the evening of Jan. 23, his editors had reason to be alarmed.

His disappearance assumed a further urgency three days later when reporters and news agencies in Pakistan and the U.S. booted up their computers to find a message from a Hotmail subscriber named "kidnapperguy" who claimed to represent a group called the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty. The quixotic ransom note accused Pearl of working for the CIA--a charge vehemently denied by the Journal and the CIA--and demanded that the U.S. release the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan Abdul Salam Zaeef and the Pakistanis it is holding at its base in Cuba's Guantanamo Bay on suspicion of terrorist links. The note also insisted that the U.S. deliver the F-16 fighter aircraft it had sold Pakistan before imposing sanctions on the country in 1990 because of its nuclear-weapons program. Kidnapperguy, it seems, hadn't done his homework: the conflict had been resolved by a refund almost three years ago.

The demands may have been preposterous, but the photos attached to the e-mail were bone chilling. In one, two hands held a black 9-mm pistol to Pearl's head. A later barrage of e-mails accused Pearl of working for the Israeli intelligence service Mossad and claimed Pearl would be executed if the group's demands were not met at once. The group also warned other U.S. journalists to leave Pakistan or "be targeted." The affair underscores the dangers journalists have faced in the region since the U.S. launched its war in Afghanistan; eight have been killed on the job.

The confusion deepened Friday when an e-mail sent to news organizations, including CNN and Fox, claimed that Pearl had been executed and that his body could be found in an unspecified graveyard in Karachi. Someone else called the U.S. embassy in Islamabad demanding $2 million for Pearl's return. Attempts to trace the e-mails have so far proved inconclusive; the Wall Street Journal, for its part, said on Saturday that it believes Pearl may still be alive.

Pakistani investigators and the FBI have illuminated the sequence of events leading to Pearl's kidnapping--but little else. The correspondent arrived in Karachi, a bustling southern port city, on Jan. 22 with his wife Marianne, a French national and freelance journalist who is six months pregnant. Pakistani officials say Pearl had earlier spent a week in a town called Bahawalpur, home to the founder of the banned terrorist group Jaish-e-Muhammad. On the day he was abducted, Pearl had a midafternoon meeting at the U.S. consulate and then met with Jameel Yusuf, the head of Karachi's Citizen-Police Liaison Committee. During the interview, Pearl received a call on his cell phone and told the caller he was just five minutes away. After leaving Yusuf's office, Pearl took a cab to a restaurant called the Village, reaching there at 6:45 in the evening, three-quarters of an hour before it opened for dinner. His kidnappers presumably picked him up there.

Pakistan's roster of chief suspects includes operatives of Jaish-e-Muhammad and Pir Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani, the leader of Jamaat al-Fuqra, an obscure extremist group that has branches in the U.S. The group is thought to have cultivated the shoe bomber Richard Reid's incipient fanaticism while he studied Islam in Pakistan. Pearl, it turns out, had hoped to interview Gilani for a story he was developing about Reid. Last week police raided the home of Pearl's liaison to Gilani, a man who goes by the alias "Arif." But inside they found his relatives mourning him, claiming he had just died in Afghanistan. Police suspect their story may be a ruse.

Gilani turned himself in to Pakistani authorities late last week in Rawalpindi, but his role, if any, in the kidnapping remains unclear. Indeed, a lack of clarity seems the only salient theme of the investigation so far. Many security experts in Pakistan doubt that the kidnappers are professionals. If the first e-mails really came from Pearl's captors, the imprecision (unclear deadlines, flip-flopping accusations) and absurdity of their demands (it's fairly well known that the U.S. does not negotiate with kidnappers) would suggest they are new to the kidnapping and terrorism business. Terry Anderson, an American reporter who was held hostage by Islamic radicals for seven years in Lebanon, said last week that upon his release in 1991, his captors acknowledged that kidnapping had not been a "useful tactic." Though it had attracted press coverage, Anderson noted, the reports focused on the hostages, not the kidnappers' demands.

In the absence of any solid leads, Pakistani officials, embarrassed by Pearl's disappearance and perhaps anticipating the usual farrago of catcalls from across the border in India, have suggested that India had a hand in the kidnapping. Pakistan's presidential spokesman, Major General Rashid Quereshi, spoke darkly of "an Indian linkage" to the kidnapping and suggested that Pearl's abduction might be a "totally stage-managed event to defame Pakistan." He was probably referring to a series of calls made after the kidnapping from a suspect's cell phone to Indian politicians--calls security experts speculate the kidnappers made to lead the investigation astray. Indian officials dismissed Quereshi's charge as "ridiculous."

As the kidnappers' initial deadlines passed late last week, Pearl's family and friends clung to the hope that his cool head, innate charm and intelligence would protect him from further harm. "Danny's incredibly resourceful," said Nick Noyes, a friend of Pearl's from his days at the Massachusetts paper North Adams Transcript. "If anyone can get himself out of a mess like this, he can." But Pearl had been caught up in a new wave of anti-American terror, one that doesn't seem to follow any script. His friends and colleagues could do little more than wait to see how it would turn out.

--Reported by Hannah Bloch/Islamabad, Sean Scully/Los Angeles and Deirdre van Dyk/North Adams