A graver threat
Bernard-Henri Lévy, France's 'rock star' philosopher-journalist, traces the killing of reporter Daniel Pearl to high levels in Pakistan -- a U.S. ally that's a far graver threat than Saddam's Iraq, he tells CHRISTOPHER DREHER in New York City
POSTED AT 4:43 AM EDT Saturday, Sep. 13, 2003
At first, the execution of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl seemed to be just another example of the acidic barbarity of militant Islam, beginning and ending with the brand of fanatical hatred that led its apostles to smash airplanes into buildings only a few months earlier.
But for Bernard-Henri Lévy, France's most renowned philosopher, Mr. Pearl's murder has a wider and more ominous significance.
In his book Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, published in English this week after selling hundreds of thousands of French copies this spring, Mr. Lévy contends that Mr. Pearl was killed not only for being an American and a Jew, but because he was about to reveal sensitive connections between terrorist organizations and security officials in Pakistan, a country that Mr. Lévy said "has the stench of the apocalypse."
His most disturbing theory -- that Mr. Pearl had uncovered proof that Pakistani nuclear scientists were giving technical information to al-Qaeda -- calls into question the wisdom of the United States' recent war on Iraq, when one of its own allies might pose a much greater and more immediate threat.
"Every reporter in the world who has ambitions to be a good reporter felt affinity with this man," Mr. Lévy said of Mr. Pearl, trying in a recent interview at the Carlyle Hotel in New York City to force his feelings through the confines of his English.
"He was one of the best reporters of this country. His way of listening to people who did not think the same as him, his way of being a Jew open to the Muslim world, his way of refusing the dramatic idea of the 'clash of civilizations' -- that the West is not at war with the rest -- with all this I felt an affinity."
After a moment, as though finding the perfect words, Mr. Lévy added, "What happened was also a prominent event: His murder was one of the most prominent events in the beginning of this century."
This sort of passionate, typically unqualified statement has made Mr. Lévy one of France's most widely read and controversial authors. The scion of a wealthy family, Mr. Lévy was originally known as the handsome and flamboyant young leader of the so-called nouveau philosophes in the 1970s.
Since then, he has developed the uniquely French persona of the intellectual that more resembles a rock star than a dowdy academic, with his trademark dark suits, open-collared shirts and long dark hair. He and his wife, movie actress Arielle Dombasle, regularly make French gossip pages, and he is widely known in France just by his initials, "B. H. L."
Yet despite these more superficial aspects, Mr. Lévy commands an impressive bibliography and has a history of ardent public support for serious causes. He is the author of 30 books of criticism, biography and fiction over the past 25 years and became a war reporter during the 1971 conflict between Pakistan and India over Bangladesh.
During the 1990s, he wrote extensively about the atrocities in Bosnia, often travelling between Paris and Sarajevo. He has also worked in diplomatic capacities for the French government, most recently in Afghanistan, where he headed a fact-finding mission after the war against the Taliban.
Mr. Lévy heard about the Pearl murder while seated in the office of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Mr. Pearl, at the time the Journal's South Asia bureau chief, had been investigating a jihadist leader named Sheikh Mubark Ali Shah Gilani, who was the guru of aborted shoe bomber Richard Reid. While supposedly going to do an interview with Mr. Gilani in Karachi, Mr. Pearl was abducted on Jan. 23, 2002.
Over the next eight days, the kidnappers sent e-mail messages with ransom demands and photos of Mr. Pearl, one of which depicted a gun to his head. On Feb. 1, the kidnappers sent word that Mr. Pearl had been executed. A grisly propaganda video of the execution surfaced a few weeks later.
To his surprise, Mr. Lévy found that he could buy a copy of the video outside the doors of a mosque in Pakistan. The brazenness of the carefully edited film -- beginning with Mr. Pearl being forced to talk into a camera about being Jewish, then climaxing with the reporter being decapitated and his severed head held up beneath a list of the captor's demands -- shocked Mr. Lévy so much that he compared it to "a mini World Trade Center" in impact.
"What is unusual about the Pearl murder is the junction of two groups," he said, referring to al-Qaeda and the upper ranks of Pakistan's fearsome Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI.
"What makes this murder so mysterious, so enigmatic, is that two powerful forces shook hands and went together in order to crush this single man. You have no other example of that."
During his year-long investigation into what he terms a "crime of state," Mr. Lévy travelled around the world. He went from the slums of Karachi to intelligence offices in New Delhi. In Bosnia and England, he investigated the mastermind of the Pearl plot. In Dubai, he found that radical Islam conducts itself more like an avaricious gang than self-sacrificing religious purists. And in the United States, he talked with Mr. Pearl's parents and wife.
His sources included a spectrum of those fighting or participating in international terrorism -- from cagey government functionaries to fanatic jihadists, disgruntled police officers and indoctrinating imams.
The resulting narrative descends from Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, two of many American writers Mr. Lévy cites as influences -- a mixture of detective story, investigative journalism, memoir, homage and speculation.
In one of the most controversial sections of the book, Mr. Lévy imagines what Mr. Pearl might have been thinking and feeling in his last moments of life. "There are some moments where speculating alone could move a few steps forward, where the investigation stops, when there are no witnesses or sources," he said.
"At that point, the technique of the novelist is like a bridge that can lead you to the other bank. Imagination works as a sort of relay in this book."
He also meant his imagination to serve as a rebuttal to the assassins' video. "If the murderers and the cameraman had this point of view of Daniel Pearl's death, then I thought it important that there was another point of view," Mr. Lévy said.
He said he also wanted to offer another vision to Mr. Pearl's son, who would never get a chance to meet his father.
One of the most interesting parts of the book is the in-depth examination of the mastermind of the kidnapping, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, the British-born son of a prosperous, London-based Pakistani businessman, and a former student at the London School of Economics.
Mr. Lévy traces Mr. Saeed's life -- from brilliant private school student and chess player, with a passion for arm wrestling in pubs, to fundamentalist fanatic who, in addition to the Pearl kidnapping, was imprisoned in India during the 1990s for another kidnapping.
"There was this mystery of a completely European Muslim becoming a monster. When I saw the extent of this enigma, I was fascinated," Mr. Lévy said.
"There was one part of his biography that was close to mine," he added. "Omar claims to have become a radical Muslim as a reaction to the international passivity to the atrocities committed against Muslims in the Bosnian war. I remember having been myself so shocked and angry after this same thing.
"In a way, my road and his road were close for a moment and there was a time we could have met. But we each chose a road after that, and mine was toward humanism while his was going toward the worst."
In fact, Mr. Lévy puts forth evidence to prove that Mr. Saeed was much more than he seemed to be. "Omar Sheikh was not just a little jihadist deciding to get his Warholian quarter of an hour," he said.
In the book, Mr. Lévy wrote, "Daniel Pearl's killer is not just linked to al-Qaeda. He is not one of the innumerable Muslims around the world in a vague allegiance to it. He is the 'favoured son' of its Chief. . . . He is a crucial character in the arm-wrestling match that the new barbarians have started against the democracies of the world."
The investigation was not just a matter of doing interviews. Mr. Lévy retraced Mr. Pearl's footsteps, spoke to many of the same sources and was forced into making some of the same risky decisions. Being a journalist and a Jew as well, Mr. Lévy faced significant danger on his trip to the little hotel that served as informal headquarters of the ISI, where Mr. Pearl first met with Mr. Saeed, or when he got the chance to visit the "Mosque of the Taliban" in Karachi.
As the investigation progressed he began receiving strange phone calls and visits -- one from a supposed journalist for a jihadist paper, who didn't know how to use his tape recorder, but ominously beseeched Mr. Lévy to go with him to another location in order to find out more about the case.
In the end, while he found no irrefutable smoking gun, Mr. Lévy's diligent speculation and the accumulation of facts and evidence provide many credible, striking theories.
As for what will happen to Mr. Saeed and the three others convicted of the murder, Mr. Lévy stated that "the trial of Omar was a joke. I think there was a deal between Omar and the men who controlled the ISI at the time of Omar's arrest, saying, 'We'll arrest you, and then we'll let you out soon.' "
He cited Mr. Saeed's arrogance even after he was sentenced to death, when he promised he would only serve three or four years in jail before he would be released. The case is now under appeal.
"Will this really happen? I don't know," Mr. Lévy said. "This is in your, my, our power, to prevent that. We have to put this country under strong watch. We have to be vigilant. It will happen in the darkness if we forget Pakistan -- if we leave them alone to their little affairs, they will liberate him. If we keep the lights on in the theatre, it will be more difficult. This is our responsibility."
Christopher Dreher's journalism has appeared in Salon, the Boston Phoenix and The Washington Post.
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