CHICAGO — The life of David Coleman Headley, a self-confessed American terrorist and Pakistani spy, has moved from soap opera to crime story to espionage thriller.
Monday begins the most revealing chapter yet: the courtroom drama.
Headley, a Pakistani American businessman and former informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration, will be the star witness against Tahawwur Rana of Chicago, his boyhood friend and alleged accomplice in the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks. Opening arguments are set for Monday in a trial that has drawn international attention because Headley’s testimony could reinforce allegations that Pakistan plays a double game in the terrorism fight.
The prosecution will depend largely on how the jury views Headley. The burly 50-year-old has a swashbuckling personality and a knack for juggling relationships with multiple wives, terrorist groups, and law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
“Sometimes he’d tell my husband, ‘Oh, I want to be in movies,’ a movie star or something like that,” Rana’s wife, Samraz, told ProPublica and PBS’s “Frontline.” “So it looks like he wants to be famous.”
Headley pleaded guilty last year to conducting reconnaissance for the Mumbai attacks, which killed 166 people, and plotting against Denmark. His confessions painted a devastating portrait of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), because he said ISI officers helped the Lashkar-i-Taiba terrorist group plot the commando-style Mumbai attacks.
Rana’s defense centers on ISI links. His attorneys say Headley convinced Rana that he was part of an ISI operation in India, then betrayed him to escape the death penalty.
“They are using a whale to catch a minnow,” said Charles Swift, Rana’s attorney. He called Headley “a master manipulator.”
Prosecutors recently raised the political stakes by indicting a suspected ISI officer in the deaths of six Americans in the Mumbai attacks. The officer, identified only as Maj. Iqbal, was charged last month, along with three alleged Lashkar masterminds of the attacks. The indictment, decided at high levels in Washington, sent a tough signal to Pakistan shortly before the raid that killed terrorist leader Osama bin Laden in a military town near Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.
“I think it shows the government believes Headley when he says his handler was an ISI officer,” said James Kreindler, a former federal prosecutor who is suing the ISI in New York on behalf of victims of the Mumbai attacks and their families.
Pakistani officials deny any links to terrorism and question Headley’s credibility.
Rana, a doctor by training, is the lowest-ranking suspect among those indicted. He is charged with material support of terrorism for allegedly letting Headley use his immigration consulting firm as a cover overseas.
Rana has known Headley since they attended an elite military school in Pakistan. When the DEA arrested Headley in 1988 and 1997 on heroin-trafficking charges, Rana put up his house as bond.
Rana’s wife, who also has a medical degree, met Headley in the 1990s. The convicted heroin dealer and recovering addict charmed her conservative immigrant family, she said during the interview.
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