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THE STORY: UNTOLD •

gence services for failing to predict the Mumbai

In 2002, intelligence informants attack. However, available evidence suggests that
despite credible intelligence that terrorists were
first began reporting that Lashkar planning attacks in Mumbai and elsewhere, India's
political leadership failed to act.
operatives were being trained in Back in 2002, Indian intelligence informants
first began reporting that Lashkar operatives were
marine commando techniques. It being trained in marine commando techniques
along the Mangla dam, which straddles the border
soon became clear that the I ashkar between Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (POK) and the
province of Punjab. It soon became clear that the
.was hoping to open new rO\ltes Lashkar, which found it increasingly difficult to pen-
etrate India's Line of Control defences, was hoping to
across the Indian Ocean. open new routes across the Indian Ocean, routes that
IN October, the Lashkar-e-Taiba's supreme reli- would give it easy access to key cities such as
gious and political head, Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, in Mumbai.
a signal speech to top functionaries of the orga- In 2006, Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil was
nisation, said: "The only language India understands• disturbed when the covert services told him to make
is that of force, and that is the language it must be
talked to in."
If India's strategic establishment had been lis-
tening, all those people who made the mistake of
being in the wrong places in Mumbai on November
26 would still be alive. If more carnage is to be
prevented, it is imperative to correct the culture of
strategic deafness that facilitated the murderous
attacks.
From the testimony of the arrestedfidayeen, Aj-
mal Amin Kasab, Maharashtra Police investigators
have garnered their first insights into the role of the
Lahore- and Karachi-based Lashkar commanders in
organising the attacks. Both the State Police and the
Indian intelligence services appear to be confident
that they will succeed in demonstrating that the
trigger of the Mumbai terror squad's guns were
pulled by their commanders in Pakistan.
But even as India debates what the authorship of
the attacks will mean for India-Pakistan relations,
commentators are scrambling to contrast India's re-
sponses to terror to those of the United States. Whe-
reas the U.S. has succeeded in blocking successive Vl
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attempts to execute attacks on its soil since the tragic >-
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events of September 11, 2001, the argument goes,
India's failure has been dismal. THE BODY OF a suspected terrorist inside the
Politicians have been quick to blame the intelli- Nariman House building.
specific mention of the need to step up
counter-terrorism defences. Among
the intelligence that Patil based his
speech on was the evolving story of
Faisal Haroun, a top Lashkar oper-
ative who commanded the terror
group's India-focussed operations out
of Bangladesh. In September 2006,
Haroun was briefly held by the Bangla-
deshi authorities before being deport-
ed, quietly. But a West European
covert service obtained transcripts of
his questioning by Bangladesh's Direc-
torate-General of Field Intelligence,
evidence that shook even the Home
Minister.
Haroun, it turned out, had been
using a complex shipping network,
with merchant ships and small fishing
boats, to move explosives to Lashkar
units operating in India. Among the
end-users of these supplies was Ghu-
lam Yazdani, a Hyderabad resident
who commanded a series of attacks,
including the assassination of the God-
hra pogrom-complicit former Gujarat
Home Minister, Haren Pandya, and
the June 2005 bombing of the Delhi-
Patna Shramjeevi Express. Investiga-
tors probing the Haroun story deter-
mined his network had helped land a
massive consignment of explosives
and assault rifles on the Maharashtra
coast for an abortive 2006 Lashkar-Ied
attempt to bomb Gujarat.
INDIAN OCEAN BASE
India's intelligence services deter-
mined that Haroun had been attempt-
ing to set up an Indian Ocean base for
the Lashkar. Along with a Male-based
Maldives resident, Ali Assham, Ha-
roun had studied the prospect of using
a deserted Indian Ocean island to
build a Lashkar storehouse from
where weapons and explosives could
be moved to Kerala and then on to the
rest of India. In 2007, when evidenqe
emerged of heightened Islamist activ-
ity in the Maldives, including the
bombing of tourists in Male's Sultan
Park and the setting up of a Sharia-run
mini-state on the Island of Himand-
hoo, the seriousness of the threat to
India's western seaboard became even
more evident.
ed over a dozen coastal police stations
over the last year, but neither State set
up a trained marine police. Fewer than
a dozen new boats were made available
to the two police forces; without so-
phisticated surveillance equipment fit-
ted on board, their use for
counter-infiltration work was at best
rudimentary. And while the I.B. re-
ceived sanction for hiring small num-
bers of personnel to man new coastal
surveillance stations last year, it got
neither boats nor observation
equipment.
Early this year, more intelligence
became available that the Lashkar had
Mumbai in its sights. Investigators
A TV GRAB of the body of Amarsinh
probing a New Year's Eve attack on a
Solanki, captain of the fishing boat .\
Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF)
"Kuber", which the terrorists used
camp in Rampur found that the Lash-
to reach the shore.
kar unit responsible for the attack also
Last year, the Lashkar's maritime had plans to hit the Bombay Stock Ex-
capabilities were underlined once change (BSE) , the Gateway of India
again, when a group of eightfidayeen and the Oberoi hotel. Uttar Pradesh
landed off Mumbai's coast. On that resident Fahim Ahmed Ansari was ar-
occasion, a superbly crafted intelli- rested in February along with two spe-
gence operation allowed the landing to cfally trained Pakistani nationals;
be tracked by Coast Guard ships. The Imran Shehzad from Bhimber in POK
police in Maharashtra and Jammu and and Mohammad Farooq Bhatti from
Kashmir, acting on information pro- · Gujranwala in Punjab. .
vided by the Intelligence Bureau (I.B.), Ansari's interrogation records,
were able to arrest thefidayeen. How- which were accessed by Frontline,
ever, it was clear the networks Haroun show he waS recruited by the Lashkar
was able to build were up and running. when on a visit to Dubai in 2003. The
On the basis of these warnings, owner of a small paper envelope man-
New Delhi moved to step up coastal ufacturing business and a one time ac-
counter-infiltration measures. In its tivist -of the Students Islamic
Annual Report for 2007-08, the Home Movement of India (SIMI), Ansair
Ministry detailed the measures put in met top Lashkar commanders in Pa-
place for "strengthening coastal secur- kistan in 2007. He returned to India
ity arrangements, to check infiltra- through Kathmandu late that year.
tion". In liaison with the nine coastal Back in M umbai, Ansari stayed at Sun-
States and Union Territories, it said, light Guest House from November 28
funds had been earmarked to set up to December 10 before renting it room
"73 coastal police stations which will off Falkland Road. He then secured ;a
be equipped with 204 boats, 153 jeeps driving licence under the ,alias Samir
and 312 motorcycles for mobility on Sheikh and enrolled himself as a stu-
coast and in close coastal waters. The dent at a computer institute near the
coastal police stations will also have a BSE.
marine police with personnel trained All three BSE assault-team volun-
in maritime activities". teers held Pakistani passports, which
Precise figures are unavailable, but they presumably hoped would enable
officials in three States told this corre.- them to escape by catching flights
spondent that progress in realising the through Nepal. Shehzad carried pass-
scheme·had been painfully slow. Mah- port number EKs149331, issued on
arashtra and Gujarat both inaugurat- March 14, 2007, while Bhatti used
passport number AW3177021, issued
a day earlier. Ansari's Pakistani pass-
port, BM 6809341, issued on Novem-
ber 1, 2007, bears the pseudonym
Hammad Hassan.
LAST-MINUTE ALERTS
On the eve of the Mumbai attacks,
warnings continued to flow in. In late
September, I.B. informants issued
warnings that the Taj Mahal Palace &
Tower hotel was on the list of a small
set of high-profile targets selected by
the Lashkar for a suicide-squad attack.
The Research and Analysis Wing
eRAW), too, on the'basis of communi-
cations intelllgence, learned that the
Lashkar had carried out reconnais-
sance on targets in Mumbai's Wasanji
Road, including the Leela Kempinski
hotel.
Finally, on November 18, the RAW
intercepted a satellite phone conversa-
tion originating in the Indian Ocean
from a ship bound for India's western
coast. In the conversation, a still-uni-
dentified Punjabi-speaking individual
notified a contact in Lahore that his
"cargo" would soon land in Mumbai.
RAW communications experts deter-
mined that the Pakistani landline
number was one sometimes used by a
top Lashkar commander for oper-
ations directed against India, who is so
far known only by the aliases "M uzam-
mil" and "Abu Hurrera". Indian Coast
Guard ships were scrambled towards
the location of the ship.
Luck favoured the Lashkar. Even
as thefidayeen squad bound for Mum-
bai panicked at the heightened Indian
naval presence in the area, an opportu-
nity presented itself. On November 15,
a Porbandar-registered fishing boat,
I\uber, was· blown off course by bad
weather. From the account of Ajmal
Amin Kasab, investigators have deter-
mined that the boat was hijacked on
the night of November 18. Later, the 10
fidayeen on the Kuber are thought to
have shot dead four of the five crew
members. After finally landing in
Mumbai, the fidayeen broke up int9
five groups and headed towards tar-
gets they had previously trained to lo-
cate on high-resolution satellite maps.
Despite the mass of credible in-
telligence that was available, no sys-
tem was put in place to guard against
the attacks: Mumbai simply did not
have the resources to do so. Less than a
week before the attacks, additional se-
curity stationed in south Mumbai was
withdrawn. Maharashtra - with at just
147 policemen for every 100,000 pop-
ulation or, expressed in another way,
49.9 policemen to guard every 100
square kilometres, falls well short of
global norms - simply did not have the
resources to keep men tied up guard-
ing every potential target.
Hotels and businesses, for their
part, failed to enhance their own in-
ternal security systems. Neither the
Trident hotel nor the Taj, for example,
had access control systems or a system
to deal with a terrorist attack or bomb-
ing. For weeks before the attacks, po-
lice sources tolq Frontline,
Maharashtra Police officials met with
top corporate security heads in an at-
tempt to convince them of the need to
invest in defending their facilities.
Nothing was done.
Even if police personnel had been
stationed near the terrorist targets, it is
improbable that they could have in-
tervened effectively. Mumbai, unlike
any Western city of scale, has neither a
specially trained emergency response
team nor a crisis-management centre
with an established drill to deal with a
terrorist assault. In this, it is not excep-
tional: no Indian city has any crisis-
management protocols in place. "Peo-
ple contrast the post-9/ 11 successes of
the U.S. with our failures," notes one
Maharashtra Police officer, "but they
should also be contrasting the billions
spent by that country with the peanuts
we have invested in our own security."
"The whole system is premised on
the assumption that our intelligence
services will get a hundred per cent
heads-up on the precise timing of a
terrorist attack," one intelligence offi-
cial says, ''but nowhere in the world
does this happen. Intelligence is only
an aid to on-ground policing, not a
substitute."
India's strategic responses were no
better. Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh and his foreign policy advisers
failed to read the signs that jehadist
groups in Pakistan were sharpening
their swords.
EXISTENTIAL THREAT
In a speech delivered on October 19
before an audience of key Lashkar
leaders such as Maulana Amir Hamza,
Qari Muhammad Yaqoob Sheikh and
Muhammad Yahya Mujahid at the or-
ganisation's headquarters in Lahore,
the Lashkar chief made it clear that he
saw India as an existential threat. In-
dia, he claimed, was building dams in
Jammu and Kashmir to choke Pakis-
tan's water supplies and cripple its
agriculture.
Earlier, in a speech on October 6,
Saeed claimed India had "made a deal
with the United States to send 150,000
Indian troops to Mghanistan". He
claimed India had agreed to support
the U.S. in an existential war against
Islam. Finally, in a sermon to a reli-
gious congregation at the J amia Mas-
jid al-Qudsia in Lahore at the end of
October, Saeed proclaimed that there
was an "ongoing war in the world be-
tween Islam and its enemies". He said
that "crusaders of the East and West
have united in a cohesive onslaught
against Muslims".
India has learned that not all terro-
rism stems from Pakistan: the country
has faced attacks from Indian Isla-
mists, Hindutva groups and ethnic-
chauvinist organisations in the north-
eastern States. Each form of hate has
fed and legitimised the other. But this
circle of hate has been driven, too, by
organisations based in Pakistan, jeha-
dist groups that have demonstrated
that they, while being friends of Pakis-
tan's Inter-Services Intelligence Direc-
torate, are enemies of the people of
Pakistan.
In his recent address to the nation,
Manmohan Singh warned that he in-
tended to "raise the costs" for those
waging a war against India. He could
start by demanding that Pakistan
President Asif Ali Zardari act against
such groups and then consider what
can be done, if need be, to compel him
to do so. D