The publication of Bernard-Henri Levy’s Who Killed Daniel Pearl? in English translation “has raised some questions about the facts surrounding the kidnapping and murder of Danny Pearl,” The Wall Street Journal’s managing editor, Paul Steiger, wrote today in a memo to the WSJ newsroom.
Steiger’s lengthy memo, obtained by Straight Up, reports “what we know and don’t know.” While it takes issue with Levy, it nonetheless urges the authorities to read the book and says the Journal will examine it closely “for leads to possible further reporting” of its own. Here is the memo:
Mr. Levy offers a dramatic theory that Danny was kidnapped and murdered by a nexus of al Qaeda and Pakistani intelligence officers who believed he had discovered and was going to reveal their partnership. Moreover, he hypothesizes that Danny was working on a story seeking to demonstrate that Pakistan was helping North Korea and al Qaeda produce nuclear weapons. We don’t know and may never know what the kidnappers believed, so Mr. Levy could well be right on that score. We do know that Danny wasn’t working on such stories, for several reasons.
First, Danny was in close contact with his editors and his colleagues while he was in Pakistan — even on the day he was kidnapped — and he told them what he was working on and what his proposals were for future articles. Nothing he was doing focused on Pakistan as a rogue state or on nuclear weapons. Danny knew the importance of working with his editors while overseas as well as any foreign correspondent at the Journal. Indeed, he’d written a memo after his experience covering the war in Kosovo that had stressed the importance of close contact between editors and correspondents as a way of protecting the safety of foreign correspondents.
As Danny noted, reporters working in difficult places in the world would be safer if they didn’t take risks for stories that editors didn’t care about and if they checked in each day with their editors so that, if one of them didn’t, the editors would know something was wrong.
Like many of the recommendations in his memo, this practice was adopted by the paper. Danny telephoned or e-mailed his lead editor, Bill Spindle, regularly while he was in Pakistan to make sure Bill knew what he was working on, and to get guidance. Danny did co-write a story in December 2001 on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, but afterward didn’t mention to Bill any plans for a follow up. In the days before he was kidnapped, Danny said he was trying to get an interview with Sheikh Mubarik Ali Gilani, who was believed to be the spiritual advisor to Richard Reid.
Reid, of course, is the infamous “shoe bomber” who allegedly tried to blow up a passenger plane heading to the United States in December 2001 by igniting explosives concealed in his shoes. Danny’s messages and calls discussed other stories as well, but there is nothing to indicate that Pakistan’s connections with North Korea or al Qaeda were anywhere on his story agenda, let alone that they were a focus of his work.
Second, the investigation into Danny’s death by authorities in Pakistan and in the US has turned up no evidence supporting the notion that Danny was reporting about nuclear weapons when he was kidnapped. Obviously, we didn’t run that investigation. But John Bussey and Steve LeVine were in Karachi within days of Danny’s disappearance, and then spent the subsequent weeks with Mariane Pearl debriefing Pakistani and U.S. investigators working on the case. We can’t say with certainty that John and Steve saw or knew of every piece of information the Pakistanis uncovered. Almost surely they didn’t. But they did question the authorities thoroughly.
We determined that Danny checked with several colleagues and sources about how safe it would be to meet with Sheikh Gilani and the men around him, and did not mention a story about nuclear weapons. For example, he spoke with the Regional Security Officer at the US Consulate in Karachi on the day he was kidnapped about his planned story on Sheikh Gilani and the proposed interview. Like Danny’s colleagues, the security officer was concerned and advised him to meet the man only in a public place and only in one of the safer parts of Karachi. Given Danny’s care in making the effort to get advice from the security officer, it seems improbable that he would have been working on a far more sensitive story about Pakistan and nuclear weapons and not have mentioned that as one of the risk factors that concerned him.
So, we firmly believe that what we published in the January 23, 2003 leder on Danny’s abduction and murder was accurate:
“On Jan. 6 [2002], Mr. Pearl, working in Islamabad, read a story in the Boston Globe about Richard Reid, a Briton accused of trying to blow up an American Airlines jet over the Atlantic with a bomb in his shoe. The story said Mr. Reid had studied under a Pakistani Islamic leader named Sheik Mubarik Ali Gilani, the reclusive head of a largely U.S.-based group called al Fuqra.
“Mr. Pearl began seeking an interview with Mr. Gilani to discuss Mr. Reid or, failing that, with someone who knew the cleric. A man with whom Mr. Pearl had been in contact, calling himself Arif, phoned to say he knew such a person.”
This was a story idea that Danny generated himself and that he proposed to his editor. Danny was as concerned about safety as any reporter we had. He knew that no one in New York was suggesting he take special risks for this story, and in fact he, and his colleagues, had been told not to arrange risky interviews with dangerous figures. But Danny was focused on the risks posed by interviewing the man about whom he was writing, Sheikh Gilani, and not on the source who said he could introduce Danny to Gilani. That source, whose real name was Omar Saeed but who gave his name as Bashir, met with Danny and then sent e-mails over 12 days that were intended to seduce Danny into believing he had established a personal rapport with this seemingly cooperative and friendly Pakistani. In reality Omar Saeed had no connection to Sheikh Gilani, and instead was an experienced kidnapper. He has been convicted and sentenced to death for his role in Danny’s murder.
Mr. Levy spent one year on his book, and he relates excerpts of many of the conversations he had with a variety of sources. There may be information in those conversations that would help the Pakistani police in their investigation, and so we would hope that at least some have read or will read the book. We will also continue to examine the book for leads to possible further reporting by us into the facts behind the tragedy of Danny’s murder.
POSTSCRIPT: For another report on Levy’s book –sort of a metamemo — have a look at what the sympathetic but increasingly long-winded Ron Rosenbaum has to say in the New York Observer. Among many other things, he writes: “Mr. Levy maintains that Daniel Pearl was not killed as a Jew, but as a journalist who knew too much.”
