Book Review: 'The Siege'

The Siege, a blow-by-blow account of the 26/11 attacks on Mumbai, is, as expected, creating a storm in the Indian security and media circles with its revelations of “the extraordinary number of extremely detailed warnings that were ignored, not taken seriously, under-developed and belittled” which allowed ten terrorists to cause mayhem and hold the city under siege for three days. It must be a response that its authors, acclaimed British journalists Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clarke, must have expected. Levy, who was in Delhi for the launch of the book admitted that people's feelings about 26/11 still run deep, especially among victims and survivors in India and elsewhere.

The Siege traces the career of David Coleman Headley as a CIA mole gone rogue and his interactions with the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) and ISI. It gives a detailed expose of how bureaucratic red-tape prevented the National Security Guard (NSG) — built precisely for Mumbai-like scenarios — from reaching the Taj Mahal Hotel till late morning of November 27. In one terrifying story, a police inspector listens to a conversation between the terrorists inside the Taj and their handlers in Karachi, and realises they have taken hostages and are preparing to execute them. The inspector texts his bosses who don't act because they are waiting for the commandos from Delhi.

But The Seige's most explosive claim is that the ISI had a "super agent" in New Delhi, code-named Honey Bee, who helped plan the attacks and was supported with logistics by 10 locals. Levy says Honey Bee is unlikely to be from the army, but someone from the Indian security establishment.

This is a story that needs to be told, especially since Indian journalists and writers have proved inadequate in marshalling the investigative skills required to write gripping thrillers that go into the back-stories of real-life events such as the December 13, 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament, or the 1993 Mumbai bombings. None of them has led to the kind of investigative tomes that followed 9/11 in the US or 7/7 in the UK. Simran Sodhi's Piercing The Heart, the only book by an Indian journalist on 26/11, does not tap fresh sources and relies, more or less, on what was reported in the media. There is also former IG Police of Maharashtra SM Mushrif's book, but that limits itself only to answering, Who Killed Hemant Karkare. All the others are memoirs or edited compilations of news articles.

In The Seige, the authors are well equipped to tell the story in all its complexity, since their two last books explored aspects of the complicated, dynamic and dangerous geopolitics of South East Asia and its brutal repercussions on international peace and security. Deception (2007) focussed on AQ Khan and the story of how he helped Pakistan acquire the nuclear bomb and distribute it secretly to North Korea, Libya and Iran. The Meadow (2012) was more chilling, meticulously detailing the brutalisation of Kashmir society, woven around the kidnapping of 10 Western tourists in 1995. The incident was perhaps the opening shot in what became the global war on terror.

Five years after the event, The Siege sets new benchmarks in investigative writing. "Our credo," Levy says, "has been to wait for the dust to settle and then go to a story, rather than racing around with a pack behind us. In nearly every case there are people who know the truth and have paid a price living with the burden of knowing it. It's a question of finding these right-minded people and matching their accounts to what is objectively known." But it wasn't easy. "Teasing out stories proved slow and painful for many," says Levy. The authors also had to battle the assumption that 26/11 had 'been done'. "Has it 'been done'? I see no evidence of that. The attitude was — let's move on. But how can you move when nothing is properly known or documented?"

The Ram Pradhan commission, set up to probe the police response, Levy dismisses as a "64-page whitewash" because it had no access to intelligence agencies directly, or the NSG or politicians, or any of the closed evidence files. "It seems as if those at fault wanted to shore up their careers rather than improve the safety of the nation by getting to the truth," he says. Sadly, for all their keen investigation into almost every facet of the conspiracy, the authors don't research the Indians who they claim were in the LeT camp — Zabihudin Ansari, especially, who started out as an electrician at Beed police headquarters, later shifted to Aurangabad to help the ATS, turned rouge and joined the LeT. It was Ansari who taught Ajmal Kasab Hindi and Marathi.

Levy says that he and Scott-Clarke are investigating the Indians at the LeT camp, but Ansari, he says, was regarded by Lashkar as nothing more than an 'office boy'. The LeT had decided to shut him off — until Operation Bombay.

Do the duo think there is anything the government can do to counter terrorism? “They can look to countries and models that are showing signs of succeeding: Indonesia, Malaysia and, to an extent, Saudi Arabia,” says Levy.