Qui a tué Daniel Pearl?
By Vanessa Gezari.
Vanessa Gezari is a journalist based in New Delhi who has
reported from Afghanistan for the Tribune
October 19, 2003
A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of My
Husband, Danny Pearl
By Mariane Pearl, with Sarah Crichton
Scribner, 278 pages, $25
Who Killed Daniel Pearl?
By Bernard-Henri Levy, translated by James X. Mitchell
Melville House, 454 pages, $25.95
There is something journalists find irresistible about the story of Daniel
Pearl's kidnapping and murder by Islamic militants in Karachi, Pakistan, last
year. Part of its lurid attraction lies in its nearness to many reporters' own
experience, in the ease with which we can imagine Pearl assiduously following
the trail, from one contact to the next, into the keep of his killers.
Pearl's story is also symbolic in a manner that is particularly well-suited to
journalism. He was an American at a time when anti-American feeling was as
vigorous as it has ever been; he was a Jew in what may be the most anti-Semitic
country in the world; he was a journalist in a place where reporters are
invariably suspected of spying. His killing was a brutal watermark in the new
era of international terrorism, a sign that even those with good intentions can
be painstakingly marked out for a violent death. For journalistic purposes, his
experience is that perfect object lesson, the story of one person that becomes
the story of us all.
It is no surprise, then, that journalists would want to tell Pearl's story. What
is surprising is that two books, both journalistic in their approaches, could
tell the story from such different reporting perspectives as the fictionalized
reconstruction of French pop-philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy and the memoir of
Mariane Pearl, a French journalist and Daniel Pearl's wife.
Pearl's "A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of My Husband, Danny Pearl" is
based on firsthand reportage about the kidnapping investigation, in which she
was closely involved, while Levy's "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?" offers a view from
the distance, based largely on press accounts, interviews and his own
reimagining of the crime. While Mariane Pearl writes with the clarity of
real-life observation about a man she knew intimately, Levy is guided by family
photos and his deep sense of kinship, or "identification," with Pearl.
Both authors seek to honor Pearl's spirit and to assert that he is, in some
sense, still alive. For Levy, this attempt to "resurrect" the dead man is also,
or primarily, an act of self-realization, a "contract, first between him and me,
then between me and myself: to contribute something." By writing about Pearl,
Levy himself becomes more substantial, more alive.
For Mariane Pearl, who emerges in the memoir as a woman of enviable mental
balance, the goal is different, and it really is Daniel Pearl, not herself, whom
she seeks to bring to life. Pearl's book is a sort of mourning, a way of uniting
language and memory that is private but also public, a conversation with the
dead of a kind that is acceptable in the contemporary West. She recounts that
while giving birth to their son months after Daniel Pearl's killing, she talked
to her husband and felt as if she herself was "the hand opening the cage so the
bird can fly again. We won't be prisoners of our own fate. And somehow, beyond
life and death, Danny is with me."
The portrait of Daniel Pearl that emerges from the books is not significantly
different from the one presented in the weeks after his kidnapping. The
38-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter was the son of an Israeli father and an
Iraqi mother, both Jewish, who had settled in the U.S. As a reporter Pearl had
traveled widely, covering the Middle East and the war in Kosovo for the Journal
before becoming the newspaper's South Asia correspondent. He and his wife moved
to Bombay, India's financial capital, in October 2000. The day after the Sept.
11, 2001, terrorist attacks, like hundreds of other journalists, they flew to
Pakistan.
Pearl spent the last months of his life there, reporting on the government's
crackdown on Islamic militancy and links between Pakistani nuclear scientists
and Al Qaeda. He was abducted while pursuing links between the radical Islamic
group Al Furqa and would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid. Through his Pakistani
fixer and other intermediaries, Pearl had sought to meet the group's leader, a
reclusive Islamic cleric named Sheikh Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani. He was kidnapped
after getting into a car in Karachi, apparently believing he was on his way to
the interview he had spent weeks trying to set up.
Before he disappeared, Pearl interviewed Omar Saeed Sheikh, one of South Asia's
most notorious radical Muslim fundamentalists and a professional kidnapper who
has since been sentenced to death for Pearl's killing. When Pearl met him,
Sheikh was posing as a jihadi, or Islamic holy warrior, named Bashir; it was
Sheikh who, through the meeting and a series of e-mails, lured Pearl to the
Karachi restaurant where he thought he would meet Gilani.
In the immediate aftermath of his kidnapping and murder, Pearl was held up in
the West as a model journalist who sought to uncover the truth in a country full
of dark secrets. This was true; it was also, in part, a justified reaction to
the opinion voiced by many senior Pakistani officials that Pearl had been asking
for it. He was accused in the Pakistani press of being an Indian agent. His
kidnappers claimed he was an agent for the CIA and the Israeli intelligence
agency Mossad, accusations that seemed ridiculous to Americans but were largely
accepted in Pakistan.
" `Three thousand journalists present during the war in Afghanistan and none of
them got into trouble!' " the Pakistani interior minister tells Mariane Pearl
during the investigation. " `What was your husband doing? What need did he have
to meet these people? This is not the business of a journalist!' "
To understand what Pearl was up against in Pakistan, it is necessary to
understand, among other things, the deep and unquestioning anti-Semitism that is
rife in a country where most people have never met a Jew in their lives. After
Pearl's disappearance, his sister was one of those who insisted vehemently that
his Judaism not be made public. Her caution, she wrote, was not a result of "
`irrational paranoia, it is healthy paranoia, it is common sense.' "
Even Levy, who praises Pearl's "affirmative" relation to his faith, his
willingness to declare it to anyone who wanted to know (Levy goes so far as to
speculate that Pearl told Omar Sheikh he was Jewish during their first meeting),
declines to expose himself to similar risk. In Karachi, Levy always identifies
himself, when people ask, as an atheist. He writes that one of the key pieces of
advice he received before going to Pakistan was: " `Don't speak about [being
Jewish]. Ever.' "
That Pearl's Judaism was crucial to his sense of identity is borne out by the
videotape his assassins made when they killed him. " `In B'nei Brak, in Israel,
there is a street called Chaim Pearl Street, named after my great-grandfather,'
" Pearl says on the tape. It was a detail that only he and his family knew, a
sign of defiance, of his continuing struggle to distance himself from the event
that was about to befall him.
Both books argue that Pearl was a cautious reporter. He turned down an editor's
request to cover the war in Afghanistan, saying he hadn't been trained as a war
correspondent and didn't think it was "responsible for a newspaper to send
people without proper training into situations like that." A year earlier he had
sent one of his editors a long memo suggesting ways to protect reporters in
conflict zones, based on his experiences in the Balkans, but he had received no
response.
When he and his wife arrived in Karachi in 2001, he arranged for an armed guard
to meet them at the airport. He e-mailed a friend: " `Hi from Karachi, which
would be a great city if we weren't scared to go out of the hotel.' "
Yet after consulting Pakistani and American security experts about his proposed
meeting with Gilani and being advised to conduct the interview in public, he got
into a car and left the restaurant where the meeting was arranged. No one knows
exactly how this happened or why--whether he was forced, or decided it was safe
to go, or for some other reason. But most reporters who have worked overseas,
particularly in Pakistan, know what it feels like to weigh desire against
judgment, to calculate the odds and to hope that this time, everything will turn
out all right.
In his book, Levy, the contemporary thinker who is so widely known in France
that he is referred to simply by his initials, B.H.L., argues that Pearl was
targeted because he was about to reveal devastating connections between the
Pakistani government and Islamic terrorists, particularly involving the sharing
of nuclear secrets.
Levy's thesis is, broadly, that Pearl's abduction and killing were carried out
jointly by Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda and elements within the Pakistani
government, specifically the national spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence.
He argues plausibly that America's decision to go to war with Saddam Hussein in
Iraq "attests to a singular error of historical calculation." Hussein, Levy
writes, is "a tyrant in his autumn, a phantom of 20th century history";
meanwhile, in Pakistan, a U.S. ally, "our next tragedies are hatching."
Levy portrays Pearl as a near-perfect being. He was a "splendid child," "charm
personified," "the good son." He was "modest" in his Stanford application,
generous with colleagues and loyal to his newspaper. He was a "very good, . . .
very great, journalist," a "passionate explorer" and a "diehard humanist." Levy
also sees himself in the slain journalist; he chose to write the book, in part,
"because of the causes that were [Pearl's] and which remain essentially mine."
Levy's self-involvement is evident on nearly every page of his book and
repeatedly gets in the way of his story. In his travels, he never fails to note
the presence of his own books on other people's shelves. He recounts protests in
which demonstrators chanted his name, digresses to describe awards he has won
and famous people he has known. " `They tell me you are a lover of literature,'
" he says grandly to a senior Pakistani official he is meeting for the first
time. " `Well, I am a novelist.' "
Levy has called his book a "romanquete"--a cross between a novel (roman in
French) and an investigation (enquete). He travels and talks to people, but he
also makes up a lot. He imagines Pearl's murder in its entirety and invents much
of what may have occurred in the mind of Omar Sheikh, with whom he was forbidden
to speak. The classic of this genre is Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood," but
Levy's "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?" doesn't match the exquisite detail and
imaginative perfection of Capote's crime novel.
While Levy makes intriguing observations and explores some mysterious
places--including a madrassa, or Islamic school, in Karachi run by a comrade of
bin Laden's--"Who Killed Daniel Pearl?" is marred by an overarching imprecision,
a disregard for detail that infects nearly every aspect of the book. Names are
mistaken and misspelled (Afghan President Hamid Karzai is routinely referred to
as Ahmid Karzai), geography is garbled and press accounts, which Levy does not
independently verify, are presented as truth.
In Levy's descriptions of Daniel Pearl and his family, sentimentality takes the
place of observation. "I sense it will be a long time before [Mariane Pearl] can
accomplish more than the merest gestures necessary to ensure her baby's
well-being," Levy writes after meeting her. No doubt he means well, but Mariane
Pearl, far from being disabled by her husband's death, has written a book that
outshines Levy's in almost every respect.
Written with former Newsweek editor Sarah Crichton, Pearl's "A Mighty Heart" is
a riveting account of the kidnapping investigation mixed with the story of a
shared life, a true love and a true loss. Daniel and Mariane Pearl enjoyed a
rare closeness that she calls "complicity." He courted her with homemade omelets.
They traveled the world together. Both reporters, they conducted joint
interviews; if one went to an appointment, the other called every 90 minutes to
check in. "I had never thought," she writes, "that I could wind up alone."
From the moment Pearl disappears until the day his body is found, his wife
believes him, somehow, to be alive. She befriends the Pakistani and American
investigators who turn the Pearls' Karachi apartment into a police headquarters.
She witnesses corruption and ill will, as well as the dedication and generosity
of a few extraordinary police officers. She sees the worst side of an
international press corps locked in competition for a grisly story.
Her wait is agonizing, but Pearl keeps herself grounded, seeking solace in
Buddhist prayer and bubble baths, French food and homeopathic remedies.
Throughout the investigation, she continues to observe and record events around
her, even writing about the impoverished house cleaner and her daughter, who
move through the Pearls' Karachi apartment like ghosts among the police.
Pearl's goal is to perpetuate her husband's spirit by safely delivering their
as-yet-unborn son, refusing to succumb to bitterness and, eventually, finding
happiness. She cannot bring herself to attend his funeral. She writes:
"For me, what . . . remains of Danny is in my belly. . . .
"[I]n a way that is difficult to articulate, I am too concentrated on Danny's
future to dwell on what is gone."
Searching for
the truth
Chris
Petit finds heroism and chance in two accounts of a martyr to terrorism, Who
Killed Daniel Pearl? and A Mighty Heart
Saturday
February 21, 2004
The Guardian
Who Killed Daniel Pearl?
by Bernard-Henri Lévy
454pp, Duckworth, £20
A Mighty Heart
by Marianne Pearl, with Sarah Crichton
277pp, Virago, £10.99
Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter abducted and murdered in January 2002, is the most obvious martyr to terrorism in the post-September 11 world. His death was exceptional for the brutal combination of atavism and technology that defines modern terrorism: he had his throat cut while being taped on camera for his death to be posted on the internet. Marianne Pearl blames a new breed of uneducated but computer-literate terrorists. Bernard-Henri Lévy takes this further, showing that radical Islam is a career choice for the cosmopolitan and well educated, a source of wealth and power, especially in Pakistan.
Pearl was chasing a story in Karachi. He had travelled from his base in India with his wife, Marianne, also a journalist, who was pregnant with their first child. Pearl, a humanitarian and idealist, was not reckless and all the more cautious because of their expected child. The theories as to why he was killed were because he was from the United States, a journalist (and suspected spy) and Jewish, or a combination thereof. Lévy arrives at a more flamboyant conclusion, turning Pearl into the man who knew too much after stumbling across the trafficking of nuclear secrets from Pakistan to Afghanistan and the Taliban. In Lévy's scary scenario of mad scientists and Islamist fundamentalists, the bomb is not Pakistan's but Islam's and the atomic arsenal an article of faith.
Lévy, a philosopher and diplomat, approaches Pearl's story as a quasi-thriller in which he feels free to speculate on what was going through Pearl's head in his last moments. This is questionable; the death, videotaped by an incompetent technician, is beyond reclaim. The bigger problem is Lévy, whose favourite subjects are himself ("I myself" is a favourite start to sentences); name-dropping ("the little plane taking us to see the Pope in April 1993"); and blowing his own trumpet.
But once he gets on with the job, Lévy encounters a vividly realised world where danger and opaqueness exist in equal measure. A descriptive tracking shot to the site where Pearl was held captive is his first pass at a "perfectly artificial" city, with the eye drawn to the sinister, telling detail: 300 virgins arriving from India to be sold in Dubai; private security guards in T-shirts proclaiming No Fear, fighting among themselves at night; and the house where Pearl was tortured and murdered belonging to a fake charity organisation that served as a mask for Bin Laden. The squalid topography of Pearl's last days is the ultimate nightmare of this suburban banality.
In a looking-glass world, speculation becomes a valid interpretation. Lévy, despite his duff start, penetrates the heart of the terrorist machine, shown to be all the more frightening for being self-devouring and out of control. Through this he drifts, compulsive and foolhardy, flirting with preposterousness, the detective in him wrestling with the big existential questions of the unreadable east, while the flaneur is too often caught in the mirror of his own regard. But this frequently tedious combination proves, in the end, a surprisingly heroic one.
Marianne's account is told in a present-tense thrillerish way too. Controlled and efficient, the book presses the right buttons, which is perhaps its problem. From the jacket photograph of the brave and beautiful grieving widow to the confidence of its narrative pacing, there's a strange process of objectification. Yet she probably gets closer than Lévy to why her husband was killed, in her strange story of a journalist whose computer broke, resulting in his being offered a used laptop and a hard disk which belonged to al-Qaida, looted after a bombing raid. The hard drive contained documents which the WSJ took the unusual step of handing over to US intelligence then bragging about in print, perhaps endangering Pearl's life. He thought so, telling his wife: "Baby, we're in trouble." For all Lévy's grand theories, it seems more likely Pearl was killed in a squalid tit-for-tat, precisely because of who he worked for.
Chris Petit's
The Human Pool is published by Scribner.
|
|
Mar. 11, 2004 11:53
A
lasting legacy
By
MICHEL GURFINKIEL
Who Killed Daniel
Pearl?
By Bernard-Henri Levy
Melville House Publishing
454 pp. $25.95
A Mighty Heart
By Mariane Pearl
Scribner
320 pp. $25
Everything about Daniel Pearl's murder two years ago was ghastly. Pearl - a rather young and promising reporter for the Wall Street Journal - was abducted, secluded, tortured, and forced to confess his "sins" (being an American Jewish journalist) before being beheaded and dismembered.
The murder was made even more horrifying by the fact that both his confession and his beheading were videotaped. His murderers exuded brazen self-righteousness, and Pakistan, America's oldest strategic friend in South Asia, was the location of choice.
Parvez Musharaff, Pakistan's president, was seen as a reliable ally of America. Without his support, it would have been quite difficult, if not impossible, for US forces to topple the Taliban regime in Kabul. The Pakistani secret service, ISI, was answerable to him alone. Yet he was apparently unable to rescue Pearl or prevent his assassination. All he could achieve was the arrest and trial of some of the murderers at a much later date.
Better than nothing, some might say, but still far less than should be expected from a dictatorial ally.
TWO BOOKS on the Pearl murder, quite different in style and content, turn out to be unusually riveting. The first, Who Killed Daniel Pearl, by French writer Bernard-Henri Levy (BHL, as he is known in his country), deals with the case itself. It has also been published in Hebrew by Babel publishers. The other, A Mighty Heart, was written by Mariane Pearl, Daniel's widow and the mother of his posthumous son, Adam. It is a reflection about love, fate, death, and life.
I played a minor role in the completion of Levy's book. Judea Pearl, Daniel's father, called me one day at my Paris home to inquire about Levy. Was he, as Judea Pearl put it, "a serious person?" I understood his reservations. On the one hand, Levy is the closest thing France has to a neoconservative thinker. He achieved fame some 25 years ago with an essay on "The Ethics of Monotheism."
On the other hand, Levy seems to believe, like a latter-day Hemingway or Malraux, that a "great writer" must be a political and revolutionary hero as well, a socialite, and even a sex symbol. He has a narcissistic flair for romantic causes, and married Arielle Dombasle, an actress who is known at times for undressing quite well. Naturally, Judea Pearl, who had just read about the couple in Vanity Fair, was a bit apprehensive, and wondered what kind of book Levy would write about his son.
As it turns out, Levy's book begins as a first-person account of his journey to Pakistan to investigate Pearl's murder.
"Arrival in Karachi. The first thing that hits you, even at the airport, is the complete absence of foreigners." His second impression, he writes, is "a world entirely devoid of women." Third is the withering of nature itself - of grass, trees, and flowers. Like many Third World countries, Pakistan is basically made up of greyish highways with dilapidated concrete neighborhoods between them.
In Pakistan, nature is not allowed to creep back, except for the privileged residential areas. Regular Karachi neighborhoods are composed, Levy says, of "vacant lots and half-finished houses whose lower floors are squatted."
As for the visible humans (all male), they watch the lonely foreigner with tense, hostile eyes, and even watch each other with the same scrutiny. The traditional garb of Islam prevails on one side of the street, uniforms and helmets on the other.
The second half of the book is more documented. In brief, Levy believes that whole parts of Pakistan's establishment were indirectly involved in Pearl's assassination - an argument that left-leaning publications tend to dismiss.
MARIANE PEARL'S book takes an entirely different direction. Still, some would recognize a certain commonality with Levy's work. She has written a book as poignant as a Greek tragedy, in no small part due to the poignancy of the case itself.
Here we find Danny Pearl, a nice Jewish boy from California (quite Jewish indeed, judging by his father's memories). In Paris he meets Mariane, an assertive young professional with mixed roots (Cuban and Dutch). They get married, drawing up a marriage contract in the Jewish Maranno tradition, in which they promise each other love and humor. Danny is assigned to Pakistan, a relatively safe Muslim country.
When he is abducted, Mariane and her in-laws launch a vigorous fight for his life, even meeting with some people who had themselves spent years in Islamist dungeons.
"What is Danny thinking about now?" they asked.
"Survival," they were told by the survivors, "only survival."
They grab on to whatever hope they can muster.
Finally, the news that Daniel has been butchered reaches the family and the world. On her way to Pakistan, a pregnant Mariane learns that the father of her unborn child was not just beheaded, but cut into 10 parts. It takes a strong woman to resist collapsing.
"They call it his remains," she says. "What really remains of my husband is in my belly." After his birth, the baby nearly dies of heart trouble. Mariane prays, asking her departed husband to help their son.
The baby survives, and so too, Pearl's legacy.
The writer is Editor of Valeurs Actuelles, a Paris-based journal.