In what a US media investigation has described as one of the “most devastating near-misses in the history of spycraft”, intelligence agencies of India, the United States and Britain all failed to connect the dots from a trove of spy data and thwart the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks.
listing several instances, notably the online activities of lashkar-e-Tayyeba’s technology chief Zarrar Shah, the media probe concludes that the intelligence agencies of the three nations failed to pull together all the strands gathered by their high-tech surveillance and other tools that might have helped disrupt the horrific plot.
“That hidden history of the Mumbai attacks reveals the vulnerability as well as the strengths of computer surveillance and intercepts as a counterterrorism weapon,” notes the joint investigation by The New York Times, ProPublica and PBS Frontline, based on material from classified documents, court files and dozens of interviews with current and former Indian, British and American officials.
The report, co-published by the three organisations on Monday, chronicles some of Shah’s online activities, particularly how he, posing as Mumbai-based Kharak Singh, shopped for VoIP (Voice-over Internet Phone service) with a New Jersey company to make calls between Pakistanis and the leT terrorists in Mumbai appear as if they were originating in Austria and New Jersey.
When the company with which the deal was struck complained that no voice traffic was running, Shah (the so-called Mr Singh) replied: “I will send traffic by the end of this month.” And sure enough, by November 24, Shah, had set up an electronic control room from where he and lead plotters Zaki-ur-Rehman lakhvi and Sajid Mir kept issuing minute-by-minute instructions over the VoIP service to the assault team.
Shah had in the fall of 2008 roamed from outposts in the northern mountains of Pakistan to safe houses near the Arabian Sea. He and fellow conspirators used Google Earth to show militants the routes to their targets in the city. And, shortly before the 26/11 assault that would kill 166 people, including six Americans, Shah “searched online for a Jewish hostel and two luxury hotels, all sites of the eventual carnage”.
But Shah did not know that by September, the British were spying on many of his online activities, tracking his Internet searches and messages, the report said citing former American and Indian officials and classified documents disclosed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward J Snowden.
Not only that, Shah was drawing similar scrutiny at the time from an Indian intelligence agency, the report said, adding the US, too, had “picked up signs of a plot through other electronic and human sources, and warned Indian security officials several times in the months before the attack”.
“What happened next may rank among the most devastating near-misses in the history of spycraft,” the report said, quoting former Foreign Secretary and National Security Advisor Shivshankar Meon as saying: “No one put together the whole picture… Not the Americans, not the Brits, not the Indians.” Menon added it was only after the shooting started on 26/11 that everyone shared what they had, and then “the picture instantly came into focus”.
“The British had access to a trove of data from Shah’s communications, but contend that the information was not specific enough to detect the threat. The Indians did not home in on the plot even with the alerts from the United States,” the report said, referring to the CIA warnings in mid- to late September about a lashkar threat to Mumbai and then its November 18 alert about location of a Pakistani vessel that turned out to be in Pakistani waters, so India could not do much about it.
But the US’s own well-chronicled bungling by not acting on clues relating to the activities of David Coleman Headley, the Pakistani-American, has also been taken note of by the report. The incriminating emails with plotters that Headley exchanged with the plotters went unnoticed until shortly before his arrest in Chicago in late 2009. “US counterterrorism agencies did not pursue reports from his unhappy wife, who told American officials long before the killings began that he was a Pakistani terrorist conducting mysterious missions in Mumbai,” the report noted.