Here, he met and befriended Mahesh Bhatt's fitness freak son, Rahul.
Headley ran an office in Tardeo's AC market in South Mumbai, lived as paying guest within walking distance in Breach Candy and frequented Moksh, an upmarket gym in the locality. To all those he met and befriended in Mumbai, Headley was a US businessman who ran the Mumbai branch of his friend Rana's Chicago-based firm, Immigration Law Centre. "Headley was a womaniser and wife-beater who consumed these drugs to keep in shape," writes Zaidi. Used by bodybuilders to gain muscle, IGF 1 and IGF 2 are also marketed as anti-ageing pills and cost over $100 (Rs 5,400) per mg. Hussain Zaidi, journalist and author of a new book Headley and I, attributes his sexual drive to a banned anabolic steroid, Insulin-like Growth Factor (IGF). His suave foreign accent was irresistible to women.īut the ageing Lothario evidently had another secret. He quickly discovered that a tall, well-built, English-speaking, white Caucasian male could operate with impunity in India. Sources say his New York-based make-up artist girlfriend helped him change his look. Headley was clean-shaven and wore western attire. In September 2006, he arrived in Mumbai as David Coleman Headley, carrying a brand new US passport and $25,000 given to him by the ISI's Major Iqbal for scouting targets in Mumbai. The drifter found his ideological moorings within an organisation determined to bleed India. In Lahore, however, Headley was slowly drawn towards the violent, virulent India-hating ideology of the LeT and its potbellied founder and chief ideologue, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed. Post-9/11, when US intelligence agencies scrambled for information on al Qaeda that operated from Afghanistan and later Pakistan's lawless tribal regions, Headley was a vital asset. He used his deep links with drug gangs in the Af-Pak region to uncover drug smugglers in the US. He agreed to work for them as an informant. He was tried, served four years in a US prison and then cut a deal with the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). In 1988, he was caught trying to smuggle 2 kg heroin into the US from Frankfurt airport. He was imprisoned but broke out of prison. He used his friend Tahawwur Rana, then studying to be a Pakistani military doctor, as cover. US investigative website ProPublica notes that in 1984, Headley was caught trying to smuggle heroin out of Pakistan's tribal areas. Headley returned to Pakistan in the early 1980s. "The germ of the idea to attack Mumbai existed," an intelligence official says, "Headley's meticulous inputs gave the ISI and the L e T the confidence to make it much bigger." The Mumbai attack is, to date, the world's only hybrid terror strike that combined all the elements of modern terrorism: Seaborne infiltration, suicide commandos and vehicle-borne explosives.
As he led the agency into the Pakistani deep state where the ISI ran the L e T as a strategic asset in its war against India, they discovered that Headley was the agent provocateur who had expanded the scale of 26/11. Patton's favourite line, 'No guts, no glory', was his motto. Not just because of his heterochromatic eyes-a blue right eye and a dark brown left eye-but also because of his soaring ambition. Four NIA officials granted week-long access to him for 34 hours between June 3 and June 9, 2010, in an underground US federal prison, say Headley was unlike any terrorist or criminal they had encountered.
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