Stanford Report, Jan. 28, 2004

Who Killed Daniel Pearl? author details one-year effort to find murder clues

BY ESTHER LANDHUIS

It was in Kabul during a meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Jan. 31, 2002, that Bernard-Henri Lévy heard the news. On a diplomatic mission for the French government after the fall of the Taliban, the distinguished French writer and philosopher learned that Pakistani extremists had murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl earlier that day. Pearl graduated from Stanford in 1985 with a degree in communication and joined the Journal in 1990.

Although Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was undoubtedly targeted because he was Jewish and American, Lévy told a crowd that Pearl may have been killed because he was investigating sensitive nuclear issues. Photo: L.A. Cicero

"At this very moment -- I don't know why, I cannot explain it yet -- I was so deeply shocked, so deeply moved," Lévy told more than 100 faculty, journalists, students and community members who crowded into Encina Hall Thursday to hear him discuss his recent book, Who Killed Daniel Pearl? Speaking in a measured but impassioned tone, Lévy paused occasionally to translate his thoughts from French to English and warmly accepted cues from audience members.

"I had such a deep impression that something very strong, very important, very central had happened," Lévy said, "that I decided to devote the time necessary -- a few weeks, a few months, I did not know it happened to be one year -- to try to find the truth."

His quest for the deeper story behind Pearl's gruesome slaughter took him to Karachi, Kandahar, New Delhi, Washington, London and then back to Karachi. And what he discovered was evidence of strange, shadowy alliances.

"I cannot say that I found the truth," Lévy said of his attempt to reconstruct the death of a man he had never met. "I think I tried to find a few pieces of it. ... My conclusions do not contradict the conclusions of others who are involved in the investigation here. But on some points maybe a few steps more."

Lévy's book, described as "part detective story, part espionage thriller," recounts his investigation of Pearl's death along two threads. First, he followed the road of Pearl himself. "I tried to know, to discover, what he did the last week, the last days of his life," Lévy said. "I tried to get, to know, if in what he did there was one of the reasons that could have led some people to want his death."

The "other way," Lévy said, "was to put myself in the footsteps of the killer, of the mastermind of the plot: Omar Sheikh." As Lévy sees it, the involvement of Sheikh -- a wealthy, well-educated British "modern man" -- casts doubt on the popular assumption that Pearl's murder was simply the act of maniacal followers of Osama bin Laden.

Nevertheless, Lévy presents strong evidence in his book for Sheikh's ties with Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and al-Qaida. What Lévy found "very strange" was that al-Qaida, ISI and six or seven major Pakistani jihadist groups, which are often in quarrel with one another, joined forces to kill a single man.

"One single and lonely man representing only himself, searching the truth for himself, representing no government, no community at all," Lévy said. "So why?"

While he believes Pearl was undoubtedly targeted because he was Jewish and American, Lévy contends that the third reason for his murder had more to do with the possibility that Pearl was a reporter who was onto something. Lévy hypothesizes that Pearl may have been investigating the exchange of nuclear technology between Pakistan, North Korea and al-Qaida.

During the question-and-answer session after his talk, Lévy was asked about the ramifications of Pearl's death. "It's more and more difficult for an American journalist and an American citizen to do his work in Karachi," he said.

He also bemoaned the fact that "Pakistan was shown as a place of dishonor and shame, which is unfair for Pakistani people who were not at all involved in that."

Lévy concluded the event -- sponsored by the John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists and the Stanford Institute for International Studies -- with a call to recognize the "strong clash inside the Muslim world between the radicals and the moderates." He emphasized that "Islam is not a block" and that inter-Muslim struggles are far more serious than conflicts perceived as "West versus the rest."

"We have to learn from our mistakes of the past," Lévy said. "And one of our biggest mistakes is not to help the moderates against the fundamentalists. ... The soul of the planet in the next years is linked to this topic: What shall we do toward the women in Algeria, the anti-Taliban in Afghanistan, the free spirit in Pakistan ... and so on and so on. Islam versus Islam. Not West versus rest."

Lévy has written some 30 books and has reported on the Middle East since 1971, when he began his career as a war correspondent covering the conflict between Pakistan and India over Bangladesh. The English edition of Who Killed Daniel Pearl? was released in September 2003.