David Headley

David Coleman Headley was born Dawood Sayed Gilani on June 30, 1960, in Washington, D.C., to a Pakistani father and an American mother. His father Sayed Salim Gilani was a well-known Pakistani diplomat and broadcaster, while his mother Alice Serrill Headley worked as a secretary at the Pakistani embassy in Washington D.C., and hailed from Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Headley has a younger sister, Syedah, and a half-brother, Danyal. Danyal became the spokesman for Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani and served as Pakistan's press attaché in Beijing. Shortly after Headley was born, his family left the United States and settled in Lahore, Pakistan. Headley stood out because of his light skin color and the heterochromic coloration of his eyes. Headley's mother was unable to adapt to Pakistani culture and returned to the U.S. Due to Pakistani custody rules, she was forced to leave her children with their father in Lahore. After getting a divorce, she went through four more marriages and spent time in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan. Headley was raised in a political environment steeped in Pakistani nationalism and Islamic conservatism, both of which were amplified by Pakistani tensions with India. During the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, bombs hit Headley's elementary school in Karachi and killed two people. Headley went on to attend the elite Cadet College Hasan Abdal, a boys' international military prep school; while there, he befriended co-conspirator Tahawwur Hussain Rana. In 1977, at the age of seventeen Headley left Pakistan following a difficult relationship with his Pakistani stepmother, and moved in with his biological mother in Philadelphia, where he helped her manage pubs such as the Khyber Pass Pub and the adjacent Miss Headley's Wine Bar. Employees at the pub nicknamed him "The Prince." Headley enrolled at Valley Forge Military Academy but dropped out after one semester. He was a student at the Community College of Philadelphia but dropped out without a degree in the 1990s. In 1985, he married a Pennsylvania State University student, but they divorced two years later due his ideological hostility. He eventually moved to New York City and opened a video rental business in Manhattan. Drug Convictions and DEA Deal During his frequent trips to Pakistan, Headley associated himself with heroin users and started using the drug himself. At his sentencing hearing, the judge made the following statement: "It's up to you, Mr. [Headley], to do what you can with the rest of your life. You are still a young man. You can either take advantage of this opportunity. Your mother, your lawyer, people said some nice things about you, but what you did, not only to yourself, but to perhaps thousands, hundreds of victims, heroin users in this country is a terrible thing." Headley managed to overcome his addiction to heroin, but was still involved in the drug trade. In early 1997, Headley was arrested with another man in a DEA sting operation when he tried to smuggle heroin into the country from Pakistan. The DEA has insisted that Headley's 1998 trip to Pakistan was the only one paid for by the agency. On November 16, 2001, six weeks after his interrogation, Leader and Assistant U.S. Attorney Loan Hong made a joint application to Judge Amon asking for Headley's supervised release to be terminated three years early. Amon agreed to their request and discharged Headley from any further probation. Leader has claimed that the DEA was involved in the drive to end Headley's probation, which would have kept him from traveling to Pakistan to continue his intelligence work on terrorists. However, the DEA has claimed that Headley wanted his probation lifted so he could travel to Pakistan for family reasons. DEA officials also claim that the agency officially deactivated Headley as an informant on March 27, 2002. Headley himself has claimed that he ended his work for the DEA in September 2002; other agencies claim that he remained a DEA operative as late as 2005. In February 2002, Headley went to a LeT training camp and attended a three-week introductory course on LeT ideology and jihad. That summer, Serrill Headley, who by then had moved to the town of Oxford, Pennsylvania with her brother, confided to friends that her son had become a religious fanatic and had been to terrorist training camps. While Headley was on a catering visit to his mother's house, one of her friends, Phyllis Keith, noticed that he parked his car behind her residence as if he was trying to hide it. Keith reported Headley to the FBI office in Philadelphia, which apparently did not follow through with an investigation. In the summer of 2005, she confronted him after learning about his other marriages, and about his trips to the LeT training camps in Pakistan, Headley then proceeded to hit her during an argument at his Manhattan video store. After Headley was arrested for assault, his wife called a government hotline and disclosed his terrorist activities. She was subsequently interviewed three times by the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force. The FBI, citing Headley's work for the DEA, did not consider him a threat despite the accusations leveled against him in 2001 and 2002. The FBI agent investigating the matter speculated that Headley's wife made her accusations because she had "an axe to grind" regarding his other marriage. Headley was never questioned, and the assault charge was eventually dropped. Headley later closed his video store. In June 2006, Headley's Canadian wife applied for a green card under the Violence Against Women Act which allows those in abusive relationships with United States citizens to proceed with their immigration intent, without relying on their initial spousal petitioners. During her immigration interview she made reference to Headley's radicalization and terrorist training; his anti-Semitic and anti-Hindu prejudices; and his praise for suicide bombers. USCIS granted her a green card, but did not alert law enforcement about Headley because of strict privacy laws governing immigration cases which involve spousal abuse. ==26/11 (Mumbai plot)==