For all Danny’s great contacts, his stories weren’t leaping off the Journal’s front page. While he was writing about trading in Afghan currency, other correspondents were packing up to cover the war next door. But by late November, seven journalists had been killed there. “It’s too dangerous,” Danny said at a meal with other reporters before Thanksgiving. “I just got married, my wife is pregnant, I’m just not going to do it.”
Quietly, though, Danny was onto something much more compelling than the daily bombing reports: he’d found links between the ISI and a “humanitarian” organization accused of leaking nuclear secrets to bin Laden.
The group — Ummah Tameer-e-Nau (U.T.N.) — was headed by Dr. Bashiruddin Mahmood, former chief of Pakistan’s nuclear-power program and a key player in the development of its atomic bomb. Mahmood — who’d been forced out of his job in 1998 after U.S. intelligence learned of his affection for Muslim extremists — acknowledged making trips to Afghanistan as well as meeting Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar. But he claimed that all they’d discussed was the building of a flour mill in Afghanistan. As for bin Laden, Mahmood said he knew him only as someone who “was helping in different places, renovating schools, opening orphan houses, and [helping with] rehabilitation of widows.”
That’s not how the C.I.A. saw it. According to the agency, Mahmood and another nuclear scientist, Chaudry Abdul Majid, met with bin Laden in Kabul a few weeks before 9/11 — and not to talk about whole-wheat bread. U.S. pressure got the scientists detained in late October, and they admitted having provided bin Laden with detailed information about weapons of mass destruction. But, for what was termed “the best interests of the nation,” they were released in mid-December.
All this had been reported. What no one had tumbled to, except for Danny and Journal correspondent Steve LeVine, were U.T.N.’s connections to top levels of Pakistan’s ISI and its military. General Hamid Gul — a former ISI director with pronounced anti-American, radically Islamist views — identified himself as U.T.N.’s “honorary patron” and said that he had seen Mahmood during his trip to brief bin Laden. Danny and LeVine also discovered that U.T.N. listed as a director an active-duty brigadier general, and ran down a former ISI colonel who claimed that the agency was not only aware of Mahmood’s meeting with bin Laden months before his detention but had encouraged his Afghan trips.
“It could be a big scoop — like your scoop,” Danny told Mir. But the Journal played the story on page 8 on Christmas Eve and it passed without impact....———The Jounalist and the Terrorist (Daniel Pearl and Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh)
Vanity Fair ^ | August 2002 | Robert Sam Anson