A young Moroccan woman went to American authorities in Pakistan to warn them that she believed her husband, David C. Headley, was plotting an attack, less than a year before terrorists killed at least 163 people in Mumbai.It was not the first time American authorities were warned about Headley, a longtime informer in Pakistan for the United States Drug Enforcement Administration whose roots in Pakistan and the United States allowed him to move easily in both worlds. Two years earlier, in 2005, an American woman who was also married to Headley told investigators that she believed he was a member of the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba created and sponsored by PakistanÂ’s powerful intelligence agency.
Despite the warnings by two of his three wives, Mr. Headley travelled far and wide on LashkarÂ’s behalf between 2002 and 2009, receiving training in small-caliber weapons and countersurveillance, scouting targets for attacks, and building a network of connections that extended from Chicago to Waziristan.
In 2008, it was his work as chief reconnaissance scout that set the stage for Lashkar’s strike against Mumbai. An examination of Headley’s movements in the years before the bombing shows that he had overlapping, even baffling, contacts among divergent groups — Pakistani intelligence, terrorists, and American drug investigators.
Those ties demonstrate that the Mumbai bombings represent another communications breakdown in the war on terror, and are raising the question of whether US officials were reluctant to investigate HeadleyÂ’s movements because he had been an informant for the DEA Perhaps more significantly, they may indicate American wariness to pursue evidence that some officials in Pakistan were involved in planning an attack that killed six Americans.