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Scores of people killed in the terror attacks on November 26, 2008, could have been saved, had the Taj Mahal Palace management agreed to provide food to security guards manning pickets outside the tower lobby.
Three weeks before the Pakistan-based outfit Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) struck Mumbai, the Taj management had let the security picket go because the guards had demanded food while on duty.
This is just one in a series of tragic lapses exposed in The Siege, a book by British investigative journalists Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark. There were 26 intelligence alerts, the authors have said while reconstructing the November 26 to 29 terror strike. The alerts were so precise that deputy commissioner of police Vishwas Nangre Patil conducted a security drill with the Taj staff in October 2008. However, the security steps were dismantled as soon he went on leave.
According to the authors, the 26/11 attack by the LeT was distinct in that almost everybody, including the CIA, India’s Intelligence Bureau (IB) and Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) and even the Taj management knew of the impending calamity. But little was done to stave off the attack in which 166 people were killed.
“The inability of RAW to work with IB, and the rivalry between the national bureaus and the state ones… The police too were ineffective and unsupported until July 2008 when DCP Vishwas Nangre Patil decided to piece together the intelligence and came to the immediate conclusion that Mumbai was about to be hit and that the Taj, Leopold Cafe and other places were the targets,” Levy told dna.
As Indian agencies dealt with the intelligence inputs, back in the US and Pakistan even the wives and family of plotter Pakistani origin American David Coleman Headley got a whiff of the attack. One of his wives Faiza approached the US mission in Islamabad and briefed the officials about Headley’s frequent Mumbai trips. But, her complaint was dismissed as a domestic tiff. The IB mole within the LeT training centre in Pakistan had also tipped off the agency about a possible attack on May 24 and then on August 11.
Tracing the footmarks of Headley, a CIA and US drug enforcement mole, Levy and Scott-Clark claim he had originally conceived the idea of attacks and offered help to the ISI as a trade-off to release him from detention. He was caught by Pakistani security agencies while illegally touring the tribal region bordering Afghanistan. In a race to catch up with Osama bin Laden five months after 9/11, CIA operators asked Headley to ‘join’ the LeT, many of whose cadres were also orbiting around al Qaeda. He had set up two offices in Mumbai in 2006, the Reliance cyber café near Churchgate station and another at the Immigration Law Centre in Tardeo a/c market. Initially, the LeT’s old guard was against becoming part of global jihad and wanted to concentrate only on Kashmir. But a faction within the outfit was arguing to shift focus to Afghanistan and to take on US forces to compete with Taliban.
The main planner Zaki-u-Rahman Lakhvi in an e-mail had conceded serious problems in holding the Lashkar together. “The outfit needed to pull something out of the hat, an operation that would bind everyone together,” write Levy and Scott. The suggestion to attack the Chabad was fiercely opposed by the old guard but was included at the insistence of 16 Indians recruited by LeT, including Zabiuddin known as Chohay (mice) in the camp.
Delay in NSG deployment
The 26/11 attack, states the book, is not only about overlooking intelligence but also the security management and the delay in the deployment of National Security Guard (NSG). Referring to the forensic account prepared by Black Cat commandos based in Manesar in Haryana, the authors say they were unofficially mobilised at 10.05pm on November 26, just 22 minutes after the first shots were fired in Mumbai. But 70 minutes later, they were warned by cabinet secretary KM Chandrasekhar and later by a joint secretary (internal security) against mobilisation without orders. At 12.34am, the then home secretary Madhukar Gupta, gave the go-ahead to NSG chief Jyoti Dutt.
But at the Delhi airport, they were informed that the transport plane was 156 miles away in Chandigarh. Dutt called RAW to lend an Ilyushin-76 aircraft. But the plane had not been fuelled.
When Dutt called the home secretary at 1am, he found that he was himself stranded in Pakistan where he had gone for talks. Finally when the plane landed in Mumbai at 5.30am the next day and by the time NSG took charge, terrorists were in complete control.
26 alerts failed to prevent 26/11 - Mumbai - DNA
CIA shared alerts prior to 26/11
Less than four years after the Mumbai terror strike, the ghost of 26/11 has come to haunt the UPA government again with a new book claiming that American intelligence agency CIA had shared 26 alerts warning of Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) planning to target Mumbai and top of the brand hotels.
The intelligence inputs generated by the CIA were shared with India since August 2006, claims the book, ‘The Siege, Attack on the Taj’, authored by Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark. Elaborating on the intelligence sharing, the book says that three of the alerts were specific to convey that ‘Fidayeen’ would be used to carry out a live raid on the country’s financial capital. Interestingly, the first of the warnings were shared with New Delhi only a month prior to Mumbai attack mastermind David Headley’s visit in September 2006 to recce the country for targets for banned outfit Lashkar.
The authors have sourced their information from several interviews of intelligence operatives and LeT cadres to outline that “six warnings pointed to a seaborne infiltration, which would be first in India....Then, the Intelligence Bureau had received two more date-specific warnings about the Taj attack. One concerned a possible attack on May 24 and the other on August 11, both prompted by tip-offs from a source in Pakistan said to be inside Lashkar”. Besides, the intelligence inputs talked of the terrorists’ plan of multiple simultaneous attacks.
The book hints at the country’s security apparatus failure to assess the seriousness of the possible attacks. Quoting an instance, it says that Mumbai South DCP Vishwas Nagre Patil had carried out security drill at the targets mentioned in the alerts. The Mumbai police officer had warned the Coast Guards and visited fishermen’s colony to sound them off of terrorists taking boats to reach Mumbai and launch attack.
He did his own bid to have a meeting with Taj Security chief Sunil Kudiyadi and follow up with a letter on possible 26 arrangements to be made for securing the majestic hotel.
CIA shared alerts prior to 26/11
26/11 terrorists had free run for 28 hours: Book
NEW DELHI: Two British journalists in a book that's being called the most compelling, detailed and propulsive account of what in India has come to be acknowledged as the 26/11 attacks have revealed that a lot more of the threat was known than anyone cared to let on. Written by Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy, 'The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel' also wonders in great amazement at the confused, often lackadaisical and slow response of Indian authorities as gunmen from Pakistan left more than 160 dead across Mumbai in the two-day assault.
"The sobering reality was that one man less than a cricket team had got an entire nation on the run," Scott-Clark and Levy write, knitting up a gripping narrative that tells how while some policemen simply fled the bloody scene, red tape and political dithering led to delays that turned happy guests in one of India's most iconic hotels into cowering sitting-ducks, often waiting for that one close-range shot to the head. The four terrorists at the Taj remained almost unchallenged for 28 hours. It would eventually take 58 hours to kill them.
There were many who failed the victims even as some, like The Taj Mahal Palace Hotel's executive chef Hemant Oberoi and general manager Karambir Kang, exhibited amazing courage under fire. But could India, on the receiving end of terrorism for decades now, just have been a little more careful about the caution, a little more conscientious about its will to fight the danger? Perhaps. The book says that months ahead of the bloodbath, New Delhi received at least 26 intelligence warnings, including from the CIA, about the LeT's intention to carry out major violence in Mumbai. Eleven of these tip-offs, the journalists maintain, suggested the strike would involve multiple, simultaneous attacks: "Six warnings pointed to a seaborne infiltration, which would be a first in India."
The initial alert, the book claims, came in 2006, around the time Pakistani-American terrorist David Headley was tasked by the LeT and its ISI handlers to come to Mumbai to scout potential targets. In August that year, the journalists say, "the first gobbet" arrived to input that the LeT was making preparations for an assault on the city. Several five-star hotels were mentioned. "Since then there had been 25 further alerts, many of them delivered by the CIA to the Indian government's external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, and passed on to India's domestic Intelligence Bureau."
The book, based on hundreds of interviews, its investigative spread spanning five years, has stark moments that stick - like the chef who was saved by the pair of chopsticks he kept in his chest pocket: "A bullet heading for his heart had glanced off them. On his chest was a tender, fist-shaped bruise." Or the observation that the attacks were carried out by "landlocked boys from impoverished rural communities, who knew only about chickens and goats." Men who were promised that in death their "faces will glow like the moon. Your bodies will emanate scent, and you will go to paradise."
26/11 terrorists had free run for 28 hours: Book - The Times of India
Three weeks before the Pakistan-based outfit Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) struck Mumbai, the Taj management had let the security picket go because the guards had demanded food while on duty.
This is just one in a series of tragic lapses exposed in The Siege, a book by British investigative journalists Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark. There were 26 intelligence alerts, the authors have said while reconstructing the November 26 to 29 terror strike. The alerts were so precise that deputy commissioner of police Vishwas Nangre Patil conducted a security drill with the Taj staff in October 2008. However, the security steps were dismantled as soon he went on leave.
According to the authors, the 26/11 attack by the LeT was distinct in that almost everybody, including the CIA, India’s Intelligence Bureau (IB) and Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) and even the Taj management knew of the impending calamity. But little was done to stave off the attack in which 166 people were killed.
“The inability of RAW to work with IB, and the rivalry between the national bureaus and the state ones… The police too were ineffective and unsupported until July 2008 when DCP Vishwas Nangre Patil decided to piece together the intelligence and came to the immediate conclusion that Mumbai was about to be hit and that the Taj, Leopold Cafe and other places were the targets,” Levy told dna.
As Indian agencies dealt with the intelligence inputs, back in the US and Pakistan even the wives and family of plotter Pakistani origin American David Coleman Headley got a whiff of the attack. One of his wives Faiza approached the US mission in Islamabad and briefed the officials about Headley’s frequent Mumbai trips. But, her complaint was dismissed as a domestic tiff. The IB mole within the LeT training centre in Pakistan had also tipped off the agency about a possible attack on May 24 and then on August 11.
Tracing the footmarks of Headley, a CIA and US drug enforcement mole, Levy and Scott-Clark claim he had originally conceived the idea of attacks and offered help to the ISI as a trade-off to release him from detention. He was caught by Pakistani security agencies while illegally touring the tribal region bordering Afghanistan. In a race to catch up with Osama bin Laden five months after 9/11, CIA operators asked Headley to ‘join’ the LeT, many of whose cadres were also orbiting around al Qaeda. He had set up two offices in Mumbai in 2006, the Reliance cyber café near Churchgate station and another at the Immigration Law Centre in Tardeo a/c market. Initially, the LeT’s old guard was against becoming part of global jihad and wanted to concentrate only on Kashmir. But a faction within the outfit was arguing to shift focus to Afghanistan and to take on US forces to compete with Taliban.
The main planner Zaki-u-Rahman Lakhvi in an e-mail had conceded serious problems in holding the Lashkar together. “The outfit needed to pull something out of the hat, an operation that would bind everyone together,” write Levy and Scott. The suggestion to attack the Chabad was fiercely opposed by the old guard but was included at the insistence of 16 Indians recruited by LeT, including Zabiuddin known as Chohay (mice) in the camp.
Delay in NSG deployment
The 26/11 attack, states the book, is not only about overlooking intelligence but also the security management and the delay in the deployment of National Security Guard (NSG). Referring to the forensic account prepared by Black Cat commandos based in Manesar in Haryana, the authors say they were unofficially mobilised at 10.05pm on November 26, just 22 minutes after the first shots were fired in Mumbai. But 70 minutes later, they were warned by cabinet secretary KM Chandrasekhar and later by a joint secretary (internal security) against mobilisation without orders. At 12.34am, the then home secretary Madhukar Gupta, gave the go-ahead to NSG chief Jyoti Dutt.
But at the Delhi airport, they were informed that the transport plane was 156 miles away in Chandigarh. Dutt called RAW to lend an Ilyushin-76 aircraft. But the plane had not been fuelled.
When Dutt called the home secretary at 1am, he found that he was himself stranded in Pakistan where he had gone for talks. Finally when the plane landed in Mumbai at 5.30am the next day and by the time NSG took charge, terrorists were in complete control.
26 alerts failed to prevent 26/11 - Mumbai - DNA
CIA shared alerts prior to 26/11
Less than four years after the Mumbai terror strike, the ghost of 26/11 has come to haunt the UPA government again with a new book claiming that American intelligence agency CIA had shared 26 alerts warning of Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) planning to target Mumbai and top of the brand hotels.
The intelligence inputs generated by the CIA were shared with India since August 2006, claims the book, ‘The Siege, Attack on the Taj’, authored by Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark. Elaborating on the intelligence sharing, the book says that three of the alerts were specific to convey that ‘Fidayeen’ would be used to carry out a live raid on the country’s financial capital. Interestingly, the first of the warnings were shared with New Delhi only a month prior to Mumbai attack mastermind David Headley’s visit in September 2006 to recce the country for targets for banned outfit Lashkar.
The authors have sourced their information from several interviews of intelligence operatives and LeT cadres to outline that “six warnings pointed to a seaborne infiltration, which would be first in India....Then, the Intelligence Bureau had received two more date-specific warnings about the Taj attack. One concerned a possible attack on May 24 and the other on August 11, both prompted by tip-offs from a source in Pakistan said to be inside Lashkar”. Besides, the intelligence inputs talked of the terrorists’ plan of multiple simultaneous attacks.
The book hints at the country’s security apparatus failure to assess the seriousness of the possible attacks. Quoting an instance, it says that Mumbai South DCP Vishwas Nagre Patil had carried out security drill at the targets mentioned in the alerts. The Mumbai police officer had warned the Coast Guards and visited fishermen’s colony to sound them off of terrorists taking boats to reach Mumbai and launch attack.
He did his own bid to have a meeting with Taj Security chief Sunil Kudiyadi and follow up with a letter on possible 26 arrangements to be made for securing the majestic hotel.
CIA shared alerts prior to 26/11
26/11 terrorists had free run for 28 hours: Book
NEW DELHI: Two British journalists in a book that's being called the most compelling, detailed and propulsive account of what in India has come to be acknowledged as the 26/11 attacks have revealed that a lot more of the threat was known than anyone cared to let on. Written by Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy, 'The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel' also wonders in great amazement at the confused, often lackadaisical and slow response of Indian authorities as gunmen from Pakistan left more than 160 dead across Mumbai in the two-day assault.
"The sobering reality was that one man less than a cricket team had got an entire nation on the run," Scott-Clark and Levy write, knitting up a gripping narrative that tells how while some policemen simply fled the bloody scene, red tape and political dithering led to delays that turned happy guests in one of India's most iconic hotels into cowering sitting-ducks, often waiting for that one close-range shot to the head. The four terrorists at the Taj remained almost unchallenged for 28 hours. It would eventually take 58 hours to kill them.
There were many who failed the victims even as some, like The Taj Mahal Palace Hotel's executive chef Hemant Oberoi and general manager Karambir Kang, exhibited amazing courage under fire. But could India, on the receiving end of terrorism for decades now, just have been a little more careful about the caution, a little more conscientious about its will to fight the danger? Perhaps. The book says that months ahead of the bloodbath, New Delhi received at least 26 intelligence warnings, including from the CIA, about the LeT's intention to carry out major violence in Mumbai. Eleven of these tip-offs, the journalists maintain, suggested the strike would involve multiple, simultaneous attacks: "Six warnings pointed to a seaborne infiltration, which would be a first in India."
The initial alert, the book claims, came in 2006, around the time Pakistani-American terrorist David Headley was tasked by the LeT and its ISI handlers to come to Mumbai to scout potential targets. In August that year, the journalists say, "the first gobbet" arrived to input that the LeT was making preparations for an assault on the city. Several five-star hotels were mentioned. "Since then there had been 25 further alerts, many of them delivered by the CIA to the Indian government's external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, and passed on to India's domestic Intelligence Bureau."
The book, based on hundreds of interviews, its investigative spread spanning five years, has stark moments that stick - like the chef who was saved by the pair of chopsticks he kept in his chest pocket: "A bullet heading for his heart had glanced off them. On his chest was a tender, fist-shaped bruise." Or the observation that the attacks were carried out by "landlocked boys from impoverished rural communities, who knew only about chickens and goats." Men who were promised that in death their "faces will glow like the moon. Your bodies will emanate scent, and you will go to paradise."
26/11 terrorists had free run for 28 hours: Book - The Times of India
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