Mariane Pearl with Sarah Crichton: A Mighty Heart

Reviewed by ROBIN ARTHUR

This widow's tribute fails to deal with some of the hardest questions about the kidnap and shameful execution of journalist Daniel Pearl two years ago in Pakistan.

Mariane Pearl criticises the media for reducing the story to "a simple tale: handsome hostage husband, pregnant despairing wife". Yet, in parts, her own record is as jarringly frothy as a gossip column. And as churlish as it sounds, her account lacks the detachment to grapple with some uncomfortable facts.

A French foreign correspondent herself — assisted here by former Newsweek editor Crichton — Mariane Pearl understandably wanted this book to commemorate her husband's bravery. A franker view would also rail at the risks Daniel Pearl took.

The Wall Street Journal reporter went to Karachi on the trail of links between the London-born "shoe bomber" Richard Reid and a fundamentalist Muslim leader.

Among the many Pakistanis supporting what they believe are jihads in neighbouring Afghanistan and Kashmir were some who saw the American journalist as a target for their cause. Weeks after luring him with the prospect of interviewing a jihad leader, his kidnappers released a video of Daniel Pearl's throat being cut.

Shortly before Daniel Pearl's capture, another Wall Street Journal reporter had, by amazing chance, acquired a computer hard-drive looted from an Al Qaeda office in Afghanistan.

After publishing stories based on its contents, the Journal announced it was handing the computer over to the American intelligence services. Daniel Pearl knew this would make it harder to gain the trust of Islamic militants he wanted to interview. He told his wife: "Baby, we're in trouble."

As she explains: "When you are a journalist in a country like Pakistan, where you spend so much time trying to convince people you are not a spy, you aren't helped when the company you work for announces to the world that it is collaborating with the CIA."

But Daniel Pearl had not built his media career by sticking to anyone's party line. He had helped to reveal that a supposed Sudanese chemical weapons plant, bombed on President Clinton's orders in 1998, was an aspirin factory. And he had probed Nato claims on the extent of Serbian atrocities in Kosovo.

However, he knew that in Karachi, described to him by a leading local businessman as "the kidnapping capital of the world", all American media were "spies". In this climate of intense suspicion he inexplicably abandoned a safety measure he had adopted on previous assignments in Islamic countries. However distasteful the need for such caution might seem from the safety of liberal democracies, he did not tell Middle Eastern or South Asian contacts of his own family's Jewish and Israeli background. Yet there in Karachi he revealed this to an untested contact he hoped would arrange interviews with jihadi activists.

Daniel Pearl had also written a memo to Journal editors on how to protect journalists reporting from global hotspots. The day he was lured to that fatal capture, he broke at least three of his own recommendations: don't go places without your local "fixer", only use your regular and trusted driver, and hold meetings only in public places, preferably the main hotel. More than 2000 foreign journalists had visited Pakistan covering the US campaign against the Taleban in Afghanistan and investigating militants linked to the September 11 attacks. Daniel Pearl alone was kidnapped and murdered.

His wife's memoir of the heart also skips critical questions about the investigation of his disappearance and the eventual capture, trial and conviction of four confessed kidnappers.

Pakistani authorities held back resources in the hunt that could have freed Daniel Pearl alive. A breakthrough conveniently occurred only as Pakistan's military ruler, General Musharraf, was about to meet US President Bush.

Scarcely considered in Mariane Pearl's study is why the supposed ringleader, the British public school-educated Omar Saeed Sheikh, surrendered to a provincial governor who was a former senior officer of Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI. Sheikh was then held for days without the official investigation being alerted.

He is now on death row in a Pakistani prison. In 1994 he had been jailed in India for kidnapping foreign tourists but was released in a 1999 hostage swap after the hijacking of an Indian jetliner. That a committed jihadi would surrender rather than be captured is an unexplained mystery.

Other analysts suggest Sheikh deliberately surrendered to divert investigators from the track of three others who may have slain Daniel Pearl. Some evidence revealed since the trial suggests links to pro-Taleban factions of the ISI or directly to Al Qaeda.

Mariane Pearl doesn't pursue this or dig deeper into the Pakistani regime's response. She settles for recording the expressions of personal sympathy from US ally President Musharraf. Daniel Pearl, by all accounts, would have kept asking the hard questions.

More satisfying studies than this book can be found, with the help of Google, on the websites of CNN, PBS, the BBC and the South Asian Journalists' Association. Each carries extensive archived stories and background material on the Pearl tragedy.

* Robin Arthur is an Auckland lawyer.

Virago, $35