‘The Siege’ author Adrian Levy reflects on the 26/11 Mumbai attacks

On Nov. 26, 2008, 10 young Pakistani men, under the direction of Lashkar-e-Taiba, launched a series of attacks at multiple civilian targets in Mumbai, India. In addition to a railway station, cinema, hospital, Nariman House, the Leopold Cafe, and the Oberoi Trident Hotel, the fighters stormed the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel. Thirty-three people were killed over the course of three days of fighting inside the five-star luxury complex. Many more were injured. Journalists Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy chronicle the events in their new book, “The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel.” In a Consider This Q & A, Levy reflects on the process of developing and writing the book, the fifth anniversary of the 26/11 attacks, and his collaboration with co-author Scott-Clark.

Q. The narrative structure of your book weaves together many perspectives — what inspired you to tell the story in this way?

A. I think calamities like these are experienced in a very piecemeal way, and there are so many different perspectives and viewpoints. I mean, first of all, you are dealing with a very unconventional target in that it’s a chaotic, enormous city — the fourth-largest in the world — and the targets within it, including the historic Taj Hotel, are themselves labyrinthine. [The Taj] is one of the most luxurious and oldest hotels across South Asia, and the most glamorous certainly. I think we wanted to reflect all of those different viewpoints and take the reader on a 360-degree journey through this appalling calamity.

Q. I know you did extensive interviews — how did you select which characters to focus on?

A. It's a very hard thing to do. Because, first of all, also, there are two writers involved, so there are two sets of opinions, and then there are the opinions of the characters themselves. We interviewed hundreds of people and they compete for your time and emotions. Therefore, it becomes a really challenging thing to be able to step back and regain objectivity about who best suits the situation. With everything, we tried to recreate a consensus of the truth. What we do is we interview extensively and then we match those interviews to digital information like SMS messages, CCTV, mobile phones, photographs, and look at the metadata and create timelines. Certain characters suggest themselves because of the amount of information available — how they interview, and what else surrounds them, and the fact they may be in a pivotal location, and because their stories are extraordinary.

Q. All of the stories you tell are deeply personal especially given the nature of the event. What was that reporting process and that interview process like for you?

A. The best interviews are remarkably intimate and they require absolute listening, the concentration of absolute listening and absolute telling. If both of those things coincide, this alchemy takes place where what would otherwise be a humdrum narrative of events becomes a hugely emotional revelation as to what somebody went through and quite often places them back in the scene so painfully that [the interviews] become quite an emotionally charged proceeding. We interview people multiple times, as often as we can, and as often as they will tolerate. We record those interviews and then we create transcripts and try and create a consensus from the interview. But the best ones are definitely very charged. You have a huge responsibility for the people that you are with to treat their stories well.

Q. How did you distill that wealth of material into the final narrative?

A. It is extremely difficult. We create an enormous infrastructure, and then on the infrastructure we place digital coat-hangers which contain characters and scenes, and then we attach different scenarios around those. Both of us work on different sections of the book and then come back together to hand over our material to the other person to edit and to shape. Those are the most difficult things. There is a lot of scrabbling around. We have one room where all our data, physical and digital, is kept. We kind of lay it out like a jigsaw. That's what takes the longest, continually refining it and stripping it back so that what you get is the essence of the story and not all of the story, because that would be 20 volumes long.

Q. What surprised you most in your reporting for this story?

A. One thing that surprised me that’s going to sound really hackneyed, but it really was brought home: How ordinary people can become extraordinary. I think with all our reporting we look for intimacy, we look to be inside situations, [to have] an immersive experience. People told us stories where you just wonder how they recreated themselves in that moment when an emergency happened and they stepped up, whether [they] be the lowly paid workers at the Taj Hotel — who were very poor compared to the millionaires that they served — or some of the western guests, all of whom it seems had extraordinary stories. I remember particularly one U.S. Marine captain, Ravi Dharnidharka, who’d served as a fighter pilot for the Marines flying carriers for the Fallujah campaign in Iraq. He pitched up on holiday and was having dinner in the Taj tower, heard the gunshots moving up through the hotel and knew immediately what it was. And, very quietly, without telling anybody at all, he shredded all of his American IDs, concealed his Stars and Stripes credit card in his sock, and then proceeded to create a bastion, a safe room for all the guests — 250 people — up in the tower. Then, when the time came, he evacuated them all down 20 stories, including across a snipers’ alley and then disappeared into the night without telling anybody who he was or what he did. That kind of bravery is extraordinary.

Q. How did you find him, given that?

A. We found him by talking to, interviewing, other people who had been in that restaurant called the Souk on the top of the tower of the Taj and they mentioned how this quietly spoken American had helped to bring guests together and recounted his actions, what had happened that evening. Some of the people who worked with him … were part of a security team who were over to do the Cricket World Cup that was going ahead. And they then pointed us towards this Marine, and then we got his identity, and then we tried to trace him and eventually found him in San Diego and had to drag the story out of him because he’s extremely reticent to be in the limelight.

Q. It's been five years since the attack. Do you think the city has recovered?

A. I think the city’s recovered because the people of Mumbai are extremely resilient, extremely entrepreneurial. And so many things happen in the city, it's one of those places that continually reinvents itself, and over the years has sustained many tragedies as well as being a place of creativity and commerce, and the home of the film industry and the commercial hub of India.

But, I'm not sure that the city is any better prepared five years on. I think the people may be as extraordinary, but the police are still completely depleted and underfinanced, well below the limits required to police the fourth-largest city in the world. I also don't think that, necessarily, the Indian intelligence services or Special Forces are any readier. I think they’ve had a huge political battle on their hands to become resourced to the level that they want to be. But, then I wonder, looking five years back, whether, how, any city would handle itself in the light of this kind of attack. I wonder how New York, or Washington, or London, or Manchester would respond if two of their largest hotels were stormed by four 21-year-old gunmen armed with explosives. You know, it’s an extraordinary, extraordinary way that terrorism has morphed and these wide-open civilian targets are the new norm. And if you look at what happened in Nairobi this year at the Westgate Mall, which was taken hold of and then kept for three days, the masterminds for that operation were trained in Africa, were trained in Pakistan, and they were trained by the people who came up with the Mumbai plot, 26/11, as they call the attack in Mumbai. So you can see that this is not just a one-off attack, it's very much the future of terrorism — what experts call a "swarm" — a few men who can hold a whole city hostage, or give that impression.

Q. Based on what you learned throughout the reporting process, do you think that the attacks in Mumbai could have been prevented?

A. I think they possibly could have been prevented if the intelligence had been taken more seriously. There was an extraordinary amount of information which has subsequently been concealed through embarrassment by the intelligence services. But, then if you remember, with 9/11, and 7/7 in London, there was also extraordinary amounts of intelligence and subsequently we learned via the 9/11 Commission, and through great books like “The Black Banners” by Ali H. Soufan the FBI agent, that the FBI and the CIA were all at each other, and intelligence was stovepiped and kept from each different agency, which led to an incomplete picture. And the same was true in London. So, in that sense, though there [were] extraordinary amounts of intelligence prior to the Mumbai attack that named the city and the targets, and the methodology — that's not the same thing as being able to say that the attack would have been stymied. But certainly, when it began, if the police had not been stood down by the commanding officer, but been sent into the hotel and given backup, as was requested by countless more junior officers, I think they could have nipped it in the bud within two hours. But the inability of the police to get stuck in, that decision which I think was fatal, to stand back, and wait for 12 hours until the SWAT teams of the National Security Guard arrived, led to the siege situation that arose there. So some terrible, terrible judgment calls [were] made.

Q. The Taj reopened in October 2010 after being majorly restored — do you have a sense of whether the hotel itself has recovered?

A. Yeah, the hotel, it's just wondrous when you walk into it now. It kind of has the same kind of timelessness that it's always had, and I think it is the same kind of place it always was. You know, for Mumbaikars, for local people, it's a place for the more upmarket, where they celebrate christenings, and engagements, and marriages, and birthdays, and it still has that function. I think the sight of it burning — you know, one of the subcontinent's most significant landmarks — the sight of it burning was a scarring experience for local people and for tourists who come through it. Whether or not everyone is recovered, I think it's difficult to say. I mean, a lot of the stories of the Taj staff have never been told. They carried on dutifully, keeping their stories to themselves. In that sense, there may still be a lot of scars behind stage, in the backstage areas where people did so much but never came forward. In the backstage area there's a small plaque, a small gold and black marble plaque, with the names of 10 or 11 chefs who died. And, it's a quiet comment on that kind of silent sacrifice that happened in the hotel where Taj staffers threw themselves in the way of bullets to protect guests, and extraordinary actions that wouldn't be bragged about or posted about. So, I think it's in those quiet moments when Taj staff pass that plaque that no member of the public can see, that they think of what they have been through.

Q. As you select your projects, what do you consider the hallmarks of a good story?

A. I like stories that to a certain extent are fenced-in precincts, if you like, whether that be islands, or communities, or a valley, or a hotel. It helps if it’s somewhere that you can populate, and you can envisage, you can imagine, you can bring to life. Somewhere where you can strip it down to reveal all of the layers, like a grand hotel. I remember doing a project in a Calcutta station, Howrah station — which is one of the largest stations in the world — where millions of passengers go through every day. If you see the station as a tower block, and you start at the top with the stationmaster, and then you end up under the platforms with children who stepped off the wrong train and get lost, you can recreate a real community and bring these stories to life. Whether it is a station, or a tower block, or a hotel, or a valley, I think that the enclosure of the story really helps to find a narrative in it and drive it forward. All people are extraordinary if you spend enough time with them. The other element is to be immersive, to spend as much time inside a story and get to understand its little details.

Q. This is your fifth collaboration on a book with Cathy [Scott-Clark] — I'd love to learn more about what that collaborative process is like.

A. Well, you know, I'd be lying if I said it was always good-humored and smooth-running. There are pros and cons. The pros are that there’s someone who can prevent you disappearing down a rabbit hole. There is someone there who is looking at your material and asking all the questions a good editor would ask: Why you've gone down that road; why you've interviewed those people; what the relevance of that is. And the objectifying force on complex, remote stories is really fantastic. It is a real privilege to have that. The difficulty, of course, is being overly attached to your material and having someone else mess with it. You know, having someone edit and tell you a chapter is now defunct can be quite hard to take on the chin. So, there's often some high-octane arguments while we fight for each other's characters to survive as it gets close to the finish, and by that stage, quite often, we are only communicating by email to each other and there is so much to do we may be in different parts of the world. We’ve also got to sort of leave that world and have a life together, as we have been living together for a long amount of time. We’ve got two kids, and so, you know, trying to snap out of it, and come back to the real world can be equally difficult. … So [those] are the problems of having an all-encompassing life/work relationship.

Q. Is there anything else you would like to add?

A. It's always worth not censoring yourself. We found that really every idea is worth pursuing when you are on a project like this, and every interview is worth doing, even if later you may file it away as research or experience. Because, the over-censoring of the process often leads to the pre-imagining of where a story will go. And I think taking bigger risks, and going further helps to create more immersion. You know, every time we work in Pakistan, or when we’re in India, we’ll try and get as far as we can down that road, down a valley, up a mountain. It’s always worth going the extra ten kilometers because something will come from it that will give insights. So I think not censoring yourself and fighting the exhaustion to get the last interview is the tip to creating more immersion.

Adrian Levy’s interview has been condensed and edited. You can follow Levy on Twitter: @AdrianMLevy.