The Looming Tower (53 page)

A
S SOON AS
A
LI
S
OUFAN,
the young Arabic-speaking agent recently assigned to the I-49 squad, got on the plane to Yemen, O’Neill told him that he was the case agent for the USS
Cole
—the biggest assignment of his career.

Soufan is a highly caffeinated talker, his voice carrying a hint of Lebanon, the country where he was born. He knew what it was like to live in lawlessness and chaos, to see cities destroyed. His family fled to America during the civil war, and he loved America because it allowed him to dream. In return, America embraced him. His experience was completely opposite to that of the alienated Muslims in the West who had turned to Islamism as a way of finding an identity. He never personally experienced prejudice because he was an Arab or a Muslim; on the contrary, he was elected president of his student body and presented with many academic awards. After gaining his master’s degree in international relations at Villanova University, he planned to get his Ph.D. at Cambridge. But he had developed a fascination with the American Constitution, and like many naturalized citizens, he had a feeling of indebtedness for the new life he had been given. As he stood poised on the brink of an academic career, he decided—“as a joke”—to send his résumé to the FBI. He thought the chances that a Muslim American scholar of Arab extraction would be hired by the bureau were laughably remote, but he was drawn by the mystique, and obviously something inside him cried out to be saved from the classroom. As he was packing to go to England, the response came: report to the FBI Academy in two weeks.

O’Neill had drafted him on the squad because of his language ability, but he soon came to value Soufan’s initiative, imagination, and courage. When the plane landed in Aden, the agents looked out upon a detachment of the Yemen Special Forces, wearing yellow uniforms with old Russian helmets, each soldier pointing an AK-47 at the plane. The jittery hostage rescue team, who had been sent along to protect the investigators, immediately responded by breaking out their M4s and their handguns. Soufan realized they were all going to die in a bloodbath on the tarmac if he didn’t do something quickly.

He opened the plane’s door. One man among the yellow uniforms was holding a walkie-talkie. Soufan walked directly toward him, carrying a bottle of water, while the guns followed him. It was about 110 degrees outside; behind their weapons, the Yemeni soldiers were wilting.

“You look thirsty,” Soufan said in Arabic to the officer with the walkie-talkie. He handed him the bottle of water.

“Is it American water?” the officer asked.

Soufan assured him that it was; moreover, he told the man, he had American water for all the others as well. They treated it as such a precious commodity that some would not drink it.

With this simple act of friendship, the soldiers lowered their weapons and Soufan gained control of the airport.

O’Neill was a little puzzled to find the soldiers saluting as he disembarked. “I told them you were a general,” Soufan confided.

One of the first things O’Neill noticed was a sign for “Bin Ladin Group International,” a subsidiary of the Saudi Binladen Group, which had a contract to rebuild the airport after it was damaged in the 1994 civil war. It was a small reminder that he was playing on his opponent’s court.

O’Neill had already spent some time studying the country. He was reading a book by Tim Mackintosh-Smith titled
Yemen: The Unknown Arabia.
He learned that Sanaa, the capital, claimed to be the world’s first city and that the Hadramout, bin Laden’s homeland, meant “death has come.” He underlined these facts with his Montblanc ballpoint in a firm straight hand, as he always did when he was reading. He was determined not to be defeated by the exoticism.

His real adversary, however, turned out to be his own ambassador, Barbara Bodine. She had personally negotiated the agreements between the United States and Yemen two years before, which allowed American warships to refuel in Aden’s harbor. That now seemed a calamitous miscalculation. They met at six o’clock on the morning after O’Neill arrived. In his New Jersey accent, he remarked that he was looking forward to working with her in “Yay-man.”

“Ye-men,” she coldly corrected him.

From O’Neill’s perspective, Yemen was filled with jihadis, and it was still quaking from the civil war. “Yemen is a country of 18 million citizens and 50
million
machine guns,” he later reported. Gunfire was a frequent distraction. The temperature often exceeded 120 degrees, and scorpions were as common as houseflies. Moreover, Yemen was full of spies who were well equipped with listening devices. One of the largest cells of Zawahiri’s al-Jihad operated here, and there were many veterans who had fought with bin Laden in Afghanistan. When the rest of O’Neill’s team arrived, he warned them, “This may be the most hostile environment the FBI has ever operated in.”

Bodine, however, saw Yemen as a promising American ally in an unsettled but strategically crucial part of the world. The country was an infant democracy, far more tolerant than its neighbors; it even allowed women to vote. Unlike O’Neill, the ambassador had plenty of experience working in dangerous places. During the Iraqi invasion and occupation of Kuwait, she had served as deputy chief of mission and stayed through the 137-day siege of the American Embassy by Iraqi troops until all the Americans were evacuated. Moreover, Barbara Bodine was as forceful and blunt as John O’Neill.

Bodine thought she had an understanding with O’Neill that he would bring in a team of no more than fifty. She was furious when many more investigators and support staff arrived. In her mind, it was the same as if a military plane with “three hundred heavily armed people” arrived to take over Des Moines. (O’Neill’s account, confirmed by other agents and news reports, said that there were only 150 personnel in his group, not 300.) She pleaded with O’Neill to consider the delicate diplomatic environment he was entering. O’Neill responded that he was here to investigate a crime, not to conduct diplomacy. That was the kind of answer Bodine had come to expect in her dealings with the FBI. “There was the FBI way, and that was it,” she had concluded. “O’Neill wasn’t unique. He was simply extreme.”

Her goal was to preserve the delicate relations between the United States and Yemen, which she had worked hard to improve. Although one can understand that the State Department and the FBI might have two different agendas, in this case Bodine had been given clear directives by the secretary of state to ensure the safety of American investigators and to assist them in their investigation. Those were to be her top priorities, not protecting the relationship with the Yemen government; instead, she continually worked to lower the bureau’s “footprint” by reducing the number of agents and stripping them of their heavy weapons, which she said was for their own safety. Meanwhile, on local television each night, the Yemeni parliament featured speakers who were openly calling for jihad against America.

Bodine ordered that the entire FBI team be moved to the Aden Hotel, which was crammed with other U.S. military and government employees. O’Neill’s investigators were billeted three and four to a room. “Forty-five FBI personnel slept on mats on the hotel’s ballroom floor,” O’Neill reported. He set up a command center on the eighth floor of the hotel; fifty Marines guarded the sandbagged hallway. Outside, the hotel was ringed with machine-gun nests manned by Yemeni troops. It wasn’t entirely clear what their purpose was, other than to make sure the Americans were confined to the hotel. “We were prisoners,” one of the agents recalled.

Early on the morning after his arrival, O’Neill boarded a launch to the
Cole,
which was listing in the harbor a thousand yards offshore. The recovery of the dead was still under way, and bodies lined the deck, draped with American flags. Down below there were clumps of flesh mashed into the tangled mass of wire and metal of a ship that had once seemed so invulnerable. Through the blast hole, O’Neill could see divers searching for bodies and, in the background, the rocky city embracing the port like an ancient theater.

The sailor in charge of refueling the ship told investigators that it normally took about six hours for the ship to take on the
240,000
gallons of fuel it required. They were just forty-five minutes into the process when the bomb exploded. He’d thought the gas line had blown, and he immediately shut off the connection. Then a cloud of black liquid suddenly covered the ship. It was not oily. It was the residue of the bomb.

O’Neill spent much of his time coaxing the Yemeni authorities in the Political Security Organization—the equivalent of the FBI—to cooperate with the investigation. He was conscious of the need to build cases that would survive American standards of justice, so his agents would have to be present during interrogations by local authorities to assure U.S. courts that none of the suspects had been tortured. He also sought to gather eyewitness testimony from residents who had seen the explosion. Both the PSO and Bodine resisted these requests. “You want a bunch of six-foot-two Irish-Americans to go door-to-door?” Bodine asked O’Neill. “And, excuse me, but how many of your guys speak Arabic?”

Actually, there were only half a dozen Arabic speakers in the FBI contingent, and language was a constant source of misunderstanding. O’Neill kept Ali Soufan at his side most of the time. Once, when he was talking to an obstructionist colonel in Yemen intelligence, O’Neill exclaimed in frustration, “Christ, this is like pulling teeth!” When the colonel’s personal translator repeated the remark in Arabic, the officer stood up, visibly angry. “What’d I say?” O’Neill asked Soufan. Soufan told him that the translator had told the colonel, “If you don’t answer my questions, I’m going to pull out your teeth!”

The Yemeni authorities understandably felt encroached upon and unfairly treated. In exchange for the evidence O’Neill was demanding, they wanted access to any information the FBI gathered outside the country, which for legal reasons O’Neill could not provide. The Yemenis finally produced a videotape taken by a harborside security camera, but it appeared to have been edited to delete the crucial moment of the explosion. When O’Neill expressed his frustration to Washington, President Clinton sent a note to President Ali Abdullah Saleh. It had little effect. The FBI was convinced that the bombers had been tipped off about the arrival of the
Cole,
and they wanted to expand the investigation to include a member of the president’s own family and a colonel in the PSO. There was scant interest on the part of the Yemen authorities in pursuing such leads.

O’Neill had spent his entire career romancing police from other countries. He had found that “coppers”—as he called them—formed a universal fraternity. And yet some of his requests for evidence mystified the local detectives, who were not acquainted with the advanced forensic techniques the bureau is famous for. Elementary procedures, such as fingerprinting, were rarely employed. They couldn’t understand, for instance, why O’Neill was requesting a hat worn by one of the conspirators, which he wanted to examine for DNA evidence. Even the harbor sludge, which contained residue from the bomb and bits of the fiberglass fishing boat, was off-limits until the bureau paid the Yemeni government $1 million to dredge it. The debris was loaded onto barges and shipped to Dubai for examination.

Yemen was an intensely status-conscious society, and because Soufan had promoted O’Neill to “general,” one of his counterparts was General Hamoud Naji, head of Presidential Security. General Naji finally agreed to take them to the site where the bombers had launched their boat. The police had discovered a twelve-year-old boy named Ahmed who had been fishing on the pier when the bombers unloaded their skiff. One of the men had paid him a hundred Yemeni riyals—about sixty cents—to watch his Nissan truck and boat trailer, but he never returned. The police had arrested Ahmed to make sure he didn’t disappear, and then locked up his father as well to take care of him. “If this is how they treat their cooperating witnesses,” O’Neill observed, “imagine how they treat the more difficult ones.”

O’Neill also viewed the safe house where the bombers had been living. It was clean and neat. In the master bedroom was a prayer rug oriented to the north, toward Mecca. The bathroom sink was full of body hair that the bombers had shaved before going to their deaths. The investigators were solemn, imagining the scene of the ritual ablutions and the final prayers.

But cooperation was still very slow in coming. “This investigation has hit a rock,” General Naji admitted. “We Arabs are very stubborn.”

Ali Soufan teased him, saying, “You’re dealing with another Arab, and I’m also stubborn.”

When Soufan translated this exchange, O’Neill contended that the Arabs were not the equal of the Irish in that department. He told a story about the O’Neill clan in Ireland, who he said had the reputation of being the strongest men in their country. Every year there was a boat race to a giant stone in the middle of a lake, and the O’Neills always won. But one year, another clan was rowing faster and pulling ahead, and it appeared that they would touch the stone first. “But then my great-grandfather took his sword,” said O’Neill, “and he cut off his hand and threw it at the rock. You got anything that can match that?”

Soufan and the general looked at each other. “We’re stubborn,” said Soufan, “but we’re not crazy.”

O
NE OF THE PROBLEMS
investigators faced was that the
Cole
was in real danger of sinking. Naval engineers were urgently trying to prevent this indignity. Finally an immense Norwegian semi-submersible salvage ship, with a middle deck designed to dip underwater and scoop up oil platforms, arrived to pick up the wounded warship and take it on its long journey home. The public-address system of the
Cole
broadcast “The Star-Spangled Banner” as it piggybacked out of the harbor, followed defiantly by Kid Rock’s “American Bad Ass.”