The Black Banners

and of the efforts being made to save the ship. He spoke slowly, clearly still coming to terms with the magnitude of what had happened. He was a brave and kind man, and it seemed as if each one of the sailors killed was one of his own children. John put his arm around the captain and asked him again, “How are you doing?”

Commander Lippold replied, “I’m not worried about myself.” He then paused and added: “The navy eats its own.”

It was sad to hear that the captain felt that his career was over. It shouldn’t have been. Commander Kirk Lippold was a rising star in the U.S. Navy. He was an Annapolis graduate and had all the right talent and assignments to become a future senior leader in the Department of the Navy. He was not responsible for his ship’s choosing to dock in the port, nor was there anything he could have done to prevent the bombing. And a commander who cared so deeply about his men was someone the navy should hold on to. We told him that. “It doesn’t matter,” he told us, and focused on what needed to be done: his only concern was saving the ship. His courage and resolve were inspiring. The same traits were displayed by everyone else on the ship.

After speaking to sailors and inspecting the blast site, John and I took a walk around the deck of the Cole. From one side we could see the hills of Aden lined up against the horizon. For a few minutes neither one of us spoke. We just leaned on the rails, thinking our own thoughts.

I broke the silence. “If we are right that al-Qaeda is responsible for this attack, as I believe we are, I am sure they had someone in those hills to record the operation to use it for propaganda purposes. That means there’s at least one more person involved in this operation, and he’s still out there.”

John nodded. “So let’s find him.”

It was at the hotel that I first got to meet some members of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, led by Hank Crumpton. One of the CTC officers—Ed—had been mentioned to me by fellow FBI agent and al-Qaeda expert Dan Coleman, who had worked with him in Pakistan, and Dan spoke highly of him. When Ed introduced himself, I mentioned Dan’s high estimation of him. He was friendly and said that he had heard good things about me, too, from CIA colleagues. (I would later encounter Ed in Guantanamo Bay, after 9/11, and then during the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah.)

With John and the rest of the team on the ground we had the manpower to really start investigating. We established an early-morning meeting that everyone, from the case agent to the technical staff staying at the hotel, would attend. No matter his or her role in the investigation—whether guarding a door, searching a site, or interrogating suspects—everyone is important. Without any one of them, our team wouldn’t function properly. In addition, all of them were risking their lives every day by being in Yemen. That deserved to be recognized, and so everyone was included in the morning meeting.

There were obstacles we faced, however, starting with the Yemenis. As was the case at the airport, all the different Yemeni agencies were trying to monitor us and were demanding that we clear everything with them. This meant that a large part of our day was spent negotiating the same terms again and again. Even when we just wanted a convoy to get to the Cole, it wasn’t enough to clear our visit with the PSO. We had to clear it with military intelligence, with the local police, and with other entities.

A second problem was that the highest levels of the Yemeni government were disputing whether the attack on the Cole was or was not a terrorist attack. After the bombing, President Saleh had first claimed that the bombing wasn’t a terrorist attack but an accident. Echoing this line, some Yemeni government officials tried to convince the United States that the explosion was caused by a malfunction in the Cole’s operating systems, and Saleh asked the United States government for money to repair the damage the United States had “caused” in the port. When it had become indisputably clear that the bombing was an attack, Saleh tried blaming Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency.

Hostility came from other quarters: clerics in mosques denounced our presence and warned people not to cooperate with us, and Yemeni parliamentarians claimed we were invading their country. We were also under the constant threat that extremists would try to attack us. Another concern we had was that a number of Yemeni officials we met were clearly sympathetic to al-Qaeda. The relationship made us question whether these officials had had anything to do with the attack. Many appeared to be playing a game with the extremists: they would let them operate as long as they didn’t harm Yemeni interests. The good news was that for many Yemeni officials, that line was crossed with the bombing of the Cole.

Finally, we were given reason to frankly mistrust some Yemenis. One morning during our 7:00 briefing, an HRT member entered the room and whispered something into his commander’s ear and then pointed up to the ceiling. We all looked up and saw that a wire with a small microphone was hanging down from the ceiling. Someone was trying to listen in. Because the hotel was made of cement, the wire was literally taped to the ceiling and was easy to spot. It must have been put in overnight. We followed the wire from the ballroom (where our meeting was taking place) through the hotel up to the mezzanine level, where it went behind a partition.

A U.S. Marine was standing nearby with a sniffer dog. Knowing that Yemenis in general are scared of dogs, I asked her to come with us. We went around the partition and saw a Yemeni man sitting at a desk monitoring cameras and listening to an earpiece. The Yemeni saw the dog, which snarled helpfully, and the man jumped onto the desk, shaking. When the dog started barking, he jumped off the desk and ran away from the listening post.

We looked at the cameras and examined the wires and saw that the Yemenis had set up monitoring devices in quite a few of our rooms. As we were looking at them, some other Yemeni officials ran into the area, but before they could speak, I angrily asked: “What is going on here? Why are you monitoring us? There are going to be problems.”

“No, no,” one officer responded, “this is for your own protection.”

“These ones,” I said, gesturing to the wires and cameras monitoring us inside the hotel, “aren’t. Outside the hotel is fine. But inside our rooms is not. Get rid of them.”

Convincing the Yemenis that the attack on the Cole was in fact a terrorist action and not a malfunction of the ship was a kind of game. We didn’t think they believed their official story—no intelligent person could, we thought—but it was their country and their rules, so we had to play along.

We took senior Yemeni officials representing all their intelligence and security agencies to the Cole. The delegation included the head of the PSO in Aden, Hussein Ansi; the head of President Saleh’s security team, Hamoud Naji; the chief of staff of the Yemeni military; and the governor of Aden. Navy engineers demonstrated that the damage done to the ship—the blast hole clearly went inward, not outward —meant that the explosion had to have been caused by an external attack. Sailors then recounted what they saw moments before the blast: the boat and the men on board. There was little to argue about, and when the Yemenis saw the blood, the bodies, and the pain on the faces of the sailors, they seemed genuinely touched, and expressed their sympathies.

We went directly from the ship to our hotel for a meeting with the Yemenis, and we were expecting a positive discussion as to how we could move forward with the investigation. We all gathered in a big conference room. We sat across from each other, Americans on one side, Yemenis on the other. John faced Naji, and I faced Ansi and translated for our side. Ansi was the first to speak. He was a short, mustached man with salt-and-pepper hair, and he liked to assume a pious air. What seemed to be an involuntary smirk often appeared on his face when he spoke. It gave the impression that he thought he was the most intelligent person in the room and that he was secretly laughing at everyone else.

“After reviewing the evidence,” Ansi began, “we believe that the attack on the Cole was in fact a terrorist attack.” I translated. Everyone nodded. “However—” He began again, and then he paused, and the smirk appeared for a few seconds. “The people responsible for the attack are dead, they blew themselves up, and so there is nothing to investigate. The case is closed.” I was initially too stunned to translate. I couldn’t believe my ears. Was he serious? I started arguing back without pausing to translate for the others. It was a struggle for me to mask the anger I felt.

“As you know, if a terrorist attack occurs, there are not only those who conducted the attack. There are also the people who facilitated the attack. Then there are the bomb makers, the providers of the safe houses, and the people who helped them buy the boat and the explosives. There is therefore still a lot to investigate. The case is far from closed.”

John and the others didn’t know what was happening. I was the only Arabic speaker among our team in the room. But my colleagues knew me well enough to realize from my tone of voice and facial expressions that whatever was being said, it wasn’t good.

After I replied to Ansi, I translated the exchange for the others. There was anger on our side and John