The Black Banners

He then told Bob that he had seen two of the men, with a third man, a couple of months earlier, in August. He couldn’t remember the exact date. The men took their boat to the water, but rather than using a crane they simply pushed it in. They then invited Hani and his family to take a ride around the bay, saying that they had just bought a new boat and were testing it.

I guessed that the purpose to be served in taking the boy’s family for a ride was to test how much weight the boat could take, so the terrorists could calculate how much explosive power they could use without sinking it. I assumed, too, that because the boat was empty the first time, they could just slide it into the water, whereas the second time—for the bombing—they needed a crane because it was heavy with explosives.

It was not just Hani who had problems remembering dates. We found this to be common among many Yemenis we encountered. Linear thinking is less important to them than it is to those in many other cultures. In particular, they are not used to paying attention to ages, dates (especially birthdays), and times. Many of our questions confused the Yemenis—and their answers frustrated us. When Bob asked Hani’s father how old Hani was, he replied, “He is between ten and twelve, closer to ten.” One witness I spoke to said of a suspect, “He was born about twenty years ago.”

“How old is he?” I asked.

“Oh, twenty-five years old.”

Many of the suspects we questioned said that they were born on January 1. We first thought that perhaps it was a joke they were playing on us, but we learned that in Yemen, January 1 is commonly given as a birthday so that people won’t have trouble “remembering” their birthday if asked.

Other potential witnesses besides Hani who lived around the harbor had seen a third man, known to the locals as Abdu, participate in what we continued to assume was the test run. The neighborhood is small; people know each other, and outsiders are easily spotted. In addition, two of the three men, known as Abdullah and Khalid, had been seen by several people on the day of the Cole bombing. They were the suicide bombers, we guessed. The description of Abdullah that was provided by these witnesses matched the picture of the man, presumably named Abdullah Ahmed Khalid Sa’id Musawa, whose vehicle ownership papers we had found with the sunglasses and hepatitis pills in the abandoned truck. Khalid was referred to by locals as the “handsome one.” Witnesses reported that Abdu appeared to be the leader of the two other men. We also located the crane operators. They confirmed that they had rented a crane to two men for 10,000 rials.

An FBI artist worked on creating sketches of the men. He was the same artist who had drawn the Wanted sketch of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. It was a tortuous process, as he didn’t speak Arabic and had to work through a translator. Despite the difficulty, the witnesses said that the final sketches were realistic likenesses.

Days after we arrived in Yemen, one of my Yemeni friends told me confidentially that some pieces of the USS Cole, including parts of the protective fiberglass cover on the outer surface of the radar, had washed ashore. He said that Yemeni officials from the ministry of the interior had taken them. My friend was one of those Yemenis who sympathized with the United States and was firmly committed to getting justice. We had not heard anything about the boat parts from the Yemenis.

Under our agreement with them, they were to notify us of any new evidence that came in. Any and all parts of the Cole were U.S. property. I asked Ansi about the wreckage and he denied knowing that anything had washed ashore. Still other Yemeni friends, however, confirmed that parts had been found and told me how to find the lab in which the wreckage was being kept.

One afternoon, while our convoy was traveling from one location to another, I directed our drivers to take a detour and head to the lab. I hadn’t wanted to give the Yemenis advance warning that we were coming. The lab was simply a fenced-in house with a courtyard and a gate; inside, there were a few rooms. We surprised the Yemenis at lunch, and they cautiously welcomed us in.

“What can we do for you?” the lab supervisor asked.

“As you know, we are working together on the Cole investigation.” He nodded. “So we’ve come to see whether there is anything here that we can work on together.”

“We don’t have anything,” he replied.

“There is nothing here from the Cole?”

“No.”

“Okay, then.” I walked past him to look into the next room.

“What are you doing?” he asked, his face showing confusion.

“We have approval to look here, and we’re going to see what you have,” I said, and signaled to my colleagues to start looking around. The official protested but seemed unsure what to do. I offered him my phone and said, “Do you want to call someone to confirm what you should already know?” He was hesitant. It was just after lunchtime; most senior officials would be taking their midday nap, and he didn’t want to wake them unnecessarily. We went on with our search as he followed us nervously.

Within a couple of minutes of searching the rooms we found parts of the Cole’s radar cover along with other pieces of wreckage from the destroyer. I told my team to load them into our trucks. “What are you doing?” he asked, running up to me. “Stop! You can’t take that!”

“Now you listen to me,” I told him. “When we came you told us you didn’t have anything from the USS Cole here. This is from the Cole and this belongs to the United States, and I’m taking it with me.”

“Wait a second,” he said, “let me speak to someone first.” He started dialing a number on his phone.

“Let’s go!” I told my team. I didn’t want to hang around. We jumped into the cars and drove off.

“Keep your heads down,” George shouted. We didn’t know if they would start shooting. We made it safely out and back to our hotel. No Yemeni official ever mentioned the incident to me.

From Hani’s family and local fishermen we learned that the men with the boat had been seen coming from Madinat al-Sha’ab, another impoverished area of Aden. We spoke to Aql al-Hara—a Yemeni term for the unofficial mayor of the neighborhood—and he said that a couple of Saudis had been spotted going into and out of a certain house with a boat. They were identifiable as Saudis because of their dialect. Ansi and a few other Yemenis took us to the house. As we approached, we saw that it was one story high, surrounded by a wall, with a courtyard in the back. One of the surrounding walls also served as a wall of the house, and another of the outside walls had a gate in it wide enough to let a truck in and out.

Ansi and the Yemenis told us that we had to wait outside, and they went in first. After a few minutes they came out and told us, “There is nothing in the house. We can move on.”

“Can we look?”

“You’ll be wasting your time,” they told us, “but if you insist, sure, go ahead.”

To the Yemenis, unskilled in forensics, a house with no obvious clues (IDs, papers, weapons) is useless. But to FBI forensic investigators, the house was a treasure chest: we found hairs, what later proved to be RDX and TNT residue, and other pieces of evidence. (RDX, or cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine, is a nitromine that forms the basis for a number of explosives.) We made no effort to hide the fact that what we found was important. Realizing that he and his team had made a mistake, Ansi tried telling us that we needed to leave the house and return later. We weren’t going to risk losing all these clues, and we insisted on staying.

Ansi didn’t have sufficient cause to make us leave, so he and the other Yemenis watched in surprise as we began collecting bits of what we hoped would prove to be evidence. Some of them chuckled as we collected dirt from the floor to check for DNA and other evidence; later, however, they came to appreciate our methods. When the terrorists were eventually prosecuted in Yemeni courts, our lab reports were used in the trial. I briefed the Yemeni prosecutor general on the lab reports beforehand so that he could explain their importance to the judge in court.

Next we tracked down the owner of the house. He said that he had rented it to a man he was introduced to as Abdu in 1999; the description he gave matched the description given at the harbor. Beyond that, the owner denied knowing anything about the men and said he was simply looking to rent the house and make some money. The name on the rental agreement was Abda Hussein Muhammad. We didn’t think we had heard it before. The Yemenis said that it didn’t mean anything to them, either, and the trail seemed to stop cold.

I kept mulling over the name Abda Hussein Muhammad. On second thought, it sounded somewhat familiar, but initially I couldn’t remember why. I returned to our command center, went to the storage room, and took out the photo-book from the 1998 East African embassy bombings, which at the time was still the FBI’s main al-Qaeda