“Let me ask the pilot what happened,” I replied.
Colonel Newman went to the pilot and asked why he had fired flares over the airport. He told Newman: “We were painted. They locked a missile on us. So we went into standard evasive procedures.” I returned to the Yemeni general and explained what the pilot had said.
“Well, don’t shoot flares, you’re scaring our population,” he said.
“Well, don’t paint them,” I told him. “And you know,” I continued, “when you paint a plane and we see that a missile is locked on it, to us that counts as an act of war. Are you declaring war on the United States? Because you’re painting our planes left and right.”
“No, no,” he said, “this is just training for our missile defense system.”
“Well, train on your own planes,” I angrily told him.
Newman jumped in. “Are you declaring war on the United States? Are you?”
“No, no,” said the general.
Back in the New York office there was mounting concern about the escalating threats we were facing. Eventually the decision was made to send everyone other than nonessential personnel back to the United States. Having fewer people on the ground would make us easier to protect and would offer a less appealing target to would-be attackers. John, myself, and other top officials organized the exodus. Military planes carried people to Germany, the United States, and Bahrain.
For those of us who remained, a decision was made to move to a different hotel, the Gold Mohur—site of the failed attack allegedly sponsored by al-Qaeda on U.S. Marines in December 1992. By moving there, we joked, we were either tempting fate or betting on the terrorists’ not striking the same place twice. Gallows humor, they call it.
Despite the history of the hotel, it was judged to be the safest place for us in Aden, and I understood the logic. The hotel was set far away from other buildings, surrounded by water except on one side. It could be easily secured, as anyone approaching could be seen from a distance.
While the hotel was safer, we still needed to move around Aden and visit sites, follow leads, meet with the Yemenis, and interrogate suspects. This was when the risk was greatest, so we took all the precautions we could. We traveled in unmarked cars and varied our route and times of departure and return every day. Still, there were daily scares. One day, for example, while we were on our way to an interview, we heard a bomb explode. The sound came from the direction of a route we often took. At our destination we asked the Yemenis the source of the explosion. “We’ll check it out,” we were told. Later, in the interrogation room, we were given assurances: “We checked it out, don’t worry, a tire exploded.”
“Come on,” I said. “We know the difference between a tire and a bomb.” But they insisted.
A few hours later, on our way back to the hotel, we passed an area near the harbor where there was a facility built by the British and saw from our car windows that the place was scarred and damaged. It was clear that a bomb had exploded. The next day I said to the Yemenis: “We saw the damage from the explosion.” They continued to insist that it was a tire. “Okay, you stick to your story,” I told them, laughing uncomfortably at their ridiculousness.
Steve Corbett was the Naval Criminal Investigative Service commander on the ground and also served as assistant special agent in charge for the NCIS. Their commanders remained on-site a long time, a better policy than that allowed by our thirty-day rotations for commanders, which kept only the team of agents and me in place. We also parted ways with the HRT. In their place the NYO sent over a SWAT team to handle security. Among the agents was Carlos Fernandez, who is like a brother to me. It took pressure off me to have him on the ground: he was someone I could bounce ideas off and discuss problems with in complete confidence.
Another of the new FBI agents was Joe Ennis. A skinny redhead from Alabama, his nickname in the FBI was “Alabama Joe.” Easygoing and good-natured, always smiling and willing to help, Joe quickly became loved by the FBI team.
It had taken Joe a while to adapt to New York, however. On his first day he drove into New York City in his pickup truck with Alabama plates, wearing a cowboy hat. That same day, a small Ku Klux Klan rally was taking place near our offices, and opposite it was a much larger anti-KKK rally. As Joe drove into the city, he passed through the anti-KKK rally and they mistook his car and hat as signs of his allegiance to the KKK. He barely escaped.
Those of us in Yemen had never met Joe before he arrived in Aden, as he had been transferred to New York after we’d left. We received a phone call from New York one day at the Gold Mohur Hotel that a new agent would be arriving the following day. Because of the time difference, we thought he was coming a day later than he actually was, so Joe arrived at the Aden airport (his first time in Yemen) with no one waiting for him. He called to let us know that he was in town, and we rushed to the airport to find him standing and laughing with a group of Yemenis. His southern demeanor enabled him to bond easily with people, despite the language barrier.
Joe’s efforts to befriend the Yemenis were a constant source of entertainment. Many whom we worked with were from South Yemen—the half of the country that had lost the civil war. Joe would tell them, “I’m from the South, too. I know what it’s like to lose a civil war.” The Yemenis were by turns confused and amused to learn that an English-only-speaking white-skinned redhead from the United States thought he had something in common with them.
Once he had learned some Yemeni words, Joe told the Yemenis that they should call him Yusef al-Kabili al- Janubi. Yusef is Joseph in Arabic; Janubi means southerner; and Kabili means tribal. Joe thought that Kabili was the Yemeni equivalent of “redneck.” The Yemenis couldn’t stop laughing.
Alabama Joe was one of the most hardworking agents I have ever met, and he fit in well with our group, which worked around the clock. Joe was in charge of administrative issues. In a case of the magnitude of the
Joe shared a room with George Crouch, and one day George came to me looking agitated. “Ali,” he said, squaring his hand on his jaw as he always did when he was focusing on a problem, “you have to speak with Joe.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked. It turned out that when Joe slid his slim frame into bed, he barely mussed the covers; when he slid out in the morning, the bed looked almost untouched. It left the impression that he hadn’t been in his bed at all. When the Yemeni housekeepers came into the room, they would see what they thought to be one used bed and one unused bed, and two men in the room. They would wink at George, as if they “knew” what was going on. It didn’t sit well with George.
John O’Neill and Ambassador Bodine continued to clash. As the top FBI official, it fell to John to represent our interests in meetings with her. Whoever represented the FBI in meetings would have had the same problems he did, but Bodine’s persistent complaints through the State Department to the FBI led to a second review, by headquarters, of John’s performance.
A few days after we had moved into the Gold Mohur, the assistant director in charge of the New York office, Barry Mawn, came to visit. Barry was newly appointed and I had never met him, but it annoyed me (and the others) that my boss’s boss was coming to ask me about my boss.
“We’re trying to investigate a major attack on a U.S. ship, and rather than helping us deal with the Yemenis, people seem more concerned about them,” I told John. He shrugged. He never openly let this type of thing bother him.
“We can only do our best, Ali,” he said, “and hope that others come to recognize situations for what they are.”
Our team in Yemen often felt that headquarters wasn’t supporting us enough, with regard to our problems both with the State Department and with the CIA. Over time, I began to see that this stemmed in part from the fact that no one in headquarters really understood what we were up against in Yemen. They probably never guessed that the U.S. ambassador was more concerned about the feelings of Yemeni officials than with meeting the needs of the investigative team. Moreover, none of them understood the nature of the country itself. Their lack of knowledge was summed up in a single incident that took place one day when John was on the phone with headquarters and we were in the backyard of the al-Burayqah house. John told headquarters that he needed evidence sent to Washington, DC, for DNA analysis. Headquarters, weary of Ambassador Bodine’s complaints of us not trusting the Yemenis, asked him: “Why don’t you just have the Yemenis do the testing?”
To anyone who knew Yemen, this was a ridiculous question: the Yemenis didn’t have any forensic labs or
