The Black Banners

operatives in the field. Khallad regularly traveled from Kandahar, where bin Laden was based, to Karachi, where he’d speak on the phone to Nashiri.

Beyond acting as a liaison to Nashiri, bin Laden told Khallad that he wanted the rest of his time devoted to helping with the planes operation. Bin Laden said that the mastermind of that operation was a jihadist who had joined al-Qaeda after the East African embassy bombings, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Khallad spent a lot of time in Karachi planning with KSM and also traveled around the Middle East and Asia to help with the plot. In September 1999, he administered a forty-five-day special course in hand-to-hand combat at al-Qaeda’s Loghar camp to select trainees, including Khalid al-Mihdhar, Nawaf al-Hazimi, and Ahmed Mohammed Haza al-Darbi—all viewed as promising recruits.

Al-Qaeda’s decentralized system of management meant that once bin Laden decided who would be in charge, it was left to that person to work out the details. Bin Laden only instructed Nashiri that Salman al-Adani and Taha al-Ahdal would be the suicide bombers for the boats operation; Nashiri was in charge of making all the other decisions. He would relay them through Khallad to bin Laden for his sign-off.

Nashiri had felt, since the end of the summer, that they were ready to attack the next ship that entered Aden harbor. He and Khamiri had carefully surveyed the port for possible launch points. Finally, on January 3, 2000, they saw the USS The Sullivans enter the harbor. Nashiri sent the designated suicide bombers, Taha al-Ahdal and Salman al-Adani, to strike at the ship under cover of night while he waited in a hiding place, ready to view the explosion.

Ahdal and Adani placed the boat in the water, not realizing it was low tide. Because of the weight from the explosives, the boat got stuck in the sand. They tried a few times to move it, but it wouldn’t budge, so they gave up and returned home, leaving the explosive-laden boat. Nashiri was waiting to videotape the operation from an apartment he had rented in Tawahi, and as daybreak approached, he realized that something had gone wrong. He went to the house where the bombers had been living before the operation to see if there were any clues to what had happened and was surprised to see them there, sleeping. He angrily woke them and they explained what had happened. After a firm rebuke he took Salman with him and, with Khamiri also in tow, rushed down to the harbor in a truck. When they saw the boat, they froze. The Beachboy Five were removing the explosives and throwing them casually to one another. Nashiri, Salman, and Khamiri approached cautiously, in case something exploded, and Nashiri negotiated to get the explosives back.

Nashiri, Taha, and Khamiri fled to Afghanistan, Nashiri reporting to bin Laden. The al-Qaeda leader said that they should keep out of sight and wait to see what happened in Yemen. No reports of the Yemenis or the United States investigating the incident reached them, however, and they became increasingly confident that, ultimately, their plans had not been compromised.

Nashiri returned to Yemen within a few months and reconnected with Badawi and the local cell. New suicide bombers were chosen, as Ahdal had been killed in Afghanistan fighting for the Taliban, and Adani had died after jumping into a sewer to try to save a boy who had fallen in. Although Khallad had regularly petitioned bin Laden to use him as a suicide bomber, the al-Qaeda leader wished to use Mu’awiya al-Madani. In fact, however, by September, when the boats operation was ready to be carried out, Nashiri substituted Nibras and Khamiri.

Newly married, Salim Hamdan was visiting Yemen when the attack on the USS Cole occurred. He knew nothing about it in advance but recognized the al-Qaeda hallmarks: suicide bombers and a U.S. target. One of his first responses to the attack was fear of arrest because of his well-known connections to bin Laden. But when he heard President Saleh saying on Yemeni television that the attack was an Israeli Mossad operation, he relaxed, as that, too, made sense to him: Israel was an enemy of Yemen and wanted to provoke the United States against Yemen. It would be illogical, on the other hand, for al- Qaeda to risk angering Yemen, which until then had been such a welcoming place for extremists, including al-Qaeda operatives. Hamdan traveled with his in-laws from Sanaa to Saudi Arabia for al-Umra, a minor pilgrimage. From Saudi Arabia he returned to Afghanistan to resume his duties for bin Laden.

When he arrived in Kandahar, bin Laden welcomed him back and asked him if there was “any news from Yemen regarding the attack on the American destroyer.” Hamdan said that he had heard President Saleh blaming Mossad. Bin Laden smiled and walked away. Later that day, Hamdan bumped into Nashiri. Like bin Laden, Nashiri asked what the news was from Yemen. Hamdan repeated what he had told bin Laden. Nashiri started laughing. He then gestured in bin Laden’s direction and said, “It’s all from his head.” Hamdan now understood why bin Laden had smiled earlier in the day—the Cole was an al-Qaeda operation.

It also now made sense to Hamdan why a few months earlier in Kandahar he had seen Nashiri experimenting with explosives in the company of Abu Abdul Rahman al-Muhajir, al-Qaeda’s explosives expert and master bomb maker. He had watched the two men detonating and exploding bombs in the body of an old vehicle. Hamdan knew that Muhajir only instructed people when specifically instructed to do so by bin Laden. If he was involved, one could assume that it was an important operation. He also noticed that Nashiri was spending a lot of time with Khallad, Abu Hafs, and bin Laden, further indication of his involvement in an upcoming operation.

Not everyone in Kandahar agreed with the wisdom of hitting a U.S. target in Yemen. Many al-Qaeda members were either Yemenis or had family ties to Yemen, and they feared the effect an attack would have on their families and their ability to travel home. They also questioned the wisdom of upsetting a country that had been very useful in providing refuge to them.

Hamdan was one of the al-Qaeda members who questioned the wisdom of the attack. His wife was a Yemeni, and he feared that they would be prevented from returning to Yemen after the attack. When he spoke to his brother-in-law in Yemen, Hamdan was told that the PSO was looking for him. Yemen was a no-go country for him for now.

When they were alone, Hamdan asked bin Laden, “Sheikh, why in Yemen, when that was always a safe haven for the brothers?” Bin Laden did not respond directly and changed the subject.

Other al-Qaeda members would not dream of questioning bin Laden, and Nashiri fell into this camp. He believed that bin Laden always knew best. Abu Jandal described Nashiri as someone who would commit a terrorist act “in Mecca, inside the Kaaba itself” if he believed the cause demanded it.

Bin Laden was convinced that the United States would retaliate against al-Qaeda for the bombing of the USS Cole. At a minimum, he expected al-Qaeda’s training camps to be bombed, as had happened after the East African embassy bombings. Before the Cole attack, bin Laden moved to protect himself and his followers.

Training camps were temporarily shut down, and operatives were ordered not to plan or carry out any terrorist acts. Bin Laden himself kept on the move, traveling from one safe house in Afghanistan to another. He first went to the hills around Kabul, then on to Khost and Jalalabad. After that he returned to Kandahar, moving between safe houses there. He also sent Abu Hafs and Ayman al-Zawahiri to separate locations in Kabul. That way, if one of them were killed, the others could continue running al-Qaeda.

Yet there was no retaliation from the United States, to bin Laden’s surprise. They would have to hit harder to get America’s attention, he told his aides. Hamdan later told me, “You [the United States] brought 9/11 on yourselves; you didn’t respond to the Cole, so bin Laden had to hit harder.”

As days and weeks went by, rumors that al-Qaeda was behind the Cole attack reverberated around the Muslim world. The image of the attack on the Cole—a small boat bringing down a mighty destroyer—was a powerful one. Bin Laden would later say that “the destroyer represented the capital of the West and the small boat represented the Prophet Muhammad.” In Kandahar, bin Laden, Abu Hafs, and Saif al-Adel met to discuss how best to further capitalize on the attack to boost al-Qaeda’s fund-raising and recruitment. They decided to make a video about the bombing.

Bin Laden instructed Ali al-Bahlul to produce the video. He and other members of al-Qaeda’s media office spent six months on the project, which included a reenactment of the Cole bombing, along with images of al-Qaeda camps and training sessions. It opened with the voice of Abu Hajer al-Iraqi, reading passages from the Quran—he was in jail in the United States for his role in the East African embassy bombings. The touch was significant: before the Cole bombing, bin Laden had issued a warning to the United States to release prisoners, among them Abu Hajer. Operatives later noted that the voiceover was bin Laden’s creative flourish—one of many improvements and revisions insisted upon by the al-Qaeda leader.

Al-Qaeda distributed the video internationally, and it aired around the world. Money and recruits started pouring in, and in appreciation bin Laden promoted Bahlul; it was at this point that he attained the dual position of al-Qaeda’s public relations secretary and bin Laden’s personal propagandist.