The Black Banners

by Soufan, Ali H.

  We needed permission from Ambassador Bodine, but she vetoed the decision. She refused to give the helicopter from the Tarawa a country clearance to come pick us up. We had come in a boat, she maintained, and we could leave in one. The Yemenis had told her that they didn’t like military helicopters flying into and out of Aden, and she decided that it was unnecessary. Her decision angered military officers, who felt she was risking U.S. lives.

  On the DoD’s recommendation, we decided to stay in the hotel until the situation was resolved. Stuck there for the night, we went in search of food. Most hotel staff had departed for security reasons, but the few left managed to make us something. Although the hotel was empty, we still bunked with roommates for security reasons.

  Early the next morning we were told that Ambassador Bodine had been overruled by her superiors in the State Department. They had ordered her to give us permission to take a helicopter back to the boat, and she reluctantly signed the authorization. The plan was to fly us first to the Tarawa; from there we would get to the Duluth in a boat. We prepared to take off from the Aden airport, the pilot aiming out to sea. It should have been a simple ride. But as soon as we were airborne, the helicopter’s alert siren went off. We were being “painted”—a missile system was locked in on us. The pilot swung into action and began emergency evasive maneuvers. He kept changing the direction we were flying in to try to lose the lock. There was silence in the cabin as we all held our breath and held on to the straps tightly (as if they would save us if a missile hit). After a series of maneuvers, the system stopped blinking red. The pilot had successfully evaded the lock. Seconds later we were out on the ocean heading toward the Duluth. We had no idea whether it was the Yemeni military or al-Qaeda locking on us. We didn’t know if it was a test or a warning, or if someone was really trying to shoot at us. It was a terrifying experience, and I learned then firsthand what it means when people say they’ve seen their life flash before their eyes.

  We arrived at the Duluth flustered and angry. On the boat, military personnel were tracking the incident. They told us that it was the Yemenis who had painted our helicopter—the first time it had happened, as the U.S. military had been flying helicopters into and out of Aden without problems till then. From then on, painting became standard Yemeni practice, and not only for helicopters. Whenever a U.S. plane landed in Yemen—and they were constantly coming in and out, bringing supplies, personnel, and equipment—it would be painted. And whenever a U.S. plane is painted, the pilot, not knowing whether it’s a “friendly” procedure or an actual threat, has to go into standard emergency procedures to evade the missile lock.

  Part of the emergency procedure for planes is to shoot flares. This helps to throw any incoming missiles off course, as the missile follows the flare rather than the plane. To all but the most experienced, flares look like small missiles, so when a U.S. plane came in and responded to the painting with flares, it seemed to the local Yemenis that the United States was shooting at them. The cycle of suspicion and mistrust worsened.

  I was once at the airport with the local U.S. military attaché, Colonel Newman, when a C-130’s flares came directly at the airport, creating confusion and panic. The general who headed the military at the airport demanded to see us and angrily asked: “What’s going on? You’re making us look bad.”

  “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 w
as 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 Cole, you need a first-rate agent handling administration. If that gets messed up—registering evidence, tracking documents—the entire case collapses.

  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 expertise in the area. But to some in headquarters who had never operated in third world countries, every country was presumed to have the same equipment as the United States. John replied in frustration, “Look, these guys don’t have shoes on their feet, and you want them to do forensics?”

  When Barry Mawn came to look into Ambassador Bodine’s complaints against John, we vented our frustration, explaining that the problem was not with our boss, who was representing our needs ably, but with Ambassador Bodine and the Yemenis. We told him that we were disappointed that, rather than helping us find justice, he was here to investigate John. Barry appeared genuinely sympathetic to what we said. Once again, headquarters had simply been forced to respond to complaints from the State Department. Before very long he had taken our side and become a friend and a great supporter of our investigation.

  The lack of support we were receiving from the White House and the State Department, and the pressure they were putting on FBI headquarters, never ceased to surprise us. While people in the United States were focused on the presidential election, we still thought that everyone would make it a priority to see that an investigation into a major terrorist attack was given full support. We didn’t quite know how to explain the lack of support, but we tried to remain hopeful. “We’ll soon have a new administration,” I said to John, “and we’ll get the support we need.”

  John disagreed. “It’s not that the administration doesn’t want to support us. The problem is the director,” he said. John felt that because of the bad relationship Director Freeh had with the Clinton White House—stemming from the agency’s investigation into the Clintons’ personal lives—he had limited access to the president to make the FBI’s case to him.

  “We have to remember we are a government agency,” John added. His position was that unless the director of the FBI was close to the president, the secretary of state was likely to get the final say in any disagreement between the FBI and an ambassador. So, in disagreements between Ambassador Bodine and John, she would usually win. I was uncomfortable with John’s criticisms of Director Freeh, for whom I had, and still have, much admiration.

  “Well, either way, there will be a new administration soon, and we’ll find out,” I replied.

  President Clinton told the 9/11 Commission that before he could launch further attacks on al-Qaeda, he needed the CIA and the FBI to “be willing to stand up in public and say, we believe that he [Bin Ladin] did this.” One of Clinton’s top aides, Sandy Berger, said that the intelligence agencies had reached “no conclusion by the time we left office that it was al-Qaeda.” That just wasn’t true, and I was surprised to read it. Not long after the attack, we had concluded that al-Qaeda was responsible—which was why the FBI’s Washington field office was pulled out and the New York office placed in charge.

  I had worked for a Republican senator in Pennsylvania after college and identified with the seemingly strong national security approach of the party, so later in November, when President George W. Bush won the election, I (and many in the bureau) felt happy, especially because as a candidate Bush took a hard line on the Cole, telling CNN: “I hope that we can gather enough intelligence to figure out who did the act and take the necessary action. There must be a consequence.” After President Bush’s election, I hoped that things would change. I expected more support for the Cole investigation and in our battle against al-Qaeda. We waited and waited. No change came.

  Much later, in June 2001, when we had to move our investigation to Sanaa because of the threats from al-Qaeda against our lives, we had a meeting with a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, along with his chief of staff. After our official meeting ended and the senator walked out, the chief of staff closed the door, trapping us in the room.“Just a moment,” he said. Thinking we were about to get some deep insight, we waited. “I’m sympathetic to everything you’re saying,” he said, “but you have to be patient. Unfortunately, people in the White House can’t have al-Qaeda linked to the Cole attack.” His tone was apologetic and
sympathetic, as if he were trying to help us understand what was coming.

  We looked at him in shock. “What do you mean not linked?” I said. “Al-Qaeda is already linked. Everyone with access to intelligence briefings in the U.S. government knows that.”

  “Look,” he said nervously, “you need to understand what’s really going on.” He paused. “To tell you the truth, we completely don’t agree with the White House on this one, but from their perspective they don’t want bin Laden involved in the USS Cole. The president is weak right now. The country is not united behind him and is still split over his election victory over Al Gore. He’s not going to risk capital going after al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and splitting the country more. But if the Cole bombing is publicly declared to be an al-Qaeda attack, he’s going to look weak on national security if he doesn’t act. So the White House doesn’t want al-Qaeda blamed for the Cole.”

  “That may be,” I replied to the chief of staff, “but we report the facts. And the fact is that al-Qaeda is behind the attack on the USS Cole. What the White House does with that information is above our level.”

  Bob McFadden and I brushed past him and walked out, as did the others. We were getting daily death threats from al-Qaeda while investigating the death of seventeen U.S. sailors, and for political reasons it seemed that no one in Washington gave a damn.

  According to the 9/11 Commission, some members of President Bush’s team opposed responding to the USS Cole attack. The commission reported that defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld “thought that too much time had passed and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, thought the Cole attack was ‘stale.’” Maybe to them, but not to us, not to the victims and their families, and certainly not to bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

  Toward the end of November John left the country to go home for Thanksgiving. When he tried to return, Ambassador Bodine refused to issue him a country clearance. This shocked FBI headquarters, as it was the first time in memory that an ambassador had banned a senior U.S. government official from entering a country to investigate a terrorist act. I was also out of the country at the time, following leads first in Jordan and then in the United States.