Investigating the Attack
Teams from the FBI, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and the CIA were
immediately sent to Yemen to investigate the attack. With difficulty, Barbara
Bodine, the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, tried to persuade the Yemeni government to
accept these visitors and allow them to carry arms, though the Yemenis balked at
letting Americans openly carry long guns (rifles, shotguns, automatic weapons).
Meanwhile, Bodine and the leader of the FBI team, John O'Neill, clashed
repeatedly-to the point that after O'Neill had been rotated out of Yemen but
wanted to return, Bodine refused the request. Despite the initial tension, the
Yemeni and American investigations proceeded. Within a few weeks, the outline of
the story began to emerge.128
On the day of the Cole attack, a list of suspects was assembled that
included al Qaeda's affiliate Egyptian Islamic Jihad. U.S. counterterrorism
officials told us they immediately assumed that al Qaeda was responsible. But as
Deputy DCI John McLaughlin explained to us, it was not enough for the attack to
smell, look, and taste like an al Qaeda operation. To make a case, the CIA
needed not just a guess but a link to someone known to be an al Qaeda operative.129
Within the first weeks after the attack, the Yemenis found and arrested both
Badawi and Quso, but did not let the FBI team participate in the interrogations.
The CIA described initial Yemeni support after the Cole as "slow
and inadequate." President Clinton, Secretary Albright, and DCI Tenet all
intervened to help. Because the information was secondhand, the U.S. team could
not make its own assessment of its reliability.130
On November 11, the Yemenis provided the FBI with new information from the
interrogations of Badawi and Quso, including descriptions of individuals from
whom the detainees had received operational direction. One of them was Khallad,
who was described as having lost his leg. The detainees said that Khallad helped
direct the Cole operation from Afghanistan or Pakistan. The Yemenis
(correctly) judged that the man described as Khallad was Tawfiq bin Attash.131
An FBI special agent recognized the name Khallad and connected this news with
information from an important al Qaeda source who had been meeting regularly
with CIA and FBI officers. The source had called Khallad Bin Ladin's "run
boy," and described him as having lost one leg in an explosives accident at
a training camp a few years earlier. To confirm the identification, the FBI
agent asked the Yemenis for their photo of Khallad. The Yemenis provided the
photo on November 22, reaffirming their view that Khallad had been an
intermediary between the plotters and Bin Ladin. (In a meeting with U.S.
officials a few weeks later, on December 16, the source identified Khallad from
the Yemeni photograph.)132
U.S. intelligence agencies had already connected Khallad to al Qaeda
terrorist operations, including the 1998 embassy bombings. By this time the
Yemenis also had identified Nashiri, whose links to al Qaeda and the 1998
embassy bombings were even more well-known.133
In other words, the Yemenis provided strong evidence connecting the Cole
attack to al Qaeda during the second half of November, identifying individual
operatives whom the United States knew were part of al Qaeda. During December
the United States was able to corroborate this evidence. But the United States
did not have evidence about Bin Ladin's personal involvement in the attacks
until Nashiri and Khallad were captured in 2002 and 2003.
