Bin Laden would be at home in Yemen in more ways than one. Though President Saleh has denounced Al Qaeda almost as strongly as he has Israel-"I am for jihad, for resistance, for arms and money to be sent to fight the Jews," he once declared by way of supporting a Palestinian homeland-his "instinctive tendency," as one U.S. official puts it, "is to seek accommodation" with Islamic extremists and with the tribal leaders who have long harbored terrorists in the lawless Empty Quarter that covers a vast swath of the country. Once upon a time, travel writers spoke of Yemen as a cradle of civilization, the nexus of the frankincense trade, the land of Noah's son and the dominion of the Queen of Sheba. No longer. To talk about Yemen today is to talk about terrorism.
But that is America doing the talking. "You've been here for a while," a Yemeni acquaintance said to me while I was there. "Do we seem like a nation of terrorists to you?" And the only honest reply was no, Yemen did not seem that way. On the night of my arrival, I could hear the chattering of automatic gunfire somewhere below the window of my heavily guarded hotel in Sanaa. But this was only the revelry of a wedding party, which I caught up to the next morning, in the Wadi Dhahr valley, where grapes and pomegranates and qat flourish. On a peak overlooking a former sultan's winter palace, the bridegroom and his tribal brethren staged an elaborate jambiya sword fight to the furious rhythm of a tasa drumbeat. Several men standing around the dancers still toted their Kalashnikovs from the night before. When I told one of them I was an American, he hesitated for only a moment before replying with the word I heard more often than any other during my two weeks in Yemen: "Welcome."
I was welcome here, but so was the Palestinian organization Hamas, which maintains an office in Sanaa. To the U.S. government, Hamas is a terrorist organization; to most Yemenis, it is a resistance movement. For that matter, to the Arab world, the honey produced in the Hadhramawt region is a peerless aphrodisiac. To the U.S. government, Yemeni honey merchants are terrorist money launderers. Which truth prevails? Teetering between the exotic and the horrific became my psychic tightrope walk. While shuffling through the spice-scented thousand-year-old alleyways of the Sanaa souk, tangled up in the foot traffic of beggars and silversmiths and qat procurers-a claustrophobic bustle not that different from the one that suddenly coalesced around the U.S. embassy last year, screaming, "Death to America!"-I clung to the admonition Sometimes, usually, nearly always, a little white boat is just a little white boat.
And they, no doubt, thought of me: Sometimes, after all, an American man in Yemen is not an FBI agent. In this uneasy way, we trusted each other-though relieved, if we were to be honest with ourselves, that our governments did not.
The prison was not a prison. It might have been helpful, from the American point of view, to know this-that the ten conspirators believed responsible for the deaths of seventeen American sailors were being held in a mere interrogation center, situated on the first floor of the Aden headquarters of the PSO, a sullen two-story building the British had constructed sometime before 1967, when the South Yemen socialists escorted the colonialists out of the country at gunpoint. Whatever the building had once been, it had since taken on the PSO's own shadowy personality. Individuals were brought there without charges and were detained for unspecified periods. Many were not treated kindly. Amnesty International had asked to inspect the building to determine whether torture took place there. Lawyers demanded to meet with jailed clients. Family members showed up in tears; all were turned away. No one could get into this prison unless the PSO had dragged him there. Getting out, by comparison, was a snap.
The ten men were not equal partners in crime. One of them, Jamal al-Badawi, the accused USS Cole-plot field coordinator, was a highly regarded sheik and, along with Fahd al-Quso, an Al Qaeda camp habitue. The eight others, however, were mere crooked cops and civil servants who had supplied al-Badawi and al-Quso with phony identification and credit references. One prisoner's sole offense was that of preparing the Cole suicide bombers a farewell lunch the day before the attack. Though the FBI agents saw little sport in crucifying marginal offenders ("We're interested in quality, not quantity," said a top U.S. official), they saw no profit in quibbling. Justice of a kind would be served. All ten would be tried together. All were up for the death penalty. In the meantime, all ten occupied the same cell. And it was a lucky thing for the rest that one of them was good friends with a certain uniformed man named Hussein al-Ansi. Around Aden, al-Ansi was described as a mustachioed lout who enjoyed crashing diplomatic parties. Among the FBI, he was believed to be the foremost obstructionist in the USS Cole investigation. Here in the PSO building, he was chief.
And he was all they needed. For this prison had no surveillance cameras. No motion detectors. No electric fences. No watch-towers. What it did have was a hole, dug by hand through a concrete bathroom wall. And so through this hole, out into the coastal air, across a vacant lot and over the low perimeter fence, down the street, beyond the forbidding gates of the PSO headquarters and into a waiting taxicab galloped ten men with a plan, with one good friend and with only the moon smiling down on them-unless it, too, turned away.
Later that afternoon of Friday, April 11, 2003, while the Yemeni government was denying that any prisoners had escaped, roadblocks barricaded every major road in Aden while the PSO reprised its every-man-with-a-beard burlesque. But the USS Cole Ten-the only suspects Yemeni authorities had ever apprehended in connection with the bombing-had already disappeared into the creases of the southern Arabian desert, much as the two happy suicide bombers had scattered themselves over the Gulf of Aden three years before. Disappeared, to this day, they all remain.
The qat leaves I had been chewing for the past half hour began to achieve the expected effect. My extremities trembled, my stomach performed somersaults, and I jawed like a jackass about matters of which I was extravagantly ignorant. "You have to understand," I was saying. "Very few Americans can even find Yemen on a map. They only hear about Yemen when there's an incident like the USS Cole bombing."
The five young Yemeni journalists I was talking to passed more leaves my way. "Why is it," one of them asked, "that America is so preoccupied with hunting down people who it thinks are terrorists while it allows Israel to pursue blatant acts of terrorism against the Palestinian people?"
"America's never going to view Israel the way you do," I said. "It's the only reliable democracy in the Middle East, and it's one of the most loyal allies we have."
"What do you think about the fact that no Jews were killed when the World Trade Center was attacked?"
It was Friday, the holy day. The five of them-and almost everyone else in Yemen-had been chewing qat leaves for hours. Golf ball-size convexities formed in their right cheeks. The qat was of very high quality, I was told. No DDT or other pesticides. We sat cross-legged and barefoot on a carpeted floor in a room whose only adornments were photographs of assassinated former leaders of Yemen. I had fallen into the journalists' company while pursuing the mystery of the USS Cole escapees. The young reporters were eager to help, but in truth they knew less than I did. None of them had been to the prison, and no Yemeni official would speak to them about the investigation. As the sunlight ebbed, the sounds of traffic in the disordered streets of Sanaa gave way to the muezzin's final call to prayer. "Let's take a fifteen-minute break," said the lean-faced Yemen Observer writer as he stood up and brushed the qat remnants off his traditional Yemeni blazer, skirt, and ornamental belt.