The OnesThat Got Away
from GQ
The little white boat meant nothing to them. Out here in the Gulf of Aden on this soupy October morning, what first came to mind was, How the hell do they live in this heat? That, and How much farther to freaking Bahrain? Somewhere along the way-during the great ship's two-month voyage from Norfolk, Virginia, across the Atlantic, into the Mediterranean, and at last through the Suez Canal toward the northern Arabian Gulf-the whiff of danger had settled into the crew's nostrils. It would not be fair to say that they were unready. But you would have to say that they were, in the end, unprepared.
There were 293 of them, male and female, twenty-two-year-old doe-eyed peacetime recruits from flyspeck towns in Wisconsin and North Dakota and Texas. They were trained for a kind of warfare that, after today, would become virtually obsolete. For at their disposal aboard the 505-foot-long ship were all the tools for superpower combat. Tomahawk and Harpoon cruise missiles. SM-2 surface-to-air missiles, Spy-1 multifunction radar. A Phalanx close-in weapons system. Torpedoes and rapid-fire multibarrel cannons.
They were girded, it would seem, for Armageddon. Shielded by all this high-tech weaponry, the ship's crew lined up outside the galleys for an early lunch of fajitas; and when they observed the puttering approach of the little white boat, they responded, as any giant would, with serene obliviousness. Trusting its puniness, they dropped their guard.
The two men aboard the little white boat looked happy. They were waving and saluting-or was that a salute? And calling out in greeting-or was that a Muslim prayer? It was hard to tell from the destroyer's great height, looming 148 feet above the water. The crew believed the two men to be harbor garbage collectors, though they could just as easily have been selling trinkets and snacks like so many other vendors bobbing across the water. Or they could have been fish merchants, which was what the two men had told neighbors they were, though no one had ever seen them at the Aden fish market, just as no one had ever seen them at the mosques, the qat-vending stands, the bakeries, the beaches…Only a few furtive appearances from behind the wall they had erected around their cinder-block house overlooking the harbor. Elsewhere-Bangkok, Nairobi, Afghanistan-the two men had been seen plenty. But those in the intelligence community who were paid to track their whereabouts had failed to follow them here, to the shabby district of Madinat ash Sha'b on the southern coast of Yemen. And now, on the morning of October 12, 2000, the two men had taken leave of the neighborhood that never knew them, slid their little white boat down a ramp and into the water, revved the outboard motor, and commenced an unhurried path eastward across the bay, toward the
USS Cole.
And the little white boat? There was nothing unusual about it, nothing at all. In fact, it had plied these waters just a month earlier-from the inlet to the harbor and back-without incident, seemingly without purpose, trolling right past the Yemeni naval base. There had been another time before that, too: January 3, 2000, when another man launched the little white boat toward another
American destroyer, only to see it sink within minutes because the bomb it was carrying was too heavy. No one aboard that particular American ship, The Sullivans, ever saw the skiff submerge, or saw it being retrieved the next day, or saw it being subsequently reinforced with fiberglass while the C-4 plastic explosives were compacted into a neat five hundred-pound bundle. No, the little white boat gave away nothing. Not then, not now, nine months later, with its two bearded passengers coming ever closer to the Cole,rounding the hull toward the rear of the ship, calling out and waving.
Was that a wave? Was that a prayer? Was it garbage they were looking for? All unasked. But the answer came anyway as the little white boat and the two happy men detonated into a million pieces, and the massive American destroyer roared in pain.
In that instant, the world went asymmetric. Seventeen sailors lay dead, another thirty-nine wounded, and America suddenly needed Yemen to explain what had gone wrong. Yemen? What did we know of Yemen? Where did it stand, this dog-poor Muslim country that had been driven from our herd when it sided with Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Gulf War and only after a decade's worth of economic sanctions had been brought to heel? We would, alas, soon find out-beginning with Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who immediately blamed the explosion on a technical mishap inside the Cole, and later on the Egyptians, and later still on the Israelis. Still, to show the Americans that his government would leave no stone unturned, President Saleh dispatched his Political Security Organization-the thuggish plainclothes domestic intelligence unit that reports directly to Saleh-to rampage through Aden and collar "every man with a beard," as one Yemeni government official would say.
When FBI agents arrived in Aden two days later and requested that those behind bars be extradited to the United States for prosecution, President Saleh informed them that the Yemeni constitution forbade this. When the FBI demanded to join the interrogations, the PSO refused on the grounds of national sovereignty. When the
FBI agents asked for interview transcripts, they were handed pages that read like Dadaist poetry. And when the FBI suggested that certain Islamic extremists in the Yemeni government be investigated in connection with the crime, the PSO agents smiled and did nothing.
In late November 2000, the Yemeni government suddenly announced that the case of the USS Cole bombing had been solved, that all ten perpetrators were in custody. The investigation was shut down, and a trial was set for the following January. The Americans protested that this was lunacy: the plot's two alleged overseers, after all, men with direct ties to Osama bin Laden, were still at large. So the Yemeni government agreed to delay the trial for a year. Then it delayed the trial for another year. By that time, it was November 2002; one of the two alleged Cole masterminds was in American hands, and the United States was strongly urging Yemen to proceed with trial. As of April 10, 2003, the ten Cole suspects were still in prison, awaiting formal charges.
As of the next morning, they were not.
Here, now, grinning for the cameras, stands America with Yemen-a marriage not quite from hell, but ever so far from heaven. It would be unfair to cast all blame on the war bride. After all, no sitting American president has ever deigned to set foot on Yemeni sand-though in 1986, then vice president George H. W. Bush briefly touched down to commemorate the opening of an oil refinery there by a Texas petroleum firm.
As it has turned out, the deserts of Yemen are largely petro-barren, and its government has been known to meddle in corporate profits; and so since there is no point in Americans trying to make any money there, there has seemed little point in paying it much mind at all. Except, of course, when we have no choice. In the two years since President George W Bush proclaimed "either you are with us or you are with the terrorists" and President Saleh dashed off to Washington to pledge his country's allegiance to the war on terror, the United States has supplied Yemen with Special Forces training, Coast Guard patrol boats, an FBI office and a fraction of the economic aid it gives to the far tinier nation of Jordan. About its new ally, the U.S. State Department offers only this: "Any counter-terrorism cooperation will be judged on its continuing results." Though far more American travelers have been killed in, say, Mexico than in Yemen in recent years, the State Department warns Americans not to go there.
Then again, Yemen is bin Laden country. Osama's father hailed from the southeastern tribal stronghold of Hadhramawt, and Osama himself plucked his fifth and favorite wife from the town of Ibb. "Even when bin Laden was in Afghanistan," says Edmund Hull, the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, "he always imagined Yemen as a fallback." And after the routing of the Taliban last year, the worry was so great that Al Qaeda would regroup in bin Laden's ancestral homeland that, in the words of one U.S. official, "we began looking around Yemen for a tall guy with a cane."