The Black Banners_ 9_11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda - Ali H. Soufan [105]
The men had also been seen in the Tawahi neighborhood. Using regular police methods—knocking on doors, stopping pedestrians, and checking rental offices—we eventually located an apartment they had used, and the landlord from whom they had rented it. Abdullah Musawa had rented the apartment for four months, with the rent paid in advance. Neighbors said that there had been other men in the house, and that they had claimed to be fishermen and had kept to themselves.
The apartment overlooked the harbor, a perfect location for the terrorists to watch boats coming and going and from which to record any attack, which al-Qaeda would then try to use in propaganda videos. The known local al-Qaeda member Fahd al-Quso was identified by neighbors as having been in the apartment, and the Yemenis said that they would try to track him down.
Throughout this part of the investigation—in all three neighborhoods and at the harbor—Ansi watched us closely. At times he seemed to be encouraging witnesses not to talk to us; he would glower at them when they gave us information. Sometimes he would smirk when we didn’t get the information we needed. He also invented excuses for getting annoyed with us. When we moved from site to site, we plugged each of the locations into our GPS devices so that other team members could locate them (by and large, the country does not use a system of formal addresses). Ansi protested, telling us in all sincerity that the devices could be used for marking targets we planned to bomb. He informed other Yemeni officials of his suspicions.
We explained to him how the GPS system worked and why it was useful. Curious, he asked if he could have a device. We ordered a box of top-quality GPS devices from Dubai for him and his team as a gift. Later he complained that they didn’t work: he didn’t understand that they needed to be programmed. When we left Aden, I noticed they that had been put back in their boxes. Similarly, when we dredged the sea floor below the Cole for evidence, Ansi didn’t understand what dredging was and claimed that we were trying to mess up their harbor. Everything to him was a conspiracy.
Ansi’s attitude and lack of cooperation were annoying and time-consuming, and sometimes our frustration boiled over. Once, John and I were in a conference room in PSO headquarters in Aden speaking to Naji and Ansi about some leads we wanted to follow, and Ansi was being his usual difficult self. John stared hard into his eyes and said, “With you it’s like pulling teeth.” Ansi took a step back, shocked. His English was very basic, and he thought that John was threatening to pull out his teeth. I quickly explained the saying. John often made references to teeth, although I never knew why. When we had problems with other Yemeni officials, he would sometimes ask, his face a study in seriousness, “Are you a dentist?” Surprised by the question, they’d reply, “No, why do you ask?”
“Because with you it’s like pulling teeth,” he’d tell them.
For all the problems we had with Ansi, our friendship with his boss, General Qamish, made up for it. Qamish knew that Ansi wasn’t keen on helping us, so he tried to stay in Aden as much as possible to help us out himself. Almost every night we met with him. We grew fond of each other, and he would call John “Brother John” and me “Brother Ali.” Often while I was translating Qamish’s words for John, he would slap my thigh—a sign of friendship in Yemen.
Once when I noticed that Qamish’s personal bodyguards were using the small AK-74s used by Soviet Spetsnaz, I joked with him that they were using bin Laden’s jeffreys. (The guns were referred to in Yemen as jeffreys.) The al-Qaeda leader was known to carry a small AK-74 that he claimed to have taken from a Russian soldier he had killed in Afghanistan during the May 1987 Battle of Jaji. A few days later Qamish told me he had a gift for me in his office in Sanaa. It was a