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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