The Black Banners_ 9_11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda - Ali H. Soufan [130]
Only FBI personnel, and Steve Corbett and Bob McFadden of NCIS, returned to Yemen in late August 2001; the NYPD and City Hall decided that it was too dangerous to send their people. The head of our team was my old supervisor Tom Donlon, and we stayed at the Sanaa Sheraton.
Delegations from Washington occasionally visited us. Alabama senator Richard Shelby and his wife, Annette, stayed in the ambassador’s house. I was invited to join them for dinner, and during the meal I briefed them on the Cole investigation and what we were doing in Yemen. As I was leaving the residence, Senator Shelby walked out with me, and, putting his arm around my shoulders, said, “You have to promise me something.”
“What is that, Senator?”
“Don’t leave the FBI before you finish investigating this case.”
“I’m not planning on it, sir.”
While FBI headquarters was barely on speaking terms with Ambassador Bodine, I always had a cordial relationship with her. Her anger was primarily directed at John and others. As the case agent, I tried to keep my eyes on the ball, and she was always kind and polite to me.
One evening in the embassy, during a conversation, she told me that she had been in Kuwait when Saddam invaded, launching the first Gulf War. She hadn’t felt unsafe then, she told me; nor did she feel unsafe in Yemen. The only time she had felt unsafe in her life, she continued, was when she took part in a protest in Santa Barbara and a policeman held a gun to her face and told her to go home.
What surprised me most about Ambassador Bodine was that she attacked the FBI in the pages of the Washington Post years later, in May 2008, when the Yemeni government released some of the terrorists responsible for the Cole bombing—terrorists we had helped lock up. Instead of holding the Yemenis accountable, she was quoted as saying that the FBI had been slow to trust Yemeni authorities and had been “dealing with a bureaucracy and a culture they didn’t understand. . . . We had one group working on a New York minute, and another on a 4,000-year-old history.”
It was shocking to read those words, especially given the centrality of the Cole to the 9/11 attacks. I responded in an opinion piece: “In fact, our team included several Arab American agents who understood the culture and the region. Even so, such comments were irrelevant. The FBI left Yemen with the terrorists in jail. It is true that while tracking the terrorists we worked ‘on a New York minute.’ We owed that much to the sailors murdered on the Cole and to all innocent people who remained targets as long as the terrorists were free. It is also true that we did not trust some Yemeni officials. We had good reason not to.” The Yemenis themselves later reluctantly admitted that our distrust of some officials was merited: after Quso and Badawi “escaped” from jail in April 2003, we pressured the authorities to look into the matter, and Hussein Ansi was arrested, questioned, and sacked (but they never prosecuted him).
The difficult relationship we had with Ambassador Bodine was no secret to the Yemenis, who knew that if they had any problems with us they could turn to her. This often undermined progress. Many Yemeni officials were even sympathetic to us in this situation. One day, while I was interrogating a suspect, the head of President Saleh’s security team, Naji, came running into the room and said, “Can I talk to you outside?”
I stepped out, thinking it must be important. “Well,” he said with a grave look on his face. “I don’t know quite how to say this to you, but a plane has been hijacked.”
“What plane?”
“Your ambassador is on the plane.”
“What’s the situation? Is she okay?”
“It’s all okay,” he replied. “It was some crazy guy. He didn’t even know the ambassador was on board. And while he was in the cockpit, all the passengers escaped via one of the emergency doors. The hijacker was then hit over the head with a fire extinguisher