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In January 2002 Nashiri was on a boat off the coast of Dubai with four other Yemenis, all of whom had at one point been members of bin Laden’s bodyguard detachment. Now they were under Nashiri’s command in his dual position as head of operations in the Arabian Peninsula and head of naval operations. The four were Omar Hasan Saeed Jarralla, alias Ibn Hafeez; Fawzi Yahya Qasim al-Hababi, alias Abu al-Shahid al-Sannani; Fawzi Muhammad Abed al-Qawi al-Wajih, alias Abu Mu’ab al-Taezi; and Bashir al-Safari, alias Salman al-Taezi.

Nashiri outlined to them his plans to conduct a series of attacks in Yemen, one of which would be a naval attack, similar to the bombing of the USS Cole. This time, however, Nashiri wanted to target an oil tanker off the coast of al-Mukalla in South Yemen. Before the Cole attack Nashiri had considered an attack on an oil tanker, and had done casing for the operation, so he knew exactly what was needed.

After 9/11 Abu Ali al-Harithi had been chosen by bin Laden to be al-Qaeda’s main representative in Yemen. He was a veteran mujahid with a strong Yemeni tribal background, which enabled him to operate with tribal protection. His cell would assist Nashiri’s men in whatever way was required.

Nashiri told his operatives to get explosives for the oil tanker operation from Abu Ali, and told them what else he wanted: a small boat, a villa to prepare the boat, a Dyna pickup truck to move the boat, fraudulent documents to purchase the boat and truck, and a place to store the explosives.

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DocEx

In December 2001 I returned to the United States, where the FBI’s al-Qaeda team had gone through a reorganization: headquarters didn’t want the investigation into 9/11 and al-Qaeda to be run out of the New York field office anymore, despite the institutional knowledge base there, and created a new squad based in Washington, DC, known as the 9/11 Team.

My boss, Pat D’Amuro, was reassigned from New York to Washington to oversee it, and many agents from New York were temporarily moved with him. Later, all veteran terrorist investigators returned to New York. Many New York agents felt that their expertise was unwelcome in Washington, where a new leadership, mostly from the West Coast and appointed by Director Robert Mueller, was running the show. Excluding Pat, none of them had experience in dealing with al-Qaeda. The division was compared, within the FBI, to the East Coast/West Coast rap wars going on at the time. Pat’s deputy running the team, which was now responsible for operations against al-Qaeda around the world, was an assistant special agent in charge from Detroit named Andy Arena.

Prior to the Iraq war, when there was a lot of pressure on the FBI from the White House to produce a “link” between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, the 9/11 Team’s assessment, again and again, was that there was no link. The White House didn’t like that answer, and told the bureau to look into it more and “come up with one.” Andy refused, and in an exchange (now famous among bureau agents), he told Robert Mueller: “Sir, in the FBI, we present facts. We don’t manufacture reasons for White House wars.” The director agreed, and the message went back that the assessment wouldn’t be changed.

I was temporarily reassigned to Washington, as were George Crouch, who had worked with me on the USS Cole; veteran FBI al-Qaeda expert Dan Coleman; and Debbie Doran, who was assigned to DocEx, a program that involved sorting through the thousands of documents that had been recovered from battlefields, guesthouses, and various facilities in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Coordinating the organization and translation of all the documents was a complicated task, but Debbie had played a similar role in the East African embassy investigation. Boxes and boxes of evidence were shipped to Washington, and translation teams, made up of contractors with no background in al-Qaeda or terrorism, were set up to deal with them.

“Ali,” Pat said,