The Black Banners_ 9_11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda - Ali H. Soufan [77]
He withdrew some cash, saw that his account was untouched, and walked back to me smiling and waving his Jordanian banknotes.
PART 3
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USS COLE
8
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A Naval Destroyer in Yemen?
The terrorists sitting in Bayt Habra, a safe house in Sanaa, nodded in agreement. They wouldn’t ask bin Laden for his approval of their operation. It was a tough decision for them, but they felt that it was the right one. While they revered their emir, they knew that the al-Qaeda leader felt a close personal connection to Yemen: his father had been born there, and one of his wives was a Yemeni. The operatives doubted that he could bless an operation against the Yemeni government. But they had to act; their friend Abul al-Hasan al-Mihdhar would soon be executed. On May 5 he had been sentenced to death in a Yemeni court. What they had in mind was no less than Mihdhar’s rescue from jail. To fund the operation, they planned a series of car thefts. It was May 1999.
On December 28, 1998, Mihdhar’s group, the Islamic Army of Aden-Abyan, had kidnapped sixteen Western hostages (twelve Britons, two Americans, and two Australians) who were touring Yemen. The group had announced that they would release the hostages only if the Yemeni government released nine Islamists being held in jail and if international sanctions on Iraq were lifted. The Yemeni government had refused to accept their demands and had launched a rescue operation the next day.
When the kidnappers saw Yemeni soldiers approaching, they took cover behind the hostages and started firing at the soldiers. During an intense firefight, two kidnappers and four hostages—three Britons and one Australian—were killed. The Yemenis arrested the remaining kidnappers and rounded up any members of the group they could find. Mihdhar himself was captured and brought before a judge, who sentenced him to death. His friends and fellow terrorists in Yemen, among them many al-Qaeda members, resolved to rescue him—they just wouldn’t tell bin Laden.
To fund the rescue operation, Mihdhar’s supporters had come up with the car theft plan. They would steal and then sell cars from an American rental company in Yemen. With the proceeds, they would buy weapons and vehicles. Before they got very far, the Yemeni authorities learned of the plot and made numerous arrests. The Yemeni Criminal Investigative Division (CID) raided the al-Qaeda safe house in Sanaa after learning that al-Qaeda members were involved.
One of the al-Qaeda terrorists staying in the safe house at the time of the raid was Abu Jandal. He had recently returned to Yemen to get married—at least that’s what he’d told bin Laden. He confided to friends that finding a bride wasn’t the only reason he had left Afghanistan. He was unhappy with bin Laden’s pledging bayat to Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, and with bin Laden’s endorsement of the honorific bestowed upon Mullah Omar in 1996 following the Cloak of the Prophet spectacle: Amir al-Mu’minin. Abu Jandal felt that al-Qaeda’s aligning itself with the Taliban was a distraction from the organization’s broader goals. It was not what he had signed up for.
Like many operatives, he also wasn’t happy that Egyptians were running al-Qaeda. Traditionally, Arabs from the Persian Gulf are accustomed to having Egyptians work for them. In al-Qaeda Egyptians took many of the top positions: they headed most of the training camps and were in other positions of power as well, and they tended to order the Gulf Arabs around. Of the nine members of the shura council, seven were Egyptian. And of the heads of al-Qaeda’s various committees, other than bin Laden himself and Abu Hafs al-Mauritani, all were Egyptians. The division extended to recreation: when al-Qaeda members played soccer on Fridays, the teams were usually Egyptians versus Saudis and Yemenis