The Black Banners_ 9_11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda - Ali H. Soufan [79]
“Have the brothers be patient,” bin Laden replied. “An operation in Yemen is coming, and you will be involved. You need to be patient and discreet.”
Khamiri returned to Yemen to help plan the operation and regularly visited the operatives who were still in jail. He spent a good deal of time speaking to Khallad, and to Khallad and Muhannad bin Attash’s younger brother Abdul Aziz bin Attash (al-Bara). Although al-Bara’s sentence was up, because of his family’s close ties to bin Laden, the Yemenis continued to hold him, citing national security reasons. They thought that he could be a future bargaining chip with bin Laden. “Don’t worry,” Khamiri told al-Bara, “the sheikh understands our concerns. Some kind of action is coming.”
In the summer of 2000 Khamiri sent al-Bara a letter saying that bin Laden and Saif al-Adel had asked him to no longer visit him and their other al-Qaeda brothers in prison; he had to remove himself from “suspicious activities.” Khamiri concluded, “Soon you will hear the good news.” It was a clear message that he would be involved in an operation.
Al-Bara smiled and burned the letter—while sitting in his Yemeni prison cell.
October 12, 2000. The darkness of the night was only beginning to retreat as I drove my car from my apartment in Brooklyn to the FBI offices in Manhattan. It was around 6:00 AM, and it wasn’t unusual for me to be awake and on my way to the office at that early hour. The hours before daybreak were in many ways my favorite part of the day. New York was silent and peaceful, traffic and honking almost nonexistent. Not only did the quiet remind me, somehow, of my years in rural Pennsylvania, but it also gave me time to think clearly and without interruption before things started getting busy.
I was midway through my drive, deep in thought on a case I was working on—and almost exactly in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge—when my cell phone rang. It startled me. A call at this hour meant that either something was wrong or a friend in the Middle East had forgotten the time difference. Having recently worked in Jordan to thwart the millennium attacks, I half-expected phone calls at early hours from the Middle East. But it wasn’t someone from Jordan on the phone; it was Kevin Cruise, supervisor of the I-45 squad, dedicated to the investigation into the East African embassy bombings.
“Did you hear what happened?” Kevin asked, skipping a hello and other niceties.
“I heard on NPR earlier,” I began cautiously. “Israel bombed Arafat’s headquarters. We probably need to take precautions . . .” As the words came out, I knew something else must have happened. That alone wouldn’t warrant a 6:00 AM call.
“Not that,” he interrupted, not allowing me to finish my sentence. “A navy ship in Yemen was bombed. There are a lot of casualties, and some sailors are missing.”
“Yemen?” I asked. “Why on earth do we have a navy ship in Yemen?”
Yemen was well known in the intelligence community to be full of radical Islamists, including al-Qaeda members. Radical Islamist fighters developed a close relationship with the Yemeni authorities during the country’s civil war, when President Ali Abdullah Saleh reportedly used Arab mujahideen veterans of the Afghan-Soviet war to help him lead the North to defeat the socialist South. In return for the mujahideen’s help, the government turned a blind eye to radical Islamist activities in the country as long as they weren’t directed against the government or didn’t harm the country’s interests.
As a result al-Qaeda sympathizers could be found throughout Yemeni institutions, including in the intelligence services. Some would help terrorists obtain visas and fraudulent documents, or tip them off when foreign governments were looking for them. Many non-Yemenis involved in the 1998 East African embassy bombings, for example, used fraudulent Yemeni passports