The Black Banners_ 9_11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda - Ali H. Soufan [91]
With John and the rest of the team on the ground we had the manpower to really start investigating. We established an early-morning meeting that everyone, from the case agent to the technical staff staying at the hotel, would attend. No matter his or her role in the investigation—whether guarding a door, searching a site, or interrogating suspects—everyone is important. Without any one of them, our team wouldn’t function properly. In addition, all of them were risking their lives every day by being in Yemen. That deserved to be recognized, and so everyone was included in the morning meeting.
There were obstacles we faced, however, starting with the Yemenis. As was the case at the airport, all the different Yemeni agencies were trying to monitor us and were demanding that we clear everything with them. This meant that a large part of our day was spent negotiating the same terms again and again. Even when we just wanted a convoy to get to the Cole, it wasn’t enough to clear our visit with the PSO. We had to clear it with military intelligence, with the local police, and with other entities.
A second problem was that the highest levels of the Yemeni government were disputing whether the attack on the Cole was or was not a terrorist attack. After the bombing, President Saleh had first claimed that the bombing wasn’t a terrorist attack but an accident. Echoing this line, some Yemeni government officials tried to convince the United States that the explosion was caused by a malfunction in the Cole’s operating systems, and Saleh asked the United States government for money to repair the damage the United States had “caused” in the port. When it had become indisputably clear that the bombing was an attack, Saleh tried blaming Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency.
Hostility came from other quarters: clerics in mosques denounced our presence and warned people not to cooperate with us, and Yemeni parliamentarians claimed we were invading their country. We were also under the constant threat that extremists would try to attack us. Another concern we had was that a number of Yemeni officials we met were clearly sympathetic to al-Qaeda. The relationship made us question whether these officials had had anything to do with the attack. Many appeared to be playing a game with the extremists: they would let them operate as long as they didn’t harm Yemeni interests. The good news was that for many Yemeni officials, that line was crossed with the bombing of the Cole.
Finally, we were given reason to frankly mistrust some Yemenis. One morning during our 7:00 briefing, an HRT member entered the room and whispered something into his commander’s ear and then pointed up to the ceiling. We all looked up and saw that a wire with a small microphone was hanging down from the ceiling. Someone was trying to listen in. Because the hotel was made of cement, the wire was literally taped to the ceiling and was easy to spot. It must have been put in overnight. We followed the wire from the ballroom (where our meeting was taking place) through the hotel up to the mezzanine level, where it went behind a partition.
A U.S. Marine was standing nearby with a sniffer dog. Knowing that Yemenis in general are scared of dogs, I asked her to come with us. We went around the partition and saw a Yemeni man sitting at a desk monitoring cameras and listening to an earpiece. The Yemeni saw the dog, which snarled helpfully, and the man jumped onto the desk, shaking. When the dog started barking, he jumped off the desk and ran away from the listening post.
We looked at the cameras and examined the wires and saw that the Yemenis had set up monitoring devices in quite a few of our rooms. As we were looking at them, some other Yemeni