The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [181]
On October 12, 2000, at 11:15 a.m., as the Cole was preparing to get under way, a fiberglass fishing boat approached its massive prey. Some of the sailors were standing watch, but many were below decks or waiting in the chow line. Two men brought the tiny skiff to a halt amidships, smiled and waved, then stood at attention. The symbolism and the asymmetry of this moment were exactly what bin Laden had dreamed of. “The destroyer represented the capital of the West,” he said, “and the small boat represented Mohammed.”
The shock wave of the enormous explosion in the harbor knocked over cars onshore. Two miles away, people thought there was an earthquake. In a taxi in the city, the concussion shook Fahd al-Quso, a member of the al-Qaeda support team who was running late; he was supposed to have videotaped the attack, but he slept through the page on his phone that would have notified him to set up the camera.
A fireball rose from the waterline and swallowed a sailor who had leaned over the rail to see what the men in the little boat were up to. The blast opened a hole forty feet by forty feet in the port side of the ship, tearing apart sailors who were waiting for lunch. Seventeen of them perished, and thirty-nine were wounded. Several of the sailors swam through the blast hole to escape the flames. The great modern man-of-war was gaping open like a gutted animal.
WITHIN HOURS OF THE ATTACK on the Cole, Barry Mawn called headquarters and demanded that the New York office gain control of the investigation. “It’s al-Qaeda,” he told Tom Pickard. He wanted O’Neill to be the on-scene commander.
As he had during the embassy bombings investigation, Pickard declined, saying there was no proof that al-Qaeda was involved. He intended to send the Washington Field Office instead. Mawn went over his head, appealing the decision to Louis Freeh, who immediately agreed that it was New York’s case. But the question of sending O’Neill was controversial.
“John’s my guy,” Mawn insisted. There was no one else with O’Neill’s experience and commitment. He was told, “If it falls on bad times, it’s your ass.”
“I can live with that,” said Mawn.
O’Neill was overjoyed. It would be his best chance to break up the criminal enterprise of al-Qaeda and perhaps his last opportunity to redeem his career. “This is it for me,” he told a friend in Washington.
O’Neill had learned many lessons since his first day on the job in Washington five years before, when he coordinated the Ramzi Yousef rendition. One of those lessons was to stockpile supplies on skids at Andrews Air Force Base so that a rapid-response team would be ready to go at any moment. In little more than twenty-four hours after the explosion, O’Neill and about sixty FBI agents and support staff were in the air.
They had to stop first in Germany to await clearance from the Yemen authorities, who were still claiming that the explosion had been an accident. Coincidentally, many of the injured sailors were also in Germany, having been flown to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, the largest American hospital outside the United States. O’Neill took his investigators directly to the ward where the sailors were being treated. While the bomb technicians swept the victims’ hair and clothing for residue, O’Neill went through the room with a naval investigator, talking to the wounded sailors. They were young men and women, most of them not yet out of their teens, some of them missing limbs, some horribly burned. Three of the sailors were too badly wounded to be interviewed. One of them, petty officer