The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [183]
“Ye-men,” she coldly corrected him.
From O’Neill’s perspective, Yemen was filled with jihadis, and it was still quaking from the civil war. “Yemen is a country of 18 million citizens and 50 million machine guns,” he later reported. Gunfire was a frequent distraction. The temperature often exceeded 120 degrees, and scorpions were as common as houseflies. Moreover, Yemen was full of spies who were well equipped with listening devices. One of the largest cells of Zawahiri’s al-Jihad operated here, and there were many veterans who had fought with bin Laden in Afghanistan. When the rest of O’Neill’s team arrived, he warned them, “This may be the most hostile environment the FBI has ever operated in.”
Bodine, however, saw Yemen as a promising American ally in an unsettled but strategically crucial part of the world. The country was an infant democracy, far more tolerant than its neighbors; it even allowed women to vote. Unlike O’Neill, the ambassador had plenty of experience working in dangerous places. During the Iraqi invasion and occupation of Kuwait, she had served as deputy chief of mission and stayed through the 137-day siege of the American Embassy by Iraqi troops until all the Americans were evacuated. Moreover, Barbara Bodine was as forceful and blunt as John O’Neill.
Bodine thought she had an understanding with O’Neill that he would bring in a team of no more than fifty. She was furious when many more investigators and support staff arrived. In her mind, it was the same as if a military plane with “three hundred heavily armed people” arrived to take over Des Moines. (O’Neill’s account, confirmed by other agents and news reports, said that there were only 150 personnel in his group, not 300.) She pleaded with O’Neill to consider the delicate diplomatic environment he was entering. O’Neill responded that he was here to investigate a crime, not to conduct diplomacy. That was the kind of answer Bodine had come to expect in her dealings with the FBI. “There was the FBI way, and that was it,” she had concluded. “O’Neill wasn’t unique. He was simply extreme.”
Her goal was to preserve the delicate relations between the United States and Yemen, which she had worked hard to improve. Although one can understand that the State Department and the FBI might have two different agendas, in this case Bodine had been given clear directives by the secretary of state to ensure the safety of American investigators and to assist them in their investigation. Those were to be her top priorities, not protecting the relationship with the Yemen government; instead, she continually worked to lower the bureau’s “footprint” by reducing the number of agents and stripping them of their heavy weapons, which she said was for their own safety. Meanwhile, on local television each night, the Yemeni parliament featured speakers who were openly calling for jihad against America.
Bodine ordered that the entire FBI team be moved to the Aden Hotel, which was crammed with other U.S. military and government employees. O’Neill’s investigators were billeted three and four to a room. “Forty-five FBI personnel slept on mats on the hotel’s ballroom floor,” O’Neill reported. He set up a command center on the eighth floor of the hotel; fifty Marines guarded the sandbagged hallway. Outside, the hotel was ringed with machine-gun nests manned by Yemeni troops. It wasn’t entirely clear what their purpose was, other than to make sure the Americans were confined to the hotel. “We were prisoners,” one of the agents recalled.
Early on the morning after his arrival, O’Neill boarded a launch to the Cole, which was listing in the harbor a thousand yards offshore. The recovery of the dead was still under