The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [184]
The sailor in charge of refueling the ship told investigators that it normally took about six hours for the ship to take on the 240,000 gallons of fuel it required. They were just forty-five minutes into the process when the bomb exploded. He’d thought the gas line had blown, and he immediately shut off the connection. Then a cloud of black liquid suddenly covered the ship. It was not oily. It was the residue of the bomb.
O’Neill spent much of his time coaxing the Yemeni authorities in the Political Security Organization—the equivalent of the FBI—to cooperate with the investigation. He was conscious of the need to build cases that would survive American standards of justice, so his agents would have to be present during interrogations by local authorities to assure U.S. courts that none of the suspects had been tortured. He also sought to gather eyewitness testimony from residents who had seen the explosion. Both the PSO and Bodine resisted these requests. “You want a bunch of six-foot-two Irish-Americans to go door-to-door?” Bodine asked O’Neill. “And, excuse me, but how many of your guys speak Arabic?”
Actually, there were only half a dozen Arabic speakers in the FBI contingent, and language was a constant source of misunderstanding. O’Neill kept Ali Soufan at his side most of the time. Once, when he was talking to an obstructionist colonel in Yemen intelligence, O’Neill exclaimed in frustration, “Christ, this is like pulling teeth!” When the colonel’s personal translator repeated the remark in Arabic, the officer stood up, visibly angry. “What’d I say?” O’Neill asked Soufan. Soufan told him that the translator had told the colonel, “If you don’t answer my questions, I’m going to pull out your teeth!”
The Yemeni authorities understandably felt encroached upon and unfairly treated. In exchange for the evidence O’Neill was demanding, they wanted access to any information the FBI gathered outside the country, which for legal reasons O’Neill could not provide. The Yemenis finally produced a videotape taken by a harborside security camera, but it appeared to have been edited to delete the crucial moment of the explosion. When O’Neill expressed his frustration to Washington, President Clinton sent a note to President Ali Abdullah Saleh. It had little effect. The FBI was convinced that the bombers had been tipped off about the arrival of the Cole, and they wanted to expand the investigation to include a member of the president’s own family and a colonel in the PSO. There was scant interest on the part of the Yemen authorities in pursuing such leads.
O’Neill had spent his entire career romancing police from other countries. He had found that “coppers”—as he called them—formed a universal fraternity. And yet some of his requests for evidence mystified the local detectives, who were not acquainted with the advanced forensic techniques the bureau is famous for. Elementary procedures, such as fingerprinting, were rarely employed. They couldn’t understand, for instance, why O’Neill was requesting a hat worn by one of the conspirators, which he wanted to examine for DNA evidence. Even the harbor sludge, which contained residue from the bomb and bits of the fiberglass fishing boat, was off-limits until the bureau paid the Yemeni government $1 million to dredge it. The debris was loaded onto barges and shipped to Dubai for examination.
Yemen was an intensely status-conscious society, and because Soufan had promoted O’Neill to “general,” one of his counterparts was General Hamoud Naji, head of Presidential Security. General Naji finally agreed to take them to the site where the bombers had launched their boat. The police had discovered a twelve-year-old boy named Ahmed who had been fishing