The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [186]
O’Neill ordered the U.S. Marines to deploy two armored vehicles to block the street in front of the hotel. The night passed without further incident, but the next day O’Neill relocated his team to the USS Duluth, stationed in the Bay of Aden. He had to get permission from the Yemeni government to fly back to shore. The helicopter pilot had to take evasive maneuvers after the craft was painted by an SA-7 missle. O’Neill sent most of the investigators home. He and Soufan and four other agents moved back to the hotel, now practically empty because of bomb threats.
Relations between Bodine and O’Neill deteriorated to the point that Barry Mawn flew to Yemen to assess the situation. “It became clear that she simply hated his guts,” Mawn observed, but what Bodine told him was that O’Neill couldn’t get along with the Yemenis. For the next ten days Mawn spoke to members of the FBI team and American military officers. Every night, when the Yemen authorities did business, he would go with O’Neill and watch him interact with his counterparts. The meetings invariably went late, with O’Neill cajoling, pressuring, charming, entreating, doing whatever he could do to inch the process along. One such night O’Neill complained to General Ghalib Qamish of the PSO that he needed photographs of the suspects that the Yemenis had arrested. The discussion dragged on deep into the early-morning hours, with General Qamish politely explaining that the FBI was not needed on this case at all and O’Neill patiently describing the urgency of the situation. Mawn could barely keep his head up. But the following night the general announced, “I have your photos for you.”
O’Neill thanked him, then went on to beg for the right to interview the suspects face-to-face, rather than feeding questions to the Yemeni interrogators. It was an endless and tortuous negotiation, but in Mawn’s view it was carried out with respect and even affection on both sides. General Qamish referred to O’Neill as “Brother John.” When Mawn returned, he reported to the director that O’Neill was doing a masterful job, adding that Bodine was his “only detractor.” He said as much to Bodine on his way out of the country. He was not recalling O’Neill, he told her. Of course, Mawn was responsible for sending O’Neill in the first place. He may not have wanted to see Bodine’s point of view. In any case, ambassadors have the final say over which Americans are allowed to remain in a foreign country, and O’Neill was not one of them.
THE YEMENIS ARRESTED FAHD AL-QUSO, the al-Qaeda cameraman who had overslept his assignment to videotape the bombing, at the end of October. Quso admitted that he and one of the suicide bombers had delivered five thousand dollars to “Khallad”—the one-legged mastermind of the Cole attack—in Bangkok. He said the money was to buy Khallad a new prosthesis. The transcript of the conversation was passed along to the FBI a month later.
Soufan remembered the name Khallad from a source he had recruited in Afghanistan. The source had described a fighter with a metal leg who was the emir of a guesthouse in Kandahar—bin Laden’s “errand boy,” he had called him. Soufan and O’Neill faxed the mug shots to the Afghan source, who made a positive identification of Khallad. That was the first real link between the Cole bombing and al-Qaeda.
Soufan wondered why money was leaving Yemen when a major operation was about to take place. Could there be another operation under way that he didn’t know about? Soufan queried the CIA, asking for information about Khallad and whether there might have been an al-Qaeda meeting in the region. The agency did not respond to his clearly stated request. The fact that the CIA withheld information about the mastermind of the Cole bombing and the meeting in Malaysia, when directly asked by the FBI, amounted to obstruction of justice in the death of seventeen American sailors. Much more tragic consequences were on the horizon.
A MONTH AFTER THE