Front Burner (39 page)

The key finding was that, of the sixty-two force protection measures listed for completion in the plan that
Cole
had submitted, the ship had waived nineteen and completed only thirty-one.

Of the sixty-two measures, the opinion section of his report concluded, “Nineteen measures could possibly have prevented the suicide boat attack or mitigated its effect. Of those 19 measures, the ship accomplished 7. The remaining 12 were either waived by the Force Protection Officer under the authority [of] the Commanding Officer, or were simply not accomplished.”

Six of those twelve unexecuted measures the report considered to be of “particularly high importance.” Its assessment of the failure to execute them was starkly critical.

“The collective failure to execute these six measures created a seam in the defense posture of USS
Cole
and allowed the terrorist craft to come alongside the ship unchallenged by those responsible for the ship's protection,” it said.

These were the six crucial measures Captain Holland's report accused my command and me of not executing, in his opinion thereby exposing the ship fatally to the attack:

We had, of course, briefed key personnel on security duties during the refueling stop, but the investigators, doing interviews among the crew at random, found that few others were aware of the security situation, and on this basis, the judgment of the report was that we had not executed measures 1 and 2. As for the remaining measures, 18, 19, 34, and 39, discussed above, I had judged that putting one of the ship's boats in the water to be manned on fifteen-minute standby made little sense in light of what I had been told to expect in the harbor. The boats were stored on the starboard side of the ship, and I had insisted on mooring with the starboard side next to the refueling pier because that would allow
Cole
to get underway quickly under its own power in case of danger; but that also meant that the boats were not deployable after we had tied up to the pier. Even
if we had deployed them, the standing rules of engagement under which we were operating would not have allowed us to take a boat under fire unless it fired at us first or showed other signs of imminent hostile action—hardly the case with the suicide boat, whose two occupants were waving and smiling at us right up until they blew themselves to (they hoped) kingdom come.

The command investigation report viewed the force protection plan submitted by
Cole
as a “perfunctory submission,” but it also judged the review of the plan by higher authority, the Task Force 50 staff we were reporting to, as equally “perfunctory.” Neither Fifth Fleet nor the CTF-50 staffs ever fully reviewed the implementation of the force protection measures that either did not apply or could not be completed due to the physical circumstances of the brief stop for fuel. For the ship's part, the report said, there was a failure to think critically about the force protection posture in view of all the security factors that were unknown to us.

“The crew, while trained, failed to shift their mindset or increase their awareness regarding the new threat environment,” the report concluded. The opinions listed in the report found a lack of focus on the importance of strictly executing the plan that was amplified by confusing messages from up
Cole
's chain of command about the threat level and the nature and danger of the threat. “When USS
Cole
. . . arrived in Aden, Yemen, the threat level was HIGH and the THREATCON was BRAVO,” it observed, yet “many of the ship's crew were not attuned to, or even aware of, the heightened threat level.” A new four-point system (High, Significant, Moderate, Low) had gone into effect, and Yemen was rated Significant, but Central Command had not implemented it and was still using the old five-point system of “CRITICAL, HIGH, MEDIUM, LOW AND NEGLIGIBLE.” “At a minimum this contributed to confusion as to the actual threat environment, as the Commanding Officer and the Executive Officer interpreted this as a ‘decrease in Threat Level,'” the report said.
⁴

Even though
Cole
had made self-authorized adjustments to the plan based on what we had learned about previous ships' experiences in Aden and on procedures in the Sixth Fleet area of operations, the report's conclusions criticized the ship for not notifying the chain of command that
we had done so. There had been a disconnect between the work done by the embassy and defense attaché, the Fifth Fleet staff, and the ships deployed to the region, the report concluded, with information gaps about who was responsible for security on the pier, identification and certification of boats approaching the ship, as well as the latest port security and threat information.

Though the force protection planning system places the onus on individual ships to gather information regarding threat levels and conditions for the areas they deploy to and ports that they visit, the report noted that there was no mechanism in place to ensure that a ship has in fact acquired this information.

The last part of the command investigation report made recommendations for the Navy and the chain of command—lessons learned from this attack:

But to me as commanding officer, as captain, the most devastating finding—again, in the opinion section of the report—was its conclusion that I and my executive officer, Chris, and two of our subordinate officers had shown “a notable absence of supervision” and “did not meet the standards set forth in Navy regulations.”
⁵

The report began winding its way up the chain of command for endorsement—in this case, first by Fifth Fleet/Naval Forces Central Command, then by Commander in Chief, U.S. Atlantic Fleet, then by the chief of naval operations, and finally by the secretary of the Navy, and the secretary of defense.

Admiral Moore, the commander of Fifth Fleet and Naval Forces Central Command, rejected its central conclusion in his letter forwarding the report to Commander in Chief, U.S. Atlantic Fleet. He determined that
Cole
's crew had a robust force protection program incorporating the intelligence assessments that were available, and though he said that he was “disappointed” in the way we had implemented it, he also observed that, “had USS
COLE
implemented the THREATCON Bravo Force Protection Measures appropriately, the ship would not have prevented the attack. I am convinced THREATCON Bravo Force Protection Measures were inadequate to prevent the attack.”
⁶
It was a stunning admission.

The admiral continued that neither Fifth Fleet nor the ship possessed specific threat information that would have compelled a higher degree of
readiness. None of the available information or intelligence included any assessment that hinted of adversaries lying in wait and poised to strike a U.S. Navy ship moored at the refueling pier in Aden harbor. Had it been known that al Qaeda was poised to strike, the ship would not have been scheduled to stop there.
⁷

In specifically addressing my actions as commanding officer, Admiral Moore stated that the Navy “cannot use hindsight to penalize a commanding officer for not knowing in advance what has become common knowledge—that a determined, well-armed and well-financed terrorist cell was operating in the Port of Aden. In fact, all of the intelligence assets of the United States and its allies, as well as the U.S. Embassy in Sana'a, did not identify the threat, let alone communicate the presence of that threat to the Commanding Officer of USS
Cole
.”
⁸

Admiral Moore wrote that because by the time he forwarded his review up the chain of command, at the very end of November 2000, the criminal investigation by the FBI, NCIS, and the Yemeni authorities had identified the terrorists responsible for the attack as close associates of Osama bin Laden. The FBI investigators, including George Crouch and Ali Soufan, discussed their findings with John O'Neill and others up the chain of command in the FBI and believed that bin Laden had ordered his subordinates years earlier to come up with a way to destroy a U.S. Navy ship in or near Yemen, though at this early stage in the probe they were having trouble tying him directly to the actual carrying out of the attack against USS
Cole
.

The Yemenis had interrogated suspects who told them that Tawfiq bin Attash, aka “Khallad,” a longtime trainer at one of the al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan who was known to be in constant touch with bin Laden, had supervised the planning. Khallad, easily recognizable because he had lost a leg, tasked one of the jihadists he had trained, Jamal al Badawi, with obtaining a boat from a source in Saudi Arabia and getting it to Aden for an attack against a U.S. Navy ship. The boat, the one that blew up alongside
Cole
, arrived well before the start of 2000.

On-scene planning in Yemen was the responsibility of Abd al Rahim Hussein Mohammed Al-Nashiri, a Yemeni who was another longtime bin
Laden operative and a first cousin of the suicide driver who had attacked the U.S. embassy in Kenya in 1998. An explosives expert, he oversaw the handling, preparation, and installation of explosives into the boat, a fiberglass and wood hull with a centerline console to control the engine. Operating from a safe house with a view of the harbor, he and at least two other Yemeni terrorists, Hassan Said Awad Al Khamri and Ibrahim Al-Thawar, known to the authorities as associates of local al Qaeda operatives, could see when Navy ships came into the port.

Their first attempt had been a failure. On January 3, 2000, as the USS
The Sullivans
, an
Arleigh Burke
–class guided missile destroyer like USS
Cole
, glided into Aden, the boat, mounted on a trailer, was slowly backed down into the water. Although nobody knows for sure, apparently it was backed too far into the water, became stuck with the boat still attached, and could not be freed from the shoreline mud. Despite numerous attempts, they could not free the boat quickly enough and it became swamped and flooded. Unsure whether their actions had come to the attention of the local authorities, the plotters panicked and abandoned trailer and boat. By that afternoon,
The Sullivans
had been refueled and set sail for sea unscathed and, like the rest of the Navy and U.S. intelligence, unaware of how close it had come to disaster. Over the next few weeks it became clear to the terrorists that no one had detected their attempted attack. They recovered the trailer and boat and all the explosives they had placed in the hull, and continued plotting.

A new safe house was picked that was farther out of town, surrounded by a wall, in a quiet neighborhood where people minded their own business—not so different from the one in which bin Laden himself hid in plain sight for so long in Abbottabad, Pakistan, until 2011. The terrorists also selected a small apartment close to the harbor from which they could observe ship movements and film an attack to impress the world with their capabilities and exploits. Here they noted that when Navy ships tied up to refuel, small garbage boats usually came alongside soon afterward.