17

The New Millennium

TWO DAYS AFTER THE AMERICAN MISSILE ATTACKS, Mullah Omar placed a secret call to the U.S. State Department. He had a piece of advice. The strikes would only arouse anti-American sentiment in the Islamic world and provoke more acts of terrorism, he said. The best solution was for President Clinton to resign.

The unflappable State Department official who fielded the call, Michael E. Malinowski, pointed out that there was considerable evidence that bin Laden was behind the bombings in East Africa. Malinowski added that he appreciated the tribal code that required Omar to shelter bin Laden, but the Saudi was behaving like a guest who was shooting at neighbors from the host’s window. As long as bin Laden stayed in Afghanistan, Malinowski warned, there would be no reconstruction aid. Although the conversation resolved nothing, it was the first of many such candid and informal talks between the United States and the Taliban.

Mullah Omar certainly realized that he had a problem. Bin Laden’s declaration of war against the United States had split the Taliban. There were those who said that America had always been Afghanistan’s friend, so why turn it into a powerful and unnecessary enemy? They pointed out that no one in bin Laden’s inner circle, including bin Laden himself, had the religious authority to pronounce any fatwa, much less a jihad. Others felt that America had made itself Afghanistan’s enemy when it launched the missiles.

Omar was furious at bin Laden’s defiance of his authority, but the American attack on Afghanistan soil placed him in a quandary. If he surrendered bin Laden, he would be seen to be caving in to American pressure. He judged that the Taliban could not survive in power if he did so. And, of course, there was the deal that Mullah Omar had struck with Prince Turki, who would soon be returning to Kandahar to collect bin Laden and take him back to the Kingdom.

Once again Omar summoned bin Laden. “I shed tears,” bin Laden later admitted. “I told Mullah Omar that we would leave his country and head toward God’s vast domain, but that we would leave our children and wives in his safekeeping. I said we would seek a land which was a haven for us. Mullah Omar said that things had not yet reached that stage.”

Bin Laden then made a pledge of personal fealty, much like the one that members of al-Qaeda swore to him. He acknowledged Omar as the leader of the faithful. “We consider you to be our noble emir,” bin Laden wrote. “We invite all Muslims to render assistance and cooperation to you, in every possible way they can.”

With this promise in his pocket, Mullah Omar’s attitude changed. He no longer viewed bin Laden as a threat. A friendship developed between them. From now on, when other members of the Taliban complained about the Saudi, Mullah Omar proved to be bin Laden’s strongest defender. They often went fishing together below a dam west of Kandahar.

“THIS TIME, why don’t you come with me?” Prince Turki asked his Pakistani colleague, General Naseem Rana, head of the ISI, in mid-September. “That way, Mullah Omar can see that both of us are serious.”

On the basis of their own intelligence, the Pakistanis had informed Turki that bin Laden was behind the embassy bombings and that Saudi citizens had actually carried out the attack in Nairobi. Turki gloomily realized that he was no longer negotiating for a mere dissident but for a master terrorist. Surely the Taliban’s two strongest allies—Saudi Arabia and Pakistan—would be able to persuade the Afghan to surrender his nettlesome guest.

Turki and General Rana came to the same Kandahar guesthouse where Mullah Omar had received the Saudi prince before. Turki greeted the Taliban ruler, then reminded him of his pledge. Before answering, Omar abruptly stood up and left the room for about twenty minutes. Turki wondered if he was consulting with his shura council or even with bin Laden himself. Finally, the Leader of the Faithful returned and said, “There must have been a translator’s mistake. I never told you we would hand over bin Laden.”

“But, Mullah Omar, I did not say this only one time,” Turki sputtered. He pointed to Omar’s main advisor and de facto foreign minister, Mullah Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, who, Turki remarked, had come to the Kingdom only the month before to negotiate the handover. How could Omar pretend otherwise?

Omar’s voice was shrill, and he began to perspire. Turki began to wonder if he was on drugs. Omar screamed at the prince, telling him that bin Laden was “a man of honor, a man of distinction” who only wanted to see the Americans run out of Arabia. “Instead of seeking to persecute him, you should put your hand in ours and his, and fight against the infidels.” He called Saudi Arabia “an occupied country” and became so personally insulting that the translator hesitated.

“I’m not going to take any more of this,” Turki said furiously. “But you must remember, Mullah Omar, what you are doing now is going to bring a lot of harm to the Afghan people.”

Turki and General Rana rode back to the airport in stunned silence. It was particularly galling to once again pass by Tarnak Farms, bin Laden’s dilapidated citadel. From now on, not only Turki’s personal reputation but also Saudi Arabia’s place in the world would be held hostage by the man inside.

ALTHOUGH THE AMERICAN STRIKE had damaged the Afghan training camps, they were easily relocated—this time near the population centers of Kandahar and Kabul. But the attack had left a residue of paranoia, and the members of the al-Qaeda community, who were always suspicious of outsiders, turned on each other. Saif al-Adl, the head of bin Laden’s security force, was certain that there was a traitor in his camp. After all, bin Laden and key members of the shura council would have been in Khost when the missiles struck had it not been for the last-minute decision to turn off on the road to Kabul.

Bin Laden still sat with the men in his same casual manner, and it was easy for anyone to approach him. On one occasion, a Sudanese named Abu al-Sha‘tha came into the circle and spoke rudely to bin Laden in front of the other leaders. One of the men, Abu Jandal, recognized the man as a takfiri and offered to sit between him and bin Laden. “There is no need,” bin Laden assured him, but he put his hand on his pistol while he talked.

When the Sudanese takfiri made a sudden movement, Abu Jandal pounced on him and pulled his hands behind his back, sitting on the man until he could no longer move. Bin Laden laughed and said, “Abu Jandal, let the man be!”

But bin Laden and his Egyptian security men had been impressed by the alertness and strength of this loyal follower. Bin Laden gave Abu Jandal a pistol and made him his personal bodyguard. There were only two bullets in the gun, meant to kill bin Laden in the face of capture. Abu Jandal took care to polish the bullets every night, telling himself, “These are Sheikh Osama’s bullets. I pray to God not to let me use them.”

After the humiliation of Prince Turki by Mullah Omar, both the Taliban and bin Laden’s security force were on edge about an expected Saudi response. The Taliban caught a young Uzbek in Khost who was acting strangely. His name was Siddiq Ahmed, and he had grown up in the Kingdom as an expatriate. He admitted that Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh, had hired him to kill bin Laden (Prince Salman denies this). In return, the assassin would receive two million Saudi riyals and Saudi citizenship. “Did you expect that you would be able to kill Sheikh Osama bin Laden and escape from fourteen highly trained guards armed with automatic weapons?” Abu Jandal demanded. The boy was only eighteen, but he looked like a child. “I made a mistake,” he cried. He was dazed and pathetic. Finally, bin Laden said, “Release him.”

IN EARLY FEBRUARY 1999, bin Laden floated into Mike Scheuer’s sights once again. The CIA received intelligence that bin Laden was camping with a group of royal falconers from the United Arab Emirates in the desert south of Kandahar. The tip came from the bodyguard of one of the princes. They were hunting the houbara bustard, an endangered bird legendary for its speed and cunning, as well as its potency as an aphrodisiac. The princes arrived in a C-130, carrying generators, refrigerated trucks, elaborate air-conditioned tents, towering masts for their communications equipment and televisions, and nearly fifty four-by-four pickups, which they would leave behind for their Taliban hosts as gratuities. Scheuer could see the encampment vividly on reconnaissance photos. He could even make out the falcons roosting on their poles. But he could not find bin Laden’s smaller camp, which he knew must be nearby.

Whenever bin Laden set foot in the royal camp, the Emirati bodyguard would report to his American handler in Pakistan, and the information would be on Scheuer’s desk within the hour. Afghan spies placed in a wide circle around the camp confirmed the Saudi’s comings and goings.

Scheuer is tall and rumpled, with glasses and a bristling brown beard. One can imagine his portrait on the wall of a nineteenth-century Prussian estate. He is a driven and demanding person, who sleeps only a few hours a night. Coleman used to notice the employee sign-in sheets with “2:30a.m.” or some such hour marked by Scheuer’s name. He would usually linger till eight at night. A pious Catholic of the type Coleman knew well, Scheuer had a cold detachment about the job he needed to do. Only a couple of months before, Scheuer had gotten intelligence that bin Laden would be spending the night in the governor’s residence in Kandahar. When Scheuer proposed an immediate cruise missile strike, the military objected, saying that as many as three hundred people might die and a nearby mosque would likely be damaged. Such considerations enraged Scheuer.

Convinced that the sighting in the bustard camp was the best chance he would ever get to assassinate bin Laden, Scheuer accompanied CIA director George Tenet to meet with Dick Clarke in the White House. Once again, the Pentagon was readying cruise missiles—America’s chosen means of assassination—for a strike the following morning. Coincidentally, Clarke had recently returned from the Emirates, where he had helped negotiate the sale of American-built fighter aircraft worth $8 billion. He had personal ties to the UAE royal family. No doubt the image of dead princes scattered in the sand played in his mind, along with the failures of Operation Infinite Reach. Moreover, the CIA could not guarantee that bin Laden was actually in the camp.

Clarke rejected the mission. Tenet also voted against it. Scheuer felt betrayed. The considerations that turned the men against the project seemed petty and mercenary compared to the opportunity to kill bin Laden. “I’m not a big consequences guy,” Scheuer admitted, and to prove it he sent out a series of wounded, recriminating e-mails. Talk in the hallways of the agency suggested that he had suffered a breakdown, that his obsession with bin Laden had gotten the best of him. In the meantime, he blew up at a senior FBI manager in Alec Station, which elicited an angry phone call from Director Freeh to Tenet. In May, Scheuer was dismissed as the head of Alec. “You’re burned out,” his boss told him.

He was expected to retire and accept the intelligence medal that had been struck for him. “Stick it in your ass,” said Scheuer. He reported at his usual dizzying time on Monday morning and occupied a desk in the library. He remained there month after month, with no duties, waiting for the agency to come to him when it was ready to kill, not to dither over a few dead princes.

O’NEILL’S OFFICE was in the northeast corner of the twenty-fifth floor of New York’s 26 Federal Plaza, overlooking the Chrysler and Empire State buildings through one window and the Brooklyn Bridge through the other. He made sure that there was no other FBI office like it. He cleaned out the prison-made government-issue furniture and brought in a lavender couch. On his flame mahogany coffee table was a book about tulips—The Flower That Drives Men Wild—and he filled the room with plants and seasonal cut flowers. He kept two computers, one the antiquated and handicapped version supplied by the bureau and the other his own high-speed PC. In the background CNN ran constantly on a small television. Instead of the usual family pictures that adorn office walls and desktops, O’Neill had prints of French Impressionists.

Few people in the bureau knew that he had a wife and two children (John Junior and Carol) in New Jersey, who did not join him when he moved to Chicago in 1991. Shortly after he arrived in that city, he met Valerie James, a fashion sales director who was divorced and had two children of her own. She was tall and beautiful, with a level gaze and a sultry voice. She saw O’Neill at a bar and bought him a drink because “he had the most compelling eyes.” They stayed up talking till five in the morning.

O’Neill sent Valerie flowers every Friday, the weekly anniversary of the day they met. He was a terrific dancer and allowed that he had been on American Bandstand when he was a teenager. Whenever Valerie had to travel on business, she would find a bottle of wine waiting for her in her hotel room. “Are you sure you’re not married?” Valerie asked.

Just before O’Neill moved to Washington, a female agent pulled Valerie aside at the bureau Christmas party and told her about O’Neill’s family in New Jersey. “That’s not possible,” said Valerie. “We’re getting married. He asked my father for my hand.”

While he was courting Valerie, O’Neill had a girlfriend in Washington, Mary Lynn Stevens, who worked at the Pentagon Federal Credit Union. He had asked her for an “exclusive” relationship two years before, when she visited him in Chicago on New Year’s Eve. Mary Lynn found out about Valerie when she happened to hear a message on O’Neill’s answering machine. She confronted him, and he dropped to his knees begging forgiveness, promising he would never see Valerie again. But when Mary Lynn got back to Washington, her hairdresser, who happened to be from Atlantic City, filled her in about O’Neill’s wife. O’Neill explained that he was still talking to the lawyers; he hadn’t wanted to endanger his relationship with Mary Lynn by revealing a marriage that was over except for the last legal details. He had said much the same to Valerie James.

Soon after he got to Washington, he met another woman, Anna DiBattista, a stylish blonde who was working in the defense industry. She knew he was married from the beginning—a coworker informed her—but O’Neill never let her know about his other women. Anna’s priest warned her, “That guy is never going to marry you. He’s never going to get an annulment.” And yet one day O’Neill told her he had gotten the annulment after all, which was a lie. “I know how much that means to you,” he told her. Often he spent part of the night with Mary Lynn and the rest of it with Anna. “I don’t think he ever stayed later than five or six a.m.,” said Mary Lynn. “I never made him breakfast.” In the meantime, he kept his relationship with Valerie in Chicago alive. All three women were under the impression that he intended to marry them. He was also obsessed with a beautiful, high-powered woman in the Justice Department who was married, a fact that caused him endless despair.

In an odd way, his protean domestic drama paralleled that of his quarry, Osama bin Laden. Perhaps, if O’Neill had lived in a culture that sanctioned multiple marriages, he would have created such a harem. But he was furtive by nature, thriving on dangerous secrets and innovative lies. His job, of course, gave him the perfect cover, since he could always disappear for days on some “classified” mission.

There was a side of him that sought the solace of a committed relationship, which he seemed closest to achieving with Valerie James. When O’Neill moved to New York, Val joined him. They got an apartment in Stuyvesant Town. He was so fond of her two grown children that friends mistook them for his, and when her first grandchild came along, and needed babysitting, O’Neill stayed home with the baby so Val could go to work. They settled into a routine. On Tuesday mornings, they left their clothes at the Laundromat and went for a run. Every Saturday morning, O’Neill would treat himself to a haircut and a hot shave. On Sundays, he and Val experimented with churches and sometimes explored the city on bicycles. Often when he came in late at night, smashed after entertaining cops from Venezuela or Uzbekistan, he would crawl into bed with a glass of milk and a plate of chocolate-chip cookies. He loved handing out candy on Halloween.

But there was a restlessness in him that seemed frightened of simple arrangements. When Anna DiBattista got a job offer in New York in 1999 that threatened to complicate his life beyond reason, O’Neill actually pleaded for her to come. “We can get married!” he said. But when she arrived, he told her she couldn’t move in with him right away. He said there were “linguists” staying in his apartment.

With each woman, he lived a different life. He managed to keep his social circles separate, so one group of friends knew him with Val, another with Anna, another with Mary Lynn. He took them to different restaurants and even to different countries on vacation. “Jazz was his thing,” said Val. With Anna, he listened to Andrea Bocelli. “Our song was ‘Time to Say Goodbye,’” she recalled. Mary Lynn introduced him to grand opera. “He flew all the way from California when I invited him to Mephisto.” His politics were also flexible, tending to conform to the views of his companion at the time, a moderate Democrat with one, a moderate Republican with another.

On holidays, he went home to New Jersey to visit his parents and to see his wife and children. Although he had been separated from Christine for many years, he never got a divorce. He explained to his friends who knew about his family that it was a “Catholic thing.” He continued to support them, and he spoke to his children frequently on the phone. But Atlantic City was part of his life that he shared with very few. Because the women in his life sensed that they could never trust him, they couldn’t give him the unqualified love and devotion that he sought. He remained isolated by his compulsive deceptions.

Inevitably, the complexity took a toll. He left his Palm Pilot in Yankee Stadium; it was filled with police contacts from all over the world. Fortunately, the Yankees security force found it. Then he left his cell phone in a cab. In the summer of 1999, he and Valerie were driving to the Jersey shore when his Buick broke down near the Meadowlands. His bureau car happened to be parked nearby at a secret off-site location, so O’Neill switched cars, although the bureau bans the use of an official vehicle for personal reasons. Still, O’Neill’s infraction might have been overlooked had he not let Valerie enter the building to use the toilet. She had no idea what the place was. When the FBI learned about the violation, apparently from a spiteful agent who had been caught using the site as an auto-repair shop, O’Neill was reprimanded and docked fifteen days’ pay.

That was a penalty O’Neill could scarcely afford. He had always been a showy host, grabbing every tab, even going so far as to tear another agent’s money in half when he offered to split the bill. These gestures mounted up. An agent who did his taxes noted O’Neill’s credit-card debt and observed, “Gee, John, you’d be a candidate for recruitment.” O’Neill was also paying the mortgage on his wife’s house and dipping into his retirement funds and borrowing money from wealthy friends, who held promissory notes that he had to disclose. Anyone with that much liability would normally come under scrutiny as a security risk.

He was insecure, deceptive, and potentially compromised. He was also driven, resourceful, and brilliant. For better or worse, this was the man America now depended on to stop Osama bin Laden.

IRAQ WAS AN UNLIKELY ALLY in al-Qaeda’s war on the West, but there had been a series of contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda since the end of the first Gulf War. Saddam Hussein sought allies to salvage his shattered regime, and the radical Islamists at least shared his longing for revenge. In 1992 Hasan al-Turabi arranged a meeting between the Iraqi intelligence service and al-Qaeda with the goal of creating a “common strategy” for deposing pro-Western Arab governments. The Iraqi delegation met with bin Laden and flattered him, claiming that he was the prophesied Mahdi, the savior of Islam. They wanted him to stop backing anti-Saddam insurgents. Bin Laden agreed, but in return he asked for weapons and training camps inside Iraq. That same year, Zawahiri traveled to Baghdad, where he met the Iraqi dictator in person. But there is no evidence that Iraq ever supplied al-Qaeda with weapons or camps, and soon bin Laden resumed his support of Iraqi dissidents.

Talks continued intermittently, however. When bin Laden issued his fatwa against America in 1998, Iraqi intelligence officials flew to Afghanistan to discuss with Zawahiri the possibility of relocating al-Qaeda to Iraq. Bin Laden’s relations with the Taliban were strained at the time, and several senior members of al-Qaeda were in favor of seeking a new haven. Bin Laden opposed this notion, since he didn’t want to be indebted to the Iraqi tyrant.

In September 1999, Zawahiri went to Baghdad again with a false passport to attend the Ninth Islamic People’s Congress, an international consortium of clerics and activists under the sponsorship of the Iraqi government. Coincidentally, a Jordanian jihadi named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi arrived in Baghdad at about the same time. Zarqawi was not a member of al-Qaeda, but he ran a training camp in Herat, Afghanistan. He saw himself as a competitor to bin Laden, but he had close ties to al-Jihad. Iraqi intelligence may have assisted Zawahiri and Zarqawi in setting up a terror organization of Kurdish fundamentalists called Ansar al-Islam, which was inspired by Iran’s sponsorship of Hezbollah.* (Zarqawi would later become the leader of the al-Qaeda insurgency against the American forces following the invasion of Iraq in 2003.)

O’NEILL WAS PARTICULARLY CONCERNED THAT, as the millennium approached, al-Qaeda would seize the moment to dramatize its war with America. He was certain that Islamic terrorists had established a beachhead in America. This view was very much different from the one that the leadership of the bureau endorsed. Director Freeh repeatedly stressed in White House meetings that al-Qaeda posed no domestic threat. Bin Laden did not even make the FBI’s Most Wanted list until June 1999.

O’Neill had come to feel that there was a pace to the al-Qaeda attacks, and he told friends, “We’re due.” That feeling was very much on him in the second half of 1999. He knew how much timing and symbols meant to bin Laden, and the millennium presented an unparalleled opportunity for theatrical effect. O’Neill thought the target would be some essential piece of the infrastructure: the drinking water, the electrical grid, perhaps the transportation system. The intelligence to support that hypothesis was frustratingly absent, however.

In December, Jordanian authorities arrested sixteen suspected terrorists believed to be planning to blow up a Radisson Hotel in Amman and a number of tourist sites frequented by Westerners. One of the plotters was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, although he was not captured. The Jordanians also discovered a six-volume al-Qaeda training manual on CD-ROM. The Jordanian cell included several Arab Americans.

The CIA warned of multiple attacks inside the United States but provided few details. With the FAA, the Border Patrol, the National Guard, the Secret Service, and every sheriff’s office and police department in the country on high alert, there was still no actual sign of any forthcoming attack. The fears of a terrorist strike were wrapped up in the general Y2K hysteria—the widespread concern about the possible failure of most computers to accommodate the millennial change in the calendar, leading to a collapse of the technological world.

Then on December 14, a border guard in Port Angeles, Washington, stopped an Algerian man, Ahmed Ressam, whose obvious anxiety aroused her suspicion. She asked him to step out of the car. Another guard opened his trunk and said, “Hey, we’ve got something here.” A customs officer grabbed the back of Ressam’s coat and guided him to the trunk of the car. Inside were four timers, more than a hundred pounds of urea, and fourteen pounds of sulfate—the makings of an Oklahoma City–type bomb.

Ressam bolted, leaving his coat in the hands of the customs officer. The guards gave chase and caught him four blocks away trying to break into a car stopped at a traffic light.

It developed that Ressam’s target was Los Angeles International Airport. For all the precautions that had been taken, if that one border guard had not been sufficiently curious about Ressam’s nervousness, the millennium might have gotten started with a major catastrophe. But luck chose a different venue.

Ressam was not really an al-Qaeda operative, although he had learned to build bombs in one of bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan. He was a freelance terrorist sailing under al-Qaeda colors, the sort that would proliferate after 9/11. A thief with little religious training, he could be called a harbinger. Trained and empowered by al-Qaeda, he formed his own ad hoc cell in Montreal. He had called Afghanistan before the attack to inquire if bin Laden would like to take credit for the act, but he never heard back.

John O’Neill was certain that Ressam had confederates in the United States. Who were they? Where were they? He felt that there was a ticking clock, counting down to New Year’s, when an al-Qaeda attack would be most noticeable.

In Ressam’s pocket litter, Washington State authorities found a slip of paper with a name, Ghani, on it, as well as several telephone numbers. One of them had a 318 area code, but when Jack Cloonan called it, a child in Monroe, Louisiana, answered. Cloonan looked again at the number. Perhaps it could be a 718 area code instead, he decided. When he checked, he found that the number belonged to Abdul Ghani Meskini, an Algerian who lived in Brooklyn.

O’Neill oversaw the stakeout of Meskini’s residence from the FBI’s Brooklyn command post. A wiretap picked up a call that Meskini made to Algeria in which he spoke about Ressam and another suspected terrorist in Montreal. On December 30, O’Neill arrested Meskini on conspiracy charges and a number of other suspected terrorists on immigration violations. Eventually, both Meskini and Ressam would become cooperating witnesses for the government.

On that frigid New Year’s Eve, O’Neill stood with two million people in Times Square. At midnight he spoke to Clarke in the White House to let him know he was standing under the giant ball while the bells tolled the new millennium. “If they’re gonna do anything in New York, they’re gonna do it here,” he told Clarke. “So I’m here.”

AFTER THE MILLENNIUM ROUNDUP, O’Neill concluded that al-Qaeda had sleeper cells buried in America. The links between the Canadian and the Jordanian cells all led back to the United States; and yet, even after the attacks on the American embassies and the attempt to bomb the Los Angeles airport, the bureau hierarchy continued to view al-Qaeda as a distant and manageable threat. Dale Watson, the assistant director of the Counterterrorism Division, was an exception. O’Neill and Watson met with Dick Clarke over the next few months to create a strategic plan called the Millennium After-Action Review, which specified a number of policy changes designed to root out al-Qaeda cells. They included increasing the number of Joint Terrorism Task Force groups around the country, assigning more agents from the Internal Revenue Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service to monitor the flow of money and personnel, and creating a streamlined process for analyzing information obtained from wiretaps. But such changes were not sufficient to overcome the bureaucratic lassitude that fell upon Washington after the millennium passed.

THE NIGHT OF POWER, near the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, commemorates the date that the Prophet Mohammed began to receive the word of God in a cave on Mount Hira. On that auspicious date, January 3, in 2000, five men broke their fast in Aden, Yemen, then walked down to the shore. They saw the oddest thing: a fiberglass fishing skiff swamped in the surf. Their eyes fell on the new 225-horsepower Yamaha outboard motor. The men talked about this apparition and decided that it was a gift from heaven. Since they were in a state of ritual purity, they believed they were being rewarded for their devotion, and so they proceeded to strip the boat of whatever they could find, beginning with the six-hundred-pound motor, which was worth more than $10,000. When they disconnected the massive motor it plunged into the salt water. They had to roll it to shore, and by then it was ruined.

Then one of the men opened the hatch. It was stacked with strange bricks. He thought they must be hashish, but there were wires running between them and a battery. The man pulled one of the bricks loose and smelled it. It had a strange oily odor, not at all like hashish. The men decided that the bricks must be valuable, whatever they were, so they formed a line from the boat to the shore and began tossing the bricks to each other.

Suddenly, a couple of al-Qaeda operatives in a small SUV drove up and demanded to know what the men were doing with their boat. When the operatives saw the Yemeni men throwing the bricks they backed away in alarm.

Later, American investigators would learn that the fiberglass skiff was to have been used in a suicide attack on an American destroyer, USS The Sullivans, that was refueling in Aden harbor. The al-Qaeda operatives who had overloaded the boat with C-4 explosives had removed the flotation devices from the craft, which caused it to sink in the soft sand as soon as it slid off the trailer. They eventually were able to retrieve the boat using a marine crane, and soon it would be ready for another operation.

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