The two sailors aboard a 20-foot fiberglass vessel puttering nearby, however, probably had very specific plans to die. To them, the Cole was a despicable symbol of American power and prestige. According to the assessment of U.S. intelligence analysts, the men or their sponsors probably knew the Cole’s layout and capabilities, information that is available on the Internet. They surely knew that it was outfitted with some of the most sophisticated weapons and sensors in the U.S. arsenal. At the press of a few buttons, the Cole’s officers can launch a variety of missiles to hit aircraft, surface vessels, submarines and land targets. What it lacks is an effective countermeasure for two seemingly friendly seamen aboard what appeared to be a harbor tender.
At about 9:45 a.m., according to fleet officers, as the smaller boat glided along the destroyer’s port side, the two men apparently detonated an enormous load of explosives. “At first, some people [onshore] thought it was an earthquake,” says Hisham Bashraheel, an editor at the Al-Ayyam newspaper in Aden. The explosion tore a 40-by-40-foot hole through the half-inch steel of the Cole’s outer hull, and burst through an engine room, the mess deck, chief’s mess and galley. The torrent of steel, water and flame killed 17 American sailors and wounded at least 33 others. It was the most lethal attack against the U.S. military since 1996, when a truck bomb killed 19 American servicemen near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.
The Aden attack instantly broadened the conflict in the Middle East to a new level of strike and counterstrike. Palestinian rioters, Lebanese guerrillas and Israeli soldiers were no longer the only combatants. Now international or Yemeni terrorists had drawn the United States directly into the violence. The urge to hit back was immediate. “We will find out who was responsible and hold them accountable,” President Bill Clinton warned last week, even as he was trying desperately to persuade Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to hold fire. The attack on the Cole raised questions about a U.S. intelligence failure, and further complicated Washington’s self-professed role as an honest broker in the Middle East at a time when American diplomacy in the region was already under assault. It also reminded Americans, in the most painful of ways, that global power comes at a price, and that conflicts of the future may look significantly different from those of the past.
The first impulse by Washington after the explosion was to contain the damage, both military and political. Commander Lippold, a well-liked officer who, back at the Naval Academy, made a habit of getting up early to run along a sea wall in combat boots, oversaw an extraordinary damage-control effort. But he had made the most important decision hours earlier, as the ship was entering harbor, when he ordered all below decks hatches “closed and dogged.” If he hadn’t done that, naval experts say, the blast likely would have sunk the Cole.
As the destroyer took on water and listed four degrees to port, emergency calls quickly dominoed along the chain of command. Within a short time, national-security adviser Sandy Berger woke up the president, who was celebrating his wedding anniversary at his home in Chappaqua, N.Y. Several hours later, Clinton was still seething but also wary of overreacting. How ironic, he remarked to aides, that Americans would now have to experience some of the same anger, frustration and powerlessness felt by those in the Mideast.
Aboard the Cole, after the sailors had contained the crisis, they had time to assess the damage. “It was absolutely horrifying,” said a senior U.S. official who boarded the vessel. “They’re very focused on saving the ship and getting that part of it done, but in their faces you can see they just lost 17 of their friends, and there’s an element of shell shock as well.”
Washington promised retaliation, but against whom? Terror groups increasingly recognize that little frustrates the proudly rational, scientific West more than a foe that cannot easily be measured, quantified and targeted. They often attempt to cover their tracks or muddle their identity. That said, scores of U.S. intelligence analysts last week were sifting and evaluating clues. They’ve long known that terror groups were targeting American naval vessels in the region. Over the last two years, U.S. intelligence has foiled at least two terrorist plots directed at U.S. Navy ships visiting ports in the area, authoritative U.S. sources told NEWSWEEK. “It’s been a cat-and-mouse game,” said one American official. In this round of mouse-chasing, FBI and CIA agents will need Yemen’s cooperation to find out how the perpetrators penetrated Aden port operations. In particular, agents will want to get a look at video from four surveillance cameras around the port area–tapes that were seized last week by Yemen’s secret police, according to a source familiar with activities at Aden’s port. They might also like to talk to some of the many port workers and relatives detained by Yemeni police last week.
Several terrorist outfits, including the Al Qaeda organization led by Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, have specifically vowed to strike at U.S. military targets in the Arabian Peninsula. Just two weeks ago a satellite TV station in the Emirate of Qatar broadcast a video in which bin Laden himself, flanked by two Egyptian lieutenants, made veiled threats against the United States. Looking thin, his formerly dark beard turning gray, bin Laden was shown meeting a group of Islamists and promising to “work with all our power to free” militants held prisoner in the United States, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. One of bin Laden’s lieutenants said it was “time to take action against this iniquitous and faithless force [the United States] which has spread troops through Egypt, Yemen and Saudi Arabia.” Some analysts, in the wake of the attack on the Cole, took special note of the reference to Yemen.
American officials have long been aware that Muslim extremists operate in Yemen. “It’s a bad, bad place,” says one former CIA agent who worked there. Bin Laden’s family has roots in Yemen, and his organization has ties to militants there. A shadowy homegrown outfit called the Aden-Abyan Islamic Army, which opposes the use of Yemeni ports by Western vessels, claimed responsibility for the attack last week. Such claims are often suspect: terrorists share resources and use different identities to suit their needs. In this case, American investigators believe locals could have executed the operation with outside help from someone like bin Laden. But among a long list of possible other culprits were Iraq, Yemeni Marxists and the Lebanese fundamentalist group Hizbullah. The nature of the attack suggests, in any case, that the bombers had very good intelligence and sophisticated logistics.
Why, under the circumstances, had a U.S. Navy ship stopped in Aden at all? Washington has been trying to improve ties with Yemen to draw it out of the orbit of radical Arab countries like Iraq. In April, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh visited Washington and met with President Clinton, as well as CIA Director George Tenet. When the CIA chief told Saleh that Washington had hard evidence that Yemen was a haven for terrorist networks, Saleh “said he was willing to cooperate, but didn’t believe that terrorists operated in his country,” according to sources privy to the meeting. Last week it was more of the same: Saleh offered cooperation while insisting that the explosion must have been an accident.
In the weeks ahead, policymakers will weigh the available evidence to determine whether it justifies a counterattack. The last time the United States engaged in high-profile retaliation –following the bombings of two American embassies in Africa in 1998–one of the targets for U.S. missiles was a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan. Administration officials later conceded that some of the information they had on the plant–that it was producing chemical-weapons materials at the time of the strike and the plant was financed by bin Laden–was incorrect. Retaliation this time may not be so impulsive as it was then, not least of all because the Middle East is already aflame with rage and revenge.
