Front Burner (38 page)

This small space with a couple of computers, desks, and a copier would provide them with at least some degree of privacy for interviews. While it was an awkward arrangement, since the crew often needed to access the space for technical information, drawings, and equipment manuals, it worked for their purposes. This space also served as a central location for
them to collect the reams of data that would be incorporated into the body of the investigation.

As the investigation started, one of the first questions they addressed was how
Cole
came to be in Aden in the first place. A Navy oiler, USS
Arctic
, made the first port visit to Aden in 1997 following the 1990 Yemen Proclamation that, after years of war, initially unified North and South Yemen into one country. That was subsequently followed by port visits, not brief stops for fuel, by two Navy ships in April and May 1998. The Navy and Department of Defense, in consultation with the Department of State, assessed that the security situation and evolving political and military ties warranted greater involvement with Yemen. Consequently the Navy, in coordination with the Defense Energy Support Center, negotiated a fueling contract for the port of Aden. The contract ran for a five-year period from June 9, 1999, to June 8, 2004. By the time the contract was signed, six ships had already pulled into Aden to refuel. Over the next fifteen months prior to
Cole
pulling into Aden, twenty more ships pulled into Aden for brief stops for fuel.
Cole
was the twenty-seventh ship to pull into Aden for a brief stop for fuel.

After the attack on
Cole
, national security officials in Washington expressed bafflement that the Navy had ever allowed ships to enter the port. Ali Soufan, the Arabic-speaking special agent who had been in the FBI team on the ship, later wrote, “Yemen was well known in the intelligence community to be full of radical Islamists, including al-Qaeda members.” He said that the NCIS's Multiple Threat Attack Center had even described security in Aden as “tenuous,” and that though the government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh had turned a blind eye to radical Islamic activities, the Clinton administration, wanting its cooperation, decided to trust Yemen with hosting U.S. ships. None of this, of course, was known to me or anyone else aboard
Cole
as we sailed unsuspectingly down the Red Sea.
²

Before pulling into port,
Cole
had submitted the mandatory force protection plan with sixty-two measures required for Threat Conditions (THREATCON) Alpha and Bravo (Appendix). We also reviewed messages that contained lessons learned about the port from other ships that
had pulled into Aden to refuel. None of them commented on either the threat conditions or force protection measures implemented during their time in port.

It was not until October 11 that
Cole
received approval of the force protection plan by Commander, Task Force 50, with no deviations authorized, and early on October 12, we received the message from the U.S. embassy granting us diplomatic clearance to enter Aden. The message was addressed only to
Cole
and did not contain any updates to either intelligence for the port or a change to the expected threat environment.

At 0546, according to the timeline that would be established in the investigation report,
Cole
stationed the sea and anchor detail watch team to enter port. At about 0740 we arrived at the first navigation buoy outside the port to pick up the harbor pilot who guided us into the inner harbor and pier. By 0851 the ship was twisted around with the starboard side next to the pier with mooring lines being worked by the deck crew to securely moor us in place. The ship was finally ready to start the in-port refueling checklist by 0940 when we secured the Sea and Anchor detail. The in-port watch team, consisting of an officer of the deck, petty officer of the watch, and messenger, was shifted from the bridge to the amidships quarterdeck area between the stacks and on the starboard side where they could better communicate with the Yemeni fuel workers and coordinate the activities of the husbanding agent. The engineers commenced refueling the ship at 1031.

Although the ship's deck log had entered a time of 1115 for the explosion, that entry was written in during the post-blast period, after the quarterdeck watch standers had been injured by the force of the explosion and evacuated to local hospitals for treatment. The blast was recorded in the engineering log at 1118, and the investigation report ultimately determined that time to be the most accurate estimate, given that the engineering officer of the watch, who was uninjured by the explosion, was maintaining the log in the central control station.

For two and a half weeks, Captain Holland and a growing team of Navy lawyers interviewed crew members, gathered up the ship's deck log,
engineering log, and messages exchanged between
Cole
and Fifth Fleet, CTF 50, and others, as well as key shipboard documentation on qualifications and training. When it was all analyzed and put together, the team hoped to build a picture of our force protection mindset and posture prior to the attack. Most of the officers, as well as key members of the crew, were brought in for interviews or asked to provide statements for the record. Almost immediately, however, the command investigation team ran into a legal issue that put them in conflict with the criminal investigation headed by the FBI.

Initially, crew members were read their legal rights and signed an acknowledgment form under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), article 31(b), prior to being questioned by the command investigators. The problem that arose was that once a person has heard UCMJ legal rights read to them as part of any legal proceeding, if another agency needed to interview the individual, each crew member had to be given a “cleansing” statement about their rights, as well as be afforded the right to have an attorney present during any further questioning. While the crew was blissfully unaware of this issue, in the eyes of the FBI and NCIS investigators, it could severely complicate their criminal investigation of the terrorists.

Almost immediately, the lead FBI and NCIS investigators, after consultation with John O'Neill, approached me about this issue. They specifically sought to assure me that neither organization had any intention of pursuing criminal charges against the crew for what had happened. While that was good to hear, everyone remained somewhat guarded since no one knew exactly what the Navy's investigation might try to do regarding my actions and those of key crew members responsible for force protection. But the matter appeared to be quickly resolved when Captain Holland and his legal advisors chose to take unsworn statements from the crew without reading them their UCMJ legal rights. Complications from this decision would arise later, however.

At the end of the two and half weeks in port, the command investigation team left the ship and returned to Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain to finish the investigation and reach their conclusions. At the same time,
however, another investigative team arrived with a mandate from the secretary of defense. A week after the attack, on October 19, Secretary of Defense William Cohen had assigned retired Army General William W. Crouch and retired Navy Admiral Harold W. Gehman, Jr. as co-chairs to head up a commission to carry out an investigation from the perspective of the Department of Defense into the circumstances surrounding the attack on the USS
Cole
.

The
Cole
Commission was specifically tasked with taking a larger perspective view to determine the circumstances surrounding the attack on
Cole
and what the implications were about the possible vulnerability of any military unit in transit around the world. General Crouch and Admiral Gehman visited the ship while pierside in Aden and were taken on the standard tour of the ship that other visitors had received. There were also shown the areas where the crew had been recovered from the wreckage of the mess line, galley, and main engine room 1.

When speaking privately with me, they both reiterated their desire to know the mindset and procedures the crew followed as we entered port. This was a national-level report that would drive a number of force protection changes throughout the Department of Defense and had ramifications far beyond the attack on us. Without a clear understanding of what processes were followed by not only the ship and crew but also those within the chain of command, as well as other government agencies and departments, General Crouch and Admiral Gehman would not be able to adequately determine just how vulnerable U.S. military units were during transit periods like our move from the Mediterranean to the Arabian Gulf. Following a short few hours on the ship speaking with Chris, Joe Gagliano, and me about force protection issues and the status of the ship and crew, the
Cole
Commission team left the ship to continue their investigation.

Back at Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, the command investigation team spent long days organizing and collating all the information and interviews gleaned from the crew. Poring over the material, they confirmed that once
Cole
moored to the refueling pier, we had waived a number of
the sixty-two force protection measures we had agreed to follow because of the physical surroundings of the ship.

Since the pier was located in the middle of the harbor and not pierside, there were no fewer than nineteen measures that did not apply to our circumstances (see Appendix, THREATCONs Alpha and Bravo: 6, 8, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 22, 24, 27, 30, 31, 32, 33, 45, 56, 57, 60). These force protection measures included actions that pertained to vehicular access, vehicle barriers, liberty boats, conducting searches under the pier, and placing armed sentries on the pier (as there would be no liberty calls ashore, and we were moored at a refueling station in the middle of the harbor, no brow or gangplank was put down to the pier), and so on. In statements submitted to the command investigation team, all the officers involved in force protection said that we had completed all remaining measures—our assessment was that we had taken all the precautions that were applicable, in light of what (little) we had been told to expect.

One issue that directly impacted the investigation was the damage sustained by the electronic data system the ship used to store information about personnel qualifications, which by Navy-wide mandate had replaced the old-fashioned paper filing system for crew members' service records that had to be submitted to the Bureau of Personnel in Washington. The shipboard electronic system thus was the only official record of their training and watch qualifications. Located on the refrigerator decks, however, it was now mostly underwater. The magnetic drives were damaged and deemed unsalvageable, and there was no backup or off-ship storage of the training and watch qualification material. Consequently, the command investigation team felt they had no choice but to determine that all qualifications were not officially verified. All the hard work we had done before leaving Norfolk to get the crew qualified to stand all watch stations while entering or leaving port was thus ignored in the command investigation report.

The team also conducted interviews with personnel other than those assigned to
Cole
. These included the commanding officers of
Hawes
and
Donald Cook
, as well as staff members, force protection officers, and intelligence
officers assigned to Fifth Fleet, and the
George Washington
and
Abraham Lincoln
battle group staffs. These interviews tended to focus on instances when force protection requirements in a plan that had been approved by higher authority could be waived or not completed. In almost every case, staff officers expected a ship to follow the submitted plan no matter what. From the staff's perspective, at no point would a waiver be considered even if it were clear that the ship could not complete or would be unable to complete measures it had listed because of physical arrangements or conditions that staff members, unlike ship's officers, were aware of in the particular port.

The command investigation team also conducted an extensive interview with Lieutenant Colonel Bob Newman, the defense attaché in Sana'a. He stated that, “during at least one BSF (brief stop for fuel) prior to my arrival (during a period when Fifth Fleet was in THREATCON CHARLIE) [a higher threat level than when
Cole
stopped in Aden for fuel], a USN ship put a small boat (RHIB) in the water for security reasons, ... and the Yemeni Navy objected to this as a sovereignty issue, even though we believed we had not had any previous problems with this.”
³
He further stated that he had addressed this issue with the Yemeni minister of defense and Southern Area commander and considered this issue resolved; however, he was unaware if this information was passed on to Navy ships that pulled into port. The command investigation report determined that it had not been. It also observed that no Yemeni assistance had been offered in ensuring the safety and security of
Cole
while the ship was in Aden.

After weeks of reviewing all the information they had collected, resolving conflicting statements from crew, staff, and other personnel, and piecing together the timeline of events and actions of the officers and crew, Captain Holland submitted his report on November 27, 2000, to Admiral Moore.

Throughout the course of the investigation, I had not had any access to it, nor to the endorsements by senior officers in the chain of command and their conclusions as they made them. I did not learn about any of it until the report and the endorsements were publicly released in early 2001.
When I finally got the report, I saw that Captain Holland, given the narrow scope of his mandate, had clearly sought to place blame for the entire incident squarely on my shoulders, and to varying degrees accused my officers and crew of being derelict in the performance of our duties. It was unfortunately shortsighted, failing to put the attack into the larger context of the then-unacknowledged war being waged by al Qaeda against the United States. But the report was merely the first step in the investigative process, and the chain of command had yet to weigh in with opinions and conclusions that would address and counter the report's assertions of substandard performance.