Front Burner

by Kirk S. Lippold

  As we walked back to sit down on a couple of big bitts—two stubby vertical posts welded to the deck and used to secure the thick mooring lines tying the ship to the pier—I checked to make sure the phone’s battery was well charged as we continued to catch up on the events of the day and agree on arrangements for the expected Marine security platoon. About twenty minutes later, the phone rang.

  “USS Cole, Commanding Officer speaking, may I help you?” I asked. On the line was an officer from the White House situation room, calling to verify that he was, in fact, speaking with me. After being put on hold for a few minutes, another person came on the phone, again verifying that I was still there and the commanding officer of USS Cole. Chris and I were quietly chuckling at this point. Finally, minutes later, President Bill Clinton came on the line.

  “Commander Lippold?”

  “Yes sir, this is Commander Kirk Lippold, sir.”

  “How are you and your crew doing?”

  “Mr. President, the crew and I are doing OK. They have done a great job saving the ship and we’re working hard to get systems restored.”

  “On behalf of the American people, I want you to know that our prayers are with you. Each of us is thinking of you. We’re working very hard to get this situation back in the box in the Middle East to prevent people from doing things like this to you. Again, I want to thank you for the great job you’re doing and let you know that you and your crew are in our prayers. God bless!” said the President.

  “Mr. President, thank you,” was all I could say back to him. What he had told me may have conveyed his concern, but there was no offer of support or discussion of future action, let alone retaliation.

  At that point the phone was handed back to someone else in the White House, and I was told that was the end of the conversation and thanked for taking time from what I was doing to speak with the President.

  Looking at Chris, all I could do was take a deep breath and rub my temples. “Grab your pen and copy this down before I forget what he said,” I told him, then slowly recounted the words exactly as I remembered the President speaking them to me. “XO, I want to read this to the crew tomorrow morning at quarters,” I said. “It will be important for them to understand that this is becoming bigger than any of us can imagine.”

  Chris nodded in agreement, and we returned to my fender perch for the rest of the evening.

  The Marine security team arrived a little after 2230. You could almost hear the crew breathe a sigh of relief—the Marines had landed and were here to help us save the ship. Captain Wesley A. Philbeck, the platoon commander, strode up the brow, crisply saluted the national ensign and requested permission to come aboard the ship. A model image of a Marine, he stood well over six feet tall and cast an imposing figure in his camouflage uniform, flak vest, and helmet, with a weapon strapped across his chest. His self-confidence in his abilities was reflected in his demeanor. “Captain, my team is ready to assume responsibility for your ship’s security,” he announced.

  While not doubting their ability to do a great job, I calmly looked back at him and responded, “Captain, I don’t want any of your folks to take responsibility for any security stations until they each stand at least two watch rotations with our security teams. It is going to be critical for them to have clear situational awareness and an understanding of how we are operating in this port.” Cole’s security teams had become guardedly familiar with how the port operated. The teams also knew how internal communications worked with the bridge watch teams, as well as how and when small boats approached the ship and the pier area. To prevent any misinterpretation of their movements, I knew the Marines had to gain this valuable insight and experience.

  “Understand, sir,” he replied, and within minutes the Marines began to take up positions shoulder to shoulder with Cole’s security teams.

  The Marines’ arrival in Aden had not been an easy one. The Yemeni military and police forces at the airport felt threatened by Captain Philbeck and his team, who were bristling with weapons. Almost simultaneously another plane landed carrying the Foreign Emergency Support Team (FEST) that had been deployed from Washington. As the Marines disembarked off their aircraft, armed and ready for any confrontation, it was readily apparent the Yemenis felt inadequate and defensive of their capability, and compensated by brandishing weapons in a misguided attempt to appear helpful. They leveled their own weapons directly at the arriving Americans. Ever since the explosion, the Yemeni government had been denying the presence of terrorists in their country and repeatedly claimed that this incident was an accident connected with the refueling. Given this attitude, reinforced by their military superiors, the personnel at the airport could not understand why the arriving U.S. personnel needed weapons.

  In the middle of this standoff, a civilian passenger airline packed with German tourists landed and taxied up to the ramp area, passengers pressing their faces to the windows trying to figure out what was happening. The German tourists were taken off in buses to their hotel; the standoff at the airport continued.

  Neither American team had diplomatic clearance to enter the country. The Yemeni government’s weekend was Friday and Saturday—this was Friday night, so it had not yet been formally contacted. Finally Lieutenant Colonel Bob Newman, the defense attaché, was able to tell the Yemeni authorities at the airport that the government had given permission to let the Marines go to a staging area from which they could launch inflatable boats and get out to the Cole. The FBI agents and others on the emergency support team could proceed to their hotel—the same one where the German tourists, now perplexed even further, were staying.

  As part of the FEST, an FBI team came on the scene as well. The FBI special agent in charge of the civilian team was Don Sachtleben, an FBI veteran since 1983, with a specialty as a bomb technician. He had been involved in investigating the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania two years previously, and before that had been one of the crime scene team leaders at the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and the Oklahoma City federal building bombing in 1995. He had cleared the explosives-filled Montana cabin of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, after he had been identified and captured in 1996. Now, as a supervisory special agent in the Forensics and Explosives Laboratory at FBI headquarters, he was running the team that would gather evidence and try to determine who was responsible for the plot to attack USS Cole.

  By early morning Saturday, a small but growing advance team from NCIS had linked up with the FBI, and around 0930, Don Sachtleben led the small joint law enforcement contingent off the dock and chugged out to Cole on one of the Yemeni supply boats. Don had thought, seeing CNN’s reports on the attack before he left Washington, “This one can’t be that difficult; it’s a Navy ship. Probably just a puncture.” He had brought a video camera with him, and now, taking pictures of the ship, realized that this deployment would be no cakewalk. The scope of the damage, the dangling piping, the shredded and torn metal, was huge. Making a circle around the ship before docking at the refueling pier, the boat disembarked its passengers, and Don took charge as we started to walk around the ship.

  He did not want a repeat of the problems he had experienced at the Khobar Towers, the military housing development in Saudi Arabia where a suicide bomber killed nineteen U.S. servicemen in 1996. In the aftermath of the event, the Saudis had prevented the American evidence collection team from doing its job. In the case of Cole, the entire ship was essentially an evidence scene; fortunately, even though we were in Yemeni waters, naval ships are legally considered sovereign U.S. territory. Don gave his group a quick safety briefing and then asked me if he could film the damaged areas of the ship, emphasizing that he would not be filming the crew. With the XO and Petty Officer Crowe, we started the rounds directly above the epicenter of the blast. From the standpoint of national security, I was concerned about keeping elements hostile to the United States from getting a close enough look to have any understanding about the vulnerability of a U.S. Navy ship to this type of attack, wh
ich might enable them to think up ways of producing even more devastating damage in the future. To prevent them and the media from being able to see into the hole and the interior, I had a white tarp tied and lowered from the undamaged deck stanchions above the blast hole to cover the side of the ship from the deck edge to the waterline. Several crew members were rounded up to lift the tarp up and away from the hole, and with Petty Officer Crowe holding his belt, Don leaned over the side to film the blast area, indented metal, and explosive residue spray that covered the side of the ship. Continuing the inspection toward the forecastle, the group saw debris and pieces of all sizes and shapes from the suicide boat still scattered about the deck. Don asked if the ship was normally one color, or painted in different shades. No, it was uniformly gray on the outside; what he was seeing was the residue from the wave of soot and explosive residue that had washed over everything after the blast.

  He continued filming the evidence of damage—the radar dome of the forward 20 mm close-in weapons system, crushed and blown off by the concussion; antennas sheared or broken off other pieces of equipment; debris at every level.

  Don said he would propose bringing more investigators out to the ship and, with the help of the crew, sweeping the deck clean, noting where the pieces came from. He thought it would take about an hour. “OK, great!” I said, looking forward to getting the ship back under our complete control and jurisdiction. At this point, Chris and Crowe spoke up and told him about the crew finding shards of bone and flesh on the forecastle and other areas of the ship. Knowing these were key pieces of evidence, they specifically showed the agents where a tooth had been imbedded into one of the mooring lines that tied us to the pier. Crowe also told them about the evidence he had collected and how he had maintained a strict chain of custody with it under guard.

  We saw in the starboard passageway outside the combat information center how much progress the crew had managed to make in restoring the overhead lighting and even the 1MC announcing system in this part of the ship. Closer to the center of the damage, we warned the team to be careful about where they stepped and what they grabbed onto. The chiefs’ mess and the port side passageway were untouched and provided Don with his first real view of the damage done to the interior of the ship. Again crossing up by the forward repair locker and down the starboard side, we made our way back to the mess decks and then through the small passageway that led up to what was left of the mess line.

  The full scope of the damage was beginning to come into view. Surveying it for the first time, Don told me later, he thought to himself, “This is going to change everything.” He gingerly stepped out to the edge of the blast hole to the same spot I had reached immediately after the attack. As he panned the camera, he asked about where the missing sailors might be. I pointed out that there were up to three bodies trapped further down the passageway where we were standing, and the rest were located in the folds of metal of the galley area and down in what remained of main engine room 1 and the general workshop.

  Up to this point, Don figured he and his team would recover parts of a bomb—the wires, batteries and switches, explosive residue, and so on—and be out of there in fairly short order. Looking around now, he knew that was not going to happen. The FBI/NCIS team would have to deal with the recovery of twelve bodies trapped in the wreckage, above and below the waterline. As far as evidence was concerned, parts of the suicide bombers’ bodies had been found outside, with more pieces probably located on the interior of the ship. Coordination between the various support groups would have to be worked out to avoid duplication of effort and confusion. The ship would not truly belong to the crew for much longer than anyone could imagine.

  As we walked back into the hot sunlight, Don told the group that now that they had an idea of what they were dealing with, they needed to get back to the hotel and brief the rest of the team, as well as the follow-on group that would soon land in Aden. As the group filed off the ship, Don told us to expect another visit that afternoon if we could support them. Of course we could: the work of the criminal investigation took priority over almost everything else.

  Two key new members of the next group included Bob Sibert, now the most senior on-scene FBI agent, and Steve Kruger, an FBI chemist. Arriving back at the hotel, Don quickly briefed them and with three to four hours of daylight left, they were soon back on the ship to see what they were dealing with. Sibert then made it clear to everyone that the ship was an explosion crime scene and the explosives experts would have primacy in directing the gathering of evidence. FBI and NCIS would gather and maintain evidence. At the back of the ship, under the flight deck, the ship’s classroom and career counselor’s office were emptied of non-essential gear and equipment to serve as the law-enforcement coordination center on board the ship. The career counselor’s office could be locked and secured, which made it an ideal location to process and store evidence gathered during the course of the investigation.

  All evidence gathered on the ship had to stay strictly within U.S. custody. Don also knew he would have to work closely with the Department of State personnel to ensure that FBI members were an integrated part of the Yemeni teams that were expected to gather evidence of the criminal activities of the terrorists who had planned, financed, and carried out the attack from in town, but as much as possible he hoped to minimize the amount of evidence handled by them so as to be able to build the strongest possible case.

  Navy divers from Detachment Alpha, Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit Two (MDSU-2) also arrived on Saturday, with repair equipment from the Mediterranean to help assess the damage to the ship. They joined the long list of Americans who had to endure the not-so-helpful hospitality of the Yemenis. Like the FEST, they wasted hours standing with the hot sun burning down on the tarmac, explaining in mind-numbing detail why all the equipment they had brought with them required clearance through customs to be allowed into the country. Eventually, all their equipment was unpacked, physically examined and “x-rayed” by Yemeni customs authorities, and cleared into the country without any further harassment.

  Concerned about the security of their equipment, they decided that the only area to stage the Detachment Alpha dive equipment before it could be sent out to the ship was near the security area established by the Marine FAST Platoon, who controlled access to the boats supporting Cole. Soon they arranged to load the dive gear onto trucks and have it driven out there. Detachment Alpha’s officer in charge, Chief Warrant Officer Frank Perna, along with his divers, shortly loaded themselves onto small hot buses, interspersed with armed Yemeni military personnel, and drove to the staging area.

  Before they left, however, they were strictly warned to maintain as low a profile as possible—do not lean out of the bus windows, do not take any pictures, avoid eye contact, and be quiet but courteous at the check points. The staging area was in a very good location from a force protection standpoint, but it was a long thirty-minute drive from the airport through three Yemeni checkpoints and a U.S. checkpoint to get there.

  Once at the FAST Platoon security site, the divers unloaded their gear and set it up for movement out to Cole. Warrant Officer Perna knew he had to get out to the ship as soon as possible and make that initial assessment on where they could set up dive stations and what the best methods were to access the flooded compartments and dive underneath the ship. It was Saturday night before he and two other senior members of his team, Engineman Senior Chief Lyle Becker and Boatswain’s Mate Chief David Hunter, were able to make their first visit out to us.

  A third support plane would arrive Sunday morning, carrying one of the FBI’s most experienced counter-terrorism experts, Supervisory Special Agent John O’Neill, who had been one of the leaders into the investigation of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which led to the capture of the al Qaeda terrorist Ramzi Yousef and his subsequent conviction and imprisonment for that crime. (O’Neill later became head of security for the World Trade Center and died heroically there on September 11, 2001.) With his experience
as a supervisory agent in the FBI’s New York Field Office, he would now take charge of the investigation.

  A couple of hours before Don came out to the ship with his team Saturday morning, shortly after quarters, the commanding officers from USS Hawes and USS Donald Cook arrived to get their first-hand look at the ship. Hawes was an Oliver Hazard Perry–class guided-missile frigate, and Donald Cook was identical to Cole, an Arleigh Burke–class Aegis guided-missile destroyer.

  First to arrive was Hawes, Commander Jeffrey S. “Scott” Jones. Subdued but still upbeat, Scott had brought a thermos of coffee to share with me. Although the coffee pot in the ship’s central control station still worked and I had already gone through several cups, I gladly accepted his kind offer and kept up the intake of caffeine. A few minutes later, Donald Cook, in the person of Commander Matthew E. Sharpe, arrived as well.

  Both Scott and Matt were armed and dressed in flak vests and Kevlar helmets. After being dropped off, they both ordered the boats that had brought them to slowly circle off the stern of the ship and provide security to supplement the Yemeni navy boats that were “patrolling” the harbor area. Each of them had also brought in their own shipboard experts to offer any additional expertise and assistance Cole’s teams might need.

  Prior to arriving, Scott and Matt had discussed what each ship would be best at providing us and had agreed to a division of duties to avoid duplication of effort. Hawes would focus on general damage control and crew amenities, like food and laundry. Donald Cook, being similar to Cole, would focus on engineering and platform-specific damage control equipment.

  It had been with Matt Sharpe that I had quietly exchanged e-mails about the port of Aden before we arrived. He had given me many of the pieces of information describing the port and its facilities that I could otherwise only have learned about upon arrival. Donald Cook had been in the port in August to conduct the same type of short-duration refueling stop as Cole. Like me, Matt had run into the same issues with the pilot being reluctant to turn the ship around and moor starboard side to the pier. He had also experienced the same lack of communication from the U.S. embassy and Fifth Fleet staff.