Front Burner

by Kirk S. Lippold

  “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:(1) Increase the emphasis on force protection measures and incorporate them into the training cycle prior to every deployment. Key areas included: specific delineation of responsibilities, clarification of host-nation responsibilities, better coordination with local NCIS threat assessments, and a better process for recommending and reporting force protection measure deviations.

  (2) Fleet Commanders must conduct force protection briefings for ships in their area of responsibility before they arrive, thereby encouraging the proper mindset is established for the applicable threats.

  (3) The Force Protection Officer should be designated as a primary billet on ships, not a collateral duty, as it was on Cole. In other words, it should not be a part-time job, and specific training and experience standards should be set for the designation.

  (4) The Navy must initiate dialogue with the Department of Defense, the Department of State and other federal agencies in developing plans for port security of U.S. ships in foreign countries, and ensure the necessary authority is granted to carry out all necessary force protection measures.

  (5) There should be closer coordination between individual U.S. defense attachés and ships pulling into their country of responsibility.

  (6) Uniform force protections should apply throughout the Navy and other services.

  (7) There should be daily backup and preservation of shipboard electronic databases containing watch qualifications.

  (8) The Navy should encourage the Department of Defense to develop a system by which threat analysis information is “pushed” to individual units, rather than putting the burden on the unit to “pull” information from individual sources.

  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, an
d 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.

  In September of 2000, bin Laden was reportedly so unhappy with the terrorist cell’s lack of success that he wanted to replace Al-Khamri and Thawar. Al-Nashiri, in response, ordered them to execute an attack on the next U.S. warship to enter the port of Aden—that would be Cole—and left Yemen to try to talk bin Laden out of making any changes.9

  By the time Cole arrived on October 12, the terrorist attack boat sported a fresh coat of white paint, with red and black speckled carpet laid in the interior that gave it a clean look. Over months of careful and methodical work, Al-Nashiri had precisely placed blocks of explosives into the hull. As each was placed inside, fiberglass sheets and coats of sealant held it securely in place. The explosives used were blocks of C-4 and Semtex, containing cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine, or RDX, interleaved with blocks of TNT, or trinitrotoluene. TNT is not readily moldable, and as the explosives were built into the boat and slowly filled, it was probably used to line those areas where there were minimal curves and bends along the hull. Batteries built into the boat as part of the bomb provided the charge for the electric blasting caps the attackers used, apparently at least two for each block of RDX-based explosive. It can never be known with certainty how much was used, but the terrorists apparently believed there was enough to sink a ship at the refueling pier.

  The suicide bombers themselves—Al-Khamri and Al-Thawar—initiated the detonation, exactly according to the plan. Allah was surely going to bless them when they triggered the switch that morning, which explained why they were smiling and waving at the infidels they thought they were dispatching to hell. No one knows whether the trigger was built into the console or activated by a foot switch, but it did not matter. The ignition circuit closed and their destiny was sealed. A surge of current from the battery raced along the lines to the electric blasting caps. The caps’ bridge wires heated white hot and burst into searing flame, igniting the RDX-based explosive that initiated the explosive conversion of the TNT surrounding it as numerous strands of detonation cord extended the blast. In about one ten-thousandth of a second, the chemical chain reaction was initiated and the massive shock wave, travelling at over 25,000 feet per second, began to do its work.

  Ultimately, prisoner interrogations and other evidence showed that bin Laden had not only ordered the attack, but also paid for it himself. None of this, none of this at all, was known. Not to me as commanding officer, nor to Admiral Moore as Commander, Fifth Fleet, nor to anyone in Washington when Cole pulled up to the refueling pier on October 12.

  The admiral did not know that the Central Intelligence Agency had absolutely no assets in Aden to monitor and assess the terrorist threat there. In reality, without relying on local Yemeni authorities to provide NCIS with information, the United States was essentially blind in its ability to accurately evaluate threats in the port. As the FBI investigator Ali Soufan put it much later in his book, Cole was “a sitting duck.”10 The blind leading the blind had led directly to the tragedy that disabled my ship.

  In closing out his review of the actions of the leadership on Cole, Admiral Moore took a broader view of the events of October 12, 2000, and put them in context. He felt the combination of actions by USS Cole, fleet logistic and contingency requirements, the declining number of replenishment ships, intelligence assessments, Task Force oversight, U.S. policy and relations with the government of Yemen, Navy and Joint Force Protection Measures, and the training cycle prior to deployment had all contributed to putting USS Cole and its crew in a situation where a successful attack could be ruthlessly carried out by a well-trained and determined adversary.11

  Admiral Moore concurred with each of the recommendations set forth in the investigative report. Just as damage control is integrated into every facet of a sailor’s training, he said, force protection must now assume that same priority. But regardless of what measures were taken to improve force protection measures throughout the Navy, he observed, a ship and its crew must not bear the onus of finding out what the threat was in a theater of operations. That burden should be borne by the upper echelons of the chain of command, which should assume greater responsibility for the coordination and integration of intelligence reports to support commanding officers in making force protection decisions. He also called for closer coordination and a broader intergovernmental effort to provide ships with relevant information about ports. Admiral Moore said he and his staff did not believe an attack in Yemen was any more likely than it would be anywhere else in the region. “The simple fact is that terrorists operate out of most Middle East countries,” he wrote.

  The United States had been drawn into an undeclared war with al Qaeda, Admiral Moore observed. The attack on USS Cole was not a purely criminal deed; it was an asymmetric act of war. While our nation had dedicated billions of dollars towards developing a sophisticated intelligence network and a modern military that could detect, deter, and defend against conventional threats, these resources, tactics, and strategy must now be focused on the global terrorist threat. Clearly, there was insufficient emphasis on waterborne security by the Navy. Unlike land facilities where layered defenses were possible, no such protection existed for ships. His conclusion set the stage for the revolution in the Navy’s approach to force protection that the attack on USS Cole made inevitable.

  Immediately following Admiral Moore’s endorsement on November 30, 2000, the entire command investigation package was forwarded to Admiral Robert J. Natter, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, in Norfolk, and Admiral Natter’s legal team, headed by Captain Larry McCullough, JAGC, USN, started an independent internal review process.

  The document was classified Secret, with the special caveat NOFORN attached, meaning not for release to foreign nationals because the information contained in it was so sensitive that it could not be shared with any of our allies. When it arrived at Atlantic Fleet headquarters on December 6, Admiral Natter was adamant that only a limited number of personnel could have access to it.

  But the media were continuously pressing the Navy for updates on the status of the investigation. Once the crew returned home on November 3, the drumbeat picked up considerably. Given the public attention being devoted to the investigation, the hunt was on to find a scapegoat, someone who must have been responsible for ordering Cole into the port of Aden and leaving the ship open to attack. It was only a matter of time until someone in the Navy leaked the investigation still in progress. On December 9, the Washington Post published a front-page article citing the failure of Cole to fully execute its classified force protection plan. The article also noted that while some of the crew had assumed the attacking boat was a garbage scow, they were unaware of any attempt to challenge it.

  In response to the bad press, the head of the Navy’s public affairs office, Rear Admiral Stephen Pietropaoli, warned against a “rush to judgment” against the crew or me, stressing
that the inquiry was continuing. The damage, however, was done.12 I took the leak as a violation of the trust I had assumed existed between the Navy’s leadership and me.

  The morning the article came out, I debated for a couple of hours before deciding to telephone a Naval Academy classmate of mine, Commander Frank Thorp, the public affairs officer of Admiral Vern Clark, the Chief of Naval Operations. I felt betrayed and set up, and said precisely that. “Frank, the only way the Post could know about the status of what security measures I did or did not complete could be if someone familiar with the investigation purposely leaked it to the press,” I told him.

  Frank was an exceptional officer. Calm and focused, he had been working the halls of the Pentagon for years. As the public affairs officer for the CNO, he was a candidate for eventual promotion as the Navy’s Chief of Information. “Kirk,” he said, “you know as well as I do that these kinds of leaks happen. I don’t know who did it but there is nothing we can do about it now.”

  “Well, Frank, let me put it to you this way,” I told him. “That investigation is classified Secret–NOFORN. If the Navy is casually leaking classified information to the press in an effort to create the appearance that I’m going to take the fall for this, they better stand by. I have been completely loyal to the Navy to date and have yet to say anything to the press while the investigation is ongoing. You know as well as I do that the Navy’s instruction for handling classified information calls for a signature by anyone that checks out or handles classified information at the Secret level or above. That means the Navy knows who has had access to the investigation and that means we have a limited group of people that could leak it to the press.”

  Frank tried to calm me down. “Kirk, come on now. You know that this stuff happens. You saw it all the time when you were working for SECNAV (Secretary of the Navy). There’s nothing we can do about it.”