Endless Enemies by Raymond Holcomb

Author:Raymond Holcomb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Potomac Books, Inc.
Published: 2011-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Twelve

The USS Cole

Almost two years had passed since the destruction of our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, and we were settling back into chasing regular criminals. It was a good October morning, not too cold, yet crisp, and cloudless in the Hudson River Valley.

Good weather means a good day for training. The team was at firearms practice when we received the early reports. We heard that terrorists had driven an explosive-laden boat alongside a U.S. Navy vessel moored in the Yemeni port of Aden, nearly sinking our warship and killing seventeen sailors. I wondered why anyone would detest America enough to plan and execute a complex attack in such an obscure corner of the world. I still did not fully appreciate the deep hatred that Osama bin Laden and his followers harbored against the West. Bin Laden’s name had surfaced numerous times in connection with failed and successful attacks during the 1990s, but with the exception of a committed group of New York terrorism investigators, the rest of us were going about our routine business. “The Base” was the last thing on our collective minds. Sure, we knew about Ramzi Yousef, who had had a role in some faraway plot to take down airliners over the Pacific, but we still believed that the World Trade Center and Landmarks plotters were just a group of disgruntled immigrants who hated us because they didn’t feel as if they fit in. Not until the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa did we get a good handle on bin Laden and al Qaeda. They had failed in their 2000 attack on the USS The Sullivans but succeeded less than a year later in damaging the Cole. That attack showed us just how big a problem we faced.

Within two days, SAC John O’Neill and a group of young investigators, an explosives forensic team from the lab at Quantico, and bureau scuba divers departed for Aden, along with virtually the entire FBI Hostage Rescue Team, in an ill-considered start to what would be a protracted and draining effort. Agents who had never deployed outside the United States were going to a Third World nation. I was baffled that the HRT was pegged to protect the New York investigative team, since New York SWAT had previously deployed for an extended period to Tanzania, where it had performed well, and the Thirteenth Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), which had trained and was equipped for just such a mission, was on its way to Aden. I arranged to have one of my men, Dan Fethiere, brief O’Neill and his people before they boarded the military transport out of McGuire Air Force Base. A former ranger, Dan had participated in Operation Desert Storm and had some knowledge of Middle Eastern ways. He spoke passing Arabic, and that skill had landed him a position as an adviser and liaison to a Saudi Arabian infantry unit during the first Gulf War.

Dan admonished the young female agents, “You can’t wear shorts or sleeveless blouses in Yemen, and do not sit so that the soles of your feet are exposed to a Middle Eastern man.

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