destroyer, the uss cole in yemen's harbor, killing 17 sailors and injuring 39. the naval investigative service and federal bureau of investigation led a joint investigation into the bombing. next, does co-former -- two nci s special agents share their experience working on the investigation and how their findings shaped investigations of future terrorist attacks. the natural -- the national law enforcement museum in washington dc hosted this discussion. lori: good evening. welcome to the national law enforcement museum. we are thrilled to have you tonight. my name is lori sharp day. i am the interim ceo of the fund, and i would like to thank target for making the sponsorship for these wonderful programs possible. [applause]

lori: i'm happy to introduce steve pomerantz, former assistant director and chief of counterterrorism for the fbi. thank you. [applause] steven: thank you, lori. i'm only going to be up here for a minute. i want to welcome you, you are the second person to welcome you to the national law enforcement museum's witness program. the series explores landmark events in american history by having the participants in those events speak. tonight, we are going to look at the attack on the uss cole, often thought of as a precursor to 9/11, a very significant event in and of itself and certainly set the stage for what was to come later. i want to take a minute, because the theme is partly remembrance .

and as lori said, i was chief of counterterrorism at the fbi along time ago, in the mid-1980's to roughly 1990. i can stand up and give you the litany of terrorist attacks that most people in this business can do, many of which occurred before most of you were born, pan am 103, twa 40, the marine corps barracks in lebanon, oklahoma city, the uss cole, and 9/11. they roll off my tongue as if reciting days of the week or months of the year. we sometimes forget when we remember the incidents, we forget the individual victims, the thousands of men, women and children who died in those attacks, and the people in their families, the survivors who live the rest of their lives in agony over those events. i know that it is not true in the case of the uss cole.

i know the individuals who died are well-remembered, individually and collectively. but it is true in other cases, and we ask ourselves why, when these victims of hate at the hands of unadulterated evil, there is no rhyme or reason that makes any sense. and i think it is important to remember those people as individuals. when we think about terrorism it is not an abstract, it is thousands of people whose lives were taken, many at an early age that was totally unnecessary, unwarranted, and victims of pure evil. one thing that impressed itself on me in that regard very, very strongly was my conversation with one of our fbi agent after the oklahoma city bombing at the murrah federal building. i caught him at a moment where he was standing there he was

, looking at the remains of the building with a pensive look on his face so i asked him, he , turned to me and he said, i know from our investigation that timothy mcveigh, the bomber, surveilled this building before he committed the crime, stood up there and looked, and mcveigh had to know that there was a daycare center, a child day care center at the building, and he still set the bomb and killed some of the children that they. how can somebody be so evil as to blow up a building knowing there are children inside for some abstract, hate reason? that is part of the reason this subject matter is so compelling. i also want to thank target for sponsoring this, and mahogany in particular. not only does target and mahogany sponsor this event, but they are such friends of law enforcement and they do so much for law enforcement in this country.

they ought to be congratulated and recognized for that. thank you. thank the guests, who you will hear more about in a minute, for giving up their time and mostly for their service to this country. i want to thank you for coming, for your interest in coming to this event, which i know you are going to find fascinating, interesting and compelling. let me introduce our moderator, jim handley, well-known local tv anchor. thank you for doing this, and the floor is yours, sir. jim: it's my honor to be with all of you tonight as we look back on the attack on the uss cole. we do have an esteemed panel joining us. they were on the front lines in the hours and days after the attack on the uss cole, and they are here to share perspective and insights with us tonight. we are also going to hear from you later, your questions, so

you can ask them what is on your mind and follow up on anything said here. but first it's important to refresh everyone's memories and take you back to october 12, 2000. the uss cole guided missile destroyer was in aden harbor in yemen, and a boat laden with explosives and two suicide bombers came up to the ship and detonated. the cole suffered extensive damage 39 sailors were wounded, , 17 sailors were killed. a joint fbi, ncis investigation began immediately and linked the bombing to al qaeda operatives. i would like to introduce our panel. cathy clemens is a former special agent and member of the response team that was first on the scene of the bombing.

robert mcfadden, former special agent for the ncis-fbi investigation of the uss cole bombing. i would like to ask you, agent clemens, when you were first notified about the bombing, and what did you hear and learn initially? ms. clemens: october 12 was a thursday and i was stationed in naples, italy and was doing criminal investigations at the time, and major case response. the first call i got was, come back to the office, and told there had been an explosion on the cole. it was hazy information coming out. people were saying it was a refueling accident, that fuel going into the ship had exploded.

initial photos from cnn showed that was not the case at all, from the way the damage looked. and then i was told to get ready, that myself and my co-team leader in naples would be flying in the next 24 hours to aden, yemen, to begin on the ship. jim: agent mcfadden, were you in the region? mr. mcfadden: i was not. i had just left dubai and started my next assignment as it -- as a special agent afloat for a marine expeditionary unit. i was in san jose, california, had been there 10 days doing work with marine counterintelligence units. so the very, very early morning on october 12, i received a call

in my room at around 3:00 in the morning. and it was special agent randy hughes in the dubai office of ncis. he said, turn on the tv. i said, it is 3:00 in the morning. he said, turn on the tv. i turned on the tv, cnn, breaking news, u.s. navy destroyer suffers explosion in the port of aden. and i was looking at the tv, randy was looking at the tv and we both said oh, shit. we know what that is. it was breaking news, and we said, intuitively at least we knew it was al qaeda. jim: could you tell from the video, or did you just know? mr. mcfadden: we just knew.

knowing al qaeda, their modus operandi, their goals. for an investigator, intuition is one thing for the investigation, but we had that feeling and that instinct. so later that morning i received a call from headquarters that said get ready, standby. my boss said pack a bag for seven to 10 days and head to yemen to meet the vanguard of the investigative unit, fbi-ncis. it took three days to get there and the seven to 10 days turned two and a half years. i would not trade it for anything. >> how long did it take for the government of yemen to acknowledge this wasn't an accident? they were saying that for a few weeks, or for how long? >> the better part of a week. i think somewhere on or about october 16 or 17, the president and his administration said, yes, it was not. even by that time there was information coming from the government of yemen, as well as

our source intelligence that pointed to definitely not an accident. >> the former ambassador was supposed to be with us and one question i wanted to ask her, what was our relationship with yemen? >> from my assignment in dubai and previously bahrain, i spent quite a bit of time in yemen. i don't want to go too deeply for the sake of time, but the rapprochement between the united states and the unified government of yemen was just getting underway in making progress, especially as far as dod engagement. and the brief stop for refueling in the port of aden was part of that engagement process between the u.s. and yemen.

however, in my and my colleagues' protection effort work, it was very, very shallow, especially in the south were aden was. because the civil war it had experienced up until the late 1990's, it was a getting to know you phase. i know the state department had made much more progress up north the capital. i had been going in and out of yemen since 1997 for force protection liaison visits, counterintelligence work, and it was easy to get around there. the threat level was moderate. there were more unknowns than knowns, but we knew it was a permissive environment for various international terrorist groups. when i arrived on october 17, what was going on in the background, if you recall, aer

-- if you are a deep follower of the middle east, ariel sharon former prime minister of israel , had just visited temple mount and riots broke out as a result of that visit. in yemen there were massive street demonstrations. when i arrived i had never seen anything like that. so this was all roiling in the background and turned the temperature up as far as the force protection situation, it -- and again, that danger element. >> talk about your role with the case response team, and what you did initially. >> it was my responsibility to work with the fbi and do body recovery off the ship, as well post blast recovery, any kind of evidence that would come from the ship. once we hit the ground, myself and my teammate, we had to marry

up with guys coming from bahrain. as i was telling someone earlier ncis, if you watch the show, our , agency is nothing like the show, although it is very entertaining. but we are about 2000 agents worldwide. if you think about that, the fbi's five or six times that big if not larger. so our supervisors look at us as generalists. we are supposed to walk into a scene and be able to do just about anything that is a felony crime regarding the navy and marine corps. think of it like the texas rangers, one agent, one fight. there were six of us on the thompsonyself and don hit the tarmac because the commander of the sixth fleet allowed us to use his learjet from naples direct to aden. the pilot said, good luck, and

turned right around and left us standing on the tarmac with whatever gear we could put together and the duffel bag of personal gear. and we walked into what was probably not much bigger than this room as the terminal for the airport. and just as we get into the terminal, a c-130 lands, and that is the fbi with 300 people. then the marine fast team from bahrain hits the ground, long guns, jeeps, they come rolling up, and aden thought they were being invaded by americans. we got there friday morning at roughly 10:00 and did not leave the airport until 10:00 at night, and then the young men the yemenis wanted a convoy so they could control where the americans had access. so as a convoy, we left the

airport, dropped the marines where would be considered a beachhead to control access to the cole, and then we go to the hotel. the hotel where all the american agencies were staying. that was at about 1:00 in the morning, probably our first meeting. from there we quickly met, got up at the next morning, 7:00, now trying to divide out. i probably did not see bob other than morning meetings and evening meetings with our on scene commander, who was mike dorsey. all of us formalized our information, figured out where we were going and pushed forward. so myself and three other nis agents went out to the ship with a team of about 15 fbi agent.

and we convoyed with yemenis taking us around the bay, going through numerous checkpoints until we were inside an american circle for access to the ship. >> what was your first impression when you saw the ship in person? and i want to get into evidence collection and how difficult that was. your thoughts initially when you laid eyes on? >> did you get to the ship? >> i did. my answer will be much shorter. kathy is very modest about this, i will say the conditions were very difficult. it was very emotional and gripping to see the ship that way. even in in the south of yemen in october, october, the average temperature was somewhere between 95 and 105 fahrenheit with high humidity, 70% to 90%. so just the sites, the sounds,

the odors, the hazards were just incredible. if you need anything to make you any more patriotic to see the working relationship between the fbi and ncis team, the crew was incredible. >> the first day we couldn't get access to the ship. we needed a yemeni boat to take us out there. we were in the middle of the harbor. there was a lot of diplomatic things going on behind the scenes that i don't have a clue. but the next day we actually got up to the ship. so the very first day, we actually decided, since we are here we might as well, if you think of an explosion it is going 360 degrees, so there is going to be possible items of evidence in all directions. the tide comes in and out of the bay, everything hits the shoreline, so we walked to the shoreline for whatever we could

find. collected that up and by the , time we came back the fbi, my little duffel bag of gear, i laugh about it now, the fbi literally erected an entire tent and had plastic, rubbermaid tupperware that went the length of it with every piece of evidence-collection equipment you could ever ask for. so we had that to be able to start processing what we found. when we were finally able to get on the ship the second day, it was to go in a yemeni garbage ship out to the ship. you didn't want to touch anything, because that is what they collected their garbage in. you get on a cement structure in the middle of the bay, which was a refueling structure, and from there, we took the ladder up to

the ship. the ship, depending on the generator, the only generator that was working on the ship, to keep the bilges empty and to keep the ship righted. if it wasn't it would be listing about 60 degrees and make it a little bit more difficult to get on board. anyone who has been around the military knows, ships are loud, there is always a lot going on, people talking, radios, depending on who is doing what and what music, complete silence. a very somber moment. if you haven't been around the military, if you can encapsulate in any one ship, this is their home, they deploy for six months. they have a barbershop, they eat their meals, they sleep, they work, so now we are walking into someone's home and which, as an -- in which as an investigator , it makes it that much more difficult because you would

preferred that in any kind of, especially a death investigation, that the family members were not present when you had to do your job. so there was a lot of caution and a lot of reverence, due to our desire to keep that crew engaged but removed from the investigation all at the same time. >> all of the crew stayed on the cole? and how many are we talking about? there was roughly 50 i think that were taken off injured and dead. and there is a crew of roughly 350 on this destroyer. >> so you had to work with all of them around? did they provide any insight, because it came out of nowhere? quattro on, there were -- four of us.

we divided into teams. mike marks was doing post blast so his main job was on the deck of the ship. i was doing body recovery i was , actually down inside the ship, finding the people that had been pinned into the ship through the explosion. we had two other people doing interviews with the crew to determine what they saw, where they were, if they sustained injuries. a lot of them assisted with the removal of victims, their crewmates, when they were taken to the hospitals in germany and to the united states. >> i can remember hearing back that it was tantamount to the truck bomb we saw at beirut, talk about the sophistication and the power of these explosives, and the extent of the damage. >> the extent of damage, from the photos, especially that photo, you are getting maybe

half of the damage that was done. the damage went all the way to the keel and into midship, if that helps anybody. so the midline of the ship, that damage actually actually pushes all the way into the midline of the ship, and down all the way to the bottom along the keel. and it buckles the keel. so the main deck is what you see. a deck down is there mess deck where everybody ate. that is where a lot of our victims were. excuse me, that is not exactly true. as we divided our responsibilities, there were a lot of people that came in, not just ncis and not just fbi, so i will take a step back. there was a mobile dive and salvage unit that has expertise going underwater and specific gear to go in through the ship

and under the water. they were then responsible for locating victims under the waterline, and then we handled the victims that were actually what we would consider in the drier areas of the ship. we were dealing with both. there were engine compartments underneath the mess deck in which the deck plating buckled up this way and buckled down. so think 360 degrees. everything is just moving out like a ball and bending steel. >> robert, talk about the investigation from your perspective. how long did it take for a link be made to al qaeda? >> from all source intelligence, that is what the fbi and ncis team said from the beginning. this is in the early phases, and anand intelligence issue, --

anelligence issue, intelligence investigation. so having the greatest resources and assets out there, it was coming in very early that there were strong indications that it was al qaeda-linked individuals, and al qaeda's modus operandi from the east africa bombing, for example. so that very early on developed, but that by itself is just in the beginning, to provide a vector for us and the things we were going to do. so on the morning of october 17, not too long after i arrived in the command post, cathy mentioned special agent mike dorsey and the late john o'neill. they had a briefing early that morning because behind the scenes the state department was negotiating with yemeni foreign ministry and interior ministry as well as our foreign intelligence service, to be able to take the u.s. investigative team out to the sites that were known at that time, and there

were four sites from the land part of the investigation. we went out in a massive convoy that morning, and we had the fbi hostage response team, which i'm very thankful they were there, because again, many great unknowns there, and all their equipment. so we went to the first of four sites. the first one was where they had apparently done most of the work in the fabrication of the boat that was used in the bombing. we had teams divided up that would do the forensic examination plus other leads at each site. i and a partner from the fbi in new york who worked extensively in the al qaeda bombings in

nairobi and tanzania in august of 1998. he and i were the co-captain leads for the next site, what we called the safe house. this is where the two suicide bombers, i'm going forward in the narrative, that was the point where they actually worked on the boat before the launch, a little bit more fabrication. they had a big tank to work on the outboard motor, and that was the actual location. we had the good fortune to have an eyewitness, a laborer working on the roof of the house next door, that we had access to how he described how the two suicide bombers very gently drove the suv and trailer with the boat, made a left turn, swung around the neighborhood, stopped by a speedbump and a passenger got out to look. why? because they had several hundred kilograms of explosives in that boat. then they made their way to the

port. went to the next site, the actual boat launch location. the fourth site that morning that started the forensic examination was the lookout location, which the al qaeda cell that pulled this off certainly did their homework because it had a perfect vantage point from the living room window of an apartment that was elevated that had a direct line of sight to where the cole was in the harbor. >> i want to talk more about significant interviews you did. while we are on evidence, can you touch on what you gleaned from some of the evidence collected? was that a tedious process, bins and tents spread out? >> i wasn't involved in the sites that were on land.

that was bob and other teams from the fbi. on the ship what we did, we were doing multiple scenes. we were recovering bodies, collecting post blast evidence. so that evidence was being screened on the deck. .o we had sifting tables andy on, the captain knew, we engaged with him early on on how to incorporate his people back into their own ship. how to get them involved in what was going on. through those conversations, they were daily, they assisted with daily, they assisted with us sweeping every single

surface,ry single flat and helping us sort out what actually truly belongs on cole and what was debris that was not part of the cole in any fashion. we would take those two piles, sift them again, and go back through. they found all sorts of things from every single deck. biological material, dna which actually came back to the individuals that had identified parts of the boat that were recovered, everything from the outboard motor to the serial number to parts of the red carpet that was on the deck of the boat, to we found teeth on the deck that we didn't know if they were involved or not, so

definitely becomes part of the evidence that you collect. we -- i just have to say this -- we could not have done our job if the master of arms that was on that boat didn't convince the captain not to do any kind of cleanup of the scene. he was instrumental. he was first class. his last name was crow. he was great. convinced the captain, please don't clean or sweep or wash this. there was, through the ship when the explosion occurred, diesel fuel rained down on the ship, so the whole ship was covered. it acted kind of like a sticky material that could collect the evidence that we were looking for as these wave blasts came over the ship. it all kind of stuck. we were able to use that in collecting all the evidence we

needed, so lots of pieces -- i don't even know how many, do you recall? -- well over 200, maybe closer to 500 pieces of evidence were recovered from the ship. small pieces of wire and things that were later examined. jim: bob, you interviewed fad al-quso. i don't really care if i mispronounce his name. [laughter] you gleaned a lot of intel from him. tell us about him and what he told you. bob: with credit to ambassador bodin and the state department, there was a gap of october to january where we had little access to witnesses. that was a long and arduous investigation process. -- negotiation process. primarily when we had access --

me and my partner, former fbi agent ali soufan, terrifically talented, much more famous partner then me, but that's ok. when we finally had access to al-quso, in his role within the local conspiracy -- and this fit within al qaeda's modus operandi -- a very centrally controlled organization, only the two masterminds really had all the pieces, but al-quso was a trusted confidant of the cell, taking direction from afghanistan from al qaeda central. he was trusted in the sense that he had been to places like bosnia, afghanistan. he had these associations. he was the underling or protege of the local cell leader, jamal al badawi. when we finally had access to al-quso -- after all this buildup of months, ali and i

were in there, chomping at the bit. the interrogation room was something out of central casting, more dungeon like than office like. the room was filled with yemeni officers waiting to see what was going to happen. right at the point where we were about to start the interview, the head of the yemen intelligence service for the entire south walked into the room. everyone on the yemen side, british style from old colonial days, clicked their heels and saluted the colonel general, and he looked at us and nodded dismissively, because that's a whole other story with the relationship there. he made a beeline to al-quso. they kissed, right cheek, left cheek, right cheek, then the colonel was whispering sweet nothings into al-quso's ear. i banged my fist on the table. what's going on? ali, same thing.

the colonel said, have at it. al-quso sat there. and that was the start of the interview. the short of the story over many nights, many days, building a rapport. a little bit of cunning and finding the motivators for quso, even though to this day -- he has long departed now -- he gave us the first little tidbits of information that he felt were not important, but then it starts to build upon itself. names, associations, the way they did things, his role as the would be videographer was all very valuable. one quick postscript, because 9/11 and the cole are tied -- the team was still in the country after the investigation

when we had to leave the country because of a very serious threat. when 9/11 happened, the team was much smaller because of the threat. our first order of business, fbi and ncis, was to get by any means necessary -- that was actually said. we were able to have him flown up from aden, and we had access to him very early morning of the 13th of september. quso had no idea why i and ali were there. he was not happy to see us. he gave us the first known al qaeda member identification of two of the 9/11 hijackers. that morning. jim: wow, that soon after. you mentioned he was supposed to be the videographer. was there any footage? did he oversleep or something, did i read?

robert: that's what the investigation -- we did not believe him at all. but his story was that he woke up for prayers, put his alarm, silence, because they had a code when the ship was in place, then he would go to pick up the camera. but he said he overslept because the pager was on silent. we didn't believe him, but later on in the investigation, spending quite a few man-hours digging down, that tape, if it exists, never surfaced, so tend to believe that story. jim: talk about the al qaeda connection and any connection to bin laden and what we learned after 9/11. robert: with the gttf in new york and other fbi colleagues who had intimate knowledge of how east africa was pulled off, right from the beginning they

were noticing the same type of details. the safe house that was rented, equivalent to the yemen style townhome. they said east africa was the same in both locations. those kind of tactics combined with all source intelligence very early on showed there was a definitive link to al qaeda with this operation. some of these same people that were involved in east africa were involved in the cole, two of the masterminds, for example. there was intelligence they were involved in east africa. jim: we talk about hindsight, but not to be cliche -- are there things people have poured over and said, this could have prevented this or that? something down the road in the future? cathy: i would be just guessing. robert: the short answer is yes.

but when you look at, for example -- i am thankful for the opportunity to have worked al qaeda and other sunni violent extremist movements -- al qaeda violent extremist movements -- al qaeda are extremely compartmented. they really know how to keep secrets. i say that just by way of how difficult it is to have a human penetration of an organization like that. that is really very modestly sized, very much smaller than most folks realize. it would be great to hear ambassador bodin's perspective. the geopolitical events at the time, that was the optimal place for refueling for ships going into the arabian persian gulf. that was a national command decision. our organization and others in the intelligence community pointed to the many more

unknowns about the security posture than nones. that is the part where out of a great tragedy, many lessons have been derived. it changed policy on force protection posture, on information sharing among law enforcement and intelligence agencies. out of tragedy, a lot of good has come out of it. jim: talk about the relationship. did the government in yemen get in your way? were they cooperative? i am assuming they did not start out with a lot of cooperation. cathy: i didn't have to deal with the yemeni government at all. i really was focused on the ship so my interaction would be just to and from the hotel to there. that posture never changed. you could always see -- and although we did not have access to intelligence that was going

out, the hotel could never be completely cleared to have a huge meeting, so that's why we always had small meetings with just our little groups. i think the first thing i realized was the posture of the fast team changed. once you watched that, you are like, they have heard something, there is something changing and you have to stay cognizant of the access to the boat and everything else that we had through those things. jim: steven started out the conversation talking about the lives of american sailors who were wounded and died. what was it like to go on that ship every day and be around them? you talked about how quiet it was. did things ever change? were you on their weeks, or how long? cathy: from about the 13th through -- i think i was there about two weeks. at some point we became the

target and that's when we got up and left. robert: great point, a very tight timeline. the ship was in peril. jim: when you say you became the target, talk more about that. cathy: in the evening, it would be one of those times in the hotel that you could sit back, have a beer, and discuss the day in an unclassified area with other people. i remember looking up -- you look up and there's cnn on the tv. could you turn the tv up? this is how i found out that the hotel was the target of a possible terrorist vehicle attack. we all just looked at each other, said, maybe we need to go have a meeting. then you have a meeting at the whole posture changes at that point as to what you are going to do. i want to go back to your first comment about being on the ship with the sailors.

the sailors wanted to help us at all costs. i don't know how much jokingly is like, tell me where they are and we will use the generator to realign the armament to fire something off. yeah, we are not going to do that. it might feel good right now, but -- but they definitely wanted to help us. so collection of whatever we could on those ships. as we removed bodies, they were instrumental in putting together friends, basically, that would, as we put flags on every one of the body bags, they would escort those bodies off the ship to a waiting rig. the marine fast teams would

drive them to our waiting mortuary that we had, so we got them all off. the temperature of the ship didn't change until we got the last body off. nobody wanted to sleep below deck knowing -- and what bob alluded to -- it is 110 to 120, it's humid. by day two, i don't wish to gross you out, but entomology sets in. we have flies, larva, all sorts of things. immediately the crew began to always assume it is their friends versus we have all of the ships stores where all the generators have gone down. there is a lot of food. it was at lunch when the bomb hit, so there is food debris everywhere on the ship. they wanted that cleaned up as quickly as we could. once we have the last body off,

working with the crew, the flag that is on the aft end of the ship, the same one from the day they pulled into fuel. it was not until we had the last body off that the captain took that down. the next morning a fresh ensign went out and a fresh attitude. the radios came back on. you could hear people start to clean. we were at that point where a different atmosphere was there once all the bodies had been removed. we were at a point where they could start cleaning the decks and starting to take control of the ship and make sure it was theirs. they had pride in cleaning it up. jim: thank you. bob, how long had they been planning this? you said they knew exactly what they were doing. it seemed like it was a perfect target, where it was in the harbor.

robert: great question. my overview would include events up until fairly recently, for having myself and colleagues access to some of the high-value detainees, including the two most intimately involved taking orders from afghanistan. what the planning was originally, al qaeda central referred to it as the ship's operation in arabic. the original plan was a four prong simultaneous attack in aden and other ports. in al qaeda fashion -- we know this largely from those in the organization who provided information during the interrogation. bin laden himself with his deputy at the time decided, let's go conservative. we want to get a vessel.

it was part of their land, east africa sea and air operations, which we know they pulled off. as best as investigation intelligence could tell, they started hatching the idea at least two years before the attack, but they were underway in yemen by the spring of 1999. the goal again -- not much of this is in the public realm yet. the goal was to acquire 40 tons of high explosives, and the ultimate was going to be filling a fishing boat in the region with high explosives so that with escorts it would be able to ram an aircraft carrier. again, al qaeda central said, let's pull one off first before

we go big. cathy: we found out there had been a prior attempt back in january -- robert: against the uss sullivan. jim: what happened? cathy: they sunk their own boat. but they learned. robert: they did. the cell leader was a man of details. did not actually sink. they didn't do their homework for the casing operation for the beach and the tide and the softness of the sand, and the boat was so laden with the high explosives that when they tried to release it from the trailer, it was stuck in the sand and there was not enough tide to bring it out. ? how do we know ? because we had five eyewitnesses that myself and ali had access to. we call them beach boy five. terrific witnesses that gave an account of finding the boat. jim: roughly how many people were taken into custody? are they still in custody? have people passed on?

robert: real good question. i would say along the lines of scores. kind of one of those unique things for a country like yemen. it is not an oddity. they place in custody witnesses. when we asked them about what's going on, they said witnesses are in their protective custody. yes, because there may be suspicion there. so sorting the witnesses from the actual members involved, they had at least six that we wanted access to that were in involved. jim: how do you develop that rapport with someone? you said that took days and days. robert: briefly on a complex topic, no tricks. jim: are you working with a translator?

robert: ali was a fluent lebanese, arabic speaker, and i trained formally in arabic. spent a lot of time, very good arabic with a philadelphia accent, but effective. building rapport. one, it's the training. our old value inigh, high training in a clinical setting, but also a terrific mentoring program for this skill and science of the interrogation. credit to my former boss, mark fallon, who is a champion of that. ali, although less experienced than me, was a natural people person. building rapport is not necessarily about tea and biscuits, but getting to things like motivation. what makes an individual tick? how can we leverage those things and form an operational quid pro quo? does that mean he will give us everything? no, but over time it is quite effective.

think of it in terms of the metaphor of the helicopter circling the target. it may not go right for the bullseye, but it will keep circling until we are getting more and more. jim: this is a massive team of different agencies working together. i guess that's the priority. i hear you guys mentioned names of colleagues and people under you, superiors, too. it is humbling the way you talk about it. everyone is working together, not independently. talk about it -- as laymen out there, we may not understand how you all work together. cathy: wow, ok. from thinking myopically about just the ship, there is one team working the decks, one team working to recover bodies considered in the drier areas. one team that's in the water.

we had a grid search out into the bay with fbi and special forces. literally as people are coming together and telling each other what they find, it is very collaborative. and then definitely we all were very curious of what he was finding out separately from what we were collecting. really our job is just that stuff that's left. he was getting the stuff we are like, who did you find today or where are you going today? and being able to connect all the dots. ego aside -- there is no room for that in a situation like this. you are there for the ship. i think we all felt that. definitely you rally around your friends when they get injured.

we all rally and you do what you have to do. it doesn't matter how long those days are and how swift, how quickly you are in and out of a location. you do what you got to do to make it work. we didn't have any problems on our team. jim: cathy mentioned connecting the dots. was there a moment when you are like, this is it, it is coming together and the world will soon know what we are finding. i'm sure you had to sit on a lot for a long time. robert: to cathy's point, it is a massive team effort. this situation was unprecedented for the yemenis and the united states law enforcement community. the response, we are talking fbi -- you had

diplomatic security service, you had road ride leads coming from various agencies. for myself, never having been involved in anything remotely of that size, i was wondering, how are we going to put this together? like cathy said, there were teams of experts fusing information, gathering intelligence, feeding into the briefs we had every day and putting that together. within a few days of the attack, there was a massive whiteboard with photographs acquired as to who was who and who was involved and what we were working on. the eureka moment as far as al qaeda, setting aside my bias for thinking it was from the beginning -- not long after i arrived, there was compelling evidence -- consensus among the ncis, fbi, cia, and others at the national level -- that there was the al qaeda link. i know geopolitically, there was frustration from the team. by geopolitical, i mean as far

as the administration at the time was reluctant to speak about a definitive link to al qaeda, something we couldn't quite understand from a practitioner level. but we knew it was there. jim: others tried to take credit, but you knew it wasn't. robert: that's another good point, because hamas, palestinians, some she groups, which is pretty common in international terrorism. that was essentially brushed aside by the investigative team. jim: i want to open it up. we have two microphones on either side. please step up if you have a question for our special agent and special guest, anything we haven't touched on. you do have to go to the mic. >> since i was close. there is an 800 pound elephant in this room, so i am going to front it.

the ambassador is not here or i might phrase this question -- you know where i am going -- i might phrase this question more delicately. anybody who has read about this or has seen the movie or read the book, one of the major -- let me back off and say that i was retired by the time this took place, but i was involved early on. about the mid-1980's, there was a law passed that gave us jurisdiction abroad, federal law enforcement to go abroad and conduct criminal investigations involving terrorism. that was a new thing for us. the cole was 15 years later. but i found out pretty quickly that success or failure was 90% the cooperation you got from the locals in the country that you went to, how much access they gave you, how much operation.

there are certain countries that spin you around like a two dollar top with a pretense of full operation. cooperation. the second thing was the state department, how much latitude they gave you to operate. in the case of the cole, you mentioned our mutual colleague, o'neill, who was the fbi agent in charge, who passed away on 9/11. he retired and had taken a job as chief of security at the twin towers and died one of the heroes, going back into the tower to help law enforcement. so i have a special -- if you have done anything more than superficial, you know about his dealings with the ambassador, who is not here, i recognize. it is the elephant in the room, so i ask you to say what you will about how that impacted on your investigation. robert: i know that remains a topic of great interest and a

lot was written about it. i was privy to some of the conversations and some of the churn, if you will, which i would say from a large aspect, it was an extremely stressful situation. there was also the foreign aspect in the sense that i and a few of my colleagues from ncis, we spent quite a bit of time in yemen, but i don't know if there was a single member of the fbi team that went to yemen, only because it was not part of the mission. knowing the protocols of the state department or not knowing them created an natural tension. to the more important part, did it impact the investigation from my perspective? it did not. we were very surprised that the great john o'neill was not allowed back in country. his country clearance was denied after he left.

the investigative team was back after we evacuated due to the threat. jim: who made that call? was that the ambassador? robert: in any country, that is the ambassador's call for diplomatic clearance for government personnel. again, we would have wished it could have gone differently as far as the dynamic of the relationship, but i don't think it had any negative impact on the investigation. but to your point on the host nation, having spent a large part of my career overseas, particularly the near middle east, you are right about how important that is, whether the host nation is cooperative or not. yemen was anything but cooperative. although ambassador bodin and team were working hard at the government to government level, we for our part, john o'neill on down, were working the personal relationship at the ground level.

that was very important for getting those things. the government of yemen may say, no, cannot, but at the local level, we were making progress, acquiring intelligence from liaison contacts, also getting concessions, minor enough it would not rise to the level of the top leadership. that was a really important part of moving the investigation forward. as investor bodine said in a few interviews, the interview was quite complex. steven: you are both very professional, talented people. i am sure everybody has great respect for what you did. under the circumstances that you just outlined, it is even more incredible, the results that you got and you should be admired and congratulated for what you did.

robert: thank you. [applause] robert: that's very kind. i won't speak for cathy, but i thank the dear lord i was just in the place and had the opportunity to work on something like that. another postscript, talk about the lack of cooperation and pulling teeth every day with the yemen intelligence network to bring witnesses, to let us look at evidence. we really got nowhere until deep into 2001, but it was not until 9/11 -- and i witnessed this up close and personal, a watershed event and a seachange of attitude by the yemen government overnight, literally. one of the key aspects -- i believe it is in ali soufan's book. banners", we had a meeting and we only had a couple

of swat protectors. we were the only ones in country on 9/12. we had a meeting with the head of the yemen intelligence service. he had a very close relationship with john o'neill, referred to him as brother. he was asking how john was, and we had word early on the 12th of november that john o'neill was missing and presumed dead. when the general asked about brother john, how is he, ali soufan choked up and said john may be dead. the general started choking up as well. when we said we needed al-quso immediately, he picked up the phone and told aden the last yemeni flight was not to leave until al-quso was aboard. the cooperation was tremendous. we had access to al qaeda, card-carrying members after that and it was a treasure trove of

intelligence information post 9/11. jim: any other questions? >> i have several questions. i will try to limit. and little bit of background on who i am. my name is jamal gunn. my brother cherone was one of the 17 that was killed. just a little bit of background. this is not a blame game on anyone, but my information about john o'neill is a little bit secondhand. he was more in contact with my father, giving him updates about the case/ the kind of person he is -- you know this -- when he first heard about the attack, his response was probably an expletive.

-- you aref very laughing because you know it is true. the reason why is because john o'neill actually knew it was al qaeda who did the attack right when he heard about it. he was angry about it. that's the kind of relationship and the kind of person he is. keep that in mind with his relationship with ambassador bodine. from my information, they did not get along well at all, which is why he was not let back into the country to continue the investigation with regards to what happened to my brother. you did go over a lot of information, a lot of questions i did have. i did have one particular question for each of you. agent clements, you said you arrived on october 13, correct? cathy: it was a friday. >> and the attack was on the 12th. you said you assisted in body recovery and recovering evidence.

what was going on with the crew from october 12 to 13? did they start any investigation there to keepust the ship afloat? because i know that's what they did after the attack. they were focused on keeping the ship going and making sure no other damage was taking place. i am just curious what was going on between the attack and your arrival. and the question i have for you, sir, you mentioned one name, the perpetrator who was killed. but there are several others. one right now is in guantanamo bay. he is the one we have been waiting on to be brought to trial, al-nashiri. he is the one we have been repeatedly told is the actual mastermind of the attack, but we also heard several names like al badawi. i want to know who is the actual

mastermind. was al badawi just the gopher? which from my information he was. jim: any particular order? cathy: talk about the crew. the explosion occurs. it is noon. they are in the line getting food, if they are not helping do some other refueling event on the ship. part of what helped the ship was actually being in a refueling status, if you understand how they secure zebraing in closing compartments helped keep the ship afloat. the crew then got all the injured off the ship. the crew took care of everything that they could find. and then we are intimately responsible for helping keep

that ship afloat, not just that one day before we arrived, but the entire time we were there. two are three times the generator would go down and we would all, like mice, come up onto the main deck and wonder what the next movement would be. the crew and captain would figure out what the problem was, get the generators going. they did a lot to keep the ship afloat, period. you can't underestimate the work that they did at all. they helped, like i said, with all of the evidence collection on the deck and were concerned about us removing their other friends and getting the remains off the ship. they were intimately involved with maintaining their ship. i don't know how to explain it, but that ship would not have

been afloat without that crew manning that one generator, so that one generator and their work kept that ship afloat. robert: mr. gunn, for your question about the mastermind -- first, let me say we mourn your brother and all his shipmates. god rest his soul. that is a really great question, because as the saying goes, success has many fathers. it is mostly loose press reporting, but the mastermind, if there was a mastermind, think of it in terms like the military structure, the operational element. that's where it was hatched in al qaeda central, afghanistan, between bin laden himself, his main deputy, who was taken out at an airstrike not long after 9/11. if there is a mobile or -- local or operational cell

mastermind, that is without doubt al-nashiri, who is in guantanamo right now. he was the co-lead with another al qaeda detainee, part of the 9/11 five but also was involved in the lead up to the ship operation. his name is waleed bin attash. he was arrested in a case of mistaken identity somewhere in the summer of 1999. bin laden ordered him when he was released from yemeni custody to get back to afghanistan. he wound up going to karachi, pakistan, to be a mohammed's right-hand man. he went from one operation with ships to the air operation, the planes. then nashiri, not only was he the al qaeda lead that communicated clandestinely with al qaeda corp., he also became the operations chief for all the

arabian peninsula for al qaeda. it was his henchmen who were coming after us when we were working, we later learned, trying to hit us in yemen and later do a truck bomb operation against the embassy. he was captured in dubai sometime in 2002 and has been in u.s. custody ever since. i have to say, editorial comment on my part, in a big way he is still not even past preliminary hearings and legal proceedings in guantanamo, so not close to trial. it is a capital case, but we hope justice will prevail. cathy: inching closer, he said. robert: inching closer. jim: anyone on this side? go ahead. >> for an operation -- first,

thank you very much for coming out here and sharing your experiences. for an operation like that when you are acting on behalf of the united states, what's the reach in terms of the guidance and communication you are getting, when you are deployed like that in terms of, think about this. what kind of micromanagement are you getting from stateside? when it comes to being able to focus on your operation and getting stuff done versus having to -- obviously you have someone acting as the intermediary back there, but i am curious how much reach back there was coming to you all when you are over there. cathy: i didn't feel it at all. we had one supervisor on the ground. he filtered everything for us.

we were completely focused on our mission with no interference. always obviously, information being fed back to washington, d.c. and our headquarters at the time and the fbi. but never felt like we were getting micromanaged not all. all. i think the event was so unique at the time that it was not something that anybody thought would have happened. so with all of the moving parts, i think they were very thankful for all the information we were pushing out. it was a great deal of information, especially from bob's end. we have a lot that we were pushing out as well. robert: that's a really important question. you probably get the sense and paint the narrative that there is a tremendous amount of pressure on the field element.

in the lexicon of law enforcement, the requirements are flooding in. here is the important part. it was an exceptional relationship between ncis and fbi, from top leadership down to special agents working the case. the fbi had already established protocols with the psyoc, so that was up and running, the central brain node at headquarters tied in with the headquarters and national security council. from my perspective, the most important ingredient, we were blessed to have tremendous leadership that acted as a filter to make sure we were not feeling that professional and otherwise pressure to stay focused on the job. we tried to sleep as little as we possibly could because there was just so much to be done. we never planned for, trained

for, or experienced a situation like this. large responses to terrorism events, east africa, but not with the circumstances as occurred with the uss cole attack. again, from my perspective it could not have worked better. we had tremendous leadership the entire time. jim: go ahead. >> [inaudible] we know that -- questionable assessments submitted to the navy. if you could elaborate on that. yemen wasto this,

not the typical port for our sailors. port. not a liberty we look at places like naples and those types of things. work was done on threat assessments where we put out information, we are concerned about this area, yet they obviously put in a lot of great detail in their plans. they were able to nail the ship and it did not come by accident, because the servicing that was done to the ship -- if you could expand about how that played into this. robert: of course, as the event happened, it was self-evident. really a very broad, complex, and again data rich type of situation.

but you are right, really quite unique in post desert storm, desert shield for navy ship visits. it was designed to be a brief stop for fuel and a logistics node. i was involved in some of the advanced force protection and counterintelligence teams in going to djibouti and eritrea. yemen, aden, were the top three finalists. the experts involved at the end of the day figured that because of the standoff -- i do not mean for there to be any irony, but because of the standoff and the refueling some 400 to 500 meters from the shore, that there would be a natural standoff from launched weapons. what al qaeda did for its part was quite ingenious, exploiting the local cell that jamal al badawi mentioned.

he was taken out in an airstrike year.uary 1st this he was the senior local guy that guys tap into because they knew him from bosnia and other places. badawi or quso would not know the nuts and bolts because of the compartmentalization. what al qaeda was able to do, knowing about yemen generally, through those trusted relationships knew the degree they could hide in plain sight. one of the things i will tell you -- it has often been written and i have met a lot of smart people that are convinced the yemen government was complicit. there is not one scintilla of evidence that has come my way. that is counterintuitive to how al qaeda operated. if anything, the government was the enemy of sunni extremist islam. my greater point is that they

were able to exploit the conditions, able to have a colossal failure that would have otherwise brought a lot of attention. a boat with explosives stuck in the sand in january of 2000? not one police officer or any government official that we know of were aware of it. they were really quite artful in leveraging their cultural intelligence, their knowledge. the other part of it is, my organization, the cia, responsible for doing country threat assessments. the threat assessment at the time talked about the permissive environment for transnational terrorist groups and that there were a lot of pockets outside the major cities of unknowns by the government. so therefore, caveat emptor as far as port visits and things like that. but there is nothing definitive

that said -- warning lights don't go to a country like yemen. jim: anyone else have a question? well, i would like to thank you both for a fascinating discussion. [applause] jim: sharing stories that only you two can share with us. it has just been remarkable. as we have said before, we all owe you a great deal of gratitude for all you do to make a difference. thank you very much, and we want to thank you all for coming as well. this is going to be on c-span's website if you would like to see more or refer someone to it. thank you for coming out. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2019] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org]

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