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captioning performed by vitac we had the fbi hrt team, the hostage response team, which i'm very thankful they were there. many great unknowns there. and with all of their equipment. so we went out to the first of four sites, which the first one was where apparently they had done most of the work and the fabrication on the boat that was used for the bombing. we add teams divided up that would do the forensic examination plus other leads at each site. i and a apartment from the jjtf who was an nypd police detective who worked extensively in the east africa bombings, al qaeda,

nairobi, tanzania, we were the leads for the next site which was actually what we call the safe house. this is where the two suicide bombers -- i'm going a little bit forward in the narrative. we knew this later. it was strongly suspected at the time, 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 actually good fortune to have an eyewitness working on the roof of the house next door that we had access to that 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 speed bump. the passenger got out to look.

why? because they had explosives in the boat, and then they could make their way to the boat. another team as well as the jjtf in washington, d.c., the washington field office went to the next site which was the actual boat launch location and 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 casing and their homework. 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 about some significant interviews that you did throughout this and the evidence. while we're on evidence, can you touch on what you gleaned from some of the evidence collected? was that a tedious process? you talk about bins and tents

and everything spread out. >> right. i wasn't involved with the sites that were on land. that was bob and some other teams of fbi. so on the ship, what we did, we were doing multiple scenes. we were recovering the bodies and collecting the postblast evidence. that evidence was being screened on the -- why is that completely out of my head -- >> deck? >> the front deck of the ship. >> it was a long time ago. >> we had sifting tables that we would collect. early on the captain knew and we engaged with him very early on on how to incorporate his people back into their own ship. how to get them involved in what was going on. so through that -- those conversations, they were daily, they assisted with us sweeping

every single deck, every single flat surface and helped us sort out what belonged on the "cole." and those piles of, i don't know what it is to this definitely isn't it and those belong to the "cole," we would take those piles and take them back to the post blast shifters to sift it again and go back through it. they found all sorts of things. biological material. dna that was found came back to the individuals that bob had identified. parts of the boat that were recovered, everything from the outboard -- not originally, but outboard motor to the serial number to parts of the red carpet that was on the deck of the boat.

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 arms on that boat didn't convince the captain not to do any kind of cleanup of the scene. so it was -- he was instrumental. he was a first class, his last name was crow. he was great. he convinced the captain, don't clean this or wash this. when the explosion occurs, diesel fuel rained down on the ship. the whole ship was covered. so it acted kind of like a sticky material that could collect the evidence that we were looking for as it started -- these wave blasts came over the ship. it all just kind of stuck. but we were able to then use

that and collecting all the evidence that we needed. so lots of pieces -- i don't know how many. do you recall? i know well over 200, i would say, maybe closer to 500 pieces of evidence were actually recovered from the ship. small pieces of wire and things and then later were examined. >> you interviewed fad cluso. you cleaned a lot of information and intel from him. tell us a little bit about him and what he told you and was able to tell you. >> with credit to the ambassador, there was a gap from the end of october until january where we had little to no access to witnesses. that a long and arduous negotiation process. finally when we had access,

primarily my partner, former fbi agent, terrifically talented former, much more famous partner than me in the partnership but that's okay. he deserves it. when we had access to him, in his role within the local conspiracy, this fit within al qaeda's modus operandi of how it did thing, a centrally controlled operation. only the master minds had all the pieces but he was a trusted associate of the cell taking direction from afghanistan from al qaeda central. but he was trusted in the sense he had been to places like bosnia, afghanistan, he had these associations and he was the protege of the local cell leader. so when we finally had access to him, for setting the scene of how it was, after all this

buildup of months, ali and i were in there champing at the bit. the interrogation room was something out of central casting, in a more dungeon-like than office-like. right at the point where we were about to start the interview, the head of the yemeni intelligence service for the entire south walked into the room and everyone on the yemen side, british-style clicked their heels and saluted the colonel general and he looked at us and kind of nodded dismissively, that's another story with the relationship there. and he made a beeline to cuso. he stood up and kissed. and then the colonel was whispering sweet nothingings in

his ear. and i banged my fist on the table, what's going on here? and so the colonel said, okay, have at it. and he sat there like, have at it. that was the start of the interview. okay, but the short of the story over many nights, many days in a row, building rapport, a little of guile, a little of cunning and finding what the motivators were for him. he's long departed now. he did not leave the jihad life. he gave us first little tidbits of information that he thought weren't important. but then it started to build upon itself. and so names, associations, the way they did things, his role as the would be videographer was all very valuable. 9/11 and the cole are tied.

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

did i read or -- >> that's right. that's what the investigation -- we did not believe him at all because that's not gold. it's platinum if they had that for propaganda purposes. but his story was that he woke up for prayers. he put his alarm -- his pager on silence because they had a code 1010 when the ship was in place. then he would go to pick up the camera. for his part he said he overslept because the pager was on silent. we didn't believe him at all. later on in the investigation spending quite a few man hours digging down, that tape if it existed never surfaced. i tend to believe that story. >> talk a little bit more about the al qaeda connection and any connection down the road to osama bin laden and what we learned after 9/11. >> as i mentioned with the j.t. tf in new york and other fbi colleagues who had intimate knowledge of how east africa was pulled off, right right from the

beginning, they were noticing the same types of traits, details, the house that was rented, the safe house, kind of equivalent to yemen-style townhome. east africa was the same at both two locations. those kind of techniques and procedures combined with intelligence, it very early on showed there was a definitive link to al qaeda with this operation. some of the same people that were involved in east africa were involved in the cole, two of the master minds, for example, there was intelligence and they were known to have been involved in east africa. >> we talk about hindsight. not to be cliche. are there things that people have poured over and said, oh, this could have prevented this or that or something down the road in future? >> i think -- i don't know. i would be just guessing. >> the short answer to that, it

was a really valid question, yes. but when you look at, for example, and -- i'm very thankful for the opportunity to have worked al qaeda and other extremist movements, al qaeda, as the example, are extremely compartmented when it comes. they really know how to keep secrets. i say that just by way of how difficult it is to have a human penetration operation of an organization like that. that really is so very, very modestly sized. much smaller than most folks would realize. it would be great to hear the ambassador's perspective. but the geopolitical events, the zeitgeist at the time, that was the optimal place for a brief stop for fuel for ships going into the gulf. the big, however, was our organization and others in the intelligence community, including the cia, pointed to

there were many more unknowns about the security posture than knowns. so that's the part where -- out of a great tragedy like that, many lessons learned have been derived and it changed policy, for example, in force protection posture. it changed policy on information-sharing among law enforcement and intelligence agencies. out of tragedy, a lot of good has come out of it. >> talk about the relationship, if you both would. did the government in yemen get in your way? were they cooperative at a certain point? i'm assuming i didn't start out with a lot of coordination, i don't know. >> i didn't have to deal with the yemeni government at all. i really was focused on the ship. my interaction would be just to and from the hotel to there. that posture never changed. although we didn't 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 and once you watched their posture change, you're like, all right, so they've heard something, there's something changing and you have to stay cognizant of the access to the boat and everything else that we had through those things. >> steven started out the conversation talking about the lives, the american sailors who were wounded and died. what was it like to go onto that ship every day and be around them. you talk about how quiet it was. did things ever change? were you on there weeks or how long? >> there from about the 13th through -- i think i was there

about two weeks. i don't know exactly. but at some point, we became the target and that's when we got up and left. >> it was a very tight timeline. the ship was in peril as well. >> when you say you became the target, talk a little bit more about that. >> in the evening, it would be one of those times in the hotel that you could actually kind of sit back, have a beer and discuss the events of the day and kind of an unclassified area with other people and i remember looking up and there's cnn on the tv. and we're like, can you turn the tv up. and they just now announced -- this is how i found out, that the hotel is now a target of a possible terrorist vehicle attack. and so we all looked at each other and said meeting we need to go have a meeting. so then you go and have a meeting and the whole posture changes at that point as to what you're going to do. but i want to go back to your

first comment about being on the ship with the other -- with the sailors. the sailors wanted to help us at all costs, obviously. i had one -- i don't know how much joking is, tell me where they are and we'll use the generator to realign the armament to actually fire something off. we're like, yeah, we're not going to do that. >> it would be nice -- >> you might feel good right now. but they definitely wanted to help us. collection of whatever they could on those ships. as we removed bodies, they were instrumental in putting together frins, they would then escort those bodies off the ship to awaiting rib which the uss cole is named after a marine. they would drive them in a boat

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

so once we had the last body off, working with the crew, the flag that's on the aft end of the ship was the same one that they had pulled in to fuel. it wasn't until we had the last body off that the captain took that down. the next morning, a fresh ensign went up and a fresh approach. the radios came back on. you could hear people start to clean. we were at that point where different -- a different atmosphere was there once all the bodies had been removed. and we were at a point where they could start washing and cleaning the decks and starting to take control of that ship again. and make sure that it was theirs and they had pride in it. and so definitely cleaning it up. so that -- wanted to go back to that. >> thank you for sharing that. bob, you talk about the planning. how long had they been planning this? you said they knew exactly what they were doing. it seems almost like it was a perfect target where it was in

that harbor. >> sure. i gave -- based on that, that's a great question, though, my overview would include events up to fairly recently for having to some of the high-value detainees, including the two most intimately involved taking orders from afghanistan. so what the planning was originally, al qaeda central referred to it as the ship's operation in arabic. the original plan was a four-progress simultaneous attack at various places. another small port by the border of oman. in al qaeda fashion -- we know this largely from those in the organization who provided the information to us during the interview and interrogation. bin laden himself with his deputy at the time decided go conservative. we want to get a gray hole,

whether it's a commercial or u.s. military vessel. and it was part of their land, east africa and then sea and air operations which, of course, we know they pulled off. so as best as the investigation intelligence could tell, they started hatching the idea at least two years before the cole was attacked. but they were under way and operational in yemen by the spring of 1999. and the goal, again, was -- not much of this is in the public realm yet. i'll share. the goal was to acquire 40 tons of high explosives and the ultimate was going to be feeling a dow with high explosives so it would be able to ram an aircraft

carrier. but al qaeda central said let's pull one off first before we go big. >> through bob's investigation we found out that there had been a prior attempt back in january -- >> yeah, against the uss sullivan. >> and what happened in that? >> they sunk their own boat. but they learned. >> they did. in fact, the cell leader was a man of details. didn't 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 wasn't enough tide to bring it out. how did we know that? because we had five eyewitnesses that myself and others from the investigate team had access to. we call them the beach boy five. they were terrific witnesses of finding the boat. >> roughly how many people were taken into custody and are they still in custody of -- have

people passed on? >> real good question as to how many are in custody. >> was it dozens? >> i would say more along the lines of scores because kind of one of those unique things. a country like yemen, if not a quirky oddity, they place in custody witnesses. and when we ask them about that -- what's going on, they said they're in our protective custody. we said, custody, yes, because there may be suspicion there. so that's what -- so sorting the witnesses from the actual members involved, they had at least six, half dozen, that we wanted access to that we knew were involved. >> how do you develop that rapport with someone? you said it took days and days to build that up. >> a complex topic. no tricks -- >> are you working with a

translator. >> ali was native, fluent lebanese, arabic speaker and i've trained in arabic and spend a lot of time. very good with a philadelphia accent. high, high value and premier training, but a terrific mentoring program for the art and science of interrogation. and a credit to my former boss who is a champion of that. ali less tenure and experience, he was a natural people person. building a rapport is not necessarily about tea and biscuits. it's about getting to things like motivation, what makes an individual tick. how can we leverage and manipulate those things and kind of form an operational quid pro quo. does that mean he's going the give us everything instantly? no. over the course of time, it's

quite effective in building that -- think of it in the terms of metaphor of a helicopter circling a target. may not go right for the bull's-eye, but it's going to keep circling until we're getting more and more. >> this is a massive team and different agencies working together and how -- i guess that's the priority. i hear you guys mention names of colleagues and people under you are superiors too. it's a humbling thing the way you talk about it. everybody is working together. >> definitely. >> talk about it as laymen out here, we may not understand how you all come together and work together. >> wow. okay. so from -- just think myopically of the ship. there is one team working the decks, one team working to recover bodies that are

considered in the dryer 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's more -- it's very collaborative. and we all were very curious about what he was finding out. and our job is really the post -- is just that stuff that's left. he was getting the stuff for, like, who did you find today or where are you going today? and being able to then connect all of the dots and hear it. egos aside, there's no room for that in a situation like this. you're there for the ship. i think we all felt that. definitely, you know, you rally

around, you know, your friends when they get injured. so we all rally. and you all do what you have to do. it doesn't matter how long those days are and how long -- or how quickly you're in and out of a location. you do what you've got to do to make it work. and i don't think -- we didn't have any problems on your teams -- >> mentioned connecting the dots. do you remember, was there a moment when it's like, this is it, it's coming together and the world will soon know what we're finding. i'm sure you had to sit on a long for a long period of time. >> that's right. but it was a massive team effort. this type situation was unprecedented certainly for the yemenis but it was for the united states government and d.o.d. intelligence community. so the response was -- we're talking about fbi, ncis, atf, worldwide leads coming in from

various agencies so it takes a team. now, i know for myself, never being involved in anything that remotely -- of that size, i was wondering how are we going to put this together? like kathy said, there were teams of experts fusing information, gathering intelligence, feeding into the brief that is we had every day and the debriefs and putting that together. within a few days of the cole attack there was a whiteboard with photographs that were acquired from various means as to who was who and who was involved and what we were working on. so the eureka moment, as far as al qaeda, setting aside my bias and thinking and knowing it was from the beginning. not long after i arrived, there was compelling evidence and consensus and others at the national levels of intelligence that there was the al qaeda link. now, i know geo politically there was frustration from the

team. geopolitical, i mean as far as the administration at the time was reluctant to speak about a definitive link to al qaeda, something that we couldn't quite understand from a practitioner level. but we knew it was there and it's -- >> others tried to take credit. but you knew it wasn't. >> that's another good point that could be lost. among others, hamas, palestinians, some shia groups which is common in international terrorism. but that was especially brushed aside by the investigate team. >> i want to open it up. we have two microphones on either side. please step up if you have a question for our special agents, special guests. anything that we haven't touched on. but you do have to go to the mic, please, if you would. >> since i was close, there's an

800-pound elephant in this room. so i'm going to front it, okay? the ambassador's not here. i might phrase this question -- you know where i'm going. i might phrase this question a little more delicately. anybody who has read about this or who has seen the movie or the read the book, one of the -- let me back up and say i was retired by the time this took place. but i was involved early on -- about the mid-1980s, 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. and the cole was one of the -- 15 years later that the cole incident -- but i found 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 cooperation -- there were certain countries that spin you around like a $2 top with a pretense of cooperation. so that's the one thing. the second thing was, the state department. how much latitude they gave you to operate in the case of the cole, and you mentioned john o'neil who was the fbi agent in charge who passed away on 9/11. he retired and a month later he had taken a job as the chief of security at the twin towers and died one of the heroes of that, going back into that tower to help law enforcement. so i have special -- again, if you've done any more than superficial, you know about his dealings with the ambassador who is not here, i recognize. it is the elephant in the room. i ask you to say what you will about that, how that impacted on your investigation. >> steven, 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 would have been to yemen. only because it was not part of the mission. okay? so knowing the protocols of the state department or not knowing them was, you know, created a natural tension. now to the more important part of it, did it impact the investigation from my perspective? it did not. i mean, we were kind of -- very surprised that the great john o'neal was not allowed back in

country. his country clearance was denied after he left and the investigate team was back after we evacuated due to the threat. >> who made that call? was that the ambassador? >> in any country, that's the ambassador's call for diplomatic clearance for government personnel. now, 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 ultimately on the investigation. but to your point, though, about liaison with the host nation having spent a large part of my career in the overseas environment particularly in the middle east, you're absolutely right about how important that is, whether the host nation is cooperative or not. the short of it, yemen was just about anything but cooperative. the ambassador and team were working very hard at the sog, government to government level. but john o'neil, myself, others were working the personal

relationship at the ground level and that was very important for getting those things -- the big government of yemen may say, no, no, cannot, cannot, but at the ground level, we were making progress acquiring intelligence from these liaison contacts but also getting concessions minor enough that it wouldn't rise to the level of their top leadership. that was a really important part of the -- moving the investigation forward. and as the ambassador said in a few interviews, i think she summed it up as the relationship was quite complex. >> you're very professional, talented people. again, maybe, take the latitude to say, since this was my business, i'm sure everybody in the room has great respect for what you did. under the circumstances that you just outlined, it's even more incredible the results that you

got and you should be admired and congratulated for what you've done. >> thanks. >> thank you. i really appreciate that. that's very kind. i won't speak for cathy, but i thank the dear lord that i was in a place and had the opportunity to work on something like that. but, again, another postscript, talk about that lack of cooperation and pulling teeth exhibition every day with the yemen intelligence service to bring witnesses, to let us look at evidence. we really got nowhere until deep into 2001. but it wasn't until 9/11 and i witnessed this up close and personal, it was a watershed event and a sea change of attitude by the yemen government overnight. one of the key aspects of this, and i believe it's in the book "the black banners" we had a meeting myself, my supervisor, and we only had a couple of

s.w.a.t. protecters. we were the only ones in the country on 9/12. we had a meeting with the head of the yemen intelligence service and he had a close real estate with john o'neil. referred to him as the brother. and he was asking how john was and we had word early on the 12th of november that john o'neil was missing and presumed dead. when the general asked about the brother john, how is he, he choked up and said he may be dead. the general started tearing up as well. when we said we needed kuso immediately, he called and told them the last yemeni flight was not to leave until kuso was aboard. the cooperation after that 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. >> any other questions? >> well, i have several questions. i'll try to limit the ones i have. but just a little of background who i am. my name is jamal. my brother was one of the 17 on board the uss cole. >> yes. >> one of the 17 that was killed. and just a little bit of background, this is not a blame game on anyone, but my information about john o'neil is a little bit secondhand. he was more in contact with my father, giving him updates about the case throughout. but the kind of person he is, you know this, that when he first heard about the attack, his response was probably

expletive. he's kind of very -- you're laughing because you know it's true. and the reason why is because john o'neil knew it was al qaeda who did the attack right when he heard about it. so he was really angry about it that it was happening. and that's the kind of relationship and that's the kind of person he is. to keep that in mind when his relationship with ambassador bodine, from my information, i could be wrong, but from my information, they didn't get along well at all which is why he was not let back into the country to continue the investigation in regards to what happened to my brother. but going back, you did go over a lot of information -- the questions i did have. i had one particularly question for each of you. agent, you said you arrived there on october 13th, correct? >> the friday. >> and the attack was on the 12th. you say you assisted in body

recovery and recovering evidence as well. were there any -- what was going on with the crew between that time, from october 12th to 13th, were they -- did they start any investigation themselves or were they just there to try to keep the ship afloat. i know that's what they did pretty much after the attack. they were focused on keeping the ship afloat and keeping it going and make sure no other damage has taken place. but i'm curious what was going on between the time that the attack happened and your arrive. and a question for you, sir, as you mentioned one name, he was the latest perpetrator that was killed. but there are several others. one right now is in guantanamo bay. he's the one that we've been waiting on to be brought to trial and he's the one that we've been told that was the mastermind of the attack.

but we also heard several names. i kind of want to know who is the actual mastermind, was badala just a gopher or who was responsible? >> any particular order? >> talk about the crew. the explosion occurs. it's noon. they're in the line getting food if they're not helping do some other refueling event on that ship. so part of what helped the ship was actually being in a refueling status. if you understand how they secure zebraing in or closing compartments hepds keep the ship afloat. the crew, then, actually got all of the injured off the ship. the crew took care of everything that they could find.

and then were intimately responsible for helping keep that ship afloat, not just that one day before we arrived, but the entire time we were there. two or three times the generator would go down and we would all like mice come up onto the make decks and wonder what the next movement would be and the crew and captain would figure out what the problem was, get the generators going. they did a lot to keep that 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. so, no, 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. >> your question about who was the mastermind and first let me say, we mourn your brother and all the shipmates, god rest his soul. you know, that's a really great question because i guess as the saying goes, success has many fathers. and it's mostly loose press reporting. but the mastermind, if there was a mastermind, think of it in terms of the military structure, the operation element, that's where it was hatched at al qaeda corps central between bin laden himself, his main deputy who was taken out in an air strike not too long after 9/11 in afghanistan. but then if there is a local or operational cell mastermind and

leader, that's absolutely without now the man in guantanamo now. he was the colead with another al qaeda detainee who was involved in the lead-up to the ship's operations as they called it. so banatash, he was arrested in the case of mistaken identity in the summer of 1999. bin laden ordered him when he was released to get back to afghanistan. he wound up going to pakistan to be the right-hand man. he went from one major operation in ships to what they call the air operation. not only was he the al qaeda lead that communicated with al qaeda corps, he also we later

learned became the operations chief for all of the arabian peninsula and in fact 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, as you know, in dubai, sometime in 2002 and been in u.s. custody ever since that time. but i have to say, a comment on my part, in a big, big way. he's still not even past preliminary hearings and legal proceedings in guantanamo. so not even close to trial at this point. it is a capital case. we hope that justice will prevail. >> inching closer, he said. >> inching closer. >> anyone on this side? >> i have a question.

>> go ahead. >> first of all, thank you very much for coming out here and sharing your experiences. for an operation like that, when essentially you are acting on behalf of the united states, what's the reach in terms of the -- kind of the guidance and the kind of communications that you're getting when you're deployed like that in terms of, think about this, and how much kind of micromanagement are you getting from, you know, back stateside where it comes to kind of being able to focus on your operation and actually being head down and getting the stuff down versus -- obviously you have someone who is going to be acting as an intermediary back there. how much reachback there was coming to you all when you were over there. >> do you have anything? >> i was just going to say, 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 that we were getting micromanaged at all. i think the event was so unique at the time that it was not something that they -- 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. and it was a great deal of information. especially from bob's end. but definitely, we had a lot that we were pushing out as well. >> that's a really important question because as you can -- you probably, you know, get the sense and paint the story in a

narrative that there's a tremendous amount of pressure on the field element in the lexicon of the intelligence community and law enforcement, the requirements are just flooding in. but here's the big very important part of this. first of all, it was an exceptional relationship between ncis and fbi from top leadership down to the special agencies working the case in the field on the ground. >> right. >> two, the fbi had already established the protocols with the psyok, tied in with the national security council. from my perspective, the single biggest ingredient, we were blessed to have tremendous leadership that acted as a filter to make sure we weren't feeling that professional and otherwise pressure to stay focused on the job, working -- we tried to sleep as little as we could because there was just

so much to be done. but never planned for, trained for or experienced -- yeah, large responses to terrorism events like east africa as i mentioned, but not with the circumstances as occurred with the uss cole attack. from my perspective, it probably couldn't have worked better. we had tremendous leadership the entire time. >> go ahead. [ inaudible ] >> thank you. >> we know that -- you addressed a little bit about the questionable threat assessments that were submitted out to the navy. >> right. >> if you could elaborate on that leading up to this event. yemen was not the typical port

for our sailors and ships to pull into. it certainly was a liberty port. and we look at places like naples and those types of things, the work that was done on the threat assessments where we put out the information about -- we're concerned about this area, yet they obviously went into a lot of great detail on their plan. they were able to nail the ship. and i didn't come by accident because with the servicing that was done for that ship on that particular day, that particular port, if you could expand a little bit about how that played into this. because it was questionable, i guess, to say the least. >> of course, as the event happened, it was self-evident. really, a very broad, complex,

and, again, data-rich type of situation. but you're absolutely right. really quite unique in post desert storm, desert shield for navy ship visits. it was designed to be afuel. and i know i was involved for some of the advanced force protections in counterintelligence teams in fifth fleet, and then yemen, the top finalists, command leadership in the experts involved at the end of the day figured that because of the stand off -- i don't mean for there to be any irony here, but because of the standoff and the refuelling dolphin, there would be natural standoff from launched weapons, mortars of some kind. but what al qaeda did, for its part was quite ingenious in that

exploiting the local cell -- he was taken out in an air strike the first of january this year -- he was the local master mind because they knew him from other places but he would not know the nuts and bolts of the operation because of the departmentalization. but what al qaeda knew, i met a lot of people that were convinced the yemen government was complicit. that's counter intuitive to how al qaeda operated.

so my greater point there is, they were able to exploit the conditions, they were 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. so they were really quite artful in leveraging their cultural intelligence, knowledge and those things to pull it off. the other part of it, my organization, to an extent the cia, responsible for doing country c.i. c.t. threat asensements. the threat assessment at the time talked about the per miss sieve environment for transnational terrorist groups and there were a lot of pockets out of the major city and unknowns by the government so

therefore, as far as port visits and things like that. but really there's nothing definitive that said warning lights, don't go to a country like yemen. >> anyone else have a question? well, i'd like to thank you both for a fascinating discussion. thank you. [ applause ] >> for sharing the stories that only you two can share with us. it's just been remarkable. as we said before, we all owe you a great deal of gratitude for your service and all you did to make a difference. >> thank you. >> thank you. we want to thank you for coming as well. this is going to be on cspan's websites, so if you'd like to see more or refer someone to it. thank you for coming out.

weeknights this month we're featuring american history tv programs as a preview of what's available every weekend on cspan3. tonight we look at cabinet secretaries. james baker served as secretary of state for hw bush and as ronald reagan's chief of staff and treasury secretary. in this program hosted by baylor university law school. watch tonight beginning at 8:00 p.m. eastern and enjoy american history tv every weekend on cspan3. >> american history tv on cspan three. every weekend documenting america's story. funding for american history tv comes from these companies who support cspan 3 as a public service.

>> next on history bookshelf, jeff guinn talks about his book "manson" about the life of consult leader charles manson. he reports on how manson influenced and motivating the members of the consult he called the manson family to murder seven people in august 1969. this was recorded in california in 2013. [ applause ] >> thanks a lot. when i write nonfiction, i basically start with the single premises that events never happen in a vacuum. anything is the result of many past actions where different people grew up, what they thought, how they mixed together, who they met.