John O'Neill was an F.B.I. agent with an obsession: the growing threat of Al Qaeda.
Issue of 2002-01-14
Excerpt...
O'Neill knew that Yemen was going to be an extremely difficult place in which to conduct an investigation. In 1992, bin Laden's network had bombed a hotel in Aden, hoping to kill a number of American soldiers. The country was filled with spies and with jihadis and was reeling from a 1994 civil war. "Yemen is a country of eighteen million citizens and 50 million machine guns," O'Neill reported. On the day the investigators arrived in Yemen, O'Neill warned them, "This may be the most hostile environment the F.B.I. has ever operated in."
The American Ambassador to Yemen, Barbara Bodine, saw things differently. In her eyes, Yemen was the poor and guileless cousin of the swaggering petro-monarchies of the Persian Gulf. Unlike other countries in the region, it was a constitutional democracy—however fragile—in which women were allowed to vote. Bodine had had extensive experience in Arab countries. During the Iraqi invasion and occupation of Kuwait, she had been the deputy chief of mission in Kuwait City, and she had stayed through the hundred-and-thirty-seven-day siege of the American Embassy by Iraqi troops until all the Americans were evacuated.
Bodine, who is on assignment from the State Department as diplomat-in-residence at the University of California at Santa Barbara, contends that she and O'Neill had agreed that he would bring in a team of no more than fifty. She was furious when three hundred investigators, support staff, and marines arrived, many carrying automatic weapons. "Try to imagine if a military plane from another country landed in Des Moines, and three hundred heavily armed people took over," she told me recently. Bodine recalled that she pleaded with O'Neill to consider the delicate diplomatic environment he was entering. She quoted him as responding, "We don't care about the environment. We're just here to investigate a crime."