Yemen Links to bin Laden Gnaw at F.B.I. in Cole Inquiry

[Proud American]

This is old but interesting
Yemen Links to bin Laden Gnaw at F.B.I. in Cole Inquiry


By JOHN F. BURNS SANA, Yemen, Nov. 25 ‹ When an American
guided missile destroyer sailed into Aden six weeks ago, the
Pentagon, in effect, was taking a conscious risk. It was
making use of the best natural harbor on the Arabian
peninsula, but depending for the ship's safety on a government
that relies on the uncertain loyalties of army officers,
Muslim clerics and tribal leaders with long-standing links to
Islamic militant groups.

So far, F.B.I. officials investigating the
suicide bombing of the Cole on Oct. 12, in
which 17 American sailors were killed and
39 injured, say they have no evidence ‹ at
least none they have divulged ‹ that
anybody at any official level participated in
the bombing, beyond the low-level suspects
already arrested by President Ali Abdullah
Saleh's security police for issuing false
documents and helping with other logistics.

But from the beginning, F.B.I. agents have
kept open an alternate possibility ‹ that the
attack may have involved powerful figures
inside Yemen with close ties to Osama bin
Laden, the F.B.I's most-wanted terrorist.
Despite vigorous Yemeni denials, the F.B.I.
has wanted to know whether any part of the
Cole bombing was supported from within
the government, or by powerful men with
Islamic-militant credentials who live under
official protection.

From a base in Afghanistan, Mr. bin Laden,
the 43-year-old son of a Yemeni-born Saudi
Arabian construction billionaire, reached out
to Yemen for thousands of recruits for his
"holy war," first against Soviet troops in
Afghanistan, later against American troops
in the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian
Gulf. Along the way, he met men now
prominent in Sana, the capital, including a
top army commander, the country's most
militant Muslim cleric and a prominent tribal
leader. Western intelligence reports say he
gave them money to send Yemeni recruits to
Afghanistan, and back to Yemen when the
Afghan struggle ended.

Those so-called Arab Afghans ‹ about
3,000 Yemenis, and perhaps twice as many
non-Yemeni Arabs, including Algerians,
Egyptians, Iraqis, Jordanians, Somalis,
Sudanese and Syrians ‹ were then enlisted
in terrorist attacks aimed at Communists
who had run a separate Yemeni state from
Aden between 1967 and 1990, when the
two Yemens merged under President Saleh,
the Sana ruler. That pact reached its
culmination in a 1994 civil war. Mr. Saleh
finally defeated the Communists, using
large numbers of Arab Afghans formed into
Islamic terrorist units as his shock troops,
then rewarding their service and buying
their further loyalty by bringing them into
the "big tent" of his disparate government.

The F.B.I's concern over possible links to the Cole bombing
appears to have
grown as the Yemeni investigation of the bombing has
progressed. The Yemenis,
denying the F.B.I. direct access to interrogations and other
key aspects of
their inquiry, say that their investigation is nearly
complete, that it shows
that two bearded men who attacked the Cole in a fiberglass
skiff were Saudi
Arabian-born Yemenis, like Mr. bin Laden, and that the most
useful leads in the
case now lie outside Yemen.

In the last week, the F.B.I.'s concerns were heightened by the
government's
decision to open a trial, probably in January, of half a dozen
key suspects,
mostly Arab Afghans who had low-level government jobs.
American officials say an
early trial, based on evidence the Yemenis say links the
bombers to Mr. bin
Laden's network but not to anybody at senior levels in Yemen,
could obscure more
than it reveals.

The American officials draw parallels with the Saudi
investigation into the 1996
truck-bombing of the Khobar Towers military barracks outside
Dhahran, which
killed 19 American servicemen. Saudi officials prevented the
F.B.I. from
questioning any suspects and eventually held a trial,
executing the alleged
conspirators without giving the Americans any access. But the
Khobar Towers
analogy, and the mere suggestion that prominent Yemenis may
have connived in the
Cole bombing, have enraged the Yemenis.

This week, Prime Minister Abdul Karim al-Iryani, a
Yale-educated biogeneticist,
called an American reporter and denied any suggestion of a
coverup. Throughout
his tenure, Dr. al-Iryani has been caught in a political
crossfire resulting
from his government's desire for improved relations with the
United States ‹ as
evidenced by the agreement on Navy ships refueling in Yemen ‹
and its desire not
to provoke Yemenis who are militantly anti-American.

Over the fierce resistance of Yemeni secret police, the prime
minister has been
negotiating with the American ambassador, Barbara K. Bodine,
for better F.B.I.
access to the Yemeni probe, including the right to have F.B.I.
agents watch
Yemeni interrogations through a one-way mirror or a live
television relay. Until
now, all the F.B.I. has seen of the interrogations has been
edited transcripts.

In the telephone call, Dr. al-Iryani reiterated that "it is
nonsense, absolute
nonsense" to suggest that some of Mr. bin Laden's old allies
in Sana could have
played a part in the bombing of the Cole. Referring to the
Arab Afghans who
settled into Yemen's remote mountains and deserts in the early
1990's as
jihadis, or holy warriors, he said they had been contained
since joining the
government.

"Yes, these jihadis have helped us during the secessionist
war, and yes, we
decided that they must be absorbed into the government system
afterwards and not
let loose to cause trouble," he said. But that did not
translate into high-level
Yemeni connivance in the Cole bombing, the prime minister
added. "On the
contrary, nobody who planned this attack could conceivably
have consulted with
high officials, for the simple reason that they would have
known that anyone who
did would have been arrested immediately," he said.

What anybody makes of all this depends, in part, on the
assessment of Mr. Saleh,
one of the Arab world's longest-surviving leaders, and his
policy of reaching
out to Islamic militants, rather than jailing and executing
them, as has
happened in Egypt, Jordan and other Arab states. Although the
policy raises
debate elsewhere in the Arab world, it is at least to some
extent an outgrowth
of Mr. Saleh's own turbulent political past and the Yemeni
elite's history of
assassination and betrayal.

Now 59, Mr. Saleh, then an obscure army officer, became
president after an
officers' coup in which one Yemeni president, Ibrahim
al-Hamdi, was shot dead in
1977, and a second coup eight months later in which Mr.
al-Hamdi's successor,
Ahmad al-Ghashmi, a close ally of Mr. Saleh, was killed by an
agent of the Aden
Communists with a suitcase bomb.

That Mr. Saleh is still president 22 years later, despite
assassination
attempts, his aides suggest, is partly because he reached out
to potential
enemies, rewarding any who stepped into his "big tent" with
government
protection and salaries.

But the corollary is that Mr. Saleh has made allies, or at
least beneficiaries,
of men with lurid pasts, especially the Arab Afghans. Those
alliances paid off
for him when Islamic militant groups allied with his forces
and entered Aden on
June 21, 1994, finally reuniting Yemen after centuries of
division, while
killing at least 10,000 civilians in the process, according to
Western human
rights reports. Years later, the result has been to make the
capital a hive of
political, ideological and religious contradictions that were
bound to intrigue
American officials.

One of the most powerful expressions of this complex situation
was that by the
time Mr. Saleh negotiated the agreement allowing American
warships to refuel in
Aden, two of the most powerful people in the capital, after
Mr. Saleh himself,
were one-time allies of Mr. bin Laden.

American intelligence reports say both those men traveled to
Afghanistan in the
1980's to meet Mr. bin Laden, and assisted in recruiting
militants from across
the Muslim world for the Afghan struggle. One of them is Mr.
Saleh's half
brother, Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, a high-ranking army general who
is said to have
presidential ambitions himself. Some rivals attribute to
General Ahmar, a burly
man in his early 50's, an unsavory record, including financing
militant Islamic
groups.

Before the 1994 war, some Yemeni officials and Western
intelligence reports say,
the general was in charge of $20 million supplied by Mr. bin
Laden to help
settle Arab Afghan fighters in Yemen. Later, as Mr. Saleh's
military commander
in southern Yemen, he oversaw the deployment of the Islamic
groups in the
climactic battle for the city. More recently, according to
some Yemeni reports,
he may have been unsettled by Mr. Saleh's decision to appoint
as head of his
presidential guard ‹ and heir presumptive ‹ his son Ahmed Ali
Abdullah Saleh, an
army officer in his mid-30's.

Yemeni officials say the general retains strong links to his
past involvement
with the Arab Afghan network in Yemen, through his marriage to
a sister of a
prominent tribal leader, Tariq Nasr al-Fadhli, one of the
leading Afghan war
veterans living on a government stipend in Sana. Son of one of
the most powerful
sultans in southern Yemen during the British colonial era, Mr.
Fadhli, in his
mid-40's, is said by Yemeni and American officials to have met
Mr. bin Laden in
Saudi exile in the 1980's and to have fought under him in
Afghanistan. Now, he
is a member of the presidential council, a largely symbolic
advisory body to Mr.
Saleh.

Later, he returned to Yemen as leader of one of the most
active Islamic
terrorist groups. The F.B.I. files say he was the point man in
botched December
1992 bombings of two Aden hotels housing more than 100
American troops en route
to Somalia. Those bombings ‹ also directed by Mr. bin Laden, the F.B.I.
contends ‹ failed to
kill any Americans only because a detonator went off
prematurely, disabling a
huge truck bomb. The man said to have driven the truck, and to
have lost a hand
when the detonator exploded, Jamal al-Nahdi, is said by
American officials to be
a businessman in Sana.

Another prominent figure with long-standing ties to Islamic
groups is a
militantly anti-American cleric, Abdel Meguid al-Zindani. In
his late 60's, Mr.
al-Zindani heads a Sana theological school, the University of
Faith, a
beneficiary of government financial aid, where for years
thousands of students
from across northern Africa and the Middle East have been
immersed in the
militant Salafi form of Islam that has inspired many militant
Islamic
organizations, including the Armed Islamic Group in Algeria
that stands accused
of brutal massacres of Algerian villagers.

What any of those men think of the attack on the Cole is not
known. From the day
of the bombing, the Saleh government has contrived to deny
Western reporters
free access, watching carefully where they go and whom they
see. The only senior
government officials authorized to speak about the Cole
bombing have been Mr.
Saleh and Dr. al-Iryani. Dr. al-Iryani, asked about General
Mohsen and Mr.
al-Fadhli, said both men had permanently severed their ties
with the Arab Afghan
network.

Meanwhile, the questions posed by the Cole bombing have
carried American
officials back to calculations made before the
warship-refueling program began.
Then, officials like Ms. Bodine, the American ambassador, had
to explain to the
Pentagon why it made sense to bring warships into a country
that the State
Department itself had described as "a safe haven for terrorist
groups," or to
trust a government that has espoused some sharply
anti-American policies ‹ for
example, supporting Saddam Hussein in his 1990 invasion of
Kuwait.

The argument that prevailed in Washington was that the Saleh
government was
changing, and that it had taken important steps to curb
militant Islamic groups
still based in the remote parts of the country. That is Dr.
al-Iryani's
contention, and it has strong support from Americans here, who
say that Mr.
Saleh would like to tame the Arab Afghans once and for all.

Yet even Americans who pushed hardest for the refueling
agreement now question
whether the only assistance the Cole bombers had from Yemenis
came from a
handful of lower-level officials. "It was much more
complicated than that, and
required a lot of help from inside the country," a senior
American official
said. "As for who gave that help, that's like trying to sort
out the tentacles
of an octopus."

Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company