Cole Departs Yemen, a Sea of Questions in Its Wake

Blasting “God Bless America” and Kid Rock rap through the shipboard PA system, the crippled $1-billion guided missile destroyer Cole inched out of this port city with the aid of four small Yemeni tugs Sunday, ending the first chapter in one of the most humbling attacks in modern U.S. naval history.

Members of the Yemeni navy lined up at attention on the dock beside their rusting Soviet-era frigates, some saluting the U.S. sailors standing rigid in dress blues on deck, as the Cole limped by--its gaping 40-by-40-foot hole that was inflicted by a tiny, bomb-packed fiberglass boat in full view--to the lyric “I wanna be a cowboy, baby.”

“What happened Oct. 12 was a tragedy. It was an insult. It was a crime,” declared U.S. Ambassador Barbara Bodine, who watched the departure ceremony from shore. “But I think what we saw this morning as we watched the USS Cole is that it was not in any way a defeat.”

Still, as the wounded warship disappeared into the afternoon horizon of the Gulf of Aden to a waiting Norwegian salvage ship that will carry all 505 feet and 1.7 million pounds of it piggyback to U.S. shores, it left behind far more questions than answers about a terrorist attack that is likely to be debated for years to come.

Eighteen days after at least two suicide bombers motored to within feet of the Cole’s midsection during a routine refueling and garbage-disposal stop in this historically violent Islamic land, U.S. and Yemeni investigators are still trying to work out just how to jointly investigate the crime that left 17 sailors dead and 39 injured--let alone solve it.

Declaring an end to the “interagency crisis-support phase” of the investigation with the Cole’s departure, Bodine told reporters Sunday that “there will be a second phase, and it will be a very long one.”

This next stage, she added, “will not be easy. We know this. But it is something that both President Clinton and I and [Yemeni] President Ali Abdullah Saleh are committed to seeing through until the end.”

Earlier, though, a senior U.S. government official explained that cooperation in the U.S.-Yemeni probe, in which American agents reportedly have been barred from directly questioning witnesses, has suffered in part from a clash of cultures.

“We are trying to bring two very, very different structures and systems to work together,” said the official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity and stressed that the Clinton administration is “satisfied with the cooperation” it is getting from Yemeni police and the state security agencies that are leading the probe.

Graphic eyewitness accounts of the attack are likely to add even more questions in the days ahead, when the more than 200 officers and enlisted personnel aboard the Cole as it left port are flown home and begin speaking publicly for the first time.

So far, the ubiquitous President Saleh--whose smiling portrait appears on houses, billboards, fishing huts, pickup trucks and the harbor route the Cole took toward home--has been the sole source of key information in the case. He has publicly blamed the attack on Arab veterans of Afghanistan’s Islamic holy war who spent up to two months here first rigging the suicide boat and monitoring Aden’s harbor, then penetrating port security.

FBI investigators in the U.S. are analyzing dozens of bags and boxes of forensic evidence gathered from the ship and the bombers’ hide-outs in Aden.

The agency’s scientists are seeking to identify the size, material and origin of the bomb that tore through the Cole, which was so badly damaged, a U.S. official here said, it had to be patched extensively just to manage the 23-mile tow from the harbor to the Norwegian salvage ship Blue Marlin.

The Cole left behind more than 40 FBI agents billeted on several Navy ships well offshore, partly for their security and partly in deference to Yemeni sovereignty. Bodine insisted Sunday that the agents are commuting by Navy helicopter to Aden on an “as-needed basis. . . . They’re not all sitting out bobbing around in the Arabian Sea doing nothing.”

For the Yemenis, the Cole’s exit was an occasion for both relief and concern.

Fishermen such as Amin Muraisa, 43, were happy. Their boats have been barred by Yemeni security from moving freely to sea since the blast, while the price of fish has soared.

And port Controller Khalid Mohammed Ali was almost ecstatic as he explained how the Cole left just in time for the arrival of the German cruise ship Berlin, a port call scheduled for Tuesday.

When asked whether American warships will ever return to a port that is vital to Yemen’s economic future, he shrugged, flashed a worried smile and offered, “Why not?”