Is officer a casualty in U.S. terrorism war?
Ex-Cole skipper says he wasn't warned of danger before attack
modbee.com
Cmdr. Kirk Lippold, the ex-skipper of the USS Cole, on April 1. Some family members of Cole victims believe he deserves punishment.
JENNIFER ACKERMAN/SPECIAL TO THE BEE
By JAMES ROSEN
BEE WASHINGTON BUREAU
April 23, 2006
First of a two-part series.
SHARPSBURG, Md. -- In October, as he had done on the same day in each of the four previous Octobers, a middle-aged man with an upright military bearing approached a grave at Antietam National Cemetery.
The man stood in silence for a minute, then lowered his head in tribute to a fallen seaman: Patrick Howard Roy, one of 17 sailors killed when al-Qaida operatives blew a huge hole into the USS Cole in the Yemen port of Aden on Oct.12, 2000.
The man who attended Roy's grave, Kirk Lippold, was his commanding officer on the Cole. While Lippold's punishment has not been made public, he is the first commissioned military officer or civilian official to be held accountable, since George W. Bush became president, for failing to prevent an act of terrorism against the United States.
Bush has been criticized for not holding more people accountable, particularly in connection with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, faulty prewar intelligence and poor war planning. In recent days, he has defended Donald H. Rumsfeld against withering attacks from retired generals angry over the defense secretary's handling of Iraq.
But now some are questioning whether the White House and Congress, in denying Lippold's Pentagon-approved promotion to the rank of captain, have nailed the right man.
Breaking his silence for the first time, Cmdr. Lippold, now 46, says the system is wrong to blame him for the attack on the Cole.
"If you want accountability, there was one accountable of- ficer on that ship, and that was me," Lippold said. "But if you want to blame me for allowing that attack on my ship that killed 17 of my sailors -- that is essentially putting me as a U.S. military commander in the war on terrorism on the same level as Osama bin Laden, and I believe that's wrong."
The fall guy?
Retired Navy Cmdr. Bob Brogan puts it more succinctly.
"Our friend has gotten a royal screwing," said Brogan, who was Lippold's ROTC instructor at Carson City High School in Nevada. "He went into that port completely blind."
Not everyone agrees Lippold should escape responsibility. Some military officials and family members of Cole victims believe he deserves punishment. So, apparently, does Republican Sen. John Warner, who as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee is the man most responsible for scuttling Lippold's promotion.
"They told us he deserved a medal for saving his ship and preventing his crew from drowning," said Anton Gunn, whose brother, Seaman Cherone Gunn, perished on the Cole. "Well, what about saving my brother and his 16 shipmates from dying? What did he do to prevent that?"
Yet there is more to this story. In particular, there are questions about why Lippold didn't know, prior to his refueling stop in Yemen, that two Defense Department intelligence programs had found signs of a possible attack on U.S. interests in the Middle East in the days before the Cole bombing.
One of them, a secret program now known as Able Danger, had identified Yemen as one of five "hot spots" of al-Qaida activity believed to be targeting U.S. interests. Two Able Danger analysts briefed Gen. Peter Schoomaker, then head of U.S. Special Operations Command, on their findings. The date was Oct. 10, two days before the attack on the Cole.
Nothing about the briefing reached him, said Lippold. Nor was he told that U.S. embassies in Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East had been closed for fear of violence.
At a time when no high-level official has been punished for failures in the war on terrorism, the controversy over Lippold's failed promotion puts him at center stage.
"The Senate Armed Services Committee might be holding Lippold accountable, but it is not holding anyone else accountable," said John Hutson, a former Navy judge advocate general and dean of the Franklin Pierce Law School in Concord, N.H. "Kirk has become a pawn in this greater game dealing not only with questions of accountability, but also with our response to terrorism."
The attack
As the intelligence analysts briefed Schoomaker on Oct. 10, 2000, the USS Cole was sailing at a brisk clip through the Red Sea. Lippold needed to hurry because a dispute over his itinerary between competing Navy commands had him running low on fuel.
His options limited, Lippold was finally told to go to Yemen.
Yemen, the ancestral homeland of Osama bin Laden, had supported Saddam Hussein during the 1991 gulf war. The Navy had refused to send its ships there during three decades of communist rule followed by internecine strife and widespread kidnappings of foreigners.
Trying to repair relations with the United States and other Western powers, Yemen had persuaded the Pentagon to allow naval vessels into Aden only two years before the Cole's arrival.
After making port at midmorning on Oct. 12, Lippold authorized three Yemeni barges to come out and remove garbage. He believed they had been vetted by a Yemen "husbanding agent" the U.S. Embassy there had hired. Preceded by the pilot boat, two tugs and two skiffs also servicing the Cole, two trash barges had come and gone.
As the next boat approached, its Arab crew members waved to the sailors up high on the Cole deck. The sailors waved back.
But instead of picking up garbage, the two Arabs on the boat detonated their cargo of explosives.
The blast blew a 40-by- 40-foot hole in the port side of the Cole, smashing bulkheads and destroying an engine room, the cook's galley and the ship's repair shop. Most of the 59 sailors who suffered casualties were killed or wounded in the first horrifying moments.
Lippold was reading message traffic in his stateroom when the Cole was hit. Fearing a gas explosion during the refueling, he raced upstairs for the deck, running through narrow hallways thick with smoke.
Lt. Cmdr. Debbie Powell, chief engineer on the Cole, was also in her stateroom. The explosion flung her to the floor from her desk chair. She, too, thought there had been a refueling accident.
Powell headed for the central control station deep in the ship's bowels, but heavy smoke repelled her. She donned emergency oxygen headgear and descended again.
Her control station was flooded by rising water. Torn electrical wires flailed like snakes. One of the Cole's engines was disabled, the ventilation system knocked out. Tem- peratures began rising to 130degrees.
Lippold arrived with even worse news: The Cole had been bombed. It might not be the last attack. Powell asked whether he had seen some of her missing crew.
"He didn't want to go into details," she said in an interview. "He said, 'If you haven't seen them, they're not going to be here.'"
Six of the 17 slain sailors worked directly for Powell.
Lippold spent his first hours after the attack overseeing medical evacuation of the 42 wounded sailors. For the next three weeks, he and his crew engaged in a round-the-clock effort to prevent the Cole from sinking.
When Lippold returned home Nov. 3, he received a hero's welcome for having saved the $1 billion guided-missile destroyer, prevented further loss of life and calmed 275 traumatized sailors.
The praise would not last.
The intelligence
Just hours after the attack on the Cole, Kie Fallis arrived at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, where he worked as a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst.
The next day, enraged by the Cole bombing, Fallis resigned.
For most of 1999 and 2000, Fallis had logged 80-hour work weeks on an intense project tracing a terrorist network called al-Qaida and its leader, Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden was suspected of having orchestrated the 1998 attacks on two U.S. embassies in East Africa and the 1996 truck bombing of Khobar Towers, a U.S. Air Force housing complex in Saudi Arabia.
Like a puzzle expert piecing together thousands of jigsaw pieces, Fallis was amazed by the picture that emerged. Instead of being a loosely affiliated network, al-Qaida looked more like a sophisticated mobster outfit.
By autumn 2000, Fallis felt more and more certain that U.S. interests in the Middle East were threatened. Yemen was on his short list of countries with the most likely targets.
But Fallis' bosses at DIA rejected his increasingly forceful requests to alert U.S. embassies, military bases, companies and other assets in the region. His analysis, they told him, was too speculative.
Fallis was not the only intelligence analyst zeroing in on al-Qaida -- and on Yemen.
In 2005, a Navy captain Lippold did not know contacted him. The captain, Scott Phillpott, told Lippold that less than a year before the Cole attack he had been placed in charge of a top-secret experimental program called Able Danger.
Phillpott led a dozen experts handpicked from across the U.S. military and its defense contractors. Like Fallis' goal, their mission was to find out as much as they could about al-Qaida.
But unlike Fallis' lonely quest, Able Danger was a team effort established at the highest level -- set up by directive of Gen. Hugh Shelton, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and overseen by Schoomaker.
As the summer turned to fall in 2000, Phillpott's crew was reaching some of the same conclusions that Fallis had made.
In early autumn, Phillpott flew to the Special Operations headquarters in Tampa, Fla. On Oct. 10, joined by a Pentagon civilian employee also assigned to Able Danger, Phillpott briefed Schoomaker on his team's findings.
They had, he told the general, identified five "hot spots" of al-Qaida activity -- places where they believed U.S. interests were most vulnerable.
One of the hot spots was Yemen.
But as the Cole approached Aden on Oct. 12, the findings of Phillpott and his Able Danger team had not reached Lippold.
Phillpott was incensed as he relayed the information to Lippold a year ago.
Lippold was astounded.
"I'm very disappointed and more than a little angry that the actionable intelligence was out there but wasn't being adequately analyzed," Lippold said. "I went into that port blind from an intelligence perspective."
An even more relevant piece of intelligence was unknown to Lippold -- and to U.S. law enforcement officials -- as he arrived in Yemen: Less than 10 months earlier, the same small boat that was about to blow a hole in his ship had tried to attack the USS Sullivans -- and in the same port of Aden.
That first time, the weight of the explosives sank the boat before it reached the U.S. warship. In the aftermath, the al-Qaida agents had raised the skiff, reinforced its hull and even tested the explosives.
They were confident the second suicide bombing would be successful.
Their new target was the USS Cole.
Monday: Taking sides over Navy Cmdr. Kirk Lippold. |
