USS Cole Bombing

Two years before the USS Cole was attacked by suicide bombers in a boat packed with TNT and military grade explosives, a CIA trained US Special Forces operator arrived in Yemen on an illegal mission using military grade explosives. That’s according to the operator himself, Gary Harrington in the adjacent interview clip at 34:00-35:33. When he arrived in 1998 Yemen a Major and a Colonel in the US embassy's Defense Attaché Office thought Harrington was a non-commissioned officer working under them. But when he showed them his contradictory written orders they told him:

“Oh no you’re not, that’s illegal.
You’re a soldier, you can’t do that.”

Harrington says he overruled them by ‘showing them the regulations’ and proceeded with his illegal orders under the cover of being an advance party for a 5th Special Forces Group’s land mine clearance mission near Aden. Mine clearance requires military grade explosives.

It’d be crazy to suggest the CIA intentionally supplied the explosives that killed seventeen American sailors and nearly sank the Cole. But it is plausible the C4 was transferred to the bombers via the Yemeni military. The 5th SFG were training Yemeni forces and it’s a fact that Arab Mujahideen veterans of Afghanistan (who the West calls Al Qaeda) joined the Yemeni government system after the 1994 north/south civil war, as per Yemeni Prime Minister Abd al-Karim al-Iryani:

“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.”

And CIA contractor Billy Waugh freely admits to working with Al Qaeda in 1990s Yemen. That was most likely during the 1994 war when the USA was allied to the religiously dominated north against the socialist south Yemen:

“I worked right there with these al-Qaeda operatives and heard these arguments [about the badness of US policy] firsthand many times, especially during an assignment in Yemen.”

Waugh has a very interesting career history; as well as 1990s Yemen and 2001 Afghanistan he served in Korea, in Vietnam with the CIA backed MACV-SOG, and as a CIA contractor in 1977 Libya. Waugh was employed by another off-the-books CIA asset, Edwin P Wilson, to provide training for Colonel Gaddafi’s Special Forces. Wilson used land mine clearance as a cover for the supply of military grade explosives to Gaddafi as recorded in Britain’s parliament in 1986 when Denis Healey said:

“We know now that 21¼ tonnes of C4 plastic explosive were exported from the United States to Libya by an ex-CIA agent. Only a few ounces of that explosive were required to blow up the TWA [ Flight 840] aircraft recently.”

The CIA's Billy Waugh

Healey said ‘ex-CIA agent’ because in 1983 Edwin Wilson (after being abandoned by the CIA) was convicted in America for the illegal supply of C4 to Libya and jailed for twenty years. That conviction was overturned in 2003 when an appeals court ruled that Justice Department prosecutors had known Wilson worked for the CIA past his official retirement in 1976. Wilson said he was working at the direction of the infamous CIA officer Ted Shackley. His exact mode of operating is recorded in Prelude to Terror: The Rogue CIA and the Legacy of America's Private Intelligence Network:

"Wilson and Terpil set-up Inter-Technology for oil exploration and mine-clearing as a cover for the use of the explosives in Libya. Wilson said, “Terpil said that better than an explosive ordnance school, he should call the operation down there a mine-clearing operation.” Wilson and Terpil hired William David Weisenburger, a CIA explosives expert, to build electronic triggers for the Libyan explosives."

Gary Harrington’s career is equally interesting, starting as a Marine before transferring to Special Forces in 1984. He’d been invited to and passed CIA selection circa 1990 but did not *officially* join. Instead he remained with Special Forces and progressed to their top tier, Delta Force – a truly stellar career. But that changed in 1992 during a mission to Pablo Escobar’s recently vacated private prison in Colombia. Harrington was caught trying to smuggle out souvenirs, contravening a direct order not to tamper with the evidence. On top of a ‘grave mistake’ Harrington made on operations in Honduras, it was enough for his squadron commander to kick him out of Delta Force with a promise to ‘End his career’. But amazingly it didn’t end it. Harrington initially moved to an army administration role writing training manuals. When his past career mistakes caught up with him in 1993 he was transferred again, to the US Navy’s Fort Monroe in Virginia. After dive training he spent most of his time abroad, inspecting US navy facilities. In 1996 he was able to return to Special Forces, joining 5th Special Forces Group’s operations in the Middle East, which was how he found himself in 1998/99 Yemen.

Al Qaeda’s Presence in 1990s Yemen

In the wake of the USS Cole bombing snippets of the ongoing navy inquiry were leaked to the press and framed to blame the Cole’s crew for failing to protect their ship. The journalists should have been calling out the higher echelons that ordered the Cole’s Captain Kirk Lippold into Aden. He said he felt betrayed and set up; I agree with him. Going from Billy Waugh’s candid admission to this quote from US ambassador to Yemen (1997-01) Barbara Bodine, there’s no doubt the Intelligence agencies knew of Al Qaeda’s presence:

"When I got there in 1997, there was already an Al Qaeda presence.
We knew about it. The Yemenis knew about it. Everyone knew about it.
...these people were primarily foreign nationals. One of the best ways to describe the presence is that they were largely warehousing lower-level people in peripheral areas" - 2012 PBS Interview

Bodine said Al Qaeda didn’t have an operational or leadership presence in Yemen and characterized the foreign nationals as bored with nothing to do. Harrington also reported Al Qaeda weren’t a threat; he called Yemen their R&R destination where they got false documents and the like. It appears the USA considered 1990s Yemen as a non-threatening, non-operational Al Qaeda safe haven where US forces could peacefully coexist. But the surviving attacker from the US embassy bombings in August 1998 contradicted them both. Under interrogation he told the FBI their primary contact number was in Yemen’s capital Sanaa. He also said: “Al Qaeda is going to target US navy ships pulling into Aden”, as told by USS Cole Captain Kirk Lippold in the adjacent interview at 5:40-6:16. Kirk is very clear - that Intelligence was not passed to him before he was ordered to refuel in Aden a couple of years later.

There were many open source indicators that Aden/Yemen was a hostile port. The US navy stopped refueling there in the 1970s after anti-colonial nationalists kicked the British out. When US troops used a hotel in Aden as a transit base for operations in 1992 Africa, the hotel was bombed. In 1998 there were bombs targeting a mosque and a market, a car bomb near the German embassy in Sanaa and four tourists were killed during a rescue attempt from their Salafi kidnappers. There was even a foiled attack on the Aden hotel where Harrington and his demining team were based; the attackers comprised seven British nationals and a French citizen. When American Taliban John Walker Lindh wanted to learn Arabic he went to Yemen in 1998. And a personal anecdote from my 1997 visit to Yemen: the first person my taxi driver stopped to ask gave us directions to the foreigners’ compound near Al Qaidah town. It was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed terrorist cell’s secure hilltop base, next to a Republican Guard palace on an adjacent hilltop. EVERYONE (except the US navy) appeared to know late 1990s Yemen was a hotbed for aspiring Jihadis, and at least one of them was personally protected by CIA director George Tenet. This recording of a call from Tenet to Yemen President Saleh proves that when he asks for an Al Qaeda suspect in Yemeni custody to be released, saying this is my person, my issue, my problem.

Al Qaidah town in Yemen's central highlands is named after a military base setup there in 1174 by Saladin's armies. I was taken there on 26 September 1997 after meeting Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in nearby Taiz - details here.

We know CIA asset Edwin Wilson supplied Colonel Gaddafi with over twenty tonnes of C4 military grade explosives in 1977. CIA asset Billy Waugh was part of that mission in Libya and went on to work with Al Qaeda in 1990s Yemen.

It’s documented that two years before the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were attacked with TNT explosives, the US embassy in Yemen and the US State Department in Washington helped source industrial quantities of TNT component chemicals for the Hayel Saeed Anam Group of Yemen. The delivery address was the HSA Group’s HQ near Al Qaidah town – where I met KSM and two Pakistani chemical engineers in 1997, as detailed here and in the adjacent image. My visit to the HSA Group HQ was setup by my employers US sales agent Dave Dean; there’s strong evidence that Dean worked with Billy Waugh in 1969 Vietnam as detailed here. Dean’s company Dean Printing Systems specialized in the supply of chemicals, specifically Toluene, the principle ingredient of TNT.

I’ve speculated the C4 required for Gary Harrington’s illegal mission in Yemen may have been transferred to the USS Cole attackers via the Yemeni army. Has anyone checked the USS Cole bomb forensics to determine the source? Were they from the batch Harrington used or maybe Libya’s twenty-plus tonne stock from 1977?

I once speculated the TNT / boat used to attack the USS Cole were prepared in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s front company near Al Qaidah town, four hours drive north of Aden. I now think it was more likely the same group that bombed the Aden hotel in 1992, acting with no agenda beyond stopping a US military presence in their country. It may or may not have been ordered by Osama bin Laden, but it should be remembered there were approximately 10,000 Yemeni veterans of the 1980s Afghan Jihad with exactly the same motivations. Whoever bombed the Cole it appears to me their principle facilitators were US Intel assets – they ignored Al Qaeda’s presence in Yemen and helped designate Aden a safe harbour, plus the very suspicious supply of TNT chemicals in 1996 and military grade explosives in 1998.

It is this level of incomprehensible failures that cause me to further speculate that they weren’t failures at all. Was this a plot engineered by America’s domestic enemies to create the Project for a New American Century’s new Pearl Harbor ?

The image above shows a page from USS Cole Captain Kirk Lippold's book Front Burner: Al Qaeda's Attack on the USS Cole. It details precisely how and which explosives were used in the attack on his ship: “The explosives used were blocks of C-4 and Semtex, containing cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine, or RDX, interleaved with blocks of TNT, or trinitrotoluene.”