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my ship, and I were left unprepared to deal with a new kind of terrorist threat that should have become apparent by 1998 at the latest, as a series of coordinated attacks simultaneously destroyed U.S. embassies and killed hundreds of people in Kenya and Tanzania.
    I do not wish to minimize or excuse my own failure as captain to prevent this tragedy. After I oversaw Cole ’s return to the United States and
turned over command to my successor, I wondered whether continuing a career in the Navy was the wisest choice for me, or if it was even possible. Yet despite my doubts, the highest leaders of my service, the chief of naval operations and the secretary of the Navy, repeatedly insisted that it would be wrong to hold me any more responsible than they and the rest of the chain of command were for what had happened to the ship and the crew. After they made that clear, on the day just before the inauguration of President George W. Bush in January of 2001, I was determined to keep working quietly within the Navy to try to ensure that such an attack could never happen again to another ship, another crew, another captain.
    So in 2001, with the rank of commander that I had held while I was captain of Cole , I found myself assigned to the Strategic Plans and Policy Division of the office of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, working on United Nations and multilateral affairs. The pace and scope of the work were beyond anything I had been exposed to in any of my previous jobs as a Navy surface warfare officer, but three years in a multiservice assignment was part of the preparation that Congress had mandated for all officers who would eventually be under consideration for promotion to the most senior ranks. The posting to one of the most coveted divisions of the Joint Staff was, to me, the clearest indication I had yet seen that the Navy understood the unusual circumstances of the terrorist attack against USS Cole .
    During my first few weeks on the staff, one of my former commanding officers, Captain John Russack, whose executive officer I had been on the Aegis guided-missile cruiser USS Shiloh, contacted me to see how I was doing. He had gone to work full time at the Central Intelligence Agency after retiring from the Navy, and was now deputy to Charles Allen, a legendary figure and forty-five-year veteran of the agency whose position gave him responsibility for how the CIA collected intelligence worldwide. After John had mentioned our acquaintanceship, Allen became interested in talking with me about what the CIA knew about Osama bin Laden and how it had determined that it was al Qaeda that had planned, financed, and carried out the attack against my ship. Needless to say, I was also very
much interested in meeting Allen and hearing why neither Central Command, which had operational control over my ship at the time of the attack, nor the Navy, nor USS Cole had been provided with the kind of information that would have better enabled us to protect ourselves. I also wanted to understand why, after American intelligence had developed evidence that al Qaeda was responsible for the attack on the ship—a classic act of war—and that high-ranking operatives tied directly to Osama bin Laden had directed it, no aggressive retaliatory action had yet been taken against any of them, though their whereabouts in Afghanistan, where the Taliban regime had given al Qaeda sanctuary, were well known. Almost a year after the attack, the Clinton and the George W. Bush administrations had left the issue on the back burner, as far as I could tell.
    John and I were finally able to work out a date for the meeting, and I arranged to arrive late to work that morning.
    I had never been to the CIA before this day. Driving from Alexandria, Virginia, to Langley, headed up the George Washington Parkway thirty minutes before sunrise, I could tell it was going to be a beautiful day. Without a cloud in the sky, the first glow of the coming sunrise