Front Burner Read Free Page A

painted the skyline of Washington, D.C., and the white marble monuments across the Potomac a pale yellow glow.
    The moment I walked into the front entrance is burned into my memory. On the highly polished floor of the Old Headquarters Building, the CIA seal, inlaid granite measuring sixteen feet across, stood out starkly against everything else around it. The sight stirred my emotions and raised the hairs on the back of my neck. The security guard in the lobby directed me to a phone to call John, who said he would be down in a few minutes. As I waited, I walked around the lobby until I came upon a single gold star in reverse bas-relief in the marble wall on the south side, honoring the men and women who had given their lives for our nation while serving with the CIA’s predecessor organization, the Office of Strategic Services. On the opposite wall were row after row of gold stars representing the men and women of the CIA who had made the ultimate sacrifice. I felt a close bond with these names—to me, the sacrifice of the seventeen sailors on
my ship just one year before was no different from the sacrifices memorialized here on these hallowed walls.
    A few minutes later, at 0630, John picked me up and escorted me to his sixth-floor office next door to Allen’s. For the next thirty minutes we sat, drinking coffee and catching up, until at 0700 sharp, we went into Allen’s office.
    The first thing Allen did was apologize for the clearance level of the material he was about to show me, since I had not undergone the extensive background checks and polygraphs necessary for a CIA clearance. But for the next hour and a half, Allen carefully walked me through what the CIA knew about Osama bin Laden and his organization. He began with the coordinated embassy attacks in 1998 and then walked me through the presumed timeline for the development of the plan of attack against my ship. Some of the things I had learned from the FBI’s criminal investigators—including John O’Neill, George Crouch, and Ali Soufan, who gathered evidence on the ship in Aden and at safe houses—such as the names of the suspected masterminds and in-country facilitators of the attack, for instance, were not included in the CIA briefing.
    What I found most difficult to understand was why the CIA station chief at the U.S. embassy in Sana’a, Yemen’s capital, had been unable or unwilling to ascertain that al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations operating in Yemen and throughout the region could pose a threat to ships refueling in Aden. The embassy, of course, was a couple of hundred miles north of Aden, but along with the ambassador, he was supposed to be the in-country expert and, in my view, both had failed the crew and me. But I bit my tongue. At our meeting, Allen and the others conveyed a strong sense of urgently wanting to go on the offensive and bring to justice the terrorists who had committed the atrocity against Cole , whoever and wherever they were, and that was more important now.
    As the discussion wrapped up, we briefly discussed how magnificently my crew had performed in the aftermath of the attack, taking care of each other and preventing the ship from sinking. I shook my host’s hand and said, “You know, Mr. Allen, first, thank you very much for taking the time to go over all this with me. It means an awful lot for me to understand
what our country is doing to try to catch this guy. But, I don’t think America understands. I believe it is going to take a seminal event, probably in this country, where hundreds, if not thousands, are going to have to die before Americans realize that we’re at war with this guy.”
    Allen, a bit surprised, said, “Well, hopefully that’ll never happen. I hope we’ll be able to head that off before it does.”
    John then took me around the building to talk to some of his co-workers and look at more work relating to the attack on USS Cole . I