Sneak Attack

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But the fact is, Pentagon brass have received warnings about the vulnerability of Fifth Fleet warships since at least 1996, following the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia. More damaging fallout may emerge from probes into why the Cole was refueling in Aden in the first place. An Administration official said the U.S. was aware of "a general uptick in activity" in the past month among rogue groups hoping to use Arab-Israeli tensions as a justification for mischief. Yemen is a fertile staging ground for such mischief; the country is one of the world's poorest, and the government wields little control over the feuding tribes that roam through the hinterland.

Indeed, Yemen has made little progress in cracking down on terrorist cells working within its borders. One of America's chief nemeses, Osama bin Laden, has ancestral roots there and boasts a following. Earlier this year, a cabal of 28 suspected Bin Laden loyalists who met initially in Yemen was indicted by Jordan for plotting New Year's attacks on American and Israeli tourists. The country has also become a crossroads for veterans of the war in Afghanistan, some of whom later made their way to conflicts in Bosnia and Chechnya.

In recent years the U.S. has sought to improve ties with Yemen, hoping to pressure the government to defuse terrorist cells, draw the country away from its sometime ally Saddam Hussein and gain a foothold at the tip of the Saudi peninsula. Sending Navy ships to refuel in Yemen ports made strategic sense in that regard. "[Diplomacy] was at the heart of the motivation," Admiral Clark said last week. But the diplomacy outstripped the security. Crawling with terrorists who see the U.S. as invaders on the peninsula and protected only by a weak central government located 200 miles to the north, Aden was no place for Yankees, especially at a time of unrest.

As vexing as the explanations for the Cole disaster sound, the search for the culprits behind the suicide bombing could produce still more frustration. A team of counterterrorism experts, including 100 FBI investigators, accompanied by a protective force of U.S. Marines and diplomatic security agents, flew to the scene last week, setting up shop on three floors of Aden's Hotel Movenpick. Investigators believe an established organization was behind the attack, since suicide bombers are well trained and subjected to extensive psychological preparation before setting out on their missions. Pulling off an attack of last week's magnitude required considerable bombmaking expertise and access to what officials estimate to be 400 lbs. of TNT.

Forensics experts plan to scour every corner of the Cole and the surrounding port area, collecting unexploded fragments of explosive material left by the bomb. Those fragments will then undergo field tests to divine their molecular composition. Investigators will be particularly interested in anything they can learn about the bomb's detonator. Since every assailant has a favored method of wiring a bomb, the detonator's construction could help experts zero in on the bomb's provenance.