Barbara Bodine - Ambassador To Yemen and USS Cole Bombing

Ambassador To Yemen and USS Cole Bombing

On November 7, 1997, Bodine was appointed to be Ambassador to the Republic of Yemen. Bodine's appointment in Sana'a coincided with events of major importance in Yemen: In 1999, Bodine negotiated the release of three Americans kidnapped in Yemen. On October 12, 2000, the destroyer Cole was bombed in a terrorist attack in the Gulf of Aden. In January 2001, en route to the Yemeni city of Taiz to meet with the country's president, a flight carrying Bodine and 90 other passengers from Yemen was hijacked mid-flight. The plane was diverted to the small African nation of Djibouti, where it landed without further incident. Bodine left Yemen as ambassador on August 30, 2001.

Bodine's career was marked by controversy surrounding her relationship with the FBI during its investigation of the USS Cole bombing: The PBS Frontline documentary The Man Who Knew included interviews with officials such as Richard A. Clarke (the Clinton administration's counterterrorism chief) and Barry Mawn (a former head of the New York FBI office) who stated that John P. O'Neill (an FBI agent and al-Qaeda expert) came into a personal conflict with Bodine over different perspectives on Yemen. When O'Neill briefly traveled back to New York for Thanksgiving, Bodine denied his re-entry visa, blocking O'Neill from returning to Yemen to continue the investigation on the USS Cole bombing. Frontline cited sources as saying that "O'Neill's removal from the scene in Yemen may have seriously limited the Cole investigation," and some have speculated that if Bodine had not blocked O'Neill's return, the September 11 plot might have been foiled.

The chilly relationship between Bodine and O'Neill is detailed in Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower. While O'Neill viewed Yemen as a serious threat, unstable from the Yemeni Civil War, with a large number of weapons, large cells of Ayman al-Zawahiri's al-Jihad, and many Mujahideen veterans from the war in Afghanistan, Bodine, in contrast, viewed Yemen as an infant democracy, a "promising American ally in an unsettled but strategically important part of the world." O'Neill also took a hard line toward the Yemeni security forces and viewed his mission as a criminal investigation, while Bodine viewed O'Neill as reckless and harmful to diplomacy. Bodine was furious when O'Neill arrived with 150 investigators and other staff; she had thought she had an understanding with O'Neill that his staff would total no more than 50. Murray Weiss wrote in The Man Who Warned America, a biography of O'Neill, that Bodine "took an immediate and strong dislike to O'Neill, and seemingly worked to hamper some of his initiatives."

Following the apprehension of Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, an alleged suicide bomber who is reported to have been trained and equipped in Yemen, Michelle Shephard, writing in the Toronto Star, published excerpts of an interview she conducted with Bodine. Bodine criticized the withdrawal of support the USA was providing to enhance the governance and infrastructure in Yemen, warning against US unilateral military intervention there:

If we go in and make this our war ... it is suddenly going to become a war against us and we will lose it.