Day 314 - After the Cole

The area of Aden known as the crater
by  JamesGardinerCollection 

Suicide bombers attacked the USS Cole while it was refueling in Aden Harbor on October 12, 2000. Seventeen sailors were killed and 39 injured. I was in Hungary. Several of the staff from the embassy were in Aden for the long Columbus Day weekend. Their weekend holiday was abruptly interrupted and life in Yemen was never the same again.

While I was still in England, I called the embassy to provide the general services officer with my flight arrangements in order to be sure one of the drivers would be at the airport to pick me up. I was surprised when the operator told me the GSO wasn't in the office. Instead of recognizing this sign that things had changed radically, I was distracted by the fact that he had just returned to Yemen from Germany before I left for Hungary. My first thought was that he had taken leave again. Not a very generous conclusion.

When I arrived back in Yemen, I didn't recognize the driver who picked me up in one of the oldest vehicles I had seen in the city. Still I didn't recognize the signs. It took going into the embassy and learning that all the embassy's drivers and the reliable vehicles had been sent to Aden along with nearly half the American staff for me to realize that normal was gone.

The GSO, David, was in Aden. The ambassador was in Aden. The Defense Attache was in Aden. The deputy consul was in Aden. And Aden was full of hundreds of official Americans, many from the military, many investigators, many security, many from intelligence. Too many for the number of hotel rooms available. Hotel managers started asking their non-American guests to move to other hotels so that whole floors could be made available to the influx of Americans. Hotel rooms became both sleeping quarters and offices. Furniture was moved around and equipment installed, not always after obtaining, or even requesting, hotel management's approval. 

Aden with harbor in the background
by  ninjawil 

Our local drivers went to Aden, so we brought in drivers from Saudi Arabia and other nearby countries to supplement our motor pool in Sanaa. Later it occurred to me that the arrangement meant that none of us had drivers who knew how to get to where we were going. We would have been better off keeping our drivers in Sanaa and sending the temporary drivers to Aden. That way at least half of us would get where we needed to go without getting lost.

The security experts who accompanied the investigators started expressing concern about the need to make the hotel secure enough for work to continue. That led to further security measures being implemented to the dissatisfaction and inconvenience of the remaining non-American guests of the hotel. Within a few weeks, the entire cast of Americans moved to a different hotel, one where the road in and out could be controlled without inconveniencing anyone else. The hotel was the only building at the end of the road and the Americans were the only guests at the hotel.

Cynthia, my sponsor and frequent companion during my first five weeks, volunteered to be the administrative officer for the operation in Aden and ended up spending nearly all the rest of her tour there.  The financial management officer also ended up going to Aden for an extended time. GSO David spent time in Aden, time in Sanaa, and time with his wife outside of Yemen. Then in December, he resigned. Those changes meant the consular section had only one full-time officer instead of two full-time and one part-time, and the administrative section had one full-time officer instead of three. 

At first, we kept thinking things would soon get back to normal. So we kept at it. I don't recall if we first asked for help or if the Department realized we needed help and offered it. A series of TDY staff came to help not just those of us with State but all the other agencies as well. Conference rooms became dormitories as people worked around the clock. Within a few months, there was talk back in Washington that every Diplomatic Security officer in Washington had already done a TDY stint in either Sanaa or Aden. The NCIS officer who was one of my Arabic language classmates and was assigned to Bahrain came to Sanaa for a few-week TDY stint. We started looking around Aden to see if we could locate office space to set up a more permanent location in the city. At one point we were able to get into the building that had been the U.S. consulate in Aden before the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) was established in the early 1970s. A safe, still locked, was found in one of the rooms, offering us tantalizing thoughts about what might be in it.

Six months after the attack on the Cole, we started talking about defining what the new normal was. We asked the regional psychiatrist and a facilitator from the Foreign Service Institute to lead an offsite discussion of what we needed to do to adjust to the changed situation. It was a step towards acceptance. But from all I have seen and heard about the situation in Yemen now, that new normal keeps shifting. In 2004 I was able to go back to Sanaa for a week and saw that morale had suffered greatly. Everyone at the embassy was looking forward to meeting me because they knew I had enjoyed my time in Yemen and none of them were enjoying it. If I were dropped back into Sanaa today, I don't think I would recognize the place.

Less than a month after the offsite, the entire operation in Aden was abandoned based on the FBI's assessment that it was no longer safe for its staff to remain there. And normal kept shifting.

Day 309 - Preview Of Yemen

by  ~W~ 

When it was time for me to bid on my next job, the important criteria were first, that the job be in the middle east, as close to Abu Dhabi as possible, and second, that the job involve Arabic language training because I would need Arabic in order to be a credible candidate for a different job back in the U.A.E. later. The latter was important because we believed Alex would be able to continue working for Lucent until he was ready to retire. It didn't turn out that way, but we couldn't know that in advance. It was the plan. Plans change.

According to our plan, if we wanted to continue living together, I would have to bid successfully on a job at the same or higher grade in either Abu Dhabi or Dubai after my next job. Since I was leaving the most senior level position in the administrative function, I would have to bid on a job outside my specialty as head of the consular, economic, or political sections or even as deputy chief of mission in Abu Dhabi or consul general in Dubai. The latter four positions required Arabic language competency and there was no way I would be a credible candidate for the jobs if I didn't already have the language. The Department didn't send out-of-specialty bidders for senior jobs to language training because there were too many uncertainties and too much time involved. Since it had been years since I had done any consular work, I wouldn't be a credible candidate for the head of the consular section whether or not I had Arabic language competency.

There were two possible administrative positions in the region that were language-designated which meant I could get the language training before going there - in Damascus and Sanaa. The Damascus job was a higher grade and Damascus was just that much further away that it would be more difficult to get away to the U.A.E. to spend time with Alex, putting two strikes against Damascus. Whether I wanted to go to Yemen or not (and I didn't), the job in Sanaa was the only one that both met the criteria and I had any hope of being assigned to.

And that is what happened - I was assigned to Sanaa via one year of Arabic language training in Washington. And Alex planned to remain in Abu Dhabi.

At one point, I considered requesting approval to study Arabic in Sanaa so that Alex and I wouldn't be separated by such a great distance. One of the State employees in Abu Dhabi had done that. But I realized my reason - that I wanted to be closer to my husband - would be seen as a personal reason and the Department never approves arrangements for an employee's personal benefit.

by  CharlesFred 

We decided to make a trip to Sanaa from Abu Dhabi to see what I was getting into. The administrative oifficer in Sanaa, Howard, made arrangements for us that an official visitor would have reason to expect, but we were unofficially there. He picked us up at the airport, put us up in one of the embassy's leased apartments, and brought us to the embassy to meet people as well as traveled with us outside of the capital to see some of the countryside. This was much more than we had a right to expect.

When we arrived at the airport, things looked chaotic. It was our first view of the traditional Yemeni dress with men wearing what would be described as dresses or skirts, scarves on their head, sports coats worn over the ceremonial knife, the jambia, worn around the waist, with rifles over their shoulders. It was an intimidating introduction.

Typical scene in Yemen cities in 1999

Once we got out of the airport and into a vehicle, all we could see was garbage. The roads were littered with trash. Not just paper, trash. The sides of the roads were full of trash. When we got into the city itself, it wasn't any better. Most houses had high walls around them, so we couldn't see what the grounds near the houses were like, but outside the walls, there was trash.

We hadn't gotten very far before Alex announced that he wasn't coming back. 

At the embassy, we met the ambassador, Barbara Bodine, and the deputy chief of mission, Margaret Scobey. We talked about the possibility of my coming to Yemen for my language training. That might have been a way for me to make the case - if the embassy requested that I attend one of the language schools in Sanaa instead of going back to Washington. But it also raised my suspicions that I would end up working at the embassy and not get in the amount of studying I needed to master the language - the primary goal for bidding on the Sanaa job.].

While meeting with the two of them, Alex announced that he didn't see that there would be anything for him to do in Sanaa.

Village outside of Sanaa

Howard took us to a village about a half-hour's drive from Sanaa to see the sights and do some shopping in the souq. This village was well known for the number of school-aged children who could converse - and bargain - in multiple languages. They spoke English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and probably Russian and a couple of other Slavic languages. The children would approach tourists, figure out which language the tourists spoke, and then lead the tourists down the narrow alleyways to the shopping area, providing commentary on the traditional architecture along the way. There wasn't much special in the souq, but the children provided entertainment worth the trip. Sadly, embassy staff members no longer can travel outside Sanaa without permission and armed escorts due to the deteriorating security situation in the region.

All along the way, there was garbage on the roads.

Alex in a village outside Sanaa

We went to dinner with the regional medical officer - the same medical officer who had Abu Dhabi as part of his regional responsibility - and his wife at a fish restaurant where the fish were swimming around in a tank, ensuring our meal would be fresh. The fish is baked in a clay oven right alongside the flat bread that is served with the fish. And we talked about the garbage that we just couldn't ignore. The RMO's wife said she had started going outside the walls of their house each day to sweep up the trash in front of the house. Initially she was greeted with stares from her neighbors. But one day she noticed another woman on her street outside the walls at the same time, also sweeping up the trash. There was hope.

Howard also took us to Sanaa's old city, the UNESCO heritage site the gates of which are one of the most recognizable of Yemen's views. As we made our way through the very narrow and twisting alleys, we popped into several of the shops where Howard introduced us to the shopkeepers. We weren't interested in buyng anything yet, but at one point Alex did announce to a shopkeeper that he would be interested in looking at one of the items later, when we returned to Sanaa.

We still couldn't ignore the trash. But we began to see beyond it to the adventures we had to look forward to.