USS Cole

The Vessel

USS Cole (DDG-67) was an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer of the United States Navy, commissioned at the Ingalls Shipbuilding yard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, on 8 June 1996. She was 154 metres long, 8,900 tons full load, armed with a Mark 41 Vertical Launching System (with capacity for 96 missiles including Tomahawk cruise missiles, SM-2 anti-air missiles, and ASROC anti-submarine missiles), a single 5-inch gun, two Phalanx CIWS, and Harpoon anti-ship missiles. Her designed speed was 30 knots.

The Arleigh Burke class was, at her commissioning, the most capable American destroyer design ever fielded. Her Aegis combat system could simultaneously track hundreds of air, surface, and subsurface targets; her SPY-1D phased-array radar provided 360-degree surveillance at ranges up to 350 kilometres; her VLS could launch missiles for anti-air, anti-surface, anti-submarine, and land-attack missions. She was designed to protect a carrier battle group or an amphibious task force against any combination of contemporary threats.

She was named for Sergeant Darrell S. Cole, a United States Marine Corps machine-gunner who had received the Medal of Honor posthumously for his actions on Iwo Jima in February 1945. Her commanding officer from June 1999 was Commander Kirk Lippold, 40 years old, a career surface warfare officer.

The Voyage

On 12 October 2000 USS Cole was in the second day of a routine transit through the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden on her way to the Persian Gulf, where she was to join the U.S. Fifth Fleet for a scheduled deployment. Her planned port call at Aden, Yemen, was a routine refuelling stop; American destroyers and cruisers had been calling at Aden for refuelling since a 1999 agreement between the U.S. Navy and the Yemeni government had established Aden as a refuelling point for American Gulf-bound vessels.

The specific political context of October 2000 was complex. Al-Qaeda, the Sunni Islamist organisation led by Osama bin Laden, had been conducting operations against American targets for approximately five years. Al-Qaeda's previous major operations included the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (August 1998), which had killed 224 people. American intelligence had indicated that al-Qaeda was planning a major operation against American naval or shore-based assets; specific warnings about potential attacks on American warships at Aden had been issued by the State Department in late 1999 but had not produced any specific operational changes to American Aden port-call procedures.

USS Cole arrived at the Aden refuelling station at 09:30 on 12 October 2000. She moored at the Yemeni-operated refuelling barge "Cow #2" at the Aden Oil Refinery approach. Her refuelling was conducted under routine conditions: her gangway was deployed; her Phalanx CIWS was in standard security condition rather than in air-defence readiness; the Yemeni harbour boats and small craft operating in the anchorage were permitted within normal distances.

The Disaster

At 11:18 on 12 October 2000 a 7-metre fibreglass boat approached USS Cole from the starboard side at slow speed. The boat was crewed by two al-Qaeda operatives, Hassan al-Khamiri and Ibrahim al-Thawar, who had been trained for the operation over several months at an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan. The boat carried approximately 450 kilograms of shaped C-4 explosive charge, configured to direct the explosion force perpendicular to the boat's short axis.

The two operatives waved at Cole's crew as they approached. Cole's duty officer observed the approach but did not recognise the threat: boat traffic near American warships at Aden was routine, and the specific approach behaviour of al-Khamiri and al-Thawar did not violate the ship's rules of engagement. The boat came alongside Cole's port side at approximately 11:17:45 and detonated at 11:18 on 12 October 2000.

The shaped-charge explosion opened a hole in USS Cole's port side below the waterline, approximately 12 metres wide and 18 metres high. The hole opened into her auxiliary machinery spaces and crew mess areas at Frames 120-134. Seventeen members of the Cole's crew died instantly in the explosion or in the flooding that immediately followed. An additional 37 were wounded, some severely.

Commander Lippold and his surviving crew fought to save the ship over the following 72 hours. Their damage-control effort, conducted under the most extreme conditions (the port-side breach was below the waterline and admitted water at a rate that exceeded the ship's pumping capacity; the ship was listing 8 degrees to port; her main engineering spaces were progressively losing electrical power), succeeded in preventing her loss. USS Cole did not sink. She was towed out of Aden harbour on 30 October 2000 by the Norwegian heavy-lift vessel Blue Marlin for transport back to the United States.

The Legacy

Osama bin Laden personally claimed responsibility for the USS Cole attack in a video statement released on 11 December 2000. The two operatives, al-Khamiri and al-Thawar, were identified by Yemeni investigators and by American investigators working in Aden over the following months; both had died in the attack. The operational commander of the bombing, Jamal al-Badawi, was subsequently convicted in Yemen and sentenced to death; his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and he was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in 2007.

The USS Cole attack was, in retrospect, the last major al-Qaeda operation before the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. American intelligence services subsequently concluded that the Cole attack was part of a sequence that al-Qaeda had been planning for several years, and that the 9/11 attacks had been under planning simultaneously. The Cole operation had been originally planned as an attack on USS The Sullivans (DDG-68) at Aden in January 2000; that plan had failed when the al-Qaeda team's boat had sunk under the weight of its own explosive. The October 2000 plan against Cole represented al-Qaeda's second attempt at the same target class.

USS Cole was towed to the Ingalls Shipbuilding yard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, where she had been originally built. Her repair took 14 months and cost approximately $250 million. She returned to the Atlantic Fleet on 19 April 2002 and has served in continuous American naval operations since. She participated in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, in multiple Horn of Africa counter-piracy deployments, and in the Mediterranean operations of the 2010s.

The American response to the Cole attack was constrained by the circumstances of its timing. President Bill Clinton's final three months in office included a significant American retaliatory effort against al-Qaeda but no decisive operation against the organisation's Afghan sanctuary. The George W. Bush administration, taking office on 20 January 2001, had the USS Cole attack briefed as a priority counterterrorism matter but had not yet committed to a major operational response by 10 September 2001. The Cole attack was, in many subsequent American intelligence and national-security analyses, the canonical missed opportunity that preceded the 11 September 2001 attacks.

The 17 dead of USS Cole are commemorated at the USS Cole Memorial at Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia, where she is currently home-ported, and at the Pentagon 9/11 Memorial in Arlington, Virginia (where the combined dead of 9/11 and its precursor events, including the Cole, are named). Commander Lippold was awarded the Legion of Merit for his conduct in saving the ship; he retired from active service in 2007 and has since become a prominent commentator on counterterrorism policy. USS Cole remains in active Naval service in 2025.