YEMEN Officials angry at diplomat's setup of attack

After one failed raid against Al-Qaida, there was concern that Yemen would be reluctant to strike again.
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
SAN'A, Yemen -- In an assassination plot that has the ring of a spy thriller, the U.S. ambassador to Yemen made several arduous journeys into the heart of the ancient Kingdom of Sheba to help gather the goods on what one U.S. official called the "godfather of terror" in Yemen.
Along with a small army of security guards and CIA officials, Ambassador Edmund Hull, a short, stone-faced man, braved desert wastelands to meet with the fierce Arab tribesmen who often harbor Osama bin Laden's terrorist cells.
Senior Yemeni officials and tribal sources say the ambassador, who is one of Washington's top counterterrorism experts, set up last week's successful Predator Hellfire strike. U.S. officials, they say, paid local tribesmen for information that helped locate Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, whom U.S. officials suspected of plotting the strike on the USS Cole in October 2000.
Yemeni officials angry
The attack fits Washington's new vision of pre-emptive strikes on terrorists, but it infuriated Yemeni officials.
They are angry over the way the U.S. ambassador handled both the intelligence-gathering phase of the operation and after the fact, when senior U.S. officials, including Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, violated a secrecy agreement by taking credit for the Hellfire strike.
"This is why is it so difficult to make deals with the United States," said Brig. Gen. Yahya M. Al Mutawakel, the deputy secretary general for the ruling People's Congress party in Yemen, who broke his country's official silence on the issue in an exclusive interview. "This is why we are reluctant to work closely with them. They don't consider the internal circumstances in Yemen."
Hull, who has two decades of State Department experience spent commuting between the Middle East and Washington, refused to comment on the Hellfire strike or his own role in an attack that other American officials have characterized as a major groundbreaking success in Washington's global war on terror.
Last week's dead included al-Harethi and, although all of the five other victims have yet to be identified, one is thought to be Kemal Darwish. Darwish, a U.S.-born Saudi, is suspected of being the recruiter of a terror support cell that's been rounded up in Buffalo, N.Y.
Talks about attack
The attack, Yemeni officials say, was not a surprise to the government of President Abdullah Ali Saleh.
Hull and his fellow operatives had carefully explained to the Yemeni government that the United States had the option, itself, of going after the Al-Qaida figures suspected of planning the attack which killed 17 U.S. sailors on the USS Cole. If the Yemeni government chose not to, the U.S. government indicated it was prepared to take matters into its own hands, both Western and Yemeni officials say.
But Yemeni officials did not like what they call the "free-lancing" in the countryside of the Arabic-speaking U.S. ambassador.
"We are not happy with the dealings with the tribesmen," said Mutawakel, who displays little obvious emotion as he vents his views in his own posh sitting room. "There were 'diplomatic journeys' out to the region, there were discussions, and money changed hands. We knew that if we agree or disagreed, they would do it anyway, but we are not happy at all with how it has been dealt with."
But the U.S. military had been passing the Yemenis its own intelligence on Al-Qaida activities for months. In a botched raid on al-Harethi and several other Al-Qaida fighters last December, Yemen's military lost 18 of its own soldiers. Western diplomats had been concerned that Yemen would be reluctant to strike again on its own.
Despite the criticism of the U.S. approach, Ali Saleh's own internal political critics argued he was reluctant to strike because he still owes a "blood debt" to Osama bin Laden's own fighters for openly assisting him to put down a separatist movement .