FBI to resume Cole probe in Yemen

The USS Cole was damaged in a bombing last October that killed 17 U.S. sailors.

By Andrea Koppel
CNN Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- After an absence of more than three months, FBI investigators are expected to return to Yemen as soon as next week to resume their investigation into last year's bombing of the USS Cole, a senior administration source tells CNN.

An advance team from the FBI, consisting of "technical folks," are now in Yemen to pave the way for next week's arrival of FBI agents after the long holiday weekend.

Earlier this month, the FBI and the State Department reached a tentative agreement on security arrangements for FBI investigators working in Yemen.

The FBI pulled all of its investigators out of Yemen in June after a dispute between the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, Barbara Bodine, and the FBI's lead supervisor of the investigation, John O'Neill, who wanted permission for his agents to carry heavier weapons in Yemen due to "specific and credible" security threats.

When Bodine denied O'Neill's request, saying that FBI investigators would be protected by the same diplomatic security rules as agents who guard U.S. diplomats at the U.S. Embassy, the FBI suspended its operation in Yemen.

In recent weeks, teams from the FBI, the U.S. Navy and the State Department have been meeting in Washington and in Yemen to try to work out a compromise acceptable to all parties.

Officials are reluctant to provide details of the compromise security arrangement for fear of tipping off terrorists in the region.

The United States is not yet able to say definitively who was responsible for last October's bombing of the USS Cole at the Yemeni port of Aden, officials say. However, one senior U.S. official said "our theory hasn't changed" that associates of Saudi militant Osama bin Laden were behind it.

Officials say their hope is that once the FBI is back on the ground in Yemen, investigators will be able to go through telephone records, interview and reinterview witnesses and suspects and the investigation will "be able to pick up where it left off" in June.

There will be one significant difference however: Bodine will be gone. Her tour in Yemen ends Friday. Bodine's replacement with be Edmund Hull, most recently the acting head of the U.S. State Department's office of counterterrorism.