USS Cole bombing veteran to head Columbia probe

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The retired Navy admiral tapped to head an independent investigation of the space shuttle Columbia loss, Harold Gehman, is a veteran of painstaking probes with national security implications.

He co-headed a special Defense Department panel that reviewed "lessons learned" from the October 12, 2000, suicide bombing of the destroyer USS Cole. The bombing killed 17 U.S. sailors and wounded 39 during a refueling stop in the harbor of Aden, Yemen.

Gehman and his co-chair, retired Army Gen. William Crouch, avoided assigning blame for the Cole. But they found major shortcomings in U.S. security throughout the region and recommended improvements in training and intelligence designed to thwart guerrilla attacks.

In the unclassified version of their report released January 9, 2001, Gehman and Crouch made 30 findings and 53 recommendations. These recommendations were being put into force "aggressively," Army Gen. Henry Shelton, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, later told Congress.

NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said Gehman would lead an outside review of the loss of Columbia, which broke up Saturday on re-entry into Earth's atmosphere, killing seven astronauts. The independent panel includes experts from the Air Force, Navy, Transportation Department and Federal Aviation Administration.

O'Keefe said terrorism appeared to be "off the table" in the Columbia disaster, which fell amid terror fears heightened by possible war in Iraq, a nuclear crisis in North Korea and the presence of the first Israeli in space.

But Gehman's experience with the Cole and other mishaps he reviewed during his more than 35 years of active duty in the Navy "is going to guarantee that we leave absolutely no theory unturned in this particular case," O'Keefe said on the "Fox News Sunday" program.

Mishap board
The so-called Space Shuttle Mishap Interagency Investigation Board, made up of at least eight civilians and military personnel, was to hold its first meeting Monday at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.

Gehman retired from the Navy in October 2000. His last assignment was as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander for the Atlantic and commander of the U.S. Joint Forces Command, one of the United States' five geographic unified commands.

In addition to his geographic responsibilities within the Atlantic region, he was responsible for supplying other U.S. joint combatant commands with combat-ready forces, for developing joint military doctrine and for supporting U.S. civilian agencies in case of an attack on U.S. soil involving chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

Promoted to four-star admiral in 1996, he became the 29th vice chief of naval operations in September 1996 and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Other Columbia investigative board members from the military include Rear Adm. Stephen Turcotte, commander of the U.S. Naval Safety Center in Norfolk, Virginia; Maj. Gen. John Barry of the Air Force Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio; Maj. Gen. Kenneth Hess, commander, U.S. Air Force chief of safety, Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, and Brig. Gen. Duane Deal, commander, 21st Space Wing, Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado.



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