“On September 27, 2000, two weeks before the [USS] Cole attack, bin Laden told a group of al-Qaeda members about the ‘possibility of a missile attack by the infidels’ on their training camps. Around the time of the Cole bombing, the al-Qaeda leader evacuated everyone from his compound at Kandahar airport [Afghanistan] and split up from his senior advisers Mohammed Atef and Ayman al-Zawahiri so that all three would not be killed together in the event of a retaliatory American strike. But bin Laden’s precautions were unnecessary; the United States never retaliated for the Cole attack.”
– Peter Bergen, The Longest War, Page 46