Nearly one year before the attacks of 9/11, the U.S. Navy ship Cole, located off the coast of Yemen, was attacked by suicide bombers. The attack was later attributed to a cell within the al-Qaeda network; it had been supervised by Osama bin Laden. The Cole bombing alerted Americans of the reality of terrorism, though, even when the connection to al-Qaeda was established, the threat represented by the al-Qaeda network remained generally underestimated.