by Otto Penzler
“There was the FBI way, and that was it,” she said to me. “O’Neill wasn’t unique. He was simply extreme.” According to Michael Sheehan, who was the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism at the time, such conflicts between ambassadors and the bureau are not unusual, given their differing perspectives; however, Bodine had been given clear instructions from the outset of the investigation. “I drafted a cable under [then Secretary of State] Madeleine Albright’s signature saying that there were three guiding principles,” Sheehan said. “The highest priorities were the immediate safety of American personnel and the investigation of the attack. Number three was maintaining a relationship with the government of Yemen—but only to support those objectives.”
O’Neill’s investigators were billeted three or four to a room in an Aden hotel. “Forty-five FBI personnel slept on mats on the ball-room floor,” he later reported. He set up a command post on the eighth floor, which was surrounded by sandbags and protected by a company of fifty marines.
O’Neill spent much of his time coaxing the Yemeni authorities to cooperate. To build a case that would hold up in American courts, he wanted his agents present during interrogations by local authorities, in part to ensure that none of the suspects were tortured. He also wanted to gather eyewitness testimony from residents who had seen the explosion. Both the Yemeni authorities and Bodine resisted these requests. “You want a bunch of six-foot-two Irish-Americans to go door-to-door?” Bodine remembers saying to O’Neill. “And, excuse me, but how many of your guys speak Arabic?”
There were only half a dozen Arabic speakers in the FBI contingent, and even O’Neill acknowledged that their competence was sometimes in question. On one occasion, he complained to a Yemeni intelligence officer, “Getting information out of you is like pulling teeth.” When his comment was translated, the Yemeni’s eyes widened. The translator had told him, “If you don’t give me the information I want, I’m going to pull out your teeth.”
When O’Neill expressed his frustration to Washington, President Clinton sent a note to President Ali Abdullah Saleh. It had little effect. According to agents on the scene, O’Neill’s people were never given the authority they needed for a proper investigation. Much of their time was spent on board the Cole, interviewing sailors, or lounging around the sweltering hotel. Some of O’Neill’s requests for evidence mystified the Yemenis. They couldn’t understand, for instance, why he was demanding a hat worn by one of the conspirators, which O’Neill wanted to examine for DNA evidence. Even the harbor sludge, which contained residue from the bomb, was off limits until the bureau paid the Yemeni government a million dollars to dredge it.
There were so many perceived threats that the agents often slept in their clothes and with their guns at their sides. Bodine thought that much of this fear was overblown. “They were deeply suspicious of everyone, including the hotel staff,” she told me. She assured O’Neill that gunfire outside the hotel was probably not directed at the investigators but was simply the noise of wedding celebrations. Still, she added that, for the investigators’ own safety, she wanted to lower the bureau’s profile by reducing the number of agents and stripping them of heavy weapons. Upon receiving a bomb threat, the investigators evacuated the hotel and moved to an American vessel, the USS Duluth. After that, they had to request permission just to come ashore.
Relations between Bodine and O’Neill deteriorated to the point that Barry Mawn flew to Yemen to assess the situation. “She represented that John was insulting, and not getting along well with the Yemenis,” he recalled. Mawn talked to members of the FBI team and American military officers, and he observed O’Neill’s interactions with Yemeni authorities. He told O’Neill that he was doing “an outstanding job.” On Mawn’s return, he reported favorably on O’Neill to Freeh, adding that Bodine was his “only detractor.”
An ambassador, however, has authority over which Americans are allowed to stay in a foreign country. A month after the investigation began, Assistant Director Dale Watson told The Washington Post, “Sustained cooperation” with the Yemenis “has enabled the FBI to further reduce its in-country presence …. The FBI will soon be able to bring home the FBI’s senior on-scene commander, John O’Neill.” It appeared to be a very public surrender. The same day, the Yemeni prime minister told the Post that no link had been discovered between the Cole bombers and Al Qaeda.
The statement was premature, to say the least. In fact, it is possible that some of the planning for the Cole bombing and the September 11 attacks took place simultaneously. It is now believed that at least two of the suspected conspirators in the Cole bombing had attended a meeting of alleged bin Laden associates in Malaysia, in January 2000. Under CIA pressure, Malaysian authorities had conducted a surveillance of the gathering, turning up a number of faces but, in the absence of wiretaps, nothing of what was said. “It didn’t seem like much at the time,” a Clinton administration official told me. “None of the faces showed up in our own files.” Early last year, the FBI targeted the men who were present at the Malaysia meeting as potential terrorists. Two of them were subsequently identified as hijackers in the September 11 attacks.
After two months in Yemen, O’Neill came home feeling that he was fighting the counterterrorism battle without support from his own government. He had made some progress in gaining access to evidence, but so far the investigation had been a failure. Concerned about continuing threats against the remaining FBI investigators, he tried to return in January of 2001. Bodine denied his application to reenter the country. She refuses to discuss that decision. “Too much is being made of John O’Neill’s being in Yemen or not,” she told me. “John O’Neill did not discover Al Qaeda. He did not discover Osama bin Laden. So the idea that John or his people or the FBI were somehow barred from doing their job is insulting to the U.S. government, which was working on Al Qaeda before John ever showed up. This is all my embassy did for ten months. The fact that not every single thing John O’Neill asked for was appropriate or possible does not mean that we did not support the investigation.”
After O’Neill’s departure, the remaining agents, feeling increasingly vulnerable, retreated to the American embassy in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen. In June, the Yemeni authorities arrested eight men who they said were part of a plot to blow up the embassy. New threats against the FBI followed, and Freeh, acting upon O’Neill’s recommendation, withdrew the team entirely. Its members were, he told me, “the highest target during this period.” Bodine calls the pullout “unconscionable.” In her opinion, there was never a specific, credible threat against the bureau. The American embassy, Bodine points out, stayed open. But within days American military forces in the Middle East were put on top alert.
Few people in the bureau knew that O’Neill had a wife and two children (John, Jr., and his younger sister, Carol) in New Jersey, who did not join him when he moved to Chicago, in 1991. In his New York office, the most prominent pictures were not family photographs but French Impressionist prints. On his coffee table was a book about tulips, and his office was always filled with flowers. He was a terrific dancer, and he boasted that he had been on American Bandstand when he was a teenager. Some women found him irresistibly sexy. Others thought him a cad.
Shortly after he arrived in Chicago, O’Neill met Valerie James, a fashion sales director, who was divorced and was raising two children. Four years later, when he transferred to headquarters, in Washington, he also began seeing Anna DiBattista, who worked for a travel agency. Then, when he moved to New York, Valerie James joined him. In 1999, DiBattista moved to New York to take a new job, complicating his life considerably. His friends in Chicago and New York knew Valerie, and his friends in Washington knew Anna. If his friends happened to see him in the company of the “wrong” woman, he pledged them to secrecy.
On holidays, O’Neill went home to New Jersey to visit his parents and to see his children. Only John P. O’Neill, Jr., who is a computer expert for the credit card company MBNA, in Wilmington
, Delaware, agreed to speak to me about his father. His remarks were guarded. He described a close relationship—“We talked a few times a week”—but there are parts of his father’s past that he refuses to discuss. “My father liked to keep his private life private,” he said.
Both James and DiBattista remember how O’Neill would beg for forgiveness and then promise better times. James told me, “He’d say, ‘I just want to be loved, just love me,’ but you couldn’t really trust him, so he never got the love he asked for.”
The stress of O’Neill’s tangled personal life began to affect his professional behavior. One night, he left his Palm Pilot in Yankee Stadium; it was filled with his police contacts all around the world. On another occasion, he left his cell phone in a cab. In the summer of 1999, he and James were driving to the Jersey shore when his Buick broke down near the Meadowlands. As it happened, his bureau car was parked nearby, at a secret office location, and O’Neill switched cars. One of the most frequently violated rules in the bureau is the use of an official vehicle for personal reasons, and O’Neill’s infraction might have been overlooked had he not let James enter the building to use the bathroom. “I had no idea what it was,” she told me. Still, when the FBI learned about the violation, apparently from an agent who had been caught using the site as an auto repair shop, O’Neill was reprimanded and docked fifteen days’ pay. He regarded the bureau’s action as part of a pattern. “The last two years of his life, he got very paranoid,” James told me. “He was convinced there were people out to get him.”
In March 2001, Richard Clarke asked the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, for a job change; he wanted to concentrate on computer security. “I was told, ‘You’ve got to recommend somebody similar to be your replacement,’” Clarke recalled. “I said, Well, there’s only one person who would fit that bill.’” For months, Clarke tried to persuade O’Neill to become a candidate as his successor.
O’Neill had always harbored two aspirations—to become a deputy director of the bureau in Washington or to take over the New York office. Freeh was retiring in June, so there were likely to be some vacancies at the top, but the investigation into the briefcase incident would likely block any promotion in the bureau. O’Neill viewed Clarke’s job as, in many ways, a perfect fit for him. But he was financially pressed, and Clarke’s job paid no more than he was making at the FBI. Throughout the summer, O’Neill refused to commit himself to Clarke’s offer. He talked about it with a number of friends but became alarmed when he thought that headquarters might hear of it. “He called me in a worked-up state,” Clarke recalled. “He said that people in the CIA and elsewhere know you are considering recommending me for your job. You have to tell them it’s not true.” Clarke dutifully called a friend in the agency, even though O’Neill still wanted to be a candidate for the position.
In July, O’Neill heard of a job opening in the private sector that would pay more than twice his government salary—that of chief of security for the World Trade Center. Although the Justice Department dropped its inquiry into the briefcase incident, the bureau was conducting an internal investigation of its own. O’Neill was aware that the Times was preparing a story about the affair, and he learned that the reporters also knew about the incident in New Jersey involving James and had classified information that probably came from the bureau’s investigative files. The leak seemed to be timed to destroy O’Neill’s chance of being confirmed for the NSC job. He decided to retire.
O’Neill suspected that the source of the information was either Tom Pickard or Dale Watson. The antagonism between him and Pickard was well-known. “I’ve got a pretty good Irish temper and so did John,” Pickard, who retired last November, told me. But he insisted that their differences were professional, not personal. The leak was “somebody being pretty vicious to John,” but Pickard maintained that he did not do it. “I’d take a polygraph to it,” he said. Watson told me, “If you’re asking me who leaks FBI information, I have no idea. I know I don’t, and I know that Tom Pickard doesn’t, and I know that the director doesn’t.” For all the talk about polygraphs, the bureau ruled out an investigation into the source of the leak, despite an official request by Barry Mawn, in New York.
Meanwhile, intelligence had been streaming in concerning a likely Al Qaeda attack. “It all came together in the third week in June,” Clarke said. “The CIA’s view was that a major terrorist attack was coming in the next several weeks.” On July 5, Clarke summoned all the domestic security agencies—the Federal Aviation Administration, the Coast Guard, Customs, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the FBI—and told them to increase their security in light of an impending attack.
On August 19, the Times ran an article about the briefcase incident and O’Neill’s forthcoming retirement, which was to take place three days later. There was a little gathering for coffee as he packed up his office.
When O’Neill told ABC’s Isham of his decision to work at the Trade Center, Isham had said jokingly, “At least they’re not going to bomb it again.” O’Neill had replied, “They’ll probably try to finish the job.” On the day he started at the Trade Center—August 23—the CIA sent a cable to the FBI saying that two suspected Al Qaeda terrorists were already in the country. The bureau tried to track them down, but the addresses they had given when they entered the country proved to be false, and the men were never located.
When he was growing up in Atlantic City, O’Neill was an altar boy at St. Nicholas of Tolentine Church. On September 28, a week after his body was found in the rubble of the World Trade Center, a thousand mourners gathered at St. Nicholas to say farewell. Many of them were agents and policemen and members of foreign intelligence services who had followed O’Neill into the war against terrorism long before it became a rallying cry for the nation. The hierarchy of the FBI attended, including the now retired director Louis Freeh. Richard Clarke, who says that he had not shed a tear since September 11, suddenly broke down when the bagpipes played and the casket passed by.
O’Neill’s last weeks had been happy ones. The moment he left the FBI, his spirits had lifted. He talked about getting a new Mercedes to replace his old Buick. He told Anna that they could now afford to get married. On the last Saturday night of his life, he attended a wedding with Valerie, and they danced nearly every number. He told a friend within Valerie’s hearing, “I’m gonna get her a ring.”
On September 10, O’Neill called Robert Tucker, a friend and security company executive, and arranged to get together that evening to talk about security issues at the Trade Center. Tucker met O’Neill in the lobby of the north tower, and the two men rode the elevator up to O’Neill’s new office, on the thirty-fourth floor. “He was incredibly proud of what he was doing,” Tucker told me. Then they went to a bar at the top of the tower for a drink. Afterward, they headed uptown to Elaine’s, where they were joined by their friend Jerry Hauer. Around midnight, the three men dropped in on the China Club, a nightspot in midtown. “John made the statement that he thought something big was going to happen,” Hauer recalled.
Valerie James waited up for O’Neill. He didn’t come in until 2:30 A.M. “The next morning, I was frosty,” she recalled. “He came into my bathroom and put his arms around me. He said, ‘Please forgive me.’” He offered to drive her to work, and dropped her off at 8:13 A.M. in the flower district, where she had an appointment, and headed to the Trade Center.
At 8:46 A.M., when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the north tower, John O’Neill, Jr., was on a train to New York, to install some computer equipment and visit his father’s new office. From the window of the train he saw smoke coming from the Trade Center. He called his father on his cell phone. “He said he was okay. He was on his way out to assess the damage,” John Jr., recalled.
Valerie James was arranging flowers in her office when “the phones started ringing off the hook.” A second airliner had just hit the south tower. “At nine-seventeen, John calls,” James remembered. He said, “Hone
y, I want you to know I’m okay. My God, Val, it’s terrible. There are body parts everywhere. Are you crying?” he asked. She was. Then he said, “Val, I think my employers are dead. I can’t lose this job.”
“They’re going to need you more than ever,” she told him.
At 9:25 A.M., Anna DiBattista, who was driving to Philadelphia on business, received a call from O’Neill. “The connection was good at the beginning,” she recalled. “He was safe and outside. He said he was okay. I said, ‘Are you sure you’re out of the building?’ He told me he loved me. I knew he was going to go back in.”
Wesley Wong, an FBI agent who had known O’Neill for more than twenty years, raced over to the north tower to help set up a command center. “John arrived on the scene,” Wong recalled. “He asked me if there was any information I could divulge. I knew he was now basically an outsider. One of the questions he asked was ‘Is it true the Pentagon has been hit?’ I said, ‘Gee, John, I don’t know. Let me try to find out.’ At one point, he was on his cell phone and he was having trouble with the reception and started walking away. I said, ‘I’ll catch up with you later.’”
Wong last saw O’Neill walking toward the tunnel leading to the second tower.
Until September 11, 2001, I had more or less abandoned my career as a journalist and turned to writing films. One of them, The Siege, which I cowrote with director Edward Zwick and his writing partner, Menno Menjes, eerily prefigured the events that took place on that day. Because I had lived in the Arab world—I taught English at the American University in Cairo more than thirty years ago—and because I had in some sense pre-imagined the tragedy, I felt an obligation to lean what events had led to the attack on America and why. During the week that followed, as I was reporting for The New Yorker, I began scanning online obituaries, hoping to find some character whose life and death would help me tell the story. As soon as I saw John O’Neill’s name and read the brief details of his life—he was head of the FBI’s counterterrorism force in New York until he resigned over a trivial embarrassment, and then took a job as the head of security for the World Trade Center—I knew that he would lead me into the secret world of intelligence. The obit left one with the impression that O’Neill was a bit of a disgrace. I just knew there was more to it. That brief obit has led me into the book about terrorism I am presently writing, in which O’Neill will play a prominent role—as he did in life.
