The story of the legend of John P. O’Neill often begins on a Sunday. He found himself virtually alone at the huge office complex that was the FBI’s HQ and then the phone rang. It was the White House and he was thrown into the maelstrom.
O’Neill had driven all night from Chicago to Washington DC for his new bureau posting, chief of the counterterrorism section. He was still there the next day, his 43rd birthday, and would be for several more.
But it might be better to start in Yemen, five years and eight months later when the by-then New York-based O’Neill was tapped to lead a major overseas investigation, something of a vindication for the “brilliant maverick,” as he was described by his highest-ranking supporter in the FBI’s bureaucracy, Robert “Bear” Bryant, the deputy director who’d retired in 1999.
His transgressions — most notably a briefcase lost for two hours a few months earlier— were overlooked and he was given on-site control with a team reportedly of 150 to investigate the Oct. 12, 2000, suicide attack on the USS “Cole,” docked in the port of Aden, in which 17 U.S. sailors died and 39 were seriously wounded.
O’Neill’s last day at the FBI would be 10 months later, Aug. 22, 2001. He was pushed, in one reading of it. However, it made sense for him to go. He lived life to the fullest and beyond his means, and the lucrative offer to be head of security at the World Trade Center was too attractive to turn down.
On Sept. 11, he exited the North Tower to assess the damage after American Airlines Flight 11 had crashed into it at 8:46 a.m., 58 floors above his own office. On the street, he briefly spoke with a former FBI colleague, who described him as calm and saw him walk into the South Tower, which had been burning since United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into it at 9:03 a.m. It collapsed at 9:59 a.m. O’Neill, who while helping people evacuate had been making and taking calls over the previous 75 minutes, including to and from the two women with whom he was romantically involved, went silent. He was dead — one of the almost 3,000 people murdered in lower Manhattan that morning.
On the way to the Middle East 11 months earlier, his team stopped off in Germany, awaiting approval to fly on to Yemen, and he interviewed the sailors wounded in the attack who’d been transferred to hospitals there.
In Aden, O’Neill and the American ambassador took an immediate dislike to each other. Barbara Bodine asked if 6-foot-2 Irish-American agents were going to be interviewing the locals.
Lawrence Wright agrees in “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11” (first published in 2006 and adapted for a 10-part mini-series of the same name in which Jeff Daniels plays O’Neill) that the FBI was not sufficiently diverse generally; in Yemen it had only only six Arabic speakers in its team.
But one was at O’Neill’s side at all times, the Lebanese American FBI agent Ali Soufan, a protégé.
The al-Qaeda puzzle
O’Neill had personality clashes even with individuals who agreed with him on key issues — for instance, the CIA’s Michael F. Scheuer who shared his particular interest in al-Qaeda, founded by the Saudi Osama bin Laden — but in this instance, there was a deep philosophical difference of opinion and approach with the ambassador.
Bodine believed that Yemen was an ally of America’s in the making, and regarded it as an infant democracy. The FBI’s goal, on the other hand, was to apprehend the terrorists who’d planned, participated in and survived the USS “Cole” attack and that required being present for interviews of suspects, as confessions extracted by local police officers would not hold up in an American court. O’Neill also felt that Yemen was a key part of the al-Qaeda puzzle and he needed to find out more (events would prove him right).
Whatever the case, conditions were difficult and sometimes hostile. Law enforcement from a scientific standpoint was primitive. DNA evidence was unknown and fingerprinting barely understood. Meanwhile, members of parliament daily called for jihad against America.
Mohammed bin Laden, the late father of al-Qaeda’s founder, who’d become a phenomenally successful businessman in Saudi Arabia despite having no formal education, was from Yemen, and it was understood that the terrorist organization, the main suspect in the attack, had many operatives in the country.
The FBI team members were mostly confined to one hotel, except when they were escorted outside by Yemeni security forces, as opposed to the U.S. military, as would’ve been preferable. Meanwhile a plan was afoot in the State Department and with the higher-ups in the FBI in DC to have O’Neill removed from the country.
Yet, it was clear from most reports that he was having an effect. Soufan had told Yemenis that his boss was a “general” and so a general was assigned to work with him. The three men would talk late into the night. Soufan and the Yemeni general said to O’Neill he would need to allow for the fact that Arabs were “stubborn.” Not as stubborn as the Irish, O’Neill countered, and told a very tall tale about his great-grandfather in Ireland. The two others suggested that the absurd behavior described in his story wasn’t stubborn so much as “crazy.”
The boss of the FBI’s New York office, Barry Mawn, went to see for himself and determined that O’Neill’s arm-twisting and cajoling, allied with his charm, were getting results.
O’Neill went stateside for Thanksgiving. When there he brought a delegation of Yemeni cops to Elaine’s, the high-end restaurant that was his favorite, and other New York hangouts, as he worked them for access to key suspects.
But Ambassador Bodine barred his return. Wright is respectful of Bodine’s service and her experience in very difficult foreign assignments, but he said her priority should’ve been protecting the FBI’s investigation ahead of relations between the two countries. (Overall, though, the narrative of “The Looming Tower” is most critical of the CIA and its failure to give the FBI key pieces of intelligence, which might’ve allowed the latter organization to connect the dots ahead of 9/11.)
In the PBS “Frontline” documentary “The Man Who Knew” (first broadcast in October 2002, and viewable on YouTube), the Naval Criminal Investigative Service’s Michael Dorsey, who was there, praised O’Neill’s progress on the ground in Yemen and said he’d won respect from local officials, who referred to him variously as “brother” and “commander.”
In the same documentary, Richard J. Clarke, who’d been the White House-based counter-terrorism coordinator for the National Security Council, said, “Almost all of us who were following the details in Washington, whether we were in the Justice Department, the FBI, the White House, the State Department, the Defense Department, thought that John O’Neill was doing the right thing.”
Baptism of fire
It was Clarke that called that Sunday from the White House back on Feb. 5, 1995. They bonded immediately.
They were two people who could hardly have been more different in some respects, but both came from relatively modest backgrounds and shared a single-mindedness when it came to their jobs.
Clarke, who’d worked for the Reagan and Bush Administrations before being retained by President Clinton, was from Boston, the son of a factory worker and a nurse. Both of O’Neill’s parents were cab drivers in Atlantic City, while an uncle, a piano player who'd worked in casinos, helped the family financially.
The Bostonian, however, lived alone and had little social life outside of his monastic commitment to his work, while the FBI agent famously burned the candle at both ends and had a rather complicated love life. Wright suggests he was seriously involved with as many as three women in the 1990s, none of whom was aware of the others. He’d already become a father of sorts to the adult children of one of them, Valerie James, and an informal grandfather, when she discovered he was separated and had grown children of his own in New Jersey. After John Patrick O’Neill Jr. became a father, it would take the FBI man two months to see the new baby. In time, his grandson’s was the only family photo on display on his wall.
During their first call, Clarke revealed that the mastermind and a perpetrator of the World Trade Center bombing in February 1993, Ramzi Yousef, had been tracked to a house in Pakistan and was preparing a move to Afghanistan. O’Neill’s job was to help coordinate a team that would take him and bring him back for trial in the U.S. It proved to be a successful operation, and Yousef continues to serve a life sentence in Colorado.
O’Neill had been dealing in Chicago with issues like white-collar crime, organized crime’s involvement with drugs and abortion clinic bombings prior to his DC appointment. After his baptism of fire in counterterrorism, he began a study of Islamic extremism. Most Americans had heard of Islamic fundamentalism, but a closer study revealed something called Islamism, a political philosophy that was explicitly theocratic in orientation.
Its Christian equivalents believe there should be little daylight between church and state; within Catholicism, for instance, “integralists” support a theocratic approach.
In Egypt, from the 1950s onwards, the secular Arab nationalism of the head of state General Nasser was opposed by the Muslim Brotherhood, which favored Sharia law. But a more radical strain of Islamism grew. It was particularly identified with Sayyid Qutb, an intellectual who spent some years in the post-war era studying in the United States, and was hanged in 1966 for his part in a plot to kill Nasser.
Bin Laden once told a friend he agreed with a Muslim Brotherhood member who’d authored a critique of the more radical and violent brand of Islamism. He was to change his position over time and he became more extreme while involved with the struggle against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
This more radical vision would eventually be identified with organizations like Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which was founded by Ayman al-Zawahiri, a medical doctor, who was killed by a CIA drone strike in 2022.
The group experienced an internal crisis in 1990s when his own members felt al-Zawahiri was becoming too brutal and to survive, he merged his al-Jihad with bin Laden's al-Qaeda.
In “The Looming Tower,” Wright says, “O’Neill’s realization, shared by few, was that the radical Islamists had a wider dramatic vision that included murder on a grand scale.
“He was one of the first to recognize the scope of their enterprise and their active presence inside the United States. It was O’Neill who saw the man behind this worldwide network to destroy America and the West. Early in O’Neill’s career as the bureau’s counterterrorism chief, his interest in bin Laden became such an obsession that his colleagues began to question his judgment."
Wrote the author, “[H]e devoted himself to trying to understand this new enemy in the darkened mirror of human nature.”
Move to New York
When both O’Neill and FBI Director Louis Freeh went to Saudi Arabia following the June 25,1996 Khobar Towers bombing in which 19 U.S. Air Force personnel died, the former felt that the Saudis were giving them the run-around. Clarke said that O’Neill’s instincts were correct: the Saudis, it turned out, believed that Iran was behind the atrocity and they didn’t want the U.S. to bomb that country in retaliation.
In “The Man Who Knew,” ABC News’s Chris Isham, a friend, said that O’Neill felt that senior officials in the U.S. government, including Freeh, “just didn’t get it.”
O’Neill was advised by friends and allies to get out of Washington and to take his campaign to a field office, and on Jan. 1, 1997, he became special agent in charge of the National Security Division of the New York office.
When in 1998, two American embassies in East Africa — the Kenyan and the Tanzanian — were bombed, New York lobbied to take charge of the case. FBI HQ decided instead that Washington would send a team. A few weeks later, as it became clearer al-Qaeda was responsible, it reversed itself and asked New York to take over. But O’Neill would have to stay.
In 1999, Barry Mawn was appointed head of the FBI in New York. It was a huge disappointment to O’Neill who lobbied for the job. Mawn was an “O’Neill skeptic” and seemed set to have him removed from New York. It was O’Neill who broke the ice and suggested a few beers, invoking their shared Irish ancestry. They soon became allies and worked closely as the specter of terror loomed over the millennium.
O’Neill began at FBI headquarters in DC as a fingerprint clerk and then a tour guide while still at college. He went to his job each morning with a briefcase, even though he didn’t need one.
He was always, in the words of one friend, “too flashy in the buttoned-down FBI.”
Wright says, “From his earliest day his dress and manners, not to mention his Atlantic City background gave him a mobbed-up air.“The founding director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, was sufficiently concerned about the young agent when he first entered the bureau that he drew O’Neill aside to ask him about his ‘connections.’”
Wright adds, “The only link was that O’Neill, like the Mafia, was a product of a culture that thrived on personal loyalty.”
He quotes Clarke’s opinion, “O’Neill was like an Irish ward boss, who governed through interlocking friendships, debts, and obligations.”
“The Looming Tower” author writes, “O’Neill made a habit of entertaining every foreign cop or intelligence agent who entered his orbit.”
After the embassy bombings, O’Neill had 4 p.m. meetings with his team members in New York. He was often very often late, irritating those who wanted to get home to their spouses and children, and then upon arriving he would shake the hand of everyone around the table, delaying things further.
Wright says, “On one of these occasions, Jack Cloonan, a member of the I-49 squad, kissed the massive FBI ring on O’Neill’s finger. ‘Thank you,Godfather,’ he said.”
That drew a curt “F… you.”
O’Neill could be hot-tempered and vindictive, but also personally very kind — he remembered birthdays and helped people when they were ill.
“He was complicated,” said girlfriend Valerie James.
Just how complicated she and others were to find out only after he died. O’Neill led compartmentalized lives in the manner of Michael Collins, the revolutionary founder of the Irish state he admired greatly.
FBI exit
In the end his FBI enemies got the better of him. A leak to the New York Times told the story of his losing the briefcase 13 months before. His friend Fran Townsend, who worked for the Justice Department under Janet Reno, and later for the Bush Administration, called the piece “ill-motivated.”
Clarke had been trying to get him in as a successor at the White House, at a time when the Bush Administration was downplaying terrorism. O’Neill felt he would be blocked by the CIA, his own FBI and the State Department; then the Times story put paid to any advancement in the public service.
O’Neill’s body was found on Sept. 21 under rubble at the corner of Greenwich and Liberty streets. A thousand mourners attended his funeral on Sept. 28 at St. Nicholas of Tolentine Church, Atlantic City.
In Wright’s account, “Dick Clarke had not shed a tear since 9/11, but when the bagpipes played and the casket passed by, he suddenly broke down. He remembered the last conversation he had with O’Neill, when he had turned down the job. ‘Look on the bright side,’ O’Neill said. ‘Whenever you come to New York, you can come up to Windows on the World.’ And then he said, ‘Wherever we end up, we’ll always be brothers.’”
