The Best American Crime Writing (10 page)

On October 12, 2000, a small boat filled with C4 explosives motored alongside a U.S. destroyer, the Cole, which was fueling up off the coast of Yemen. Two men aboard the small craft waved at the larger vessel, then blew themselves to pieces. Seventeen American sailors died, and thirty-nine others were seriously wounded.

O’Neill knew that Yemen was going to be an extremely difficult place in which to conduct an investigation. In 1992, bin Laden’s network had bombed a hotel in Aden, hoping to kill a number of American soldiers. The country was filled with spies and with jihadis and was reeling from a 1994 civil war. “Yemen is a country of eighteen million citizens and fifty million machine guns,” O’Neill reported. On the day the investigators arrived in Yemen, O’Neill warned them, “This may be the most hostile environment the FBI has ever operated in.”

The American ambassador to Yemen, Barbara Bodine, saw things differently. In her eyes, Yemen was the poor and guileless cousin of the swaggering petro-monarchies of the Persian Gulf. Unlike other countries in the region, it was a constitutional democracy—however fragile—in which women were allowed to vote. Bodine had had extensive experience in Arab countries. During the Iraqi invasion and occupation of Kuwait, she had been the deputy chief of mission in Kuwait City, and she had stayed through the 137-day siege of the American embassy by Iraqi troops until all the Americans were evacuated.

Bodine, who is on assignment from the State Department as diplomat in residence at the University of California at Santa Barbara,
contends that she and O’Neill had agreed that he would bring in a team of no more than fifty. She was furious when three hundred investigators, support staff, and marines arrived, many carrying automatic weapons. “Try to imagine if a military plane from another country landed in Des Moines, and three hundred heavily armed people took over,” she told me recently. Bodine recalled that she pleaded with O’Neill to consider the delicate diplomatic environment he was entering. She quoted him as responding, “We don’t care about the environment. We’re just here to investigate a crime.”

“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.