The Best American Crime Writing (9 page)

It was evening when the two men arrived in Dhahran. The disaster site was a vast crater illuminated by lights on high stanchions; nearby lay charred automobiles and upended Humvees. Looming above the debris were the ruins of the housing complex. This was the largest bomb that the FBI had ever investigated, even more powerful than the explosives that had killed 168 people in Oklahoma City in 1995. O’Neill walked through the rubble, greeting
exhausted agents who were sifting the sand for evidence. Under a tarp nearby, investigators were gradually reconstructing fragments of the truck that had carried the bomb.

In the Khobar Towers case, neither the Saudis nor the State Department seemed eager to pursue a trail of evidence that pointed to Iranian terrorists as the likeliest perpetrators. The Clinton administration did not relish the prospect of military retaliation against a country that seemed to be moderating its anti-Western policies, and according to Clarke, the Saudis impeded the FBI investigation because they were worried about the American response. “They were afraid that we would have to bomb Iran,” I was told by a Clinton administration official, who added that that would have been a likely course of action.

Freeh was initially optimistic that the Saudis would cooperate, but O’Neill became increasingly frustrated, and eventually a rift seems to have developed between the two men. “John started telling Louis things Louis didn’t want to hear,” Clarke said. “John told me that, after one of the many trips he and Freeh took to the Mideast to get better cooperation from the Saudis, they boarded the Gulfstream to come home and Freeh says, ‘Wasn’t that a great trip? I think they’re really going to help us.’ And John says, ‘You’ve got to be kidding. They didn’t give us anything. They were just shining sunshine up your ass.’ For the next twelve hours, Freeh didn’t say another word to him.”

Freeh denies that this conversation took place. “Of course John and I discussed the results of every trip at that time,” he wrote to me in an e-mail. “However, John never made that statement to me …. John and I had an excellent relationship based on trust and friendship.”

O’Neill longed to get out of Washington so that he could “go operational,” as he told John Lipka, and supervise cases again. In January 1997, he became special agent in charge of the National Security
Division in New York, the bureau’s largest and most prestigious field office. When he arrived, he dumped four boxes of Rolodex cards on the desk of his new secretary, Lorraine di Taranto. Then he handed her a list of everyone he wanted to meet—“the mayor, the police commissioner, the deputy police commissioners, the heads of the federal agencies, religious and ethnic leaders,” di Taranto recalled. Within six months, O’Neill had met everyone on the list.

“Everybody knew John,” R. P. Eddy, who left Washington in 1999 for a job at the United Nations, told me. “You would walk into Elaine’s or Bruno’s with him, and everyone from the owner to the waiters to the guy who cleaned the floor would look up. And the amazing thing is they would all have a private discussion with him at some point. The waitress wanted tickets to a Michael Jackson concert. One of the waitstaff was applying for a job with the bureau, and John would be helping him with that. After a night of this, I remember saying, ‘John, you’ve got this town wired.’ And he said, ‘What’s the point of being sheriff if you can’t act like one?’”

O’Neill was soon on intimate terms with movie stars, politicians, and journalists—what some of his detractors called “the Elaine’s crowd.” In the spring of 1998, one of O’Neill’s New York friends, a producer at ABC News named Christopher Isham, arranged an interview for a network reporter, John Miller, with Osama bin Laden. Miller’s narration contained information to the effect that one of bin Laden’s aides was cooperating with the FBI. The leak of that detail created, in Isham’s words, “a firestorm in the bureau.” O’Neill, because of his friendship with Isham and Miller, was suspected of providing the information, and an internal investigation was launched. The matter died down after the newsmen denied that O’Neill was their informant and volunteered to take polygraphs.

In New York, O’Neill created a special Al Qaeda desk, and when the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania occurred, in August 1998, he was sure that bin Laden was behind them. “He was pissed, he was beside himself,” Robert M. Blitzer,
who was head of the FBI’s domestic terrorism section at the time, remembered. “He was calling me every day. He wanted control of that investigation.” O’Neill persuaded Freeh to let the New York office handle the case, and he eventually dispatched nearly five hundred investigators to Africa. Mary Jo White, whose prosecuting team subsequently convicted five defendants in the case, told me, “John O’Neill, in the investigation of the bombings of our embassies in East Africa, created the template for successful investigations of international terrorism around the world.”

The counterterrorist community was stunned by the level of coordination required to pull off the simultaneous bombings. Even more troubling was the escalation of violence against civilians. According to Steven Simon, then a terrorist expert at the NSC, as many as five American embassies had been targeted—luck and better intelligence had saved the others. It was discouraging to learn that, nearly a year before, a member of Al Qaeda had walked into the American embassy in Nairobi and told the CIA of the bombing plot. The agency had dismissed this intelligence as unreliable. “The guy was a bullshit artist, completely off the map,” an intelligence source said. But his warnings about the impending attacks proved accurate.

Moreover, key members of the Al Qaeda cell that planned the operation had been living in one of the most difficult places in the Western world to gain intelligence: the United States. The FBI is constrained from spying on American citizens and visitors without probable cause. Lacking evidence that potential conspirators were actively committing a crime, the bureau could do little to gather information on the domestic front. O’Neill felt that his hands were tied. “John was never satisfied,” one of his friends in the bureau recalled. “He said we were fighting a war, but we were not able to fight back. He thought we never had the tools in place to do the job.”

O’Neill never presumed that killing bin Laden alone would be sufficient. In speeches, he identified five tools to combat terrorism: diplomacy, military action, covert operations, economic sanctions,
and law enforcement. So far, the tool that had worked most effectively against Al Qaeda was the last one—the slow, difficult work of gathering evidence, getting indictments, hunting down the perpetrators, and gaining convictions.

O’Neill was worried that terrorists had established a beachhead in America. In a June 1997 speech in Chicago, he warned, “Almost all of the groups today, if they chose to, have the ability to strike us here in the United States.” He was particularly concerned that, as the millennium approached, Al Qaeda would seize the moment to dramatize its war with America. The intelligence to support that hypothesis was frustratingly absent, however.

On December 14, 1999, a border guard in Port Angeles, Washington, stopped an Algerian man, Ahmed Ressam, who then bolted from his car. He was captured as he tried to hijack another automobile. In the trunk of his car were four timers, more than a hundred pounds of urea, and fourteen pounds of sulfate—the makings of an Oklahoma City-type bomb. It turned out that Ressam’s target was Los Angeles International Airport. The following day, Jordanian authorities arrested thirteen suspected terrorists who were believed to be planning to blow up a Radisson Hotel in Amman and a number of tourist sites frequented by Westerners. The Jordanians also discovered an Al Qaeda training manual on CD-ROM.

What followed was, according to Clarke, the most comprehensive investigation ever conducted before September 11. O’Neill’s job was to supervise the operation in New York. Authorities had found several phone numbers on Ressam when he was arrested. There was also a name, Ghani, which belonged to Abdel Ghani Meskini, an Algerian, who lived in Brooklyn and who had travelled to Seattle to meet with Ressam. O’Neill oversaw the stakeout of Meskini’s residence and spent much of his time in the Brooklyn command post. “I doubt he slept the whole month,” David N. Kelley,
an assistant United States attorney and chief of organized crime and terrorism for the Southern District, recalled. A wiretap picked up a call that Meskini had made to Algeria in which he spoke about Ressam and a suspected terrorist in Montreal. On December 30, O’Neill arrested Meskini on conspiracy charges and a number of other suspected terrorists on immigration violations. (Meskini and Ressam eventually became cooperating witnesses and are both assisting the FBI’s investigation of the September 11 attacks.)

O’Neill was proud of the efforts of the FBI and the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force to avert catastrophe. On New Year’s Eve, he and his friend Joseph Dunne, then the chief of department for the New York City police, went to Times Square, which they believed was a highly likely target. At midnight, O’Neill called friends at SIOC and boasted that he was standing directly under the giant crystal ball.

After the millennium roundup, O’Neill suspected that Al Qaeda had sleeper cells buried in America. “He started pulling the strings in Jordan and in Canada, and in the end they all led back to the United States,” Clarke said. “There was a general disbelief in the FBI that Al Qaeda had much of a presence here. It just hadn’t sunk through to the organization, beyond O’Neill and Dale Watson”—the assistant director of the counterterrorism division. Clarke’s discussions with O’Neill and Watson over the next few months led to a strategic plan called the Millennium After-Action Review, which specified a number of policy changes designed to root out Al Qaeda cells in the United States. They included increasing the number of joint terrorism task forces around the country; assigning more agents from the Internal Revenue Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service to monitor the flow of money and personnel; and creating a streamlined process for analyzing information obtained from wiretaps.

Many in the FBI point to the millennium investigation as one of the bureau’s great recent successes. A year earlier, O’Neill had been passed over when the position of assistant director in charge of national security became available. When the post of chief of the New York office opened up, in early 2000, O’Neill lobbied fiercely for it. The job went to Barry Mawn, a former special agent in charge of the Boston office. As it happened, the two men met at a seminar just after the decision was announced. “I got a knock on the door, and there was John holding two beers,” Mawn recalled. O’Neill promised complete loyalty in return for Mawn’s support of his work on counterterrorism. “It turns out that supporting him was a full-time job,” Mawn said.

O’Neill had many detractors and very few defenders left in Washington. Despite occasional disagreements, Louis Freeh had always supported O’Neill, but Freeh had announced that he would retire in June 2001. A friend of O’Neill’s, Jerry Hauer, of the New York-based security firm Kroll, told me that Thomas Pickard, who had become the bureau’s deputy director in 1999, was “an institutional roadblock.” Hauer added, “It was very clear to John that Pickard was never going to let him get promoted.” Others felt that O’Neill was his own worst enemy. “He was always trying to leverage himself to the next job,” Dale Watson said. John Lipka, who considers himself a close friend of O’Neill, attributes some of O’Neill’s problems to his flamboyant image. “The bureau doesn’t like high-profile people,” he said. “It’s a very conservative culture.”

The World Trade Center had become a symbol of America’s success in fighting terrorism, and in September 2000, the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force celebrated its twentieth anniversary in the Windows on the World restaurant. The event was attended by representatives of seventeen law enforcement agencies, including agents from the FBI and the CIA, New York City and Port Authority
policemen, United States marshals, and members of the Secret Service. Mary Jo White praised the task force for a “close to absolutely perfect record of successful investigations and convictions.” White had served eight years as the United States attorney for the Southern District, and she had convicted twenty-five Islamic terrorists, including Yousef, six other World Trade Center bombers, the blind cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, and nine of Rahman’s followers, who had planned to blow up the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the United Nations headquarters, and the FBI offices.

O’Neill seemed at ease that night. Few of his colleagues knew of a troubling incident that had occurred two months earlier at an FBI preretirement conference in Orlando. During a meeting, O’Neill had been paged. He left the room to return the call, and when he came back, a few minutes later, the other agents had broken for lunch. His briefcase, which contained classified material, was missing. O’Neill immediately called the local police, and they found the briefcase a couple of hours later, in another hotel. A Montblanc pen had been stolen, along with a silver cigar cutter and a lighter. The papers were intact; fingerprint analysis soon established that they had not been touched.

“He phoned me and said, ‘I gotta tell you something,’” Barry Mawn recalled. O’Neill told Mawn that the briefcase contained some classified e-mails and one highly sensitive document, the Annual Field Office Report, which is an overview of every counter-terrorist and counterespionage case in New York. Mawn reported the incident to Neil Gallagher, the bureau’s assistant director in charge of national security. “John understood the seriousness of what he had done, and if he were alive today he’d tell you he made a stupid mistake,” Gallagher told me. Even though none of the information had been compromised, the Justice Department ordered a criminal inquiry.

Mawn said that, as O’Neill’s supervisor, he would have recommended an oral reprimand or, at worst, a letter of censure. Despite
their competition for the top job in New York, Mawn had become one of O’Neill’s staunchest defenders. “He demanded perfection, which was a large part of why the New York office is so terrific,” Mawn said. “But underneath his manner, deep down, he was very insecure.”