Osama bin Laden had been linked to terrorism since the first World Trade Center bombing, in 1993. His name had turned up on a list of donors to an Islamic charity that helped finance the bombing, and defendants in the case referred to a “Sheikh Osama” in a recorded conversation. “We started looking at who was involved in these events, and it seemed like an odd group of people getting together,” Clarke recalled. “They clearly had money. We’d see CIA reports that referred to ‘financier Osama bin Laden,’ and we’d ask ourselves, ‘Who the hell is he?’ The more we drilled down, the more we realized that he was not just a financier-he was the leader. John said, ‘We’ve got to get this guy. He’s building a network. Everything leads back to him.’ Gradually the CIA came along with us.”
O’Neill worked with Clarke to establish clear lines of responsibility among the intelligence agencies, and in 1995 their efforts resulted in a presidential directive giving the FBI the lead authority both in investigating and in preventing acts of terrorism wherever Americans or American interests were threatened. After the April 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City, O’Neill formed a separate section for domestic terrorism, but he concentrated on redesigning and expanding the foreign-terrorism branch. He organized a swap of deputies between his office and the CIA’s counterterrorism center, despite resistance from both agencies.
“John told me that if you put the resources and talents of the CIA’s counterterrorism center and the FBI’s counterterrorism section together on any issue, we can solve it-but we need both,” Lipka recalled. In January 1996, O’Neill helped create a CIA station, code-named Alec, with a single-minded purpose. “Its mission was not just tracking down bin Laden but focusing on his infrastructure, his capabilities, where he got his funding, where were his bases of operation and his training centers,” Lipka said. “Many of the same things we are doing now, that station was already doing then.”
The cooperation that O’Neill achieved between the bureau and the CIA was all the more remarkable because opinions about him were sharply polarized. O’Neill could be brutal, not only with underlings but also with superiors when they failed to meet his expectations. An agent in the Chicago office who felt his disapproval told me, “He was smarter than everybody else, and he would use that fine mind to absolutely humiliate people.”
In Washington, there was one terrorist-related crisis after another. “We worked a bomb a month,” Lipka recalled. Often O’Neill would break for dinner and be back in the office at ten. “Most people couldn’t keep up with his passion and intensity,” Lipka said. “He was able to identify those people who shared his work ethic, and then he tasked the living shit out of them, with e-mails and status briefings and phones and pagers going off all the time, to the point that I asked him, ‘When do you sleep?’” O’Neill began acquiring nicknames that testified to his relentlessness, among them the Count, the Prince of Darkness, and Satan.
But many in the bureau who disliked O’Neill eventually became devoted followers. He went to extraordinary lengths to help when they faced health problems or financial difficulty. “He was our Elvis-you knew when he was in the house,” Kevin Giblin, the FBI’s head of terrorist warning, recalled.
O’Neill’s tenure in the FBI coincided with the internationalization of crime and law enforcement. Prior to his appointment as the bureau’s counterterrorism chief, the FBI had limited its involvement to operations in which Americans had been killed. “O’Neill came in with a much more global approach,” Lipka told me. One of his innovations was to catalogue all the explosives used by terrorists worldwide. “He thought, ‘When a bomb goes off in the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, even though no Americans were killed, why don’t we offer our assistance, so that we can put that information on a global forensic database,’” Lipka said. Since 1984, the FBI had had the authority to investigate crimes against Americans abroad, but that mandate had been handicapped by a lack of cooperation with foreign police agencies. O’Neill made a habit of entertaining every foreign cop or intelligence agent who entered his orbit. He called it his “night job.”
“John’s approach to law enforcement was that of the old Irish ward boss to governance: you collect friendships and debts and obligations, because you never know when you’re going to need them,” Clarke told me. He was constantly on the phone, doing favors, massaging contacts. By the time he died, he had become one of the best-known policemen in the world. “You’d be in Moscow at some bilateral exchange,” Giblin recalled, “and you’d see three or four men approach and say, in broken English, ‘Do you know John O’Neill?’”
The need to improve relationships with foreign police agencies became apparent in November 1995, when five Americans and two Indians died in the bombing of an American-run military training center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The FBI sent over a small squad to investigate, but the agents had scarcely arrived when the Saudis arrested four suspects and beheaded them, foreclosing any opportunity to learn who was behind the operation.
In the spring of 1996, Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, who had supported a plot by Al Qaeda against American soldiers in Somalia four years earlier, arrived at the American embassy in Asmara, Eritrea. The CIA debriefed him for six months, then turned him over to the FBI, which put him in the witness protection program. Fadl provided the first extensive road map of the bin Laden terrorist empire. “Fadl was a gold mine,” an intelligence source who was present during some of the interviews told me. “He described the network, bin Laden’s companies, his farms, his operations in the ports.” Fadl also talked about bin Laden’s desire to attack Americans, including his ambition to obtain uranium. The news was widely circulated among members of the intelligence community, including O’Neill, and yet the State Department refused to list Al Qaeda as a terrorist organization.
On June 25, 1996, O’Neill arranged a retreat for FBI and CIA agents at the bureau’s training center in Quantico, Virginia. “We had hot dogs and hamburgers, and John let the CIA guys on the firing range, because they never get to shoot,” Giblin recalled. “Then everyone’s beeper went off.” Another explosion in Saudi Arabia, at the Khobar Towers, a military housing complex in Dhahran, had killed nineteen American soldiers and injured more than five hundred other people, including Saudis. O’Neill assembled a team of nearly a hundred agents, support personnel, and members of various police agencies. The next day, they were on an Air Force transport plane to Saudi Arabia. A few weeks later, they were joined by O’Neill and the FBI director, Louis Freeh.
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.