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.”
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.”