At 8:46 A.M., when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the north tower, John O’Neill, Jr., was on a train to New York, to install some computer equipment and visit his father’s new office. From the window of the train he saw smoke coming from the Trade Center. He called his father on his cell phone. “He said he was okay. He was on his way out to assess the damage,” John Jr., recalled.
Valerie James was arranging flowers in her office when “the phones started ringing off the hook.” A second airliner had just hit the south tower. “At nine-seventeen, John calls,” James remembered. He said, “Honey, I want you to know I’m okay. My God, Val, it’s terrible. There are body parts everywhere. Are you crying?” he asked. She was. Then he said, “Val, I think my employers are dead. I can’t lose this job.”
“They’re going to need you more than ever,” she told him.
At 9:25 A.M., Anna DiBattista, who was driving to Philadelphia on business, received a call from O’Neill. “The connection was good at the beginning,” she recalled. “He was safe and outside. He said he was okay. I said, ‘Are you sure you’re out of the building?’ He told me he loved me. I knew he was going to go back in.”
Wesley Wong, an FBI agent who had known O’Neill for more than twenty years, raced over to the north tower to help set up a command center. “John arrived on the scene,” Wong recalled. “He asked me if there was any information I could divulge. I knew he was now basically an outsider. One of the questions he asked was ‘Is it true the Pentagon has been hit?’ I said, ‘Gee, John, I don’t know. Let me try to find out.’ At one point, he was on his cell phone and he was having trouble with the reception and started walking away. I said, ‘I’ll catch up with you later.’”
Wong last saw O’Neill walking toward the tunnel leading to the second tower.
Until September 11, 2001, I had more or less abandoned my career as a journalist and turned to writing films. One of them, The Siege, which I cowrote with director Edward Zwick and his writing partner, Menno Menjes, eerily prefigured the events that took place on that day. Because I had lived in the Arab world-I taught English at the American University in Cairo more than thirty years ago-and because I had in some sense pre-imagined the tragedy, I felt an obligation to lean what events had led to the attack on America and why. During the week that followed, as I was reporting for The New Yorker, I began scanning online obituaries, hoping to find some character whose life and death would help me tell the story. As soon as I saw John O’Neill’s name and read the brief details of his life-he was head of the FBI’s counterterrorism force in New York until he resigned over a trivial embarrassment, and then took a job as the head of security for the World Trade Center-I knew that he would lead me into the secret world of intelligence. The obit left one with the impression that O’Neill was a bit of a disgrace. I just knew there was more to it. That brief obit has led me into the book about terrorism I am presently writing, in which O’Neill will play a prominent role-as he did in life.
JEFF TIETZ: THE BOY WHO LOVED TRANSIT
Before leaving his girlfriend’s apartment in Crown Heights, on the morning of his nineteenth arrest for impersonating and performing the functions of New York City Transit Authority employees, Darius McCollum put on an NYCTA subway conductor’s uniform and reflector vest. Over his feet he pulled transit-issue boots with lace guards and soles designed to withstand third-rail jolts. He took transit-issue work gloves and protective goggles. He put a transit-issue hard hat on his head. In his pockets he carried NYCTA work orders and rerouting schedules and newspaper clippings describing his previous arrests: for driving subway trains and buses and various other vehicles without authorization, possessing stolen property, flagging traffic around NYCTA construction sites, forging documents. He also carried a signed letter on NYCTA letterhead:
To: All Concerned Departments
From: Thomas Calandrella
Chief Track Officer
Re: Darius McCollum
Effective this date of January 10, 2000, Darius McCollum is a member of a special twelve-member Special Study Group; and will analyze the operations of track safety and track operations. SSG will report directly to this office and will be issued all related gear for the respected purposes of this department and will receive assistance of any relating department.
To his belt Darius clipped a flashlight and a key ring the size of a choker. From this ring six smaller rings hung like pendants. Along the curves of the small rings, 139 keys climbed symmetrical and fanlike. Each key granted access to a secure area of the train, bus, or subway system of the New York City Transit Authority. The collection was equivalent to the number of keys an employee would acquire through forty years of steady promotions. Just before he left the apartment, Darius picked up an orange emergency-response lantern.
Six weeks earlier, Darius had been paroled from the Elmira Correctional Facility, near Binghamton, New York, where he had served two years for attempted grand larceny-“attempted” because he had signed out NYCTA vehicles for surface use (extinguishing track fires, supervising maintenance projects) and then signed them back in according to procedure. Darius has never worked for the NYCTA; he has never held a steady job. He is 37 and has spent a third of his adult life in prison for victimless offenses related to transit systems.
He was at work by 7:20, eating buttered rolls and drinking coffee in a GMC pickup with a small signal crew above the Nostrand Avenue stop on the Number 3 line. The truck was hitched to an emergency generator temporarily powering the station lights; during a repair job Con Edison had spliced into the wrong cable. Traveling through the system three days earlier, Darius had encountered the crew members and told them that he was a track-department employee waiting for his truck to be fixed. In the meantime, he said, his only responsibility was the occasional street-flagging operation. The signal guys were on what they, and therefore Darius, called “a tit job”: babysitting the generator and periodically reporting on the electrical work. Darius sat in the station with the signal guys, surveying the Con Ed work and watching girls.
That slow morning there was a lot of conversation about the transit union. Its president, Willie James, was on his way out. Darius, who is voluble and almost perpetually affable, was deferentially critical of James, who, he said, “came from buses and favored the bus guys.” Darius voiced or echoed complaints about the effects of union inaction: low pay, retirement after twenty-five years instead of twenty, the difficulty of getting basic equipment. For nearly two decades Darius had attended NYCTA workers’ rallies and union meetings. At the meetings he had argued for, among other things, better lighting in tunnels and the right to wear earplugs against ambient noise. He had agreed that positive drug tests should result in mandatory ninety-day suspensions and counseling but objected to withholding salary during that time. He took detailed notes as he traveled through the system so that he could accurately critique management actions.
At noon Darius volunteered to go to his girlfriend’s apartment and bring back lunch for the crew. Darius had met his girlfriend a week earlier, on the subway. It was a snowy night; they were alone in the car. Darius said she looked cold. She nodded and smiled and pointed to his uniform. He told her where he worked in the track department and how he approached various kinds of emergency situations and that he did street flagging and drove heavy equipment. She didn’t understand anything he said because she was from Ecuador and didn’t speak English. Her name was Nelly Rodriguez. She was 45 and had five children and worked as a seamstress in a garment factory. They exchanged phone numbers; later her sister translated for them.