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The Man Who Warned America
A dapper dresser, an Elaine's regular, a lover of women, John O'Neill was one of the few people who could have understood exactly what was happening to him when he died in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. O'Neill, an ex-FBI counter-terrorism agent, had made a career out of making a case against Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.
JOHN O'Neill, the new FBI section chief for counter-terrorism, spent the night of March 8, 1995, studying a rambling communiqué from a little-known Saudi expatriate named Osama bin Laden.
At the time, U.S. terrorism experts believed the biggest threats were Hezbollah and Hamas, not something called al Qaeda.
A few days after he read bin Laden's angry denunciation of the Saudi royal family for allowing U.S. military bases in their country, O'Neill arrived at a meeting with FBI Deputy Director Robert "Bear" Bryant armed with a developing belief that bin Laden was in fact the world's most pressing threat.
Bryant was impressed.
"The first time I ever heard of bin Laden was from John O'Neill," he recalled. ONeill also began discussing bin Laden with Richard Clarke, the national coordinator for counter-terrorism.
O'Neill compared bin Laden to a young Adolf Hitler, making ominous threats that no one took seriously.
"It's like 'Mein Kampf,' he said. "Men you read what this guy says he's going to do, he's serious."
In the next three years, O'Neill investigated al Qaeda's bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, was named special agent in charge of the national security division of the FBI's New York office and delivered a speech warning that terrorists could strike on U.S. soil at any time.
He was awake at 4 a.m. on Aug. 7, 1998, when the encrypted telephone rang at his Peter Cooper Village home. Two U.S. embassies, in Kenya and Tanzania, had been bombed.
He was the first to call the FBI office at 26 Federal Plaza, recalled Detective Pat Pogan.
"We have to get moving on this," O'Neill said. "I know who did this. It's bin Laden."
O'Neill wanted to fly to Africa to lead the investigation. The bombings had killed 247 people. His New York office had the expertise about bin Laden and he was upset when he was told to wait. But he was outraged later that month when President Clinton, three days after his televised admission about Monica Lewinsky, went on TV again to announce, "Today we have struck back."
U.S. Tomahawk missiles were fired at a bin Laden camp in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan that intelligence sources identified as a chemical weapons facility.
O'Neill immediately believed that Clinton launched the attack to deflect attention from the Lewinsky scandal and his impending impeachment.
He and a few people side a tight circle of national. security officials also knew that Clinton was using old intelligence in selecting the targets.
In fact, it was as much as a year out of date, not nearly fresh enough to justify the launch of a surgically precise air assault.
O'Neill wasn't the only major FBI figure who was upset. Amazingly, the White House had failed to notify FBI Director Louis Freeh -- who had just arrived in Kenya. Freeh and Clinton already had a frosty relationship. Hundreds of Freeh's agents were investigate the bombings in two heavily Muslim countries that were loaded with bin Laden sympathizers.
"Freeh was pissed" said Lewis Schiliro, then head of the New York FBI office, who was with Freeh.
"We had agents on the streets, exposed and wearing FBI jackets, and the White House was firing in missiles. What better targets for reprisals than the FBI?'
The missile strikes had no appreciable military impact. But the bombing probe that followed defined the structure of al Qaeda and identified its leaders and key soldiers. Mary Jo White, former U.S. attorney, credits O'Neill.
"I cannot overstate it," she said. "John O'Neill in the investigation of the African embassy bombings created a template for all international terrorism investigations."
0'NEILL and Freeh had great respect for each other, but in some ways they could not have been more different...
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