reportedly preparing to board a bus for Peshawar. Unless he was apprehended, he would soon cross the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, where he would be out of reach. There was only one FBI agent in Pakistan at the time, along with several agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration and the State Department’s diplomatic security bureau. “Our ambassador had to get in his car and go ripping across town to get the head of the local military intelligence,” Clarke recalled. “The chief gave him his own personal aides, and this ragtag bunch of American law enforcement officials and a couple of Pakistani soldiers set off to catch Yousef before he got on the bus.” O’Neill, working around the clock for the next three days, coordinated the entire effort. At 10:00 A.M. Pakistan time, on Tuesday, February 7, SIOC was informed that the World Trade Center bomber was in custody.
During the next six years, O’Neill became the bureau’s most committed tracker of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network of terrorists as they struck against American interests around the world. Brash, ambitious, often full of himself, O’Neill had a confrontational personality that brought him powerful enemies. Even so, he was too valuable to ignore. He was the point man in the investigation of the terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia, East Africa, and Yemen. At a time when the Clinton administration was struggling to decide how to respond to the terrorist threat, O’Neill, along with others in the FBI and the CIA, realized that Al Qaeda was relentless and resourceful and that its ultimate target was America itself. In the lastdays of his life, after he had taken a new job as the chief of security for the World Trade Center, he was warning friends, “We’re due.”
“I
am
the FBI,” John O’Neill liked to boast. He had wanted to work for the bureau since boyhood, when he watched Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., as the buttoned-down Inspector Lewis Erskine in the TV series
The FBI
. O’Neill was born in 1952 and brought up in Atlantic City, where his mother drove a cab for a small taxi business that she and his father owned. After graduating from Holy Spirit High School, he got a job as a fingerprint clerk with the FBI. During his first semester in college, he married his high school sweetheart, Christine, and when he was 20 their son, John P. O’Neill, Jr., was born. O’Neill put himself through a master’s program in forensics at George Washington University by serving as a tour guide at the FBI headquarters. In 1976, he became a full-time agent in the bureau’s office in Baltimore; ten years later, he returned to headquarters and served as an inspector. In 1991, he was named assistant special agent in charge in the Chicago office. In 1994, he received the additional assignment of supervising VAPCON, a national investigation into violence against abortion providers. The following year, he transferred to headquarters to become the counterterrorism chief.
John Lipka, an agent who met O’Neill during the VAPCON probe, marvelled at his ability to move so easily from investigating organized crime and official corruption to the thornier field of counterterrorism. “He was a very quick study,” Lipka told me. “I’d been working terrorism since ‘86, but he’d walk out of the Hoover building, flag a cab, and I’d brief him on the way to the White House. Then he’d give a presentation, and I’d be shocked that he grasped everything I had been working on for weeks.”
O’Neill entered the bureau in the J. Edgar Hoover era, and throughout his career he had something of the old-time G-manabout him. He talked tough, in a New Jersey accent that many loved to imitate. He was darkly handsome, with black eyes and slicked-back hair. In a culture that favors discreet anonymity, he cut a memorable figure. He favored fine cigars and Chivas Regal and water with a twist, and carried a 9-millimeter automatic strapped to his ankle. His manner was bluff and
During the next six years, O’Neill became the bureau’s most committed tracker of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network of terrorists as they struck against American interests around the world. Brash, ambitious, often full of himself, O’Neill had a confrontational personality that brought him powerful enemies. Even so, he was too valuable to ignore. He was the point man in the investigation of the terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia, East Africa, and Yemen. At a time when the Clinton administration was struggling to decide how to respond to the terrorist threat, O’Neill, along with others in the FBI and the CIA, realized that Al Qaeda was relentless and resourceful and that its ultimate target was America itself. In the lastdays of his life, after he had taken a new job as the chief of security for the World Trade Center, he was warning friends, “We’re due.”
“I
am
the FBI,” John O’Neill liked to boast. He had wanted to work for the bureau since boyhood, when he watched Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., as the buttoned-down Inspector Lewis Erskine in the TV series
The FBI
. O’Neill was born in 1952 and brought up in Atlantic City, where his mother drove a cab for a small taxi business that she and his father owned. After graduating from Holy Spirit High School, he got a job as a fingerprint clerk with the FBI. During his first semester in college, he married his high school sweetheart, Christine, and when he was 20 their son, John P. O’Neill, Jr., was born. O’Neill put himself through a master’s program in forensics at George Washington University by serving as a tour guide at the FBI headquarters. In 1976, he became a full-time agent in the bureau’s office in Baltimore; ten years later, he returned to headquarters and served as an inspector. In 1991, he was named assistant special agent in charge in the Chicago office. In 1994, he received the additional assignment of supervising VAPCON, a national investigation into violence against abortion providers. The following year, he transferred to headquarters to become the counterterrorism chief.
John Lipka, an agent who met O’Neill during the VAPCON probe, marvelled at his ability to move so easily from investigating organized crime and official corruption to the thornier field of counterterrorism. “He was a very quick study,” Lipka told me. “I’d been working terrorism since ‘86, but he’d walk out of the Hoover building, flag a cab, and I’d brief him on the way to the White House. Then he’d give a presentation, and I’d be shocked that he grasped everything I had been working on for weeks.”
O’Neill entered the bureau in the J. Edgar Hoover era, and throughout his career he had something of the old-time G-manabout him. He talked tough, in a New Jersey accent that many loved to imitate. He was darkly handsome, with black eyes and slicked-back hair. In a culture that favors discreet anonymity, he cut a memorable figure. He favored fine cigars and Chivas Regal and water with a twist, and carried a 9-millimeter automatic strapped to his ankle. His manner was bluff and
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