The War at Home

ohn O'Neill's friends called him many things: a brilliant FBI investigator, a superior analyst. Most of them wouldn't have called him a soothsayer. But O'Neill saw things most people didn't.

As the FBI's lead agent in the fight against terrorism from 1995 to 2001, O'Neill had forgotten more than most people knew on the subject. He had led the investigation of two terrorist bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, as well as the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. At a time when most FBI and intelligence officials still assumed Osama bin Laden was just a financier, O'Neill was obsessed with implicating bin Laden as the leader of a vast terrorist enterprise behind the attacks in Africa and Yemen.

To expose terrorist networks, O'Neill used untraditional methods. Most FBI agents investigate crimes after they've occurred, building cases on solid evidence they hope will stand up at trial.

O'Neill puzzled over acts that hadn't happened yet. He mixed highlights from intelligence reports with leads from his palette of human sources. The intelligence might be disconnected, contradictory or even wrong. But ultimately, O'Neill painted a picture that showed how terrorists were connected to each other around the world. Unlike most agents, he wasn't interested so much in what had happened as in what might happen.

In the mid-1990s, O'Neill began warning FBI officials about the threat these terrorists, some of them training at camps in Afghanistan, posed to the United States.

In the summer of 2001, at the end of his 25-year career, O'Neill made an unnerving prediction. He was leaving the bureau to become director of security for the World Trade Center. His friends and FBI buddies joked that it was a cushy job. The terrorists had hit the towers in 1993 and couldn't bring them down, they said. They wouldn't dare take another swing.

But O'Neill told his friends they were wrong. The bombers had failed, and that ate at them. All the dots O'Neill was trying to connect foretold another attack on the towers.

"We're due for something big," he said.

On Sept. 11, 2001, O'Neill was working on the 34th floor of the North Tower. Minutes after the first attack, his FBI colleagues and family frantically dialed his mobile phone. Outside the building, O'Neill got through to his companion, Valerie James. The scene was a nightmare, but he was OK, he said. He would call back.

O'Neill adhered to an FBI code that said you didn't walk away from the scene of a crime. So the fact that he returned to the buildings he'd sworn to protect surprised no one. O'Neill was killed minutes later, when the South Tower split and collapsed.

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, FBI agents have been pilloried for not seeing the attacks coming, for not being like O'Neill. But a few tried.

Before Sept. 11, these agents, many trained by O'Neill to think outside the box, held little sway in the FBI. Their methods clashed with the criminal division's G-Men, whose investigative mentality ruled the bureau. Intelligence analysis and prediction were not the FBI's business.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, some FBI leaders tried to change that. They battled Congress, presidential administrations, other agencies and their own agents to make counterterrorism one of the FBI's top priorities.

Sept. 11 was supposed to make it so. In the subsequent year and a half, the FBI hired about 500 new counterterrorism agents. The number of joint terrorism task forces, the bureau's front-line battalions in field offices across the country, nearly doubled, to 66.

But the FBI suffered withering criticism for the way it handled events preceding Sept. 11. Why hadn't its leaders listened more closely to agents like O'Neill sooner? Bureau leaders had a new struggle: keeping the nation's most powerful law enforcement agency at the helm of the war on terrorism.

They failed. In January, President Bush announced that the FBI's counterterrorism division would move to a new facility at the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters in Virginia. The division, along with CIA's counterterrorism center-a team rich with the skilled analysts the bureau never had-will form the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC). It is supposed to be the government's hub for intelligence on terrorism. FBI agents still will be the foot soldiers in the domestic war on terrorism, but the FBI counterterrorism unit's move signals that the bureau has lost control of the anti-terror campaign.

The CIA is now the leader of a counter-terrorism partnership. Even though it is officially independent,the new center is an extension of the CIA, according to intelligence experts. CIA Director George Tenet oversees it. He appointed a CIA veteran, John Brennan, to manage the day-to-day work of collecting, analyzing and disseminating terrorist intelligence throughout the government.

A career CIA analyst also heads the FBI's Office of Intelligence, which teaches field agents how to collect intelligence and feed it to the new center. The CIA's chief of homeland security has said the center aims to absorb intelligence activities from the FBI.

FBI leaders tried to keep this day from coming. For years, they attempted to fuse the discipline of an investigator and the skills of an analyst. They tried to create agents like John O'Neill.

THE PROTOTYPE

O'Neill awoke every morning to a cup of coffee and four newspapers, James, his companion, told the PBS news program, Frontline, which featured O'Neill's story in October 2002. He read them all, while listening to CNN. Then he went to his office, late if he'd been up all night working. He read several agencies' daily intelligence reports. After that, he worked the phones, calling his vast network of allies, which included senior White House and Justice Department officials. What were they working on today, he'd ask. What were they thinking?

O'Neill was never out of touch for a waking moment. He carried two phones-one FBI-issued and the other personal. A former agent recalls waiting an hour and a half in a bar as O'Neill tirelessly paced the sidewalk outside, the phone pressed to his ear.

No one could match O'Neill's skill for making friends. He ran with the crème de la crème of politics and society in Washington and later in New York, where he served as the assistant special agent in charge of counterterrorism and national security in the FBI's most prestigious office.

O'Neill's friends became his sources. In New York, he dined at A-list haven Elaine's. He worked the room in a tailored suit, enchanting everyone from writers, actors and waitresses to cops and government officials. People knew his name. And they told him things.

After a night out, O'Neill often returned to the office. Maybe he'd picked up a new lead or had a hunch he couldn't shake. When he finally went home, he'd read up on terrorism, or watch footage of bin Laden. He built a video library of the terrorist leader. He'd sleep, then do it all again the next day.

"He had no life other than the FBI," says Robert "Bear" Bryant, the former FBI deputy director who gave O'Neill his first counterterrorism job in Washington and became one of his closest friends.

O'Neill was dedicated, and obsessed. His beguiling ways won friends. But his hard-edged persistence made enemies.

"He pissed people off," Bryant says.

People loved O'Neill or hated him. But few deny he did more to link terrorists to attacks on the United States than anyone in the FBI, or perhaps any agency. That was O'Neill's mission, Bryant says.

Bryant knew the FBI needed more agents like O'Neill. He believed counter-terrorism should be the bureau's main focus. O'Neill agreed. In 1998, with O'Neill and other agents' help, Bryant made his move.

THE PLAN

Bryant's 31-year FBI career culminated in a magnum opus he titled "Keeping Tomorrow Safe." The five-year strategic plan called for revamping the bureau's counter-terrorism efforts on two fronts.

First, agents needed technology to organize the oceans of data they collected. The bureau had more than 40 disconnected case management systems, and most agents didn't have modern computers or e-mail. "We didn't know what we knew," Bryant says. If counterterrorism agents were going to connect dots, they had to see them all.

Second, intelligence should direct counterterrorism work. Focusing only on evidence and securing indictments, agents would miss the big picture. Intelligence could show them where threats lurked and how terrorist organizations were structured. The FBI used these methods in the 1970s and 1980s to identify members of organized crime families and dismantle their networks.

Then-FBI Director Louis Freeh liked Bryant's plan. After the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Freeh had tried to loosen restrictions on the bureau's ability to gather terrorist intelligence in the United States. But senior Clinton administration officials refused, wary of encroaching on civil liberties. Congress wouldn't budge either. The official message was that the bureau should stick to investigating crimes.

But in 1998, the world was changing. When Bryant's plan hit Freeh's desk, O'Neill had implicated Osama bin Laden in planned attacks on Americans. The CIA had made the same assessment. Only months before, the United States was rocked by dual bombings of its embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. A new war was raging.

But the war was waged abroad, and by the White House. After the embassy attacks, President Clinton ordered missile strikes against a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant suspected of manufacturing chemical weapons for bin Laden. He also signed a secret order allowing lethal force against the leader and his associates. The Pentagon considered launching missions in Afghanistan, which officials suspected of harboring terrorist training camps.

Administration and intelligence leaders didn't think terrorists would strike in the United States, says Richard Clarke, Clinton's national coordinator for counterterrorism. The country was too valuable as a low-profile base for planning and fund raising. Here, they could blend in.

The momentum for expanding the FBI's role in counterterrorism dissipated. Bryant retired in late 1999. His plan reportedly went to the White House, but it never was implemented. Bryant doesn't know why.

With Bryant gone, O'Neill lost one of his best and most powerful allies.

CONFLICTING INTERESTS

By the summer of 2000, O'Neill sensed a coming storm. His team had been monitoring phone calls at a suspected terrorist safe house in Yemen, and it had intercepted a message saying bin Laden was planning "a Hiroshima-type event." An Egyptian informant had tipped off the FBI to planned attacks on U.S. military targets abroad. O'Neill's analytic mind was in overdrive, his former colleagues recall.

On Oct. 12, 2000, terror struck. A suicide bomber rammed the USS Cole, docked in the Aden harbor in Yemen. Seventeen sailors died. O'Neill believed that al Qaeda was responsible.

Headquarters dispatched O'Neill to Yemen. Accounts differ as to how he conducted his operation. Some agents recall he turned on his classic charm. He befriended Yemeni security officials and even treated some of them to dinner at Elaine's when he was back in New York.

But O'Neill's rough side showed, too. He demanded his agents travel with armed Marines, to keep them safe, but also to make their presence felt on the streets. That riled State Department diplomats, as did the FBI team's lack of adept Arab translators.

U.S. Ambassador Barbara Bodine was angry. In a story in the Jan. 14, 2002, issue of The New Yorker magazine, she called O'Neill "extreme." O'Neill didn't appreciate State's diplomatic approach to handling terrorism in Yemen, Bodine said, which had been in play well before he arrived. She indicated that O'Neill's hard edges offended Yemeni officials. O'Neill and his agents were outsiders.

When O'Neill tried to return from New York, Bodine barred him from Yemen. He was outraged, but his superiors would not intervene. Months later, in the spring of 2001, O'Neill received warnings that al Qaeda members were planning attacks on his agents. He pulled them out.

O'Neill already had linked al Qaeda to several attacks or attempted attacks on Americans. His intelligence pointed to Yemen as an al Qaeda hotbed, and evidence backed up those suspicions. Indeed, Yemeni citizens were among the hijackers on Sept. 11.

It never will be known what further investigations on the ground might have turned up. Ambassador Bodine wouldn't agree to an interview for this story, nor would other State Department officials. But former officials have been quoted saying that after O'Neill left Yemen, the Cole investigation faded.

A few months after the FBI left Yemen, O'Neill left the bureau. Within weeks, he was dead.

REJECTION WITHIN

The FBI had never been asked or allowed to expand its counterterrorism mission. The fiercest rejection of such an expansion came not from other agencies, but from FBI agents and managers.

In The Cell (Hyperion, 2002), a chronicle of the FBI's New York anti-terrorism task force's work in the 1990s, authors John Miller, Michael Stone and Chris Mitchell write that agents came achingly close to exposing a terrorist network in the United States.

In 1992, the agents pursued connections-built from a variety of sources-between the assassins of Jewish activist Rabbi Meir Kahane in 1990, and Islamic fundamentalists in New York who were calling for holy war against the United States.

The agents unearthed a plot to blow up "Jewish locations" in the city, as well as affiliations among gun dealers and Muslim extremists who gave paramilitary training to Middle Easterners. The picture was frightening, though unclear. The agents thought, "No good can come of this," Tommy Corrigan, a task force member, told The Cell's authors.

But Corrigan says his requests for money and agents to follow the leads went unanswered. His FBI chief, the head of the New York criminal division, had told Corrigan that "terrorism was dead," and that he and his team should try instead to win indictments in gang investigations.

Years later, the agents learned that some of their suspects belonged to the cell that bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. None of the agents claims they could have prevented the event, but, like O'Neill in Yemen, they'll never know what they might have discovered had they been allowed to look.

Many FBI agents have seen counterterrorism as a bad career move. In May 2002, Colleen Rowley, the special agent in the Minneapolis field office who blew the whistle on thwarted terrorism investigations prior to Sept. 11, wrote to the new FBI director, Robert Mueller, that not pursuing terrorist investigations was "the safest FBI career course" for managers.

To collect intelligence on foreigners in the United States using wiretaps, for instance, agents have been required to get permission from a court established under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Rowley pushed FBI headquarters for such permission to investigate Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen who was taking flying lessons at a local school and was indicted as a co-conspirator in the Sept. 11 attacks. Her supervisors refused.

FBI agents and managers have long viewed FISA's requirements, which set strict boundaries between intelligence and criminal investigations, as impediments. Nancy Savage, an FBI agent who specialized in criminal intelligence, says agents spent much of their energy trying to work within FISA's boundaries. "People were chewing their arms off trying to get this stuff done," says Savage, who is president of the FBI Agents Association. Agents who violated the rules were subject to criminal prosecution.

In June 2002, Rowley told her story of the blocked Moussaoui investigation to a Senate committee investigating pre-Sept. 11 intelligence lapses. Lawmakers were outraged. But few have acknowledged that the laws they'd written were, in large measure, responsible for the FBI's intransigence.

THE FINAL BLOW

In the summer of 2002, a blame game consumed Washington. Pundits, legislators and experts clashed over which agency-the FBI or the CIA-had failed to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mueller moved swiftly to show that the FBI took terrorism seriously. In May, he announced the bureau would hire 400 intelligence analysts, including 25 from the CIA. To improve intelligence collection and to increase state and local officials' participation in the counterterrorism program, Mueller nearly doubled the number of joint terrorism task forces in field offices.

By December, the FBI had hired 330 new linguists and language specialists. Agents were at work on more than 340 ongoing terrorist investigations, up from 70 before the Sept. 11 attacks. They had identified more than 200 known or suspected terrorists. And the complement of task forces stood at 66, up from 35 before the attacks.

But not everyone in the FBI followed Mueller's lead. On Nov. 21, 2002, a front-page article in The New York Times revealed that the FBI's second-ranking official had blasted field chiefs for not committing more agents and more resources to preventing terrorism.

"You need to instill a sense of urgency" in agents, Deputy Director Bruce Gebhardt wrote in a memo, according to the newspaper account. "They need to get out on the street and develop sources. . . . You need to demand that information is being sent [to headquarters]. . . . You cannot fail at this mission. Too many people are depending on us."

Mueller refuted the Times report that senior FBI leaders had "grown frustrated" with field agents. But he never disputed that Gebhardt had sent the memo.

Mueller's reaction didn't sit well with the FBI's overseers. Shortly after the Gebhardt memo was leaked, two senior members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Iowa Republican Charles Grassley, wrote to Mueller questioning whether FBI officials were being truthful about agents' new commitment to fight terrorism.

By early 2003, the FBI was taking hits from all sides. Several senators proposed curtailing the FBI's counterterrorism division or eliminating it. The Justice Department's inspector general accused agency managers of failing to take seriously the FBI's technology upgrade, which Mueller had called a key component of the terror war.

The FBI also faced competition. The CIA was scoring impressive victories. By March, CIA agents had led the capture of two top al Qaeda planners in Pakistan. One of them, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, allegedly engineered the Sept. 11 plot. FBI agents focused on rounding up suspects in the United States, but couldn't prove they were actually involved in terrorist plots. Of the more than 200 charges brought against suspected terrorists since Sept. 11, only a handful alleged direct involvement in terrorist operations.

Finally, President Bush dealt the FBI a decisive blow when he ordered its counterterrorism division to move to CIA headquarters and the new Terrorist Threat Integration Center. The White House concluded counterterrorism was an intelligence operation, and therefore belonged under the purview of CIA Director George Tenet.

A VOLATILE MIX

The new alignment of the FBI and CIA's counterterrorism units troubles many experts. The FBI remains the only agency allowed to collect domestic intelligence. And, for now, experts don't think the new center will change FBI agents' role as information gatherers.

But the CIA brings more than just analysts to the center. Its counterterrorism unit also supports counterterrorism operatives. They work abroad, where laws are less restrictive. Their mission often is to kill terrorists, not indict them. A CIA aerial drone blew up a carful of suspected al Qaeda members in Yemen in November 2002. One U.S. citizen was among them. The president's approval is not required for the CIA and its operatives to pursue al Qaeda members worldwide.

The FBI has employed operatives, too, but they've worked in a different world.

In the 1970s and 1980s, FBI operatives were used to infiltrate organized crime rings. Later, they would be used to penetrate drug cartels. These agents worked under restrictive U.S. laws.

In the early 1970s, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities, headed by Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, exposed the FBI's COINTELPRO operations, whose targets included Martin Luther King Jr. and other activists deemed politically dangerous. The revelation that FBI agents were targeting American citizens stained the bureau's history.

The Church hearings resulted in barriers between intelligence and law enforcement activities. Some of those walls have been torn down since Sept. 11. Today, FBI agents can enter mosques and other religious facilities and can monitor online chat rooms. Intelligence that agents collect on terrorist suspects in the United States, including wiretap data, now can be shared with senior officials in federal law enforcement, intelligence and Defense agencies.

Experts and some lawmakers fear the new intelligence center, with its mix of FBI agents and CIA analysts and operatives, could further breach barriers, opening the way for a return to the abuses of the past.

Former FBI Deputy Director Bryant says the FBI should be leading counterterrorism precisely because the bureau has been so heavily regulated. The memory of COINTELPRO dogs today's field agents, even though most of them were children at the time. Like the members of the Church committee, many agents find the bureau's past behavior outrageous. "FBI agents are citizens, too," says Andy Black, supervisory special agent for the bureau's counterterrorism division. Agents know better than anyone the potential for abuse.

John O'Neill knew, too. Despite his nontraditional methods, he trained agents not to skirt the boundaries. He resisted efforts in the mid-1990s to bring the FBI and CIA closer together through an exchange of counterterrorism agents.

O'Neill believed the FBI's proper role was to maintain, "ordered liberty," a balance between protecting the American way of life and protecting Americans' lives.

He knew that in some countries, rights are surrendered in times of great emergency. He told a journalist in 1997 that he hoped he'd never see that firsthand. "Hopefully, not in the United States," he said.