But while John O'Neill had succeeded in winning allies among CIA and international intelligence agencies, not everyone within the FBI was so enamored of him. A fixture on New York's celebrity social circuit, O'Neill's flamboyant style and his unconventional personal life — he had several longtime girlfriends and a wife he never divorced — had long raised eyebrows within the FBI.
"The Man Who Knew," gives viewers an insider's perspective on O'Neill's investigations as well as the internal territorial debates among the FBI, the State Department, and the White House over how to deal with U.S. terrorist investigations in East Africa in August 1998 and the Yemen in October 2000.
"[O'Neill] believed the New York field office had the greatest depth of expertise of anybody in the country on this issue, and if it's Al Qaeda, how could you send anybody else but the people who know the most?" recalls Fran Townsend, former head of the U.S. Justice Department's office of intelligence policy.
O'Neill's New York FBI team was at the center of bureacratic arm-wrestling over who would head the 1998 investigation into the embassy bombings in East Africa. O'Neill again was the focus of a heated political battle over the investigation of the 2000 attack against the USS Cole in Yemen. Current and former government officials such as Richard Clarke, counterterrorism chief in the Clinton administration and Barry Mawn, former head of the New York FBI office, recount how O'Neill's desire to show the Yemeni security forces — which he viewed as being less than cooperative — that the FBI meant business was one of many issues in the investigation which angered U.S. Ambassador Barbara Bodine.
Finally, when O'Neill made a brief trip home to New York for Thanksgiving, Bodine denied his re-entry visa, preventing him from returning to the investigation. Insiders tell FRONTLINE that O'Neill's removal from the scene in Yemen may have seriously limited the Cole investigation — an inquiry that some speculate might have led O'Neill to the Sept. 11 hijackers in time to foil their plans.
"The Man Who Knew" also chronicles O'Neill's increasing frustration with Washington's lax attitude toward the threat posed by bin Laden, including the possibility that Al Qaeda sleeper cells were already operating within the United States.
Article comments
1 - Robin Goodfellow
I happened to catch most of that show. As always with Frontline it was well researched, insightful, and thought provoking. It proved to me that the state department needs a major enema, or else they're petty politicking is going to get us killed (well, more killed). The FBI is not much better (if at all). When I think about how the best man for the anti-terror job is now dead, how none of the boneheads who farked up his al qaeda investigation have been fired (or ever will be), and how the solutions coming down the pike are more bureaucrats with cushy job security I want to scream.
I say we rape civil service job security to hell and back and get some friggen' accountability into federal intelligence and investigation agencies.