"What John O'Neill was trying to do was get a momentum going in the FBI to look seriously for those cells,” Clarke says. “It was not one of the priorities in most FBI field offices."
By the summer of 2001, O'Neill had been so marginalized by FBI officials that key clues of the looming Sept. 11 plot apparently were never passed on to him. His 25-year career with the FBI would come to an end following bureau investigations into his temporary loss of a briefcase containing a classified report and charges that he used an FBI car to give a ride to his girlfriend. In August 2001, while the allegations were pending, O'Neill opted to retire from the bureau at age 49. Just eight days after he started his new job as director of security at the World Trade Center, the terrorists he had long pursued struck the towers.
O'Neill's critics contend that his personal failings proved fatal to his FBI career. His supporters, however, believe his main failing was refusing to conform to the standard-issue FBI mold.
"John was somebody that bureaucrats were not always pleased with because they felt he wasn't marching to their tune — that he was too ambitious and that he operated out of the box too often," ABC producer Chris Isham tells FRONTLINE. "And this was an FBI that believed very much under the [FBI Director Louis] Freeh regime of operating within the box. This was a guy that was constantly pushing the envelope when the envelope didn't want to be pushed. So the envelope fought back." Very disturbing - on PBS this week and available online here.
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.