New light on the life and death of John
O'Neill By Tom Griffin
LONDON
- Former White House counter-terrorism expert Richard
Clarke has rocked the Bush administration with his
criticism of the "war on terror". However, doubts about
the administration's commitment to the fight against
al-Qaeda are not new.
In the immediate aftermath
of September 11, another counter-terrorism expert,
Irish-American John O'Neill, became the focus for those
concerns. O'Neill had been one of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation's (FBI) leading specialists on al-Qaeda,
but he was destined never to play a role in America's
response to September 11. In a supremely ironic twist of
fate, he was himself killed in the World Trade Center
attacks.
The story of John O'Neill, Richard
Clarke and their battle against al-Qaeda began at the
Twin Towers eight years earlier, when Islamic
fundamentalists made their first attempt to destroy the
World Trade Center with the 1993 bombing masterminded by
Ramzi Yousef.
Yousef was eventually tracked down
in Pakistan. The intelligence ended up on the desk of
Richard Clarke on a Sunday morning. There were only a
few hours to act on it. Clarke rang the FBI in the
forlorn hope that there would be somebody to take the
call. Clarke described what happened next in a 2002
interview.
"I called and John answered the
phone. I said, 'Who's this'? He responded, 'Well, who
the hell are you? I'm John O'Neill'. I explained, 'I'm
from the White House. I do terrorism. I need some
help'."
O'Neill had never worked on the case
before, but together with Clarke he manned the phones
coordinating the capture of Yousef before he could slip
over the border into Afghanistan. It was, according to
Clarke, "the beginning of a beautiful friendship".
After the capture of Yousef, O'Neill learned
everything he could about the threat of Islamic
fundamentalist terrorism. He became one of the first
people to understand the "new terrorism" which was
already taking shape.
He set about convincing
his colleagues of the threat with similar determination.
"John would come into the room and there would be a
presence about him," Clarke said. "He would go around
the room like it was a ward meeting and he was an Irish
politician."
There were some obstacles that
O'Neill's charismatic persona couldn't overcome,
however. That first became clear after the Khobar Towers
bombings in Saudi Arabia in 1996, which killed 19
American soldiers.
According to his friend Chris
Isham, O'Neill "felt the Saudis were definitely playing
games and that the senior officials in the US government
just didn't get it".
Similar problems dogged
O'Neill's investigation of the 2000 bombing of the USS
Cole in Yemen, when he clashed so severely with US
ambassador Barbara Bodine that he was refused clearance
to enter the country.
The level of opposition he
faced within the US government may have contributed to
O'Neill's decision to leave the FBI in July 2001, even
though there were signs of increasing al-Qaeda activity.
He took up a new post as head of security at the World
Trade Center.
He was in his office on the 34th
floor of the North Tower when he was hit by American
Airlines Flight 11 at 8.46am on September 11. From there
he made his way to an emergency command center, the last
place he was seen alive, before entering the South Tower
where his body was found.
The career and
untimely death of John O'Neill have given rise to a
great deal of speculation about the source of the
obstacles he faced. Its clear that the turf battles
between O'Neill and diplomats anxious to maintain good
relations with Arab states began in the Bill Clinton
years.
There were signs that problems
intensified under the Bush administration. When O'Neill
retired, someone leaked the story to the New York Times,
together with details of an incident when he had lost a
briefcase carrying sensitive documents. O'Neill blamed
the incoming FBI director Tom Pickard for the
disclosure.
The most serious allegation against
the Bush administration came in the controversial French
book Bin Laden, la verite interdite (Bin Laden,
the forbidden truth), released shortly after September
11.
Authors Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume
Dasquie claimed to have been told by O'Neill that "the
main obstacles to investigate Islamic terrorism were US
oil corporate interests and the role played by Saudi
Arabia in it".
Brisard and Dasquie drew
attention to the strong business links between members
of the Bush administration and Saudi Arabia through the
oil industry, and even through defense company the
Carlyle Group, between the Bush and Bin Laden families.
Richard Clarke's latest statements do not
provide outright support to the thesis that these links
led the Bush administration to obstruct O'Neill.
Nevertheless, in a CBS interview last weekend, Clarke
portrayed an administration that was remarkably
reluctant to get to grips with al-Qaeda.
In the
aftermath of September 11, Clarke claimed: "The
president dragged me into a room with a couple of other
people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find
whether Iraq did this'. Now he never said, 'Make it up'.
But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no
doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a
report that said Iraq did this."
When Clarke
insisted that there was no Iraqi connection, he claimed
that the president responded "in a very intimidating
way. I mean that we should come back with that answer."
Clarke followed up that interview on Wednesday
with his testimony to America's official September 11
Commission. "By invading Iraq, the president has greatly
undermined the war on terrorism," he told the bipartisan
commission to applause from an audience which included
many relatives of September 11 victims.
Clarke's
insider criticisms of the administration have the
potential to be uniquely damaging to a Republican
election campaign built around George W Bush, the "war
president".
Accordingly, the administration has
hit back hard, asking why Clarke did not make similar
points in previous interviews after September 11, given
when he was still a public official.
Those
interviews are still so far the only ones in which
Clarke has elaborated on the role of John O'Neill, and
that means that there may yet be further revelations
about the obstacles O'Neill faced, the reasons he left
the FBI and the source of the leak to the New York Times
about his departure.
The Bush administration
typically moves swiftly to rebut its critics. It may yet
find itself having to challenge the memory of a man who
died in the twin towers on September 11.
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