John O’Neill was the FBI’s Special Agent in Charge of the New York field office for counterterrorism in the run-up to September 11, 2001. Per John Kiriakou: “John O’Neill was a very brash, flawed guy at FBI counterterrorism New York. … All his flaws aside, [he was] spot-on about Osama bin Laden — 100 percent correct.”[1][2]
Kiriakou identifies O’Neill as the mentor of Ali Soufan, the FBI Arabic translator who would later become the principal FBI interrogator of Abu Zubaydah. “He came up under John O’Neill, exactly. And listen, if you can work under John O’Neill and thrive, then you’re somebody special.”[3][4]
O’Neill is the principal subject of Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower, which Kiriakou calls “a classic book, excellent book.”[1]
Kiriakou notes O’Neill was head of the FBI’s New York field office, was run out of the FBI, and became head of security at the World Trade Center — where he died on September 11.[5] He cites Michael Scheuer’s sworn congressional testimony that the only good thing to happen to America on September 11 was that the World Trade Center building fell on O’Neill, evidence, per Kiriakou, of just how unpopular O’Neill was inside CIA headquarters.[6] Kiriakou also recounts a story that after Ramzi Yousef’s arrest for the first World Trade Center bombing, as an FBI jet flew past the rebuilt towers, O’Neill told him, “it’s still standing,” to which Yousef replied it wouldn’t be if he’d had another $5,000.[7] Separately, Kiriakou says O’Neill worked with Tom Nicoletti on an earlier opportunity to strike bin Laden that Attorney General Janet Reno blocked by refusing to authorize a Hellfire missile strike.[8] In the same account, Kiriakou describes a second missed opportunity: bin Laden once transited Doha airport and was stopped by Qatari authorities, and President Clinton personally asked the Qatari Amir to hand him over — but because the Justice Department had never actually indicted bin Laden, Qatar could not legally turn him over and released him, letting him go on to Sudan and then Afghanistan.[9]