The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [117]
The FBI had always been a problematic member of the CSG. Its representatives tended to be close-mouthed and unhelpful, treating all intelligence as potential evidence that couldn’t be compromised, whether there was an actual criminal case or not. O’Neill was different. He cultivated his counterparts in other agencies rather than pulling down the bureaucratic shutters. In Clarke’s experience, most federal law-enforcement officers were dull and slow. By the time they had risen to the upper ranks of management, they were already at their maximum pay rank and were marking time toward their retirement. Against this drab background, O’Neill leaped out—charismatic, improvisatory, outspoken, and intriguingly complicated.
Clarke and O’Neill were both relentless infighters, and they made enemies easily. But each recognized in the other qualities he could use. Clarke had always groomed key allies who protected him against changes in administration and armed him with inside information. After more than two decades in government—beginning as a management intern at the Pentagon in 1973—he had protégés scattered all over Capitol Hill. He was brilliant but solitary, living alone in a blue clapboard house in Arlington, Virginia, with azaleas surrounding the front porch and an American flag flying from the second story. He spoke in emphatic, declarative sentences that brooked no argument. Ambitious and impatient, he had little time for life outside of his office on the third floor of the Old Executive Office Building, overlooking the West Wing of the White House. It was rare that someone interested him as a rival. He could push competitive bureaucrats aside for sport, since he played the game better than all but a few.
Although Clarke was shrewd and formidable, he was also socially awkward, tending to look past people when he spoke to them. He had the pallor of a redhead—now gone gray—and the tight, inappropriate smile of the super realist. He spotted O’Neill as someone who shared his obsession about the threat posed by terrorism at a time when few in Washington considered it real. They had in common the resentment of the unprivileged outsider who had escaped the narrow expectations of his upbringing. O’Neill still had a strong whiff of the Jersey streets about him, which Clarke, the son of a nurse and a factory worker, valued. And, like Clarke, O’Neill saw through the political burlesque.
The two men worked to establish clear lines of responsibility among the intelligence agencies, which had a long history of savage bureaucratic warfare. In 1995 their efforts resulted in a presidential directive giving the FBI the lead authority in both investigating and preventing acts of terrorism wherever in the world Americans or American interests were threatened. After the bombing in Oklahoma City in April of that year, O’Neill formed a separate section for domestic terrorism, while he concentrated on redesigning and expanding the foreign branch. He organized a swap of deputies between his office and the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center despite resistance from both organizations.
To younger agents who gave him what he demanded, which was absolute loyalty, he became a kind of consigliere. In the fiefdoms of the bureau, O’Neill was a powerful sponsor. He would often put his arms around his employees and tell them he loved them, and he showed it by going to extraordinary lengths to help when any of his people faced health problems or financial