The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [118]
O’NEILL’S TENURE IN THE FBI coincided with the internationalization of crime and law enforcement. Since 1984 the FBI had exercised the authority to investigate crimes against Americans abroad, but that mandate had been handicapped by a lack of connection with foreign police agencies. O’Neill made a habit of entertaining every foreign cop or intelligence agent who entered his orbit. He called it his “night job.” In Clarke’s opinion, O’Neill was like an Irish ward boss, who governed through interlocking friendships, debts, and obligations. He was constantly on the phone, doing favors and massaging contacts, creating a personal network that would facilitate the bureau’s international responsibilities. Within a few years, O’Neill was perhaps the most widely known policeman in the world. He would also become the man most identified with the pursuit of Osama bin Laden.
Few people in American law enforcement or intelligence, including O’Neill, had any experience with Islam or much understanding of the grievances that had already given rise to the attack on the World Trade Center and other plots against the United States. Indeed, in a country as diverse as America, the leadership of the FBI was stunningly narrow in its range. It was run by Irish and Italian Catholic men. The backgrounds of many agents in the bureau, particularly in the upper ranks, were monotonously repetitive, very much like O’Neill’s—Jersey boys, or Philly, or Boston. They called each other by boyish nicknames—Tommy, Danny, Mickey—that they had picked up when they were altar boys or playing hockey for Holy Cross. They were intensely patriotic and were trained from childhood not to question the hierarchy.
The bureau’s culture had grown up in the decades when the FBI was fighting the Mafia, an organization created by people from very similar origins. The bureau knew its enemy then, but it was deeply uninformed about this new threat. The radical Islamists came from places few agents had ever been to, or even heard of. They spoke a language that only a handful in the bureau understood. Even pronouncing the names of suspects or informants was a challenge. It was hard to believe in those days that people who were so far away and so exotic posed a real threat. There was a sense in the bureau that because they were not like us, they were not a very appealing enemy.
What distinguished O’Neill early in his new posting was his recognition of the fact that the nature of terrorism had changed; it had gone global and turned murderous. In the recent past, terror in America had been largely a domestic product, produced by underground associations such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Panthers, or the Jewish Defense League. The bureau had faced foreign elements before on American soil, notably the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN), a Puerto Rican independence group that carried out approximately 150 terrorist acts in the United States during the seventies and early eighties. But deaths from those attacks were accidental, or at least beside the point. O’Neill’s realization, shared by few, was that the radical Islamists had a wider dramatic vision that included murder on a large scale. He was one of the first to recognize the scope of their enterprise and their active presence inside the United States. It was O’Neill who saw that the man behind this worldwide network was a reclusive Saudi dissident in the Sudan with a dream to destroy America and the West. Early in O’Neill’s career as the bureau’s