The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [165]
Convinced that the sighting in the bustard camp was the best chance he would ever get to assassinate bin Laden, Scheuer accompanied CIA director George Tenet to meet with Dick Clarke in the White House. Once again, the Pentagon was readying cruise missiles—America’s chosen means of assassination—for a strike the following morning. Coincidentally, Clarke had recently returned from the Emirates, where he had helped negotiate the sale of American-built fighter aircraft worth $8 billion. He had personal ties to the UAE royal family. No doubt the image of dead princes scattered in the sand played in his mind, along with the failures of Operation Infinite Reach. Moreover, the CIA could not guarantee that bin Laden was actually in the camp.
Clarke rejected the mission. Tenet also voted against it. Scheuer felt betrayed. The considerations that turned the men against the project seemed petty and mercenary compared to the opportunity to kill bin Laden. “I’m not a big consequences guy,” Scheuer admitted, and to prove it he sent out a series of wounded, recriminating e-mails. Talk in the hallways of the agency suggested that he had suffered a breakdown, that his obsession with bin Laden had gotten the best of him. In the meantime, he blew up at a senior FBI manager in Alec Station, which elicited an angry phone call from Director Freeh to Tenet. In May, Scheuer was dismissed as the head of Alec. “You’re burned out,” his boss told him.
He was expected to retire and accept the intelligence medal that had been struck for him. “Stick it in your ass,” said Scheuer. He reported at his usual dizzying time on Monday morning and occupied a desk in the library. He remained there month after month, with no duties, waiting for the agency to come to him when it was ready to kill, not to dither over a few dead princes.
O’NEILL’S OFFICE was in the northeast corner of the twenty-fifth floor of New York’s 26 Federal Plaza, overlooking the Chrysler and Empire State buildings through one window and the Brooklyn Bridge through the other. He made sure that there was no other FBI office like it. He cleaned out the prison-made government-issue furniture and brought in a lavender couch. On his flame mahogany coffee table was a book about tulips—The Flower That Drives Men Wild—and he filled the room with plants and seasonal cut flowers. He kept two computers, one the antiquated and handicapped version supplied by the bureau and the other his own high-speed PC. In the background CNN ran constantly on a small television. Instead of the usual family pictures that adorn office walls and desktops, O’Neill had prints of French Impressionists.
Few people in the bureau knew that he had a wife and two children (John Junior and Carol) in New Jersey, who did not join him when he moved to Chicago in 1991. Shortly after he arrived in that city, he met Valerie James, a fashion sales director who was divorced and had two children of her own. She was tall and beautiful, with a level gaze and a sultry voice. She saw O’Neill at a bar and bought him a drink because “he had the most compelling eyes.” They stayed up talking till five in the morning.
O’Neill sent Valerie flowers every Friday, the weekly anniversary of the day they met. He was a terrific dancer and allowed that he had been on American Bandstand when he was a teenager. Whenever Valerie had to travel on business, she would find a bottle of wine waiting for her in her hotel room. “Are you sure you’re not married?” Valerie asked.
Just before O’Neill moved to Washington, a female agent pulled Valerie aside at the bureau Christmas party and told her about O’Neill’s family in New Jersey. “That’s not possible,” said Valerie. “We’re getting married. He asked my father for my hand.”
While he was courting Valerie, O’Neill had a girlfriend in Washington,