The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [179]
Because it was still standing, however, the Trade Center had become a symbol of the success of New York’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, a coalition of the FBI, the CIA, the New York City Police Department, the Port Authority, and various other regional and federal agencies. In September 2000 the JTTF chose to celebrate its twentieth anniversary there, in the famous Windows on the World banquet room. Some of the representatives looked a little out of place in black tie, but this was a night to congratulate themselves. Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, was present, as was Mary Jo White, his successor in that job. She praised the task force for “your close-to-perfect record of successful investigations and convictions,” which included Yousef and six other World Trade Center bombers, as well as Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman and nine of his followers who had planned to assassinate public officials and blow up New York City landmarks. The people in the room had seen the world of terrorism move from the relatively innocent days of Croatian nationalists and anti-Castro Cubans, who had been more interested in publicity than terror, to the sobering new world of deliberate mass murder.
It was a misty night, and the clouds obscured the view from the 106th floor of the tower. O’Neill seemed at ease as he wandered through the room, although some might have wondered why Mary Jo White had omitted his name from the list of FBI officials she chose to acknowledge. Mark Rossini, the new I-49 representative at Alec Station, was there; he had just gotten engaged, and he introduced his fiancée to his boss, a man he idolized. Rossini was one of the Sons of John. He studied everything about O’Neill, including his taste in cigars and restaurants; he even dressed like O’Neill. But Rossini had no idea that his mentor’s career had been thrown further into turmoil because of a troubling incident that had occurred two months earlier.
O’Neill had attended a mandated pre-retirement conference in Orlando that July. He had no intention of retiring and was impatient that he had been forced to attend, but since he was in Florida, he asked Valerie James to join him so they could spend the weekend in Miami.
During the conference O’Neill got a page, and he left the room to return the call. When he returned a few minutes later, the other agents had broken for lunch. His briefcase was missing. O’Neill first called the local police, then Mawn. He admitted that the briefcase contained some classified e-mails and one highly sensitive document, the Annual Field Office Report, which contained an itemized breakdown of every national security operation in New York. Both the director of the FBI and the attorney general would have to be notified.
“It’s hideous,” O’Neill told Valerie when he came back to the room. He was ashen.
Police found the briefcase a couple of hours later in another hotel. A Montblanc pen had been stolen, along with a silver cigar cutter and an expensive lighter. The papers were intact, and fingerprint analysis soon established that they had not been touched, but it was another careless mistake at a pregnable moment in his career.
Even though O’Neill immediately reported the theft and none of the information had been compromised, the Justice Department ordered a criminal inquiry. Mawn thought that was absurd. He would have recommended an oral reprimand or, at worst, a letter of censure. People took work home all the time, he observed; they just never had it stolen. He felt guilty because he had been pushing O’Neill to get the AFOR completed, and O’Neill was just doing what he’d asked.
Despite their competition for the top job in New York, Mawn had