The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [196]
It was the twentieth anniversary of the day he became an FBI agent. That is the time when an FBI agent can retire with his full pension and finally tell the bureau, “Kiss my ass.”
O’Neill was smiling, Rossini observed, but his eyes were sad. He was on the verge of making his choice. Rossini could see that O’Neill was saying good-bye to the man he had been, and to the man he might have been. There were dreams that would never be realized. For one, he would never catch Osama bin Laden.
All the time that O’Neill was in Spain, Mohammed Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shibh were also in the country, in a little coastal resort called Salou, reviewing the final details of the 9/11 strike.
IN THE SAME WAY that his dress and manners paid tribute to the FBI’s traditional opponent, the mobster, O’Neill also displayed an affinity for the terrorist mind. His hero was the Irish nationalist Michael Collins, the martyred leader of Sinn Fein and the inventor of modern guerrilla warfare, who (like O’Neill) had been betrayed by his own people. Although O’Neill worked against the Irish Republican Army as an FBI agent, supervising several highly successful operations, he sympathized with its aspirations. He obviously saw something of himself in Michael Collins. But for the last decade he had found himself matched in a mortal contest against the most daring terrorist in history, whose goals appalled him but whose commitment and relentlessness were unequaled.
After the Cole investigation and the inquiry about the briefcase, O’Neill grasped that his reputation was so undermined that the NSC job was now out of the question. The usual course of a retired FBI executive is to become a security consultant in a high-paying corporate job, so that in the final years of his career he can finally cash in. O’Neill had applied for several positions of that sort, but the one that he settled on when he returned from Spain was the World Trade Center post. Some of his friends, including Mark Rossini, congratulated him, saying, “At least now you’ll be safe. They already tried to bomb it.” And O’Neill replied, “They’ll try again. They’ll never stop trying to get those two buildings.” Once again, he was instinctively placing himself in the bull’s-eye. And perhaps in this decision there was a certain acceptance of his fate.
One can imagine that John O’Neill’s life exemplified, in the minds of Islamic radicals as well as believers of many faiths, the depravity that was characteristic of his country and his age. It was a time in America when, spiritually speaking, people were pushed to extremes. The comfortable morality of the center had decayed, along with the mainstream denominations, which were withering into irrelevance; meanwhile, rapidly growing fundamentalist churches were transforming the political landscape. The sexual decadence of the Clinton presidency was replaced by the dogmatism of the religious right. O’Neill, too, was pulled between turpitude and extreme piousness. He was an adulterer, a philanderer, a liar, an egotist, and a materialist. He loved celebrity and brand names, and he lived well beyond his means. These qualities were exactly the stereotypes that bin Laden used to paint his portrait of America. But now O’Neill was reaching for a spiritual handhold.
He had moved away from the Catholic Church when he met Valerie. She was the daughter of a fundamentalist preacher in Chicago. O’Neill loved the fire-and-brimstone services, but at the same time he was leading a national FBI probe of the violence of anti-abortion protesters. Both he and Val became aware of the power and danger of fundamentalist beliefs. These were people who went to churches very similar to the ones they did, who were drawn to ecstatic experiences that more traditional faiths could not provide. The difference was that the protesters were willing to kill others