Episode 86: 9/11 - The Man Who Knew

In 2002, Frontline PBS published a documentary on John O'Neill, a counter-terrorism expert who predicted that the 1993 WTC bombing would not be the last. He was, in fact, inside the WTC on 9/11 and perished there. 

What did he know?

Was he taken seriously? If not, why not?

Links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbXPqWGGQ5U

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Trade_Center_(1973%E2%80%932001)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_P._O%27Neill

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My award-winning biography of Dag is available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Unicorn-New-Look-Hammarskj%C3%B6ld-ebook/dp/B0DSCS5PZT

My forthcoming project, Simply Dag, will be available globally next summer. 

Transcript

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Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

The podcast episode discusses the PBS documentary "The Man Who Knew," focusing on John O'Neill, a former FBI agent who predicted the 9/11 attacks. O'Neill's career highlights include capturing Ramzi Yousef in 1995 and investigating the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He was promoted to head the FBI's counter-terrorism section but faced internal conflicts. O'Neill's warnings about Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden were often ignored. Despite his expertise, he was sidelined and eventually retired. Tragically, he died in the 9/11 attacks. The episode raises questions about the FBI's response and the broader implications of unheeded warnings.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

9/11, John O'Neill, World Trade Center, Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, FBI, counter-terrorism, Cold War, Suez Canal, Congo crisis, Operation Gladio, Richard Clarke, Louis Freeh, Valerie James.

Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host. Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In tonight's episode, I'll be talking about the frontline PBS documentary The Man Who Knew it was released in 2002 still holds some relevance for us today. Now we typically don't get the most revealing or the most expository information from mainstream documentaries, but that doesn't mean they're completely worthless either. Case in point, the BBC Docu series on Operation Gladio, which was, in my opinion, phenomenal. And if you haven't checked out the episodes that I recorded about that Docu series. I would highly encourage you to do so. But for tonight, since we're so close to the anniversary of 911 Let's saddle up, talk about the man who knew and see what we discover

In the shadow of the Cold War, one man stood alone, Dag Hammarskjöld was the world's most unusual diplomat, introspective but unflinching, poetic yet pragmatic. As Secretary General of the United Nations during one of the most volatile eras in modern history, he navigated emergencies like the Suez Canal and the Congo crisis with moral clarity and an iron spine. He made powerful enemies who preferred their wars profitable and their peacekeepers obedient. But that wasn't Dag ready to go deeper. Pick up your copy of Decoding the Unicorn: A New Look at Dag Hammarskjöld today.

Before we get into the details of John O'Neill's life. What he did? Why it's significant. I want to go back in time, just so we can get a little refresher. The World Trade Center was actually a complex of seven buildings in the financial district in New York City, and at one time, One World Trade Center and two World Trade Center were the tallest buildings in the world. Now they were later eclipsed by the Patronus towers in Malaysia, but for a time, they were the tallest skyscrapers in the world, and certainly they remained iconic in the New York skyline. The primary construction happened between 1966 and 1975 I think it was dedicated in 1973 it's important to remember, and it will be significant to our story about John O'Neill, that in 1993 there was a T word attack on the World Trade Center, Because things so typically get eclipsed by what happened on 911 we sometimes forget that actually there was an attack in 1993 and it was perpetrated by a man named Ramsey Youssef and his associates, and they put a device. I'm trying to be careful here, because I don't want to get my account flagged. You're gonna have to read between the lines on some of these things. But he used a device inside of a van, and it was below the North Tower of the World Trade Center, and it apparently was using urea nitrate and hydrogen gas. And their intention was that the north tower would collapse onto the South Tower, and then both of the skyscrapers would come down. 1000s of people would be killed. It didn't go the way that they intended it to, but nevertheless, there were six people who died and 1000s of other injuries, and of course, 10s of 1000s of people were evacuated from the buildings that day. So you want to keep in mind that there was this previous attack, and if you will, a sense of unfinished business, because it didn't go the way that the plotters had hoped it would go now we'll go into the man who knew, to a degree, front lines investigation is really positioned as there was an internal power struggle. There were personality and management dynamics at play. This man, John O'Neill, was seen as being a flamboyant, brash kind of character, but he knew he became an expert on the subject, and he knew that an event like 911 was going to happen, but instead of listening to him and taking him seriously. Seriously, he ran afoul of this internal power structure, and he gets kicked to the curb. So that's the sort of angle that this documentary is taking. O'Neill starts his career with the Bureau in 1976 and he works on a variety of issues, from mafia, crime to white collar crime, money laundering, counter intelligence and so forth. But he gets a promotion in 1991 and he gets moved to the Bureau's Chicago office, and he makes a name for himself in that office, he's seen as being an incredibly hard worker, very diligent and thorough. Like he's the type of employee that he doesn't want to just get a basic sense of something like he will auto didactically on his own time, make sure that he becomes an expert on whatever it is that he's working on. He also works on a task force that investigated a series of attacks on abortion clinics. So that's this kind of early to mid 90s period. Is where frontline drops us into John O'Neill's story. It's 1995 and O'Neill gets a promotion. He is asked to go to headquarters in Washington, DC. He had been working there before, which this is actually something that I don't think that the documentary exactly makes clear, but he had just been working there on a lower level. So it's like he gets an important promotion to go to the Chicago field office, but then he gets another important promotion when he gets called to go back to DC, because now he's not coming back as like an agent per se, he's coming back to be the chief of the counter T word section. So this is a big deal, and like the documentary points out that it's like a Sunday and he's already in the office. It's like, No, I don't want to move to an apartment or a house or whatever and get settled in on my first night in town. I want to be at work, damn it. So he's at work, and on the first day, he receives a call from Richard Clark, and who I think was both a friend and a colleague, and Richard Clark has learned that Ramsey Youssef, we should remember that name now from the 1993 attack. So Richard Clark learns that Ramsey Youssef has been located in Pakistan, and O'Neill just throws himself into the case. He wants to find as much information as he possibly can so that Yousef can successfully be captured and then hopefully extradited as well. John lives at the office and absolutely breathes this effort to catch Ramsey. And is successful. He puts together the team that is successful in apprehending this guy, and they're able to get him while he's still in Pakistan. If he had been moved into Afghanistan, there wouldn't have really been anything that the US could have done about it. But through John's diligent efforts, they were able to capture this man, Ramsey Youssef, is coming in via helicopter, and this man named Louis shaliro, who was apparently a bureau director for NYC for a couple of years late 90s, said that one of the agents like I guess he's coming in, he's blindfolded in This helicopter, which totally sounds like something out of a novel or a spy movie. So he's blindfolded, and one of the agents asks if it's okay to remove the blindfold from Yousef, which it's a little bit like, why would you even do that? Why wouldn't you just leave the guy completely the hell alone? I find that odd, but okay. And then, coincidentally, they remove the blindfold, and they're flying right by the World Trade Center, and one of the agents decides to pick at Ramsey Youssef. And he's like, Oh, you see it's still standing. And Youssef is like, well, it wouldn't be if we had had better funding. So we have this, like, foreshadowing again, it sounds very John le Carre, doesn't it? Like, oh well, it wouldn't be if we had better funding. Or James Bond villain. Like, I have to admit, that doesn't completely pass my sniff test. If something is odd about that, because if you have this mastermind, because they clearly say in the documentary, like, don't underestimate Ramzi Yousef. He's incredibly smart and he's wildly dangerous. Why would he take his blindfold off at all? Why would you engage with the subject at all? I find that weird, let alone to take the blindfold off. Point out the World Trade Center and be like, ha ha it's still standing.

I just find that odd. I really do.

Now O'Neill focuses on this trail between Ramzi Yousef and Osama bin Laden. And as I said, when O'Neill would become obsessed with a topic. He wanted to learn everything there possibly was to know about set topic. So for six years, he's like eating, breathing and sleeping, this question of, well, who was the financier? There would have been more damage. They would have been knocked down if we had had better funding. Well, who the hell is funding them? Like we need to get better information about all of this, and it becomes absolutely his life's work. We learned that after Ramsey Youssef fled immediately following the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, he went to the Philippines, and he was creating the devices to obliterate 12 jumbo jets in a 48 hour period of time. We also learned from somebody affiliated with the Charlie India alpha that Ramsey Youssef was planning to crash one of those planes into the agency headquarters in Langley.

We're told by Richard Clarke that one of the things that O'Neill recognized like in his reading and his research and figuring out that like there was this booklet of phone calls that had been made in connection with the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. But then also with this other plot called the bojinka plot, which was where Youssef was planning to put devices on planes and crash them all, etc. He finds this link to Osama. And everybody's like, Well, yeah, he's he's a financier of the T word. Like, that's just what he does. And Clark said that O'Neill was like, well, it's not just financing it. He's not just putting money out into the market to create maximum chaos. If he's not an agent of chaos like the Joker from Batman, it's money that's spent with a purpose. And what he wants to do is build out a worldwide network of T word people. They'll be based out of Afghanistan. Like the point really is to get a base going for what we now now know as Al Qaeda. They want to go after the United States and other governments that are friendly to the United States, and in particular, governments that might be friendly to the United States that are located in the Middle East. Now in the documentary, we meet a man named Robert Bear Bryant, who was deputy director for the Bureau from 97 to 99 and he admits that the first time he ever even heard the name O sama was from John O'Neill. But O'Neill was already well aware of Osama's background, and he was also aware of this burgeoning group called Al Qaeda. Now we get into the crux of this internal political battles narrative, because you have the criminal division of the Bureau like the old fashioned G men, and then you have this counter T word section that O'Neill is involved with, and O'Neill feels like it really needs to be this division. We need to be separate from the criminal division, and we need to be focused on foiling these plots. We need to know and understand these individuals that are enemies to the country that could be coming after us, and we don't need old fashioned G men doing it. We need a new kind of agent that's trained for new kind of plots and new kinds of technology. The world is changing so quickly that the old school methods are not going to cut it here. And naturally, that steps on some toes, because you have the old fashioned G men that are like, yeah, no, that's not, that's not how we do it around these hair parts. We're told that John has his own kind of swagger. He's a flashy dresser. He has nice clothing, and he's always very clean and well groomed and polished. And at five or six o'clock when other agents are going home to their families. He still wants to keep working, but it's like he kind of moves the work on to some other location. It's time to go out to a bar, it's time to go out to a restaurant, but continue talking shop the whole time, and he's going to these bars that are frequently populated by spies. Of people coming from the Charlie India alpha, the Delta India alpha, and so forth. And he's rubbing shoulders with people that can help what he's doing. We're told from co workers that he has sharp elbows, that he can be abrasive and argumentative. And when he feels that he's right, he gets very stubborn and doesn't want to back down. One of his colleagues says that a group of them took to referring to him as the prince of darkness, which I'm not really quite sure how that relates to somebody being a snazzy dresser and grooming themselves well, but it definitely gives you some insight that he must have rankled some people and ruffled some feathers, as O'Neill is continuing to work, he uncovers a plot in 1995 that pilots would be sent to the US to train and one of the plots would be to take an aircraft packed with explosives and then crash it into a federal building, a government building, but something that would get maximum attention and maximum casualties, because John is doing what he needs to do job wise. They're like his personal life became the thing that could potentially be an Achilles heel. And that's not at all uncommon, even in the corporate world, if somebody can't get you based on your work product, they'll figure out some other way. So John was married. He had a couple of kids. He was separated from the wife. Is his wife, and kids lived separately from him. They had separate households. But to my knowledge, he wasn't a deadbeat. I think he was supporting them and taking care of them at the same time, he had some girlfriends, and he was evidently telling them that he wasn't married or that he had gotten a divorce, and I hate to say stringing them along, but that's a bit what it sounds like. The one who's interviewed in this documentary is Valerie James, and she says that she didn't know that John was married, that she was attracted to him immediately, and they started dating and spending time together, and that, in fact, her children started to refer to him as dad, and he made the comment in front of her kids, I'm going to marry your mother one day. And she took him at his word, and then later on, when she found out through gossip. It was like the wife of one of his co workers said, hey, you know he's married, right? You may be thinking that he's going to marry you, but he's Catholic and he's already married to somebody else, and I don't think they're going to get a divorce. Lady, it was like, Oh, shit. She didn't break up with him. What she says in the documentary is like, Well, we had already been together for two or three years at that point. So I mean, what are you going to do? And I'm like, Well, I would say a conversation is in order, but at the very least, anyway, this relationship that he has with Valerie will come into more focus later in the documentary. We learn that there's a contentious relationship between the bureau director Louis free and John O'Neill. Now if you go to Wikipedia, you will see that later on, Louis free denied that they had a contentious relationship and claimed that they got along in the Frontline documentary, we're told that they didn't and we're told by multiple people that the two of them did not get along. In 1996 the attack on the Cobar towers occurs, and O'Neill is like, I need to be in the thick of this. Being in Washington, DC is not going to help me. So he flies to Saudi Arabia and and wants to just absorb as much information and come to a conclusion about what really happened there as he possibly can. It's important to note, in that case, that a device was detonated adjacent to a building that was an eight story housing unit specifically for members of the United States Air Force, both O'Neill and free the director, take, like, a 14 hour flight there and then a 14 hour flight back after the investigation. O'Neill feels that the Saudis were not really cooperating, that they were telling free whatever it was that he wanted to hear, but they were being dishonest, that there was more to the story. But free disagrees and feels like no they're cooperating. They're on the up and up. They're being level with us. So on this 14 hour flight back to the states, that's when O'Neill gets super frustrated and decides to say what he really thinks. And so he tells Louis free that the Saudis are blowing smoke up his ass. So if you have a boss that is already not your biggest fan, doing something like that is not really going to endear them to you, even if you're telling the truth, putting it to them in such a blunt way is probably not going to win you any brownie points. In the mid 90s, O'Neill continues to ring the alarm bells, and he says that the threats of T word attacks are growing. Modern groups can go rogue that they don't have to be backed by an official government. You can have individuals who band together to do evil like I guess we could put it this way, the old rules of engagement from the Cold War are over with by that point in time, and you're giving way to a different form of warfare. He also argued that some of these people were already in the United States, and that the American government shouldn't ignore that reality. He saw that there were veterans of the various Afghan struggles. You know, they call that the graveyard of empires, and it's really true this, like a certain group of veterans that had been part of the various struggles in Afghanistan, particularly against the Soviet invasion from the 1980s those people were a growing threat in 1996 1997

O'Neill gets moved to New York City, and he's going to be like a special agent in charge of the Bureau's National Security Division. And this is considered to be like a large and prestigious move to a large and prestigious field office. By 98 O'Neill is focused a lot on Osama, and then he creates a desk specifically about al Qaeda. Now we fast forward a little bit to 1998 there are two American embassies that are attacked, like almost one on top of the other in Nairobi, Kenya, and then also in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, O'Neill, obviously, just like he did with what happened in Saudi Arabia. He wants to be involved in the investigation by that point in time, he has even more knowledge about the way that Osama works. He understands al Qaeda probably better than anybody in the country at that point in time. So he's jostling Louis free to let his office be the one to take care of things. Let us run point on this at the same time, O'Neill has this friend in the media producer, I think it was for ABC named Chris Isham and O'Neill, kind of looks at the media as we really have to tell them everything, but we can certainly have a symbiotic relationship, instead of one where we're always at odds. Are there machinations behind that. I'm sure there are that's that's a whole nother topic for us to get into some other time. But there's an interview that happens, and some of you may remember in an interview that happens between Osama and a correspondent named John Miller, as well as Chris Isham. And after the interview airs, O'Neill starts pressuring Isham to release an unedited version to him so that he could carefully dissect it. Isham doesn't want to do that, even though they're supposedly big buddies or whatever, but O'Neill is able to find an unedited, unredacted copy on the internet. Oh, the early days of the net, right? The Wild Wild West. There's more internal drama because O'Neill wants to be in command of the investigation on the 1998 embassy attacks. There's tension between the counter T word division and the Criminal Division, and ultimately, the Criminal Division wins out in 1999 he gets his hand slapped pretty well and is docked, I think, a certain amount of pay because he had borrowed an agency vehicle. Something was wrong with his and so he borrowed an agency vehicle temporarily, and then he also allowed this girlfriend, Valerie, to go into a bureau safe house to use the bathroom, and doing something like that, getting caught doing it was enough to really cheese off the wrong people. Then he was also at a meeting. Left a briefcase behind. He had taken documents out of the office that he was not supposed to have taken out of the office. He leaves this brief case. He it's just kind of like he's burning the candle at both ends. He's tired, he's overworked, he's stressed out, and so he makes a mistake, but it's like. He makes the mistake at the worst possible time, because somebody lifts the briefcase. Now, I believe it was returned, but it's like, okay, look, you've already been in trouble for borrowing a vehicle with nobody's permission, for letting your girlfriend go into a safe house, and now you've left a briefcase with important documents like this. Just can't keep going. Now on the Wikipedia page, we're told that he was also borrowing money. He had substantial credit card debts because he wanted to have a certain kind of lifestyle, and he also wanted to finance all of these various girlfriends on top of paying for his wife and kids. So it sounds like he might have had a messy personal life.

Now we get to December of 1999. oh, I remember this well, because there was all kinds of hype about what was going to happen when all of the clocks went to 112, 1000, like, remember to back up your computers. Be prepared for the apocalypse. It was like all the technology in the world was going to die as soon as we went from 99 to 2000 and everybody was just like, Oh my god. Oh my god. The hype around it was insane. But in December of 1999 there's a man named Ahmed rasam, also known as the millennium, B, O, M, B, E, R, who was a member of al Qaeda after he's arrested, O'Neill conducts an investigation into various year 2000 attack plots. So it's kind of like we've already found somebody from al Qaeda who had that exact kind of intent, who's been arrested and has been thwarted. We need to make sure there's nobody else out there, because I can guarantee you there is somebody else out there that wants to do the same kind of stuff. So he launches an absolutely comprehensive investigation to try and make sure that people will be safe on New Year's Eve slash New Year's Day. I think in particular of New York, all of those people crowding into Times Square to watch the ball drop, particularly because it's not just another year, it's the dawning of a new millennium. Again, so much hype around that. I think that in Times Square, there was like 1,000,002 million people. It was like a huge amount of folks packed into that space. I remember my boyfriend at the time and I were just like, Oh my God, not for all the money in the world, because if anything goes wrong, that's that's exactly where somebody would do something. I mean, just common sense would tell you, like, that would be the target. It was, it was scary, but we were, everybody was glad that nothing happened and then all the technology of the world didn't immediately die. We're now in the year 2000 and yes, let's do a quick homage to Conan in the year 2000 O'Neill gets passed over for some promotions, not a surprise, because if you're not playing the political game internally, that's going to happen. He gets assigned to look into the T word attack that happened against the USS Cole it was a suicide attack by al Qaeda. He goes to Yemen, and once he's there, he starts to to butt heads. It's kind of we see this happening throughout his career. He starts to butt heads with Barbara Bodine, who is the US Ambassador to Yemen. The two have differing opinions on how the investigation should be conducted, what kind of interface there should be between the bureau with ordinary citizens as well as officials in the government. And it's like they start off on a bad foot, and then it just never gets any better. After about two months of being in Yemen, O'Neill comes home to New York, and he's hoping that he'll go back to Yemen to continue his work, but he gets blocked essentially by Bodine and some others. There are newspaper articles about it at the time, and so it's like his support, even within the bureau, is starting to wane, because he's just making too many enemies, internal and external, by 2001 director free has just withdrawn the team from Yemen. Now we get to an important plot twist, Richard Clark, who I mentioned earlier, it's like early 2001 and Richard Clark has been the National Coordinator for security, infrastructure protection and counter T word. He wants to go to another position, and he thinks O'Neill would be a great person to be his replacement. O'Neill is hesitant about all of this, but then the story about the briefcase. Remember, he has the briefcase. He's like burning the candle at both ends, and the briefcase gets stolen, and it had important documents. He finds out that a story is going to be published in the New York. Times, and it's going to make him look really terrible. So he decides to just retire full stop from the Bureau, which is kind of amazing, because one of the things that Valerie, his girlfriend, said was that really the bureau was his mistress. He was he was married more so to the Bureau, and was in love with the Bureau and the work that he was doing than he was with any other human being. So he retires, and that's a big step, but he goes to the private sector to take a job, drum roll please, at the World Trade Center, to be their chief of security. It's like, Wow, all the places that he could wind up. It's just mind boggling that that's the place that he would go. But late August, early September, he was talking to various people in his inner circle, and he was making comments about Osama and al Qaeda, and he was like, they will at some point want to finish the job. And allegedly, according to one of the people interviewed in the documentary, The the night before he had even made the comment, like they're going to do something again. America is absolutely ripe for another attack. It's going to happen again. And then the very next day was September 11, and in fact, they did do something again, or someone did right? We we can have a separate debate about that, but for the time being, I'm just covering what was in the documentary. He's there when the attack happens, and he dies in the attack. So you have this rather depressing story when it all boils down, you have a rather depressing story about someone who knew someone who worked hard to make himself an expert, and who rang the alarm bell like this is going to happen again, and even more specifically, with the World Trade Center, they're going to try to finish the job. Remember earlier in the documentary, in that weird helicopter scene where they take the blindfold off and Ramsay Youssef is like, well, we would have succeeded if we had had more money, we'd had better financing. Well, once the better financing came in, unless there was more to the story, they did, in fact, succeed. So what conclusions can we draw here? As I said at the start of this episode, you're not always going to get the most intense or revealing information from a mainstream media documentary, but at the same time, I do think, if nothing else, we can take from it that there were warning signs. There were people who knew that certain buildings, certain areas of the country were hot spots that there were already T word cells in the US with ulterior motives. At the very least, you start talking about dereliction of duty. You start talking about it was known that something bad was going to happen. Was it just simply allowed to happen? Now there are a plethora of questions around 911 that remain unanswered, but to me, that's one of them, how, what, what exactly was the involvement? Was it allowed to happen? And then who dropped the ball on that?

Just some food for thought. Stay a little bit crazy, and I will see you in the next episode.

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