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(Sorry my HTML skills aren’t as good as yours, Nita, so please bear with me).

I’ve been following the articles written on John O’Neill, for two reasons. As head of the FBI’s New York Joint Terrorism Task Force, he was central to the FBI’s terrorism investigations, and because the articles written posthumously tend to quote a variety of sources, and give relationships within the Bureau at the time in question (1998 to the summer of 2001).

The downside of researching O’Neill is that he has become the poster boy, posthumously, for the McKinney-like conspiracy theorists, due to the book “Ben Laden: La Verite Interdite” ("Bin Laden: the Forbidden Truth") by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, printed earlier this year, that quotes O’Neill, allegedly interviewed by the authors in July 2001, as saying "every answer, every key to dismantling the Osama bin Laden organizations are in Saudi Arabia."." Since O’Neill is dead, there’s (conveniently) no way of verifying the interview, or the exact quotes, but it is widely documented, in stories quoting sources by name, that he clashed with the Clinton State Department as the lead investigator in Yemen after the bombing of the Cole in 2000. He was also instrumental in gathering evidence upon which NY Federal Prosecutor Mary Jo White obtained convictions in the trials of the African Embassy bombers and collaborators.

In an article entitled “O'Neill Versus Osama” at NewYorkMetro.com, by Robert Kolker:

In this wildly altered political landscape, all sides are trying to lay claim to John O'Neill's legacy; he's a Rorschach test. If you lean toward the right, like some of his New York friends, you believe O'Neill quit in a fury when the diplomats neutered him. David Cornstein, who ran Finlay jewelers and now is chairman of the New York Olympic Games commission, used to tailgate with O'Neill at Giants and Jets games. "We concurred," he says, "that the country after the Cold War had really fallen a bit asleep, and there was a liberal movement toward more and more civil rights, and the country wasn't observant enough to realize that the world had changed and our view of the way security should be should change, too."

But if you lean to the left, like the French authors Guillaume Dasquié and Jean-Charles Brisard, who feature a July interview with O'Neill in their new book, Ben Laden, La Vérité Interdite, you've outed O'Neill as a sort of smoking gun -- a man who they say all but confirmed in his final months that George W. Bush's oil-industry-bred administration was so worried about alienating Saudi Arabia that it decided to negotiate with the Taliban rather than go after it.”

O’Neill wound up quitting the FBI and taking the job as Security chief at the World Trade Center for two reasons, it seems: because it paid much better than the FBI (and the NSC position he was allegedly offered by Richard Clarke (see Post #71 ), and because his record had been blemished by an investigation into the fact that his briefcase, containing (inappropriate) classified documents, had been stolen at a meeting in Orlando in July 2000. The NewYork Metro story infers that the charges regarding the briefcase originated from Louis Freeh's No. 2, Tom Pickard, who “retired” from the FBI in November 2001.

The New Yorker story is a bit more blunt: “The leak seemed to be timed to destroy O'Neill's chance of being confirmed for the N.S.C. job. He decided to retire. O'Neill suspected that the source of the information was either Tom Pickard or Dale Watson. The antagonism between him and Pickard was well known.

Now comes the most interesting item in the posthumous O’Neill saga: a 5/20/02 story in the New York Times, by David Johnston and Don Van Natta Jr., entitled

“ASHCROFT LEARNED OF AGENT'S ALERT JUST AFTER 9/11 BUT BUSH WAS NOT TOLD” :

WASHINGTON, May 20 — Attorney General John Ashcroft and the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, were told a few days after the Sept. 11 attacks that the F.B.I. had received a memorandum from its Phoenix office the previous July warning that Osama bin Laden's followers could be training at American flight schools, government officials said today.But senior Bush administration officials said neither Mr. Ashcroft nor Mr. Mueller briefed President Bush and his national security staff until recently about the Phoenix memorandum. Nor did they tell Congressional leaders.

The disclosure is certain to magnify criticism of the F.B.I.'s performance, including its failure to act on the memorandum before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The two men have not said publicly when they learned of the July 10 memorandum, but the officials said that within days of the attacks senior law enforcement officials grasped the document's significance as a potentially important missed signal.

Today, several F.B.I. and Justice Department officials said that in the chaotic days after the attacks, discussions between Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Mueller were hurried and that their recollection of events were somewhat blurred by the frenetic pace of activity. Some officials said they recalled high-level discussions about how the hijackers had attended American flight schools, but one Justice Department official did not recall a briefing about the memorandum.

Spokesmen for Mr. Mueller and Mr. Ashcroft would not discuss the issue today. A senior Justice Department official said, "The attorney general was not briefed in any detail or with any specificity about the document known as the Phoenix memo until about a month ago."

Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, who was traveling today with the president in Miami, said, "We have nothing that indicates the president had seen or even heard about this memo prior to a few weeks ago."

Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said last Thursday that the president had not heard about the memorandum before the hijackings and had only recently learned of it. "I personally became aware of it just recently," Ms. Rice said, adding that she had asked Mr. Mueller and George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, to review the matter.

The Phoenix memorandum, written by Kenneth Williams, an agent in Phoenix, was sent to F.B.I. headquarters as an electronic computer message on July 10. It was reviewed by midlevel supervisors, who headed the agency's bin Laden and Islamic extremist counterterrorism units.

But the officials said the memorandum was never sent to top F.B.I. managers, including Thomas J. Pickard, who was acting director in the summer of 2001 before Mr. Mueller took over early in September. Other senior officials were unaware of the memorandum before Sept. 11, including Michael Rolince, who managed the bureau's international terrorism unit, and Dale Watson his superior, the officials said.

The issue of when top officials knew of the Phoenix memorandum is emerging as a main focus in Congressional inquiries getting under way. Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has asked the F.B.I. to identify anyone at the agency who knew about the memorandum before the attacks.

But lawmakers also want to know when Bush administration officials learned about the memorandum after the attacks. Some lawmakers have asked whether administration officials were told about it soon after the attacks, but were slow to disclose it.

Several lawmakers, including Richard C. Shelby, a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, have already singled out the F.B.I. for blunt criticism after Mr. Williams's memorandum came to light several weeks ago.

The Phoenix memorandum is one of two documents under heavy scrutiny by Congressional investigators. The other is a daily intelligence report, shown to Mr. Bush on Aug. 6. The report mentions the threat of Qaeda members' carrying out hijackings in the United States. The White House has refused to produce the document, and administration officials have said that the information was too vague to act on.

Mr. Mueller has acknowledged that the bureau's failure to evaluate the Phoenix memorandum fully was an analytical failure that the F.B.I. has tried to correct.

"It is a very worthwhile process and a process we are undertaking to change what we do in response to that instance and others where perhaps we did not have the analytical capability," Mr. Mueller said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on May 8.

"We did not have the people who were looking at the broader picture to put the pieces in place," he said, adding that nothing in the memorandum would have enabled the F.B.I. to thwart the attacks.

The memorandum remains classified, and much of its contents are unknown. But officials have confirmed that it expressed concern that Mr. bin Laden and other groups could be using the flight schools to prepare for terror attacks. It urged F.B.I. officials to check the visas of foreigners at American aviation academies. But no action was taken before Sept. 11.

The memorandum was sent to counterterrorism offices in two cities — one copy went to John O'Neill, then the top counterterrorism agent in the F.B.I.'s New York office. Mr. O'Neill retired from the F.B.I. in late August. He had just begun a job as the security chief of the World Trade Center when he was killed in the attacks. .

Usually, internal investigative proposals that involve agencywide resources are reviewed by high F.B.I. officials. But in this case F.B.I. officials have said that officials who read the memorandum were distracted by other cases, a plot against American interests in France and the investigation of the attack in October 2000 on the destroyer Cole.

Two or three days after the attacks, Dale Watson, who was then assistant director for counterterrorism, brought the memorandum to the attention of Mr. Pickard, who had returned to his job as deputy director after a stint as acting director, officials said.

Mr. Pickard and several other agents then briefed Mr. Mueller and Mr. Ashcroft on its existence, the officials said.

The Phoenix agent's memorandum was not based on intelligence but on concerns and recommendations based on "conjecture and assumptions," said a senior official who has read it.

"There appeared to be a lot of Middle Eastern guys taking flying lessons in the Phoenix area," the official said. "This was just a good investigator taking a look at something. It was pure hunch."

For that reason, the official speculated that the memorandum had not set off strong alarms among other law enforcement officials who had reviewed it at the bureau.

Officials at the Central Intelligence Agency have said that they did not receive a copy of the memorandum until several weeks ago. But F.B.I. officials have said that the names of Middle Eastern men in the Phoenix area who were identified in the memorandum, were referred to the C.I.A. in the summer of 2001.

F.B.I. officials have said that the C.I.A. reported back that none of the men appeared to be connected to Al Qaeda.

Intelligence officials, however, have said that two or three of the men have recently been linked to the Qaeda network. These men remain at large, the officials said. (End of story)

This article is really an amazing piece of writing. In the tenth paragraph, we are told:

”officials said the memorandum was never sent to top F.B.I. managers, including Thomas J. Pickard, who was acting director in the summer of 2001 before Mr. Mueller took over early in September. Other senior officials were unaware of the memorandum before Sept. 11, including Michael Rolince, who managed the bureau's international terrorism unit, and Dale Watson, his superior, the officials said.”

Nine paragraphs later, we are told:

”The memorandum was sent to counterterrorism offices in two cities — one copy went to John O'Neill, then the top counterterrorism agent in the F.B.I.'s New York office. Mr. O'Neill retired from the F.B.I. in late August. He had just begun a job as the security chief of the World Trade Center when he was killed in the attacks.

Of the two cities to whom the Phoenix memo was supposedly addressed – Washington, D.C. and New York – the Times neglects to mention D.C., but makes quite sure it fingers a dead man – John O’Neill – as explicitly receiving the memo in New York, while neglecting to even mention the other of the “two cities” is Washington, D.C.

Either Tom Pickard, as acting director, or Dale Watson, as “superior” of the agent who managed the international terrorism unit, should logically be mentioned as the other person besides O’Neill to whom the memo was sent. Instead, they are described as “top F.B.I. managers,” and not as the ones who would be the logical target of the memo in D.C. BUT they write that O’Neill, as director of the unit in N.Y. definitely got the memo. (Dead men can’t talk.)

Then we learn that “Two or three days after the attacks, Dale Watson, who was then assistant director for counterterrorism, brought the memorandum to the attention of Mr. Pickard, who had returned to his job as deputy director after a stint as acting director, officials said.”

How very clever – the memo suddenly materialized out of nowhere, after 9/11, but now Pickard is “deputy director,” so the implication is that he’s (conveniently) no longer responsible. And Watson, who a few paragraphs before is described as the “superior” of the man “who managed the bureau's international terrorism unit,” has now suddenly become “the assistant director for counterterrorism.” So, of course, he’s not to blame either.

Pickard is out, but Dale Watson was fingered by Time.com : “Smart money says Mueller will elevate Assistant Director Dale Watson, currently head of counter-terrorism, to the counterterrorism/national security slot.”

If Watson gets the job, I guess he can thank John O’Neill’s ghost. As far as who will be blamed for missing the Phoenix memo, I’m betting it will be the man who can’t respond – John O’Neill.