Thought this name rang a bell...
John O'Neill, director of security at the World Trade Center, became an expert in terrorism over three decades in the FBI. He retired as the head of the agency's national security division in New York two weeks before the attack. With the FBI, he supervised the on-site investigations of the terrorist bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen last year, as well as the 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Friends and family believe O'Neill was in his 34th-floor office when the first hijacked plane crashed into the tower. Within minutes, O'Neill was outside on the sidewalk, calling a close friend and his son, J.P. O'Neill, from his cell phone to assure them he was safe. He then called FBI headquarters before re-entering one of the towers to assist in the evacuation. "He didn't have to be there," New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik said.
O'Neill sounded the alarm on terrorism for many years. An 1996 article, published in the Van Impe Intelligence Briefing, quoted him as saying, "A lot of these groups [international terrorist organizations] now have the capability and the support infrastructure in the United States to attack us here if they choose to do so."
O'Neill also correctly predicted the increasing destructiveness of future terrorist attacks. In his 1997 watershed speech, presented to the National Strategy Forum, O'Neill said:
"The only thing that knocked O.J. Simpson off of television, his trial, was the Oklahoma City bombing case. The larger the attack, the more newsworthy they can make it. ... We are concerned about the lethality of the attacks. We're very, very concerned that we seem to have a rash of both problems in the international side and the domestic side at the same time. And we are also concerned now that we have had obviously a lot of conventional types of attacks, but now we're starting to see unconventional types of attacks like the attack that took place in Tokyo with an unconventional type of weapon."
I will conclude this tribute to John P. O'Neill with his own powerful and prophetic words. During that same 1997 speech, he also stated:
"I think interesting times lie ahead. Certainly, we as citizens will be challenged. I know the FBI will continue to be challenged in the years to come. Unfortunately, I cannot predict that no Americans will be injured or killed as a result of a terrorist attack. And in fact, it will happen as long as violence is seen as the way to move along political or social agendas. We will have terrorism as a problem to contend with. Hopefully, working together, we will continue to reduce the amount of terrorism to its lowest amount possible."
It is a tragic irony that our top terrorism authority died in the world's deadliest terrorism attack.