Each anniversary of September 11 brings back familiar scenes: the collapse of the Twin Towers, ash and loose papers blanketing Lower Manhattan, and the solemn reading of every victim’s name.
Yet among the thousands included in that annual roll call is a life story with the devastating inevitability of a Greek tragedy.
John O’Neill, a leading FBI counterterrorism agent, resigned from the bureau in frustration only weeks before the 9/11 attacks. He believed his repeated warnings about Osama bin Laden had gone unheard.
At just 49, O’Neill was killed in the very attack he had spent years trying to prevent. After leaving the FBI, he had accepted a security position at the World Trade Center, placing him inside the doomed towers on September 11.
At the peak of his career, O’Neill served as special agent in charge of the national security division at the FBI’s New York field office. But he hardly fit the conventional image of a federal agent.
The son of Irish-American taxi drivers in Atlantic City, he favored slicked-back hair, a pinky ring, tailored Burberry suits and Bruno Magli shoes — a style that drew wisecracks from FBI colleagues dressed in more standard Men’s Warehouse attire.
He held court at Elaine’s, the famed Manhattan restaurant where journalists, diplomats and political figures traded information over dinner. Though married, O’Neill was also known for Chivas Regal-fueled late nights that often ran into early mornings at the office, prompting colleagues to wonder when, if ever, he slept.
O’Neill projected confidence in abundance, and by most accounts he inspired fierce loyalty or deep irritation — with little room in between.
John O’Neill, an FBI counterterrorism fighter, left the agency in frustration weeks before 9/11 after his warnings about Osama bin Laden appeared to be ignored.
O’Neill pictured with Anna DiBattista, his girlfriend of seven years.
‘He had this confidence, this arrogance, really, that made him own any room he walked into,’ Anna DiBattista, his girlfriend of seven years, told the Daily Mail in an exclusive interview.
Indeed, that cockiness he was renowned for stretched deep into his private life, too.
In the weeks and months following his death on September 11, the sordid details that would start spilling out ultimately proved to be just as tangled as his demise.
O’Neill, it transpired, had been juggling several overlapping lives and was involved with multiple women concurrently across different cities, none of whom knew about the others until contacted by a reporter writing his obituary.
There was Christine O’Neill in New Jersey, the high school sweetheart he wed in college with whom he had a son and a daughter who struggled with a congenital vision disorder that left her legally blind. They were living apart but were still married when he was killed.
There was longtime girlfriend Valerie James, whom he was living with in New York and told he was divorced. There was a woman named Mary Lynn Stevens in the Washington, DC area.
And there was DiBattista, who believed theirs was his only romance.
‘We discussed getting married (and) living in Europe all the time. He wanted to write a book,’ she told the Daily Mail.
DiBattista, who dated the FBI bigwig for seven years before he was killed, told the Daily Mail he took her to FBI office parties and ambassadors’ homes throughout their relationship
O’Neill (second from the left during an FBI press conference) had told colleagues, congressional staffers and even foreign governments for years that Al Qaeda wasn’t just some distant threat
O’Neill never tried to keep the blond hotel account director hidden.
DiBattista said he took her to FBI office parties, ambassadors’ homes and to meet Larry Silverstein, who had just taken control of the Trade Center. She met his parents and he had regular Monday night dinners with her mom, even when DiBattista wasn’t in town.
Looking back, she said she should have known that a man who spent his life keeping the nation’s secrets was always going to keep a few of his own.
‘I had my suspicions. But he was the ultimate spy. He knew how to manipulate and make you feel bad for asking about other women,’ she said, adding that even ‘with all his flaws and it’s sad, he was the love of my life.’
But for all his flair, it was his sober warnings about Islamic extremist attacks that largely defined him.
As the FBI’s top bin Laden hunter, O’Neill told anyone who would listen that bin Laden was the gravest threat America faced – years before most in Washington could place the name.
He believed it so fervently that he built a private archive of the Al Qaeda leader – including photographs, tapes, transcripts – and pored over it obsessively trying to spot a weakness and find some way to stop him.
Year after year, he told colleagues, congressional staffers and even foreign governments that Al Qaeda wasn’t just some distant threat. It was already here, already organized, hiding in plain sight, he insisted. In 1997, he said as much publicly, telling a room full of experts that terrorist groups had the infrastructure to strike inside the US whenever they chose.
He was also known for his impatience.
His story was the inspiration behind Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Looming Tower, which was later made into a Hulu series starring Jeff Daniels as O’Neill
Just weeks after leaving the FBI after more than three decades, O’Neill had secured a new job heading security at the World Trade Center
For O’Neill, the slow wheels of the federal government weren’t moving fast enough – especially after the US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and the attack on the USS Cole near Yemen in 2000.
The often abrasive FBI agent kept butting heads with his bosses, other intelligence agencies and diplomats over coordination and bureaucratic constraints, insisting the danger was bigger and more urgent than any of them wanted to admit.
By 2001, his bosses finally pushed back, turning on him for misusing an FBI car, losing a bureau-issued PalmPilot and finally misplacing a briefcase containing classified documents for a few hours during an FBI conference.
He knew they were careless screw-ups but inside an agency where he made enemies as an outspoken maverick, those missteps weren’t the reason he was pushed out – they were the excuse.
By August 2001, he was fed up with a bureau that sweated the small stuff while ignoring his warnings about a mass terror threat and he resigned after 31 years at the FBI.
For a man who, as Esquire once reported, was nearly $300,000 in debt, his new job heading security at the World Trade Center offered some peace of mind, paying more than twice his FBI salary. It also offered a challenge: Al Qaeda had already tried to bring the towers down once in 1993 and he repeatedly told colleagues and friends they would try to do it again.
He turned out to be right.
O’Neill (pictured second from right on an FBI trip to Saudi Arabia) worked at the bureau for 31 years before he left in August 2001. Starting out as a fingerprint clerk, O’Neill worked his way up and eventually became special agent in charge of the FBI’s national security division in New York
O’Neill (pictured far right out in the field) was a leading figure in the FBI’s fight against terrorism throughout his career. He had repeatedly sounded the alarm about the rising threat of Al Qaeda
After only 19 days on the job, O’Neill was in his 34th floor office on the morning of September 11 when the first plane hit the towers.
Between the time the first plane hit at 8:46 a.m. and the South Tower fell at 9:59 a.m., news reports noted that he had left the building briefly to contact a handful of loved ones – including his son J.P and lovers, Anna DiBattista and Valerie James – to assure them all that he was safe.
As reported by Esquire in 2002, he also took the time to message Fran Townsend, then a senior Justice Department official who went on to become US Homeland Security Advisor to President George W. Bush.
As the special agent in charge of the national security division for the FBI’s New York field office, O’Neill told anyone who would listen that bin Laden was the gravest threat America faced – years before most in Washington could place the name
‘…What he sent her at the end of his life was a page written in the numerical code he’d developed for his communications to her, and it was amazing how personal it was, how elaborate, how much time it must have taken him to write it, even in the midst of historic catastrophe, even in the midst of hideous carnage, even in the last few ticks of his existence,’ the article read.
It described O’Neill as ‘obsessed’ with Townsend — married with two kids — because she knew ‘all his different lives.’
‘He could tell her things because they both had (security) clearances. I think she understood things about him that others didn’t,’ DiBattista said.
She told the Daily Mail Townsend asked her to meet around the time of O’Neill’s memorial service in Manhattan where they had a private conversation about him.
When asked by phone about her relationship with O’Neill, Townsend — a longtime national security contributor to CNN before her stint as on-air senior national security analyst for CBS News until 2022 — hung up on the Daily Mail.
Reports of all the people O’Neill reached out to during those crucial 73 minutes beg the question: With the towers already burning, was the man responsible for their security spending his final hour managing his many relationships instead of their evacuation?
After only 19 days on the job, O’Neill was in his 34th floor office on the morning of September 11 when the first plane hit the towers. He left the building, contacted loved ones to say he was safe, then went back in to help others escape
By several accounts, after leaving the building to contact loved ones, he then went back in to help others escape.
O’Neill was spotted briefly in Frenchman Jules Naudet’s famous video footage from the Trade Center lobby that morning and was last seen heading toward the South Tower. It collapsed shortly after, killing him at age 49.
It took recovery workers days to identify his body in the wreckage of a collapsed stairwell.
In the wake of his death, his personal entanglements went unspoken when the federal government dedicated the FBI’s staging area facility at Ramstein Air Base in Germany to his memory in 2006. And they still go unspoken each year that the FBI honors him on its Wall of Honor, and the FBI Agents Association commemorates him in its statements marking 9/11 anniversaries.
The legend of John O’Neill glosses over the careless slip-ups, the deceptions, the double life in favor of a cleaner narrative: a hero who spent his final moments running toward danger instead of away from it.
His story became immortalized in a PBS Frontline episode called ‘The Man Who Knew,’ a book by Murray Weiss entitled ‘The Man Who Warned America’ and in the Esquire’s profile headlined ‘The Man Who Was Supposed To Save Us.’ He also became the central figure of Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Looming Tower, and later a Hulu series based on the book, with Jeff Daniels playing him just as DiBattista described him – brilliant, mercurial, a man nobody could rein in.
Twenty-five years later, the uncomfortable question remains: What might have happened if anyone in Washington had listened to O’Neill sooner? Nobody has an answer.
What’s certain is simpler, more personal, and no less tragic – that the man who spent his life warning the towers might fall was standing beneath them when they did.
‘Haunting, isn’t it?’ DiBattista said.
