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.

‘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.

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.

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.

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.

‘…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?

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.

Blanche d’Alpuget, the acclaimed author who chronicled Bob Hawke’s life, knew the former prime minister more intimately than almost anyone. Aside from Hawke’s first wife, Hazel, few were better placed to describe him as “perpetually unfaithful”.

D’Alpuget, who died on Tuesday at the age of 82, spoke openly over the years about her complicated romance with Hawke. Their passionate affair stretched across decades before becoming a marriage that lasted nearly 25 years.

Their story began at a Jakarta party in April 1970. D’Alpuget was then living in Indonesia with her first husband, diplomat Tony Pratt, while Hawke was married to Hazel and raising their three young children.

At the time, Hawke was already one of the biggest names in Australia’s union movement as president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions. But d’Alpuget, who had spent years abroad, had no idea she was meeting a man who would one day lead the Labor Party and become prime minister.

“I’d been living overseas for nine years … I didn’t know who the hell he was,” she later recalled during an interview with the ABC’s Conversation Hour.

In another reflection on their first encounter, d’Alpuget said she initially believed his name was Robin. “He sat down and we talked a lot,” she said. “And I thought, ‘You’re a good guy.’”

The pair crossed paths again roughly six years later, when d’Alpuget was working on a biography of Sir Richard Kirby, the longtime president of the Australian Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission.

D’Alpuget, who was 14 years younger than Hawke, said she immediately felt a powerful “energy” between them. Speaking to Conversation Hour, she said she knew from that moment their attraction would eventually be acted upon.

‘Neither of us said a thing about it… we knew we would become lovers that night,’ she said.

By then, d’Alpuget’s marriage was ‘going down the drain,’ she said in another interview – ‘the click was different’ and ‘affairs were par for the course’.

Hawke and d’Alpuget became lovers and arranged trysts when they could for much of the next 20 years.  

‘I’ve been in love with Bob since 1976,’ she told news.com.au in 2018, a year before Hawke’s death. 

‘I fell in love with his character. He was a man of absolutely good character, as far as I was concerned. 

‘He was clever and genuinely charismatic. He’s a man of enormous compassion, and I saw all of those things.’ 

D’Alpuget also always understood she was not the only woman Hawke was seeing outside his marriage, stating he was ‘having affairs with women all over the country’. 

She once told the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘He was charming, funny and straightforward… what he loved was sex.’

After 20 years of marriage, d’Alpuget was still happily talking about the couple’s sex life in 2015.

‘I think sexual attraction is very important – it is to me – but I’ve always liked sex,’ she told The Australian.

‘I think sexual attraction, honestly, if it’s intense, really can stand the test of time. We’re the living example of it.’

Hawke first asked d’Alpuget to marry him in 1978 when he woke in a Canberra hotel room after a vivid dream but a year later changed his mind.

The aspiring politician believed divorcing Hazel could ruin his chance of one day leading the country, d’Alpuget revealed in her 2018 book On Lust and Longing.

‘As it turned out, he made the right decision: for himself, for me, for his family, for mine, for his party – and, as became obvious, for the nation,’ she wrote.

Hawke’s liaisons with d’Alpuget were an open secret in Canberra but Hazel clung steadfastly to her philandering husband.

‘Each of us asked the other to leave,’ d’Alpuget said of her paramour’s wife. ‘Neither of us did.’ 

D’Alpuget actually penned two works about Hawke. The first was Robert J. Hawke: A Biography, published in 1982, the year before he was elected prime minister.

The second was Hawke: The Prime Minister, released in 2010, 19 years after he lost the Labor leadership to Paul Keating and 15 years into their marriage.

Hawke and d’Alpuget had become particularly close while she was writing the first biography but had little or no contact during the early years of his prime ministership.

D’Alpuget divorced Pratt, with whom she had a son, in 1986 and a chance phone call from Hawke reignited the affair, which continued after he left The Lodge.

In 1993, d’Alpuget was in a light plane crash in Far North Queensland, which led to Hawke taking their relationship more seriously after he feared she was dead and realised the depth of his feelings for her.

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‘A friend who was our go-between rang him up and told him,’ she told the Sydney Institute in 2018. ‘Bob said he felt himself die and that was it.

‘At that moment, he decided. He suddenly took the relationship extraordinarily seriously and made it clear to me. But it was timing. It was an angel, holy angels.’

Hawke and Hazel – who was much loved by the Australian public – jointly announced their separation after 38 years of marriage in November 1994. 

The nation was scandalised when Hawke and d’Alpuget made their romance public in an exclusive interview on 60 Minutes in February the following year. 

That tell-all sit-down was memorable for d’Alpuget rubbing suntan lotion onto Hawke’s body as the besotted couple recounted their long love story. 

D’Alpuget faced a vicious backlash for replacing Hazel but overcame being dubbed ‘the most hated woman in Australia’.

‘As for people disapproving of me, I figured that was their problem,’ she told the ABC in November last year. ‘They were acting in prejudice and ignorance.

‘If you’re very in love with somebody, that love so enhances your life and your attitude, that negativity doesn’t have much chance of getting a foothold.’

D’Alpuget said the reaction to her coming out from the shadows to declare her love for Hawke was harder on him.  

‘It took an enormous amount of courage on Bob’s part,’ she told The Australian.

‘It took much more courage on his part than on mine. Because I was a single woman, divorced. But he was married. 

‘The whole country expected him to behave in this way and was unaware of what his true feelings were and so were bound to be shocked, angered and amazed when they discovered them.’

Hawke and d’Alpuget – dubbed ‘B1 and B2’ after ABC kids show Bananas in Pyjamas – married in July 1995 and remained together until his death in May 2019, aged 89. 

D’Alpuget said in a statement marking his loss: ‘Today we lost Bob Hawke, a great Australian – many would say the greatest Australian of the post-war era.’

‘Bob was dearly loved by his family, and so many friends and colleagues,’ she continued. ‘We will miss him.’ 

Later that month, d’Alpuget described the final years of her life with Hawke to the ABC’s Leigh Sales. 

‘We were so close and intimate during that time, while I was his main carer,’ she said. ‘And we often said to each other, we’ve been blessed to have this period together.

‘We didn’t have the joy of young love. He had that with Hazel. We had the joy of mature love and then the love of old age.’

D’Alpuget also admitted feeling sorry for Hazel, who died in 2013 aged 83.

‘I used to feel very sad for Hazel… my feelings about Hazel’s sadness didn’t change,’ she said. ‘I still always really up until the end felt that sorrow.’

Six months after Hawke’s death, d’Alpuget was asked by The Project’s Lisa Wilkinson if her husband ever felt guilty about his infidelity.

‘He was perpetually unfaithful,’ she said. ‘He loved Hazel and he was perpetually unfaithful.

‘Bob was not a faithful husband. I didn’t feel I was doing anything bad.’

Most of Hawke’s ashes were interred at Sydney’s Macquarie Park Cemetery and Crematorium – the rest are in the Prime Ministers Memorial Garden at Melbourne General Cemetery.

When Hawke almost died of a stomach bug he picked up in the Middle East in 2015, d’Alpuget chose Macquarie Park as the place they would one day lie together.   

‘The graves are side-by-side,’ she said. ‘We chose a spot where the public can come. It’ll be nice. 

‘It’s in a rose garden and there’s a seat there so if a member of the public wants to come and have a sit, they can.’

– READ MORE: CHARLES WOOLEY: After Blanche D’Alpuget sensuously rubbed oil into Bob Hawke’s back, I asked: ‘When did the sex begin?’ It sparked a firestorm that haunts me to this day