FBI Agent John O'Neill Quit Weeks Before 9/11 Attacks

Every anniversary of September 11 brings back the same haunting visuals: the Twin Towers collapsing, ash drifting over Lower Manhattan, and a solemn roll call reading out the names of those who perished. Yet tucked inside this somber history lies a story that feels more like Greek tragedy than modern news. John O'Neill, an FBI agent fighting terrorism, quit his job in disgust just weeks before the attacks after his dire warnings about Osama bin Laden seemed to fall on deaf ears. At 49 years old, he tragically died as a victim of the very attack he had been warning everyone about while working inside the doomed towers.

Even at the height of his career as special agent in charge of the national security division for the FBI's New York field office, O'Neill did not look or act like your typical G-man. The Irish son of Atlantic City taxi drivers wore a pinky ring and kept his hair slicked back. He dressed in Burberry suits and Bruno Magli shoes so sharp they drew snark from colleagues wearing Men's Warehouse gear. He held a regular table at Elaine's, the Manhattan restaurant where politicians, diplomats, and journalists swapped secrets over dinner. Though married, he was known for late nights soaked with Chivas Regal that bled into early mornings back at the office, leading colleagues to doubt if he ever slept. O'Neill oozed swagger, and by most accounts, people either adored him or could not stand him.

His girlfriend of seven years, Anna DiBattista, told the Daily Mail in an exclusive interview about his intense personality. 'He had this confidence, this arrogance, really, that made him own any room he walked into,' she said. Indeed, that cockiness renowned in public stretched deep into his private life too. In the weeks and months following his death on September 11, sordid details started spilling out that proved just as tangled as his demise. It turned out O'Neill had been juggling several overlapping lives and was involved with multiple women concurrently across different cities. None of them knew about the others until a reporter writing his obituary contacted them.

There was Christine O'Neill in New Jersey, the high school sweetheart he wed in college. They had a son and a daughter who struggled with a congenital vision disorder that left her legally blind. They were living apart but remained married when he was killed. Then there was longtime girlfriend Valerie James, whom he lived with in New York and told people he was divorced about. Another woman named Mary Lynn Stevens existed in the Washington, DC area. And then there was DiBattista, who believed theirs was his only romance. 'We discussed getting married and living in Europe all the time,' she said, noting that he wanted to write a book.

DiBattista dated the FBI bigwig for seven years before he died. She told the Daily Mail that he took her to FBI office parties and ambassadors' homes throughout their relationship. O'Neill never tried to keep his blond hotel account director hidden. He brought DiBattista along to meet Larry Silverstein, who had just taken control of the Trade Center. For years, O'Neill told colleagues, congressional staffers, and even foreign governments that Al Qaeda was not just a distant threat. His warnings were clear, yet ignored until it was too late.

She met his parents and he shared regular Monday night dinners with her mom, even when DiBattista wasn't in town. Looking back now, she admits 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 served as 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 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. He was a leading figure in the FBI's fight against terrorism throughout his career and 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.

John O'Neill was spotted briefly in footage captured by French photographer Jules Naudet inside the Trade Center lobby that fateful morning. He was last seen heading toward the South Tower before it collapsed at 9:59 a.m., ending his life at age 49. News reports noted he had left the building to contact a handful of loved ones. He assured them all he was safe, including his son J.P and lovers Anna DiBattista and Valerie James. As reported by Esquire in 2002, he also messaged Fran Townsend. She was then a senior Justice Department official who later became US Homeland Security Advisor to President George W. Bush.

O'Neill served as the special agent in charge of the national security division for the FBI's New York field office. He told anyone who would listen that bin Laden was the gravest threat America faced, years before most in Washington could place the name. One article described how he sent her a page written in numerical code at the end of his life. It contained personal details and it seemed amazing how elaborate it was. Even in the midst of historic catastrophe, even in the midst of hideous carnage, he took time to write it during the last few ticks of his existence.

DiBattista said she understood things about him that others didn't because they both held security clearances. She told the Daily Mail Townsend asked her to meet around the time of O'Neill's memorial service in Manhattan for a private conversation. When asked by phone about their relationship, Townsend hung up on the reporter. Townsend was a longtime national security contributor to CNN before working as an on-air senior national security analyst for CBS News until 2022.

Reports detail all the people O'Neill reached out to during those crucial 73 minutes. This begs a hard question: With the towers already burning, was the man responsible for their security spending his final hour managing relationships instead of ensuring evacuation? After only 19 days on the job, he returned inside to help others escape after contacting family. His body took recovery workers days to identify 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. They still go unspoken each year that the FBI honors him on its Wall of Honor and the FBI Agents Association commemorates him. The legend glosses over careless slip-ups, deceptions, and a double life to favor a cleaner narrative: a hero who ran toward danger instead of away from it.

His story became immortalized in a PBS Frontline episode called 'The Man Who Knew.' Murray Weiss wrote a book entitled 'The Man Who Warned America,' while Esquire published a 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 that book. Jeff Daniels played 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?

No one holds the answers yet. The only certainty is a simple, personal, and undeniably tragic fact: the man who dedicated his life to warning that the towers might fall was standing directly beneath them when they collapsed. 'Haunting, isn't it?' DiBattista said.