If it seems slightly tacky for Kirk to present O'Neill's story to us in the extravagant manner of a renegade-cop/detective movie, that's mitigated to a large degree by the immediacy and highness of the stakes in the internecine-bickering bureaucratic game in which this particular, real-life renegade was shunted aside, with ultimately disastrous consequences. The somewhat hyperbolic narration Kirk has written, and the rather portentous way in which it's ready by Lyman, are odd but fairly excusable in context The Man Who Knew aired October 3, 2002, meaning that its preparation took place in too-close-for-subtlety chronological proximity to the attacks that traumatized and saddened the nation. Valerie James and his son were the last to hear from him on the morning of September 11, when he called from work to reassure them, from amid the panic and death, that he was still alive his body was later found in the rubble of the two towers. The former agent took the civilian job that seemed most suitable to him: head of security at the World Trade Center, where, he was convinced with very good reason, bin Laden and his followers would be back to "finish the job" they started in '93. When O'Neill left the FBI, it lost its principal alarm-trigger vis-à-vis Osama bin Laden. ambassador's distaste for his unwillingness to toe the line and be a team player, led to an unpopularity so severe that the Bureau powers-that-be used the first excuse they could - O'Neill's improper removal and sloppy loss of some confidential reports, bending regulations in order to take his work home with him - to turn the heat up so high that he felt forced out. Cole, his personal bravado, clashes with nemesis/rival Tom Pickard (who received the promotion that O'Neill thought was his), and, ultimately, his removal as the head of a big counterterrorism push in Yemen due to a U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and the 2000 suicide bombing of the U.S.S. As O'Neill followed the bin Laden trail through the " black hawk down" episode in Somalia, bombings of U.S. His abrasiveness aside, though, interviewee after interviewee tells us of O'Neill's feverish dedication to tracking bin Laden from the moment he was connected to the first WTC bombing, in 1993. That meant that O'Neill was both valuable and a thorn in the side of the FBI bureaucracy, which didn't care for his aggressive "sharp elbows," relatively eyebrow-raising personal life, or flashy, dandyish, cigar-smoking style and persona. Clarke, is that of a "maverick," someone obsessed with his work, both in terms of the integrity of excellent performance and when it came to the ambition of getting ahead. and a large group of former colleagues and bosses including White House Counterterrorism head/future Bush Administration whistleblower/target Richard A. The posthumous picture of O'Neill that emerges through interviews with Valerie James (his long-time girlfriend after he had virtually abandoned his wife and family, being " married to the bureau") his son, John O'Neill, Jr. ![]() From there, he was moved to the New York bureau in 1992 and placed in charge of hundreds of agents working on defusing anti-U.S. office to apply his skills to international terrorist threats. FBI agent John O'Neill had made his name in Chicago with a stellar history of fighting domestic crime when, in the '80s, he was transferred to the D.C. With voice-over narration (written by the episode's director/producer, longtime Frontline stalwart Michael Kirk and read by actor Will Lyman, who served the same duty in Todd Fields's Little Children) and multiple in-depth interviews with those who knew and worked with its subject, The Man Who Knew tells the story of one victim of the World Trade Center attacks who knew, with detailed, well-investigated and -interpreted facts behind him, that such an attack had long been in the making and was, in fact, the culmination of a series of deadly actions that he could prove bin Laden was behind. What the program reveals is a nightmare scenario of two instances of indulgence in the dark side of human nature - one the crime of murderous violence, the other misdemeanor of petty personality conflicts, ego, and territorialism - that colluded to allow for the awful realization of bin Laden's scheming on that infamous, tragic day. ![]() But according to The Man Who Knew - one of a large handful of PBS Frontline episodes now being made available on DVD - there was a tiny but very significant minority, a cadre of American counterterrorism and intelligence officials, who were well aware of bin Laden's long-running, deeply entrenched, and well-financed terrorist plots. ![]() Like what I would guess is the majority of Americans, I had never heard of Osama bin Laden until after September 11, 2001.
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