abdel meskini was supposed to deliver money and a cell phone to ressam. o'neill's agents arresd m. >> arrests were made that had they not been uncovered... the plot had not been uncovered and those arrests made, we could have had horrific tragedies around the millennium. >> we have two million people, two million people compressed in a small area here in midtown manhattan. >> narrator: o'neill was one of those two million people. if al qaeda struck here, this was where he wanted to be. (crowd cheering) >> five, four, three, two, one! (loud cheering) (music playing) >> and i remember talking to john shortly after midnight. there was a sense of accomplishment. we had just made the arrests in the ressam spin-off, and, you know, certainly we believed that we got everybody that we needed to find, but, you know, you're never really 100% sure of that. >> and so, i think a lot of the fbi leadership for the first time realized that o'neill was right, that there probably were al qaeda people in the united states. they realized that only after they looked at the res