He was a Catholic, married with two children, but separated from his wife; his family continued to live in Atlantic City, and he supported them financially and paid the mortgage on their house. According to Lawrence Wright in "The Looming Tower", O'Neill was involved simultaneously in extramarital relationships with three named women during the 1990s, each of whom he had told either that he was not married or that he was divorced, and that he planned to marry her. He was officially reprimanded and docked 15 days' pay in summer 1999 over the incident involving the safe house because he had allowed his girlfriend to enter it. His lifestyle, which involved frequently giving gifts to his girlfriends and lavish expenditures with his colleagues, resulted in substantial credit card debts which he found difficult to manage on his salary, and consequently, he borrowed substantial sums from wealthy friends. In 1999, O'Neill sent a close associate named Mark Rossini to work in the CIA's Bin Laden Issue Station in Virginia. O'Neill had a conflict with CIA station chief Michael Scheuer: O'Neill wanted Rossini to stay at the station and feed him information about what the CIA was doing, while Rich Blee, who had been appointed by CIA chief George Tenet to head of the Bin Laden Issue Station, wanted Rossini out working in the field. Later, when the Bin Laden Issue Station learned that bin Laden's associates Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar were headed to the US with visas, Rossini and his colleague Doug Miller attempted to alert O'Neill, but Blee blocked the message. Mihdhar and Hazmi became two of the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77 on 9/11. Following the December 1999 arrest of Ahmed Ressam, O'Neill coordinated the investigation into the 2000 millennium attack plots, described by Richard Clarke as "the most comprehensive investigation ever conducted before September 11th." O'Neill has been described as having a close working relationship with Ali Soufan. After being passed over for multiple promotions (to assistant director in charge of national security in 1999 and to head of the FBI's New York office in early 2000), O'Neill was pleased to be assigned as commander of the FBI's investigation into the USS "Cole" bombing in October 2000. However, upon arriving in Yemen, he complained about inadequate security. As his team investigated, O'Neill came into conflict with Barbara Bodine, the U.S. ambassador to Yemen. The two had widely divergent views on how to handle searches of Yemeni property, and interviews with citizens and government officials, and they only grew further apart as time progressed.