by Steve Vogel
In her office on the fourth-floor A Ring, Rita Campbell, the custodial foreman for the floor’s cleaning force, looked at the clock on the wall. It was almost 1 A.M. The “zone ladies”—Mrs. Wilcox, Mrs. Delaney, Mrs. Colbert, and one other woman, all black and in their forties and fifties, friends who had cleaned the same zone together for years—would just about be finishing up in restroom 4-E10W, always their last stop before going to the locker room to change when their shift ended at 1:15 A.M.
Campbell was chatting with a colleague at 12:59 A.M. when the building shook and she heard an enormous boom. She rushed down the A Ring and around the corner to Corridor 10, where she saw a billowing cloud of black smoke. The mailroom people said the explosion had come from the far end of the corridor, where the restroom was.
“Oh, no, not the bathroom,” Campbell called. “I hope not the bathroom.”
She tried to get closer but somebody stopped her: “You can’t go down there, Mrs. Campbell, because whatever was down there is gone.”
The explosion had blown out a twenty-five-foot section of wall separating the restroom from the corridor. The lavatory was entirely destroyed, its ceiling buckled, its toilet stalls smashed, and a two-foot-wide hole blown in the concrete slab. Water was shooting in the air as thousands of gallons of water poured from broken pipes.
Campbell was frantic. “Where are the ladies?” she yelled. “Where are the ladies?” A voice finally called to her: “Here they are, Mrs. Campbell, they were in the locker room!” The ladies had finished early and sneaked off to change. Campbell recalled: “They were crying, we were all crying, they were apologizing for going to the locker room early, and I said, ‘No, I’m glad you went to the locker room early, because if you hadn’t, we would have lost four women.’”
Later that day, the Weather Underground issued a communiqué boasting that “today we attacked the Pentagon, the center of the American military command.” No one had been hurt, though the explosion caused $75,000 in damage. The water gushing from the pipes soaked offices on the floors below, disabling an Air Force computer center and damaging the department store and Pentagon bookstore on the concourse. The cleaning ladies were terrified to return to work but all did; none could afford to lose their jobs.
At his safe house, Ayers found himself in “deepening shades of delight.” He and Dohrn took time “to rejoice and congratulate ourselves and laugh some more.” When interviewed in 2006, Ayers said he was unaware that cleaning crews had been working in the area. “I didn’t know about it, and definitely had no intention of hurting anybody, and didn’t hurt anybody,” he said.
Terrorism had struck the Pentagon, though Ayers rejected the term. The Weathermen’s surgical operation, he boasted, ensured no one would be hurt: “Terrorists destroy randomly, while our actions bore, we hoped, the precise stamp of a cut diamond.” Rita Campbell had a different understanding of why no one was killed: “By the grace of God.”
Does anyone know what really exists down here?
Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Alan Renshaw, assigned to the Pentagon in 1973, had a fourth-floor office just around the corner from the restroom blown up by the Weather Underground. His E-Ring office window gave him a bird’s-eye view whenever the Berrigan brothers or other protesters came by to splatter goat’s blood on the River entrance columns, which was pretty frequently. Security was tighter since the bombing; guards now checked identification for anyone entering the building, though the concourse shops remained open to the public. Some days, employees were told not to use the River entrance because of demonstrations. To keep a low profile, military personnel were discouraged from wearing their uniforms to work.
That was just life in the Pentagon these days, Renshaw figured. Still, after two tours overseas—one flying B-52 bombing missions over Vietnam out of Guam, and another planning the missions from Thailand—Renshaw enjoyed life in the building. Every now and then, when visitors expressed curiosity about the Pentagon, Renshaw would take them to the Mall entrance and show them the plaque. The ninth name down, after Roosevelt, Stimson, Somervell, Groves, and the others, was that of the engineer in charge of construction, his father.
Clarence Renshaw had gone on from the Pentagon to build Thule Air Force Base in Greenland, one of the toughest Arctic engineering jobs ever undertaken, and had retired in 1960 as a brigadier general in charge of all military construction for the Corps of Engineers. Living on Long Island, he was a convenient font of information for his son about the Pentagon’s oddities. On an earlier assignment to the building, Alan Renshaw worked out of the Air Force operations center in the basement, and he noticed the floor was often wet after heavy rain. “The water would actually squirt up through the floor from below,” he recalled. Clarence Renshaw was not surprised in the least. He blamed it on the decision to put the Pentagon in Hell’s Bottom, telling his son, “it was almost like a boat, on that swampy, no-good piece of property.”
It did not help that the basement slab had been poured directly on top of the wet, organic fill dredged from the lagoon. Over the years, the building’s weight had compressed the soil, forcing out water. “As the building gets older, it’s going to find ways to get inside the building,” Clarence Renshaw told his son. As usual, he was right.
The Pentagon was aging badly. As the symbol of American national security, the Pentagon seemed invincible, the nerve center of the mightiest military power in the world. Inside the building, the truth was more prosaic. By the 1970s, decades of neglect and shoddy maintenance had left the Pentagon a dump, with broken plumbing and wheezing ventilation. After Vietnam, the hollow condition of the American military seemed reflected in the deteriorating corridors of the Pentagon. Windows were rusting, walls shifting and settling, and cornices disintegrating. In the light courts and center courtyard, the concrete walls were spalling, exposing rusted reinforcing bars. Cracks and water stains were visible everywhere. Inside, the corridors were awash with vehicles; the old bicycle carts had been largely replaced by fleets of gas- or electric-powered carts, which gouged holes in the walls, demolished hallway corners, and occasionally ran over pedestrians (among them Eugene Zuckert, secretary of the Air Force under McNamara, felled at an intersection near his office).
The great office bays where Marjorie Hanshaw and her fellow plank walkers once worked had been divided up into rabbit warrens. The building’s mechanical systems, designed for the large spaces, could not operate properly. Some parts of the building would be roasting while in other parts people wore sweaters year-round. Corridors had been walled off with cinderblocks to make more space for the ever-increasing secretary of defense staff, putting further stress on the building.
Soon after taking office in 1975, the new secretary of defense explored the outer reaches of the building. Donald Rumsfeld—at forty-three the youngest man ever to serve in the position—was appalled at the general shabbiness. “It was dreary and bleak and the corridors were bare,” Rumsfeld recalled more than thirty years later. Many corridors were dim, a vestige of an LBJ-inspired campaign to save power by keeping some lights off. Rumsfeld ordered the lights back on, and a campaign was launched—tied to the American Bicentennial in 1976—to decorate the corridors. Paintings that had been sitting for years in basement storage rooms were hauled out and put on walls. Corridors were designated to honor George Marshall, Douglas MacArthur, and Hap Arnold—accompanied by photographs, paintings, and displays—joining ones previously created for Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley. Dozens more followed over the years—featuring presidents, recipients of the Medal of Honor, wars and events—turning the Pentagon into something of a military museum. Rumsfeld ordered the Pentagon opened for tours in an effort “to demystify” the place. Tourists once again wandered the building, albeit with escorts.
The corridors were spruced up, but the rot within the building continued unabated. The General Services Administration took a penny-wise, pound-foolish approach to caring for the building, routinely deferring important repairs and maintenance. GSA adm
inistrators were intimidated by its sheer bulk. Renovating most federal buildings was one thing, but the Pentagon might eat up the entire GSA budget. The twenty-nine-acre coal-tar roof regularly leaked but had never been replaced. Nothing was done about deteriorating pipes throughout the building. To Walt Freeman, the Defense Department’s facilities manager, it was like dealing with an absentee landlord. Freeman warned that the Pentagon’s ancient coal-fired boilers would not last much longer and needed to be replaced. GSA officials said they would study it, and they kept their word: They studied it.
In 1984, Steve Carter took a job in the operations and maintenance shop at the Pentagon. He had retired from the Navy as a machinist’s mate first class after fourteen years in ships’ engine rooms; looking for a little income, he figured the Pentagon assignment would be a no-headaches, no-pressure type of job. Surely the headquarters of the American military would be in tip-top shape. Carter was quite shocked by the reality. “I expected to come in here and see a state-of-the-art facility, all the gee-whiz stuff,” he recalled. “When I reported aboard it was mainly a manually operated building with mostly 1940s technology.” The building manager’s office did not have a single computer. Service tickets were written on paper and stored in cardboard boxes. If somebody wanted to know how many power outages there had been in the last year they would have to take out the boxes and sort through the tickets.
Even more worrisome was the condition of the building’s infrastructure. The basement was worse than ever. The construction of the Metro subway line to the Pentagon in the mid-1970s aggravated the problem; water was pumped out of the ground and the soil compressed further, leaving voids under the building. The basement slab had bellied down a foot or more in places and groundwater came in through the cracks. “We joked about it being tied to the tides,” said Carter. “It seemed that way. We’d get a good rain outside and the water level would pick up for the next two or three days.” The basement floor was so warped that forklifts in the Pentagon printing office sometimes toppled over. The ancient air handlers in the basement were rusted out. Carter found he could take a ballpoint pen and poke a hole in the big sewer pipes that ran through the basement.
Carter started asking a question: “Does anyone know what really exists down here?”
Logo for the Pentagon renovation program.
If we’re lucky the floods will be shallow
The Pentagon was bustling on the evening of Tuesday, August 7, 1990. It was C-Day—commencement day—the start of Operation Desert Shield, what would become the largest U.S. military deployment since the Vietnam War. The first elements of the 82nd Airborne’s ready brigade were aboard C-141s, just a few hours from landing at Dhahran Air Base in Saudi Arabia. Two squadrons of F-15 Eagles had flown from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia—refueling in the air from flying tankers—and the first fighters were now starting combat air patrols over northern Saudi Arabia. At U.S. bases around the world, a vast armada was being mobilized.
Five days earlier, the Iraqi Army had rolled over the Kuwaiti border and captured the tiny oil-rich nation. Late on August 6, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney telephoned General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, from Saudi Arabia to report that King Fahd had accepted an offer of American troops to defend his kingdom against a feared further incursion by Iraqi forces.
The Army and Air Force operations centers in the Pentagon basement were packed; the temperature inside the Army facility—the air-conditioning inadequate as always—was approaching ninety degrees. It was a nerve-racking time. The fledgling American force was at its most vulnerable, arriving in Saudi Arabia with little combat power. Lead elements of two Iraqi Republican Guard divisions were staged within a mile of the Saudi border. If Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein chose to seize the vast Saudi oil fields twenty-five miles to the south—which the CIA was predicting—the lightly armed paratroopers of the 82nd would be little more than “speed bumps,” as Powell put it. “We were going into a combat zone with a very small force initially, with no idea whether the Iraqi army would continue south or not,” he recalled.
The coffee was flowing freely in all the operations centers, as usual during a crisis. In a small, secure room in the Joint Chiefs’ area, somebody filled a cup and stuck the nearly empty pot back on the coffeemaker burner. At 7:30 P.M., the untended coffeepot started smoking profusely. The smoke was sucked into the ventilation system and began pouring out of ducts into pressurized command-center rooms. No one knew where the smoke was coming from. Arlington County firefighters rushed to the Pentagon for a two-alarm fire and hooked up a fire truck to a standpipe near the River entrance. As soon as they pressurized the system, a four-foot section of a deteriorated ten-inch water pipe blew out on the south side of the building. A torrent of muddy water began pouring into the Pentagon basement.
Steve Carter, the building engineer on watch that night, raced out of the Building Operations Center. The fire was now the least of the worries. Water was cascading down the hallways and spraying violently out of a crawlspace between corridors 9 and 10. Carter poked his head inside, trying fruitlessly to find the source of the leak, accomplishing little but getting soaked.
The pipe had burst in a steam tunnel that connected the Pentagon to the heating and refrigeration plant a thousand feet southeast of the building. The rupture was just outside the Pentagon, but close enough that it was blowing a tremendous volume of water and thick mud through the tunnel into the basement. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of water—eventually millions of gallons—poured into the building.
Inside the Air Force operations center—a good five hundred feet away from the rupture—the water was rising: two inches, four, eight, and counting. Harried Air Force officers waded out in the hallways, pleading for someone to make the water stop. “They were rather excited,” Carter recalled. “‘This was a most inconvenient time,’ was how it was explained to me.”
Carter was most concerned by the rising water in a high-voltage electrical vault located in the building near the rupture. If the water reached the current-bearing bus bars, there was imminent danger of electrocution. Electricians Bobby McCloud and Reimund Schuster, called from their homes to assist with the crisis, measured the distance of the rising water to the bottom of the bus bars. The deluge had been pouring into the building nonstop for more than an hour now and was over a foot high, within a few inches of the bus bars. They had the power plant on standby, ready to shut down the electrical feed to the vault. That would mean killing power to half the building right as U.S. forces were moving into Saudi Arabia.
Schuster found a manhole outside the building leading to a shutoff valve. The water rushing through the pipe was making an awful roar, like a missile firing, and he feared it would blow up in his face if he shut off the valve. “I finally decided, ‘Ah, the hell with it,’” Schuster recalled. He shut the valve and the water finally stopped rising, just in time. “It probably only needed another two or three inches and we would have had to kill the power,” McCloud later said.
The smoky fire was long since contained, extinguished in twenty-five minutes. The flood was another matter. The basement was a disaster zone. A vast area—350,000 square feet—was under up to a foot and a half of water, some three million gallons. Once it was pumped out, it took several days to shovel out the deposit of thick mud left behind. The water inside the Air Force operations center had reached fourteen inches. The heating and refrigeration plant, lying at the other end of the steam tunnel on lower ground than the Pentagon, was in even worse shape; its basement under seven feet of water, and it was knocked out of service for two days. All told, the flood had done about $1 million in damage.
Mechanical engineers were dispatched to find the cause of the flood. It was no great mystery. The problem, they soon reported, was the old, deteriorated pipes. It could happen again anytime the system was pressurized. “If we’re lucky,” said John Irby, one of the building supervisors, “the floods will be shallow.”
The horror boar
d
Doc Cooke would later say he knew it was time to renovate the Pentagon when he saw fungus on the wall taking the shape of Elvis. By the time of the flooding fiasco during Desert Shield in August 1990, the sixty-nine-year-old Cooke had been sounding the alarm about the building for years. Just in March, he had described the Pentagon to a House subcommittee as “a chamber of horrors.” As proof, he lugged along what had become known as “the horror board.” It was a two-by-three-foot panel upon which Steve Carter had mounted evidence of the Pentagon’s decay: chunks of loose wire, a rusted pipe with a pencil shoved through a soft spot, loose asbestos. The horror board was an effective prop, much better than any charts or figures.
David O. Cooke had many titles—presently it was Director of Administration and Management for the Secretary of Defense—but he was known universally as the “Mayor of the Pentagon.” Doc—the nickname came from his initials—was the keeper of the keys, the man who dispensed the prime offices and kept everything working. Bald and cherub-faced, with the twinkling eyes of a man privy to secrets, Cooke knew every inch of the Pentagon’s corridors.
Colin Powell had learned early on of the power Cooke wielded. When he was assigned to the Pentagon in 1984 as an aide to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Powell took a colleague down to the parking lot one day to show him an old Japanese army rifle he had in the trunk of his car. From the fourth floor, an Air Force secretary spotted two men in the parking lot handling a rifle and called Pentagon police. A Defense Protective Services officer quickly arrived on the scene to take Powell into custody.
