“It’s a huge move,” Myers said, “but it’s appropriate.”14
General Myers reported that combat air patrols were now in the skies over Washington, D.C.—the first time in history this step had been taken. We also launched two fighters to protect Air Force One and were scrambling more.15
I was told that Vice President Cheney was at the White House in the underground communications facility. Colin Powell was traveling in Peru and would be returning to Washington. George Tenet was hurrying back to CIA headquarters after a breakfast meeting. President Bush was en route to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. The Secret Service, with the support of Vice President Cheney, advised Bush not to return to Washington until the situation was clarified. We were receiving unverified reports of hijacked airliners heading toward U.S. cities. Targeting the White House remained a possibility.
I looked at screens displaying the dozens of aircraft still in the air while the Federal Aviation Administration and NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command) tried to determine which, if any, were hijacked planes and where they might be heading. At some point we received word that an aircraft believed to have been hijacked was down somewhere in Pennsylvania.16
Defense Department officials executed our continuity-of-government plans, according to long-established procedures, to ensure that at least some of America’s leadership in all branches of the federal government would survive an enemy attack. I had been involved in planning and exercises for continuity-of-government operations during the 1980s, at the request of the Reagan administration. In those days, the plans postulated a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. Now it was terrorist attacks that had put those plans into use for the first time in our history. The plan called for the secretary of defense to be moved out of the Pentagon rapidly to a secure location outside of Washington. But I was unwilling to be out of touch during the time it would take to relocate me to the safe site. I asked a reluctant Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, and my special assistant, Larry Di Rita, to leave immediately for Site R, the Pentagon’s backup headquarters, which was staffed for such an emergency.
It was not long before the Vice President reached me by phone. Like the rest of us, he was receiving a jumble of conflicting information. There was a report that there had been an explosion at the State Department and another of a plane crash north of Camp David, both of which proved false. A Korean Airlines aircraft was flying toward the United States with its transponder signaling the code for “hijack.” There was a report of an unidentified aircraft from Massachusetts bound for Washington, D.C., which was particularly worrisome because two of the known hijacked flights had originated in Boston.17
“There’s been at least three instances here where we’ve had reports of aircraft approaching Washington,” said Cheney. “A couple were confirmed hijack. And, pursuant to the President’s instructions I gave authorization for them to be taken out,” he added.
“Yes, I understand,” I replied. “Who did you give that direction to?”
“It was passed from here through the [operations] center at the White House,” Cheney answered.
“Has that directive been transmitted to the aircraft?”
“Yes, it has,” Cheney replied.
“So we’ve got a couple of aircraft up there that have those instructions at this present time?” I asked.
“That is correct,” Cheney answered. Then he added, “[I]t’s my understanding they’ve already taken a couple of aircraft out.”
“We can’t confirm that,” I told him. We had not received word that any U.S. military pilots had even contemplated engaging and firing on a hijacked aircraft.
“We’re told that one aircraft is down,” I added, “but we do not have a pilot report….”18
As it turned out, the only other aircraft that crashed had not been shot down. It was United Airlines Flight 93, a hijacked plane that went down in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The plane’s passengers had learned in midair through private telephone calls that their hijacking was one of several terrorist operations that day. Courageous men and women onboard then fought with the hijackers and prevented them from completing their mission, which likely was targeting the White House or the Capitol.*
As a former naval aviator, I was concerned about the orders being given to the military pilots. There were no rules of engagement on the books about when and how our pilots should handle a situation in which civilian aircraft had been hijacked and might be used as missiles to attack American targets. Myers was troubled too. “I’d hate to be a pilot up there and not know exactly what I should do,” I said to him.19
Myers observed that even a plane that appeared to be descending toward an airport in the Washington metropolitan area with no prior sign of hostile intent could suddenly veer off and strike any federal building in the D.C. area. By then, he said, “it’s too late.” Any plane within twenty miles of the White House that did not land on command, he speculated, might have to be shot down.20 It was a chilling thought. A military pilot in the skies above our nation’s capital, likely in his twenties or early thirties, might have to make an excruciatingly tough call. But our pilots, Myers stressed, were well trained. I had no doubt they would follow their orders if necessary, but with a prayer on their lips.
Echoing the earlier instructions from the President, I repeated his orders to Myers: The pilots were “weapons free,” which authorized them to shoot down a plane approaching a high-value target.21
During an update on the situation in New York, I learned that both towers of the World Trade Center had collapsed. Many hundreds had been incinerated. Throughout lower Manhattan, truck drivers, postal workers, stockbrokers, the elderly, and schoolchildren were scrambling away from the smoke and flame. They were making desperate retreats from the dense clouds of dust and debris of the collapsing towers. Heartsick and fearful, some looked up at the sky over New York Harbor to see if more planes were coming. Families awaited word about loved ones who had gone to work that morning in the World Trade Center and had not been heard from.
As we were working at the Pentagon, smoke from the crash site was seeping into the NMCC. Our eyes became red and our throats itchy. An Arlington County firefighter reported that carbon dioxide had reached dangerous levels in much of the building. The air-conditioning was supposed to have been disabled to avoid circulating the hazardous smoke, but apparently it took some time for it to be shut down.
Myers suggested that I order the evacuation of the command center, and he argued that the staff would feel bound to remain there as long as I stayed in the building. I told him to have all nonessential personnel leave but that I intended to keep working there as long as we were able. Relocating to any of the remote sites would take at least an hour of travel and settling in, precious moments I did not want to lose if we could keep working in the Pentagon. Eventually we moved into a smaller communications center elsewhere in the building known as Cables, which had less smoke. As the day went on, the firefighters stamped out enough of the fire so that the smoke in some portions of the building became tolerable.
Shortly after noon, I received a call from CIA Director George Tenet. From the outset of the Bush administration Tenet and I had discussed the need for a more effective strategy to combat terrorism.22 We had been preoccupied by the 2000 bombing by Islamist extremists of the USS Cole in a Yemeni port, an attack to which the United States had never responded. “George, what do you know that I don’t know?” I asked.23
The information at this juncture was still uncertain.24 But Tenet said the National Security Agency (NSA) had intercepted a phone call from an al-Qaida operative in Afghanistan to a phone number in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. The al-Qaida operative stated that he had “heard good news” and indicated that another airplane was about to hit its target.25
An hour later I again spoke to the President, who by then had arrived at Barksdale. I briefed him on the steps we had taken and updated him on what we knew about the a
ttack on the Pentagon.26 American Airlines Flight 77—a Boeing 757—had departed Washington’s Dulles airport bound for Los Angeles at 8:20 a.m. On board were fifty-nine passengers and crew. A passenger, Barbara Olson, managed to use her cell phone to call her husband, Ted Olson, the solicitor general of the United States, to tell him that her plane was being hijacked. There were teachers onboard and students going on a field trip. The youngest passenger was a three-year-old girl named Dana Falkenberg.
The jet had come in from the west at a speed of more than five hundred miles per hour, flying precariously low over stunned drivers along Route 27. The plane screamed over the Pentagon parking lot and hit the first floor of the building’s western wall. With forty-four thousand pounds of thrust from engines at full throttle, the nose of the aircraft disintegrated as the rest of the plane continued to punch through the walls of the building—the E Ring, the D Ring, and the C Ring—at over seven hundred feet per second, clearing a path for the rest of the aircraft.27 More than 181,000 pounds of aluminum and steel, jet fuel and humanity had collided with the building. The Pentagon was still standing, but the plane and everyone in it had been obliterated on impact.
Bush, frustrated at being kept so far from where he felt he belonged—in Washington—blurted out what first sprang to mind. “The United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts,” he said, an echo of his father’s words shortly after the 1983 bombing in Beirut, Lebanon. I would later offer a suggestion to the President about the word “cowardly.” The men who had gripped the controls of the aircraft and flew them into buildings at five hundred miles per hour were many things—evil, ruthless, cruel—but I felt we underestimated and misunderstood the enemy if we considered them cowards. They were Islamist fanatics dedicated to advancing their cause by killing innocents and themselves in the process, and they would not be easily intimidated or frightened, as cowards would be.
I also advised the President in the days following that I believed our nation’s response should not primarily be about punishment, retribution, or retaliation. Punishing our enemies didn’t describe the range of actions we would need to take if we were to succeed in protecting the United States. The struggle that had been brought to our shores went beyond law enforcement and criminal justice. Our responsibility was to deter and dissuade others from thinking that terrorism against the United States could advance their cause. In my view, our principal motivation was self-defense, not vengeance, retaliation, or punishment. The only effective defense would be to go after the terrorists with a strong offense.
In our initial discussions with the President that day, Myers and I recommended that he order a partial call-up of the Air Force reserves to ease the strain on our pilots, since round-the-clock patrols in the skies above our country would be needed. Bush agreed and asked me to convey his thanks to the Pentagon employees who were still at their posts. He made clear that he would like to act quickly against the perpetrators of the attacks. I said we would get to work on how best to do that. “The ball will soon be in your court,” he added.
As I got off the phone, I thought again of the Beirut bombing. Ever since then, a small circle of national security experts, including George Shultz, had worried that it was only a matter of time before Muslim extremists found their way to our shores. “Terrorism is a form of warfare, and must be treated as such,” I had said back in 1984, in the aftermath of the U.S. withdrawal. “As with other forms of conflict, weakness invites aggression. Simply standing in a defensive position, absorbing blows, is not enough. Terrorism must be deterred.”28 We could not stop all acts of terrorism or eliminate all casualties. But we could send a message to terrorists and to regimes that sponsored and harbored terrorists that if they continued to do so it would be at a price.
I remember observing to those with me early that afternoon that America’s prior history in responding to terrorism had not been effective. I considered our responses to provocations and attacks by our adversaries over the last decade hesitant and, in some cases, feckless, including: letting Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi off for his role in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103; the first World Trade Center attack of 1993; the plotted assassination of George H. W. Bush by Iraqi agents the same year; America’s retreat under fire in Mogadishu in 1993; the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996; the East African embassies bombings in 1998; and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. Actions and inactions by previous administrations had left the impression that the United States was leaning back, not forward.29
“We can’t bluster,” I said to my staff. “If you cock your fist, you’d better be ready to throw it.”30
Time also was important. I remembered that after the terrorist massacre of Marines in Beirut, American support for the Lebanese government and for action against the terrorists waned quickly.
“One week from now,” I remarked to Myers, “the willingness to act will be half of what it is now.”
Myers thought differently. “I think the country’s attention span will last longer this time,” he said. If we didn’t take the right steps to engage the American people and prepare them for the length of the war ahead, I wasn’t so sure.31
At 3:30 p.m., President Bush convened his first National Security Council meeting following the attacks. Joining us via secure video teleconference (SVTC) from Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, he began by echoing some of the comments he had made to me on the phone earlier in the day. “No thugs are going to diminish the spirit of the United States,” he told us. “No coward is going to hold this government at bay. We’re going to find out who did this. We’re going to destroy them and their resources.” The President discussed what the terrorist attacks might mean for the American people. He speculated about how people would react, especially in the cities struck by the terrorists: Would they go to their jobs the next day? Would children go to school?
During the meeting, a fresh report came in of still another suspicious plane—this one coming from Madrid and scheduled to land in Philadelphia. Over the secure video, the President authorized the use of force if necessary to bring down the airliner.32
The President insisted that the government rebound quickly after the attack. I reported that I would have the Pentagon open the following day. Not only did the Department have a great deal of work to do, I felt it was important that the terrorists not be seen as successful in shutting down the U.S. Department of Defense.
Tenet reported that the intelligence community now believed with some confidence that Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network was responsible for the attacks. The CIA had discovered that two of the hijackers were suspected al-Qaida operatives—including one who had been linked to the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole.33 One month before 9/11, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a senior al-Qaida lieutenant in close contact with bin Ladin, had discussed the details of the operation with Muhammed Atta, the lead hijacker. Their conversations were in a code in which they pretended to be students talking about various academic fields. What they actually talked about were which targets to hit: “architecture” meant the World Trade Center; “arts” referred to the Pentagon; “law,” the Capitol building; and “politics,” the White House. As he related this chilling information, Tenet warned of the possibility of additional, copycat attacks.
The State Department reported that it had placed all U.S. embassies on heightened alert. The President said he saw the attacks not as a problem for the United States alone but as a challenge to free nations, and that it was necessary to organize a global campaign against terrorism by enlisting as many countries as possible into a large coalition. He expected help not just from our traditional allies—Britain, Germany, and France had offered immediate assistance—but from new partners. We discussed the fact that our reaction to the attack would need to have many parts, and that some of our partners might want to participate in only some of them.
Later that afternoon I spoke with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov. He sounded sad as we discussed the casualties. He pledged
Russia’s cooperation. As it happened, I already had a request to make. The Russian military was conducting an aircraft exercise near Alaska, and our forces were understandably sensitive now about any intrusions into American airspace. I didn’t want problems to arise inadvertently between our two countries. So I asked Ivanov if he would have his military stand down. He promptly agreed to halt the exercise.
That evening also offered an opportunity for political rivals in the United States to come together, at least for a time. At the Pentagon, I met with Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and John Warner, the ranking Republican. They wanted to come to the Department to express their support.
“We’re foursquare with you,” Warner said.
“We will be totally arm in arm,” Levin seconded, saying he looked forward to my leadership.34
I was heading to a press briefing in the Pentagon and the two senators asked to attend to show their support. So at 6:42 p.m., I appeared before the Pentagon press corps with Levin, Warner, and Joint Chiefs Chairman General Hugh Shelton, who had just arrived from South America. As the Pentagon burned—it would continue to burn for several days—I told reporters that the Defense Department would be open in the morning, fulfilling its responsibilities. “The Pentagon’s functioning,” I said. “It will be in business tomorrow.”35 Asked about how many might have perished in the building, I replied, “It will not be a few.”
Senator Levin vowed to support efforts to “track down, root out, and relentlessly pursue terrorists, [and] states that support them and harbor them.”36 When Levin was asked a question about Democratic opposition to increasing the defense budget, he replied that he and the Armed Services Committee now were united in support of the President’s defense increase.37
On the evening of the attack, nations around the world were voicing support for a robust response. The German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, called the attacks “a declaration of war against the entire civilized world.” The French newspaper Le Monde declared, “We are all Americans.”38
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