Talking Back

by Andrea Mitchell

  We were piecing together information to try to get a handle on what had happened. No one knew how big a plot was still under way. By then, barely an hour after the first plane hit, Brokaw was able to identify the specific flights that had gone into the Trade Center towers. Government offices in New York were being evacuated. Katie asked me to describe what was happening in Washington.

  I reported, “The State Department has been evacuated. There was a meeting going on in the operations center. Other top officials were in the situation room at the White House. Colin Powell is in Lima, Peru, on a two-day trip.” Then I reported a major problem with the FBI’s ability to respond to the attacks. The FBI had been conducting a massive hostage rescue exercise in California involving all of their top teams and a lot of critical equipment. They had been scheduled to fly back on 9/11, commercially. Now all of those people were out of place, and with phone lines down in New York City, no one could reach the top FBI antiterror team headquartered there.

  There had been a rush by terror groups to take responsibility for the attack. Katie asked, “Andrea, is the State Department taking this claim of responsibility from the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine seriously? Are they giving any credence to that? Or are they dismissing it? Or how do they feel about who might have been responsible for this?”

  I answered: “They have one instant reaction, as you know, and it could be wrong. But their immediate reaction in a case like this would be to look toward Osama bin Laden and the collateral groups connected to him, simply because he has proved with the embassy bombings in Africa that he is the one terror leader who’s capable of this kind of highly coordinated attack. When bombings went off in Tanzania and in Kenya almost simultaneously, it was extraordinarily well coordinated. They proved their case to a jury effectively, and have managed to develop a great deal of information from sources, from in fact turning some former members of his network. So they believe that he is the most likely person, but it’s far too early to say anything.”

  The White House had been evacuated right after the attack, on the assumption that it was the next likely target. The chaotic decision making later described in the 9/11 Commission Report did not seem crazy to us at the time. We didn’t question why the president spent seven minutes reading The Pet Goat to that class of children, or flying around the country before finally returning to Washington. All of us were confused, and at the time, we didn’t expect a lot more from the White House. It was only later that we started asking questions.

  I was on automatic pilot, reporting the information I was gathering to update the broadcast network and, separately, our cable viewers. One side of my brain heard that the FAA was diverting incoming foreign flights to Canada. Then, more than an hour into the attack, I remembered that Alan was flying back from Switzerland that day and approaching Dulles Airport in Washington.

  Over the next few hours, I became quietly frantic as flights landed and all were accounted for except his. His office felt they must have diverted his plane elsewhere, but they had not landed in Canada. Logically, it was impossible for another plane to have been hijacked without someone knowing it. Unable to reach him, I tried to concentrate on my job, calling sources to keep updating information and get it on the air.

  Finally, his office got word that his plane had been sent back to Switzerland. Still, I was desperate to hear his voice. Then, just before three p.m., I was getting ready to summarize everything that had happened that day with Brokaw at the top of the hour. My cell phone rang, and it was Alan. They’d run out of landing space in Halifax and sent his plane back across the Atlantic to Zurich. He had just landed and wanted to know, “What is happening to America?”

  As I held the cell phone to my ear, our special events producer in New York, Phil Alongi, almost shouted through his microphone into my earpiece, “Andrea, Tom is coming to you, are you ready?”

  All I had time to say to Alan was, “Listen up.” Still connected to him in Zurich, I put the cell phone in my lap so he could hear my report, took my cue, and recounted the day’s developments up to that point. That’s how the chairman of the Federal Reserve got his first briefing on 9/11.

  In fact, with Alan out of the country, the Fed’s vice chairman, Roger Ferguson, took emergency steps to keep money flowing to the markets and make sure the banking system was safe from attack. All of the regulators and their emergency planning performed flawlessly. The nation had taken a body blow, but our financial systems proved they could withstand an enormous shock.

  That night, back in Washington, the president outlined what was to become known as the Bush doctrine. It reflected core beliefs few people knew he had. Here was a man with so little curiosity that he rarely traveled outside the United States before becoming president. Now, in the wake of the attacks on New York and Washington, he told the rest of the world, “We will make no distinction between those who planned these acts and those who harbor them.” You were either with us, or against us. There was no room for nuance or straddling.

  In our bureau, we were bringing in a stream of former government officials and other experts to provide commentary. At the top of the list for Brokaw to interview was James Baker, the former secretary of state, who was visiting from Texas. With government officials too busy to discuss the attacks, Baker—with his wide range of government experience—was an important voice. Chatting with them, I learned that he and his wife, Susan, had been stranded in Washington when all flights were canceled. Baker and the president’s father had both been attending the annual board meeting of the Carlyle Group, a global private equity firm, during the days preceding 9/11. Even more interesting was the fact that one of the other Carlyle investors stuck in Washington when the nation’s airspace shut down that day was Shafig bin Laden, Osama’s half brother.

  Later, we were the first to report that the FBI helped the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar, get all the bin Ladens—including several dozen college students around the country—out of the U.S. on chartered planes as soon as the ban on flights was lifted. That, of course, became a controversial decision for conspiracy theorists, and figured prominently in Michael Moore’s movie Fahrenheit 9/11.

  Like everyone else in the country, all I wanted was to be with the people I loved, which in my case meant Alan and my family. But my parents were in New York, and Alan was on the other side of the ocean. Still not knowing whether there was a larger conspiracy, my husband’s staff took him from Zurich to a NATO base to spend the night and wait for transport home. The White House organized a military flight and he came back the next day on a refueling plane, with a handful of other government officials who’d been out of the country when the terrorists struck. When they approached the East Coast, the pilot flew over the gaping wound that had been the Twin Towers. Alan could not believe what he was looking at. He had worked on Wall Street, only a few blocks from the Twin Towers, for more than thirty years. He had been in the air himself during the attacks and the immediate aftermath, unable to watch what most of the world was watching. To this day, he has not been able to bring himself to look at those first images.

  But I didn’t know that until later. All I knew at the time was that I had a job to do. For the next 144 hours, we broadcast as many facts as we could accumulate, even those that were difficult to absorb. It was exhausting, but no one complained. America was on a war footing, and so was television news. We were juggling different programming on NBC’s three networks, simultaneously. Tom Brokaw, Brian Williams, and the other anchors were drawing twenty-hour shifts without a break. The networks lost hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising revenue for cancelled commercials. But everything we did was dwarfed by the sacrifices of the people of New York, in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and the military and civilian personnel at the Pentagon. By the afternoon of 9/11, according to the 9/11 Commission Report, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was already wondering if Iraq was involved and should be targeted, along with Afghanistan.

  By Thursday night, Colin Powell confirmed
that bin Laden was a prime suspect. That night, I filed a report asking how, with so many leads now being developed, could the terrorists have operated successfully right under our noses. And why didn’t the billions of dollars spent on intelligence give us an early warning?

  Powell acknowledged to us, “We did not get the cueing we needed. We did not get the intelligence information needed to predict this was about to happen.” The problem, experts were telling me, was too much information, too little smart analysis. I closed the report by saying that the more alarming possibility was that our spies would never be able to guarantee it wouldn’t happen again.

  Within twenty-four hours of the attack we were identifying the failures highlighted later by the 9/11 Commission, not because we were so smart, but because the problems were so obvious. Brent Scowcroft told me, “We’re getting to the point where our ability to collect information far exceeds our ability to analyze it. We need some help.” Scowcroft, who led the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, proposed giving the director of central intelligence control over all of the intelligence agency budgets—which meant taking power away from the secretary of defense. But Donald Rumsfeld, not surprisingly, was fiercely opposed to this suggestion. As a result, Condi Rice didn’t even send Scowcroft’s plan to the president. I was told she wanted to make sure the president was sheltered from any criticism for killing the idea. It is a great irony that eventually the president did end up creating a director of national intelligence, but within a structure quite different from what Scowcroft had recommended. Scowcroft had wanted to expand the authority of the CIA director. Bush’s eventual solution did exactly the opposite.

  As draining as it was for those of us in Washington, I knew my colleagues in New York had been hit even harder. Most of them were personally connected to victims. Yet all of us, even those who had been near the Trade Center when the planes hit, responded the same way. The story came first. And in ways large and small, we found ourselves reaching out to help each other. We pooled information, updated each other’s scripts, and produced an hour-long Nightly News broadcast each night, twice as long as usual. Adrenaline kept me going, and working long hours prevented me from thinking too deeply about the events I was covering. But I couldn’t get out of my mind the ghostly skeletal silhouette of Ground Zero and the constant grinding of the forklifts and bulldozers clearing the debris.

  Three days after the attack, the president led a memorial service at the National Cathedral. Ushers passed out red, white, and blue ribbons to pin on our lapels. I had been to weddings at the cathedral, and funerals, most recently for Katharine Graham, but no service was as deeply moving as this. Usually, even in times of tragedy, friends hug each other, or tell stories about the deceased. This was different, on a scale so enormous that people seemed unable to comfort themselves, or each other. It was a horror beyond comprehension.

  With his parents and all the other former presidents, except Ronald Reagan, joining him in a show of solidarity, George Bush led the mourners in prayers of consolation and sorrow. Seeking God’s blessings, the president evoked the wrath of a vengeful nation and vowed “to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.” Sitting several pews back with Alan, I began to realize how much the attack had burdened the president, and how profoundly it had changed his worldview. “War has been waged against us by stealth and deceit and murder,” he said. “This nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger. This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others. It will end in a way, and at an hour, of our choosing.”

  Sitting in the congregation with so many members of the military, I kept looking around and wondering what these people might have to order their troops to do. What missions would they have to deploy? How many of these people have lost colleagues and friends and loved ones already? Right behind me and across the aisle was Theodore Olson, the solicitor general of the United States, whose wife was on American Airlines flight 77. She had called twice from the plane between 9:16 a.m. and 9:26 a.m. on 9/11. Calmly, she had told him the plane was being hijacked and asked what she should tell the captain to do. Now, only three days later, I couldn’t imagine how he was handling his emotions. I had interviewed both of the Olsons on Inauguration Day. Walking out, he saw me and we hugged.

  I came outside in the wake of a throng circling Bill Clinton. Suddenly, he appeared diminished in comparison with Bush, now a wartime leader. And Al Gore, walking out alone with Tipper, was almost ignored. It was a hint of how 9/11 would enlarge the new president’s standing. We had broadcast the service as part of our live coverage. Now, on my return to the bureau, I was told to go on the air with Brokaw and give a first-person account. As I sat down in front of the camera, I quickly unpinned my mourner’s ribbon. Somehow, it felt inappropriate to wear it on camera. It was all right to participate in the religious service, but now I was retreating back behind the lines, to the role of observer. Journalist.

  Tom asked me what it felt like inside the cathedral, surrounded by the country’s secular and spiritual leaders at a time of national mourning. I said that it was an extraordinary moment, because all of these very powerful people were simply humble servants unable to fathom the enormity of what had happened, and searching for answers. The most stunning moment was when the Reverend Billy Graham, frail but having risen from his sickbed to preach, was greeted by a thunderous wave of applause. You don’t often hear ovations in church.

  That same day, the president flew to New York to see Ground Zero for the first time. Standing on a charred fire truck that had just been dragged from the debris, he found his voice, forever altering his presidency. With a flag in one hand and a bullhorn in the other, he vowed to “rid the world of evil.” When a rescue worker shouted, “George, we can’t hear you,” the president delivered his memorable declaration: “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” I wondered how a civilized nation, following the rule of law, could win a fight with fanatics.

  I had still not been home to see my parents, who had been badly shaken by 9/11. Lifelong New Yorkers, they were in their eighties and had lived through two World Wars and the Great Depression. My mother still talked vividly about the Holocaust as though it had happened to her. Now, like many New Yorkers, they were trying to absorb the horror of an attack on their own city. NBC encouraged me to take time off and accompany my father to synagogue on the Jewish New Year, one week after the attack.

  It was my first visit to New Rochelle, where my father still attended services, in quite some time. What had been a very traditional service when I was growing up had become much more relaxed in the intervening years. Thanks in part to my father’s influence, women could now participate, something unheard of when I was a child, and now the rabbi invited me to take part. I’ve been on many stages in my life and broadcast to millions of people. Nothing made me more nervous than walking up the steps to accept the honor of opening the ark on Rosh Hashanah in my father’s synagogue.

  Before I returned to my seat, the rabbi asked me to address the congregation with some thoughts about the terror attacks. I spoke about the outpouring of humanity around the world for Americans in the aftermath of 9/11, and took the opportunity of the Jewish high holidays to remind the gathering that Osama bin Laden did not represent either Muslims or the Muslim faith. I recalled my experiences in Afghanistan, and how brutal the Taliban regime had been, especially toward women. But along with a warning against the excesses of religious fundamentalism, I concluded with a message of hope. I still thought our nation, and the world, could learn from the tragedy and the way the world had responded.

  A week after 9/11, just as our NBC colleagues in New York City were recovering from the initial shock of the terror attack, a letter containing anthrax arrived at our 30 Rockefeller Center studios, addressed to Tom Brokaw. Tom’s longtime assistant, a valued friend and colleague, fell ill as a result of having opened the tainted mail. On the same day, another letter c
ontaining anthrax, carrying the identical Trenton, New Jersey postmark, arrived at the offices of The New York Post.

  At our headquarters, the Nightly News staff was evacuated to temporary quarters on a different floor for weeks while the entire newsroom was sterilized. Leaders from GE and NBC, along with Nightly News executive producer Steve Capus and Brokaw, kept people from panicking, and the staff got through it, but not without a great deal of emotional pain, at a time when people in New York were most vulnerable.

  No perpetrator was found for that attack, or for other, fatal attacks in Florida and Washington, D.C. But before the spate of anthrax letters subsided, five people had died. The offices of two Democratic senators, Tom Daschle and Pat Leahy, had also received contaminated letters. The Hart Senate Office Bulding had to be closed for three months. Post office facilities in New Jersey and suburban Washington, D.C. had to be sterilized. Federal investigators determined from the text and style of the letters that they did not originate with al Qaeda. And some of the victims never fully recovered the life they’d known before being infected by the anthrax.

  As frightening as the anthrax attack was, it still paled in comparison to what happened on 9/11. In the days afterward, the nation mourned, but also expected a strong military response. But against whom? A year before 9/11, CIA drone Predator planes flying over the Afghan desert had sent back images that could have been bin Laden, but by the time the pictures were analyzed, the suspect figure had moved on. Picking targets in Afghanistan was going to be a military challenge.