At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA

by George Tenet;Bill Harlow

  At about 10:00 A.M. word was sent out for a large number of our multi-thousand-person workforce to go home. They soon joined the horrendous traffic jam that choked Washington’s roads. The White House had evacuated fifteen minutes earlier, just after the Pentagon was hit. In New York City, the United Nations complex, nearly twelve thousand employees strong, began clearing out at 10:13. Back in D.C., the State and Justice departments and the World Bank followed suit minutes later.

  Initially, our senior leadership team moved from my seventh-floor conference room to one on the first floor—a bit safer, but still too vulnerable if an airplane came crashing into the building. We then left the building altogether, exiting via the southeast corner of the headquarters building and heading diagonally across the campus to the Agency’s printing plant, where a makeshift operational capability had been installed.

  One group stayed behind in headquarters. Cofer Black felt very strongly that the roughly two hundred employees in his Counterterrorism Center needed to maintain their positions both in the Global Reaction Center on the highly exposed sixth floor, where a shift of eight people routinely worked, and in a safer, windowless facility down low in the building, where the bulk of CTC was located.

  “Sir,” he said to me after I had issued the evacuation order, “we’re going to have to exempt CTC from this [evacuation] because we need to have our people working the computers.”

  “Well,” I responded, “the Global Response Center—they’re going to be at risk.”

  “We’re going to have to keep them in place. They have the key function to play in a crisis like this. This is exactly why we have the Global Response Center.”

  “Well, they could die.”

  “Well, sir, then they’re just going to have to die.”

  According to Cofer, I paused for a moment, and said, “You’re absolutely right.”

  Now that we were under attack, the Counterterrorism Center, with its vast data banks and sophisticated communications systems, was more vital than ever. Even as we were discussing going or staying, CTC was sending out a global alert to our stations around the world, ordering them to go to their liaison services and agents to collect every shred of information they could lay their hands on. I admired their unwavering courage and dedication. CIA headquarters is pretty much a glass house. If a plane had targeted it, the people in the Global Response Center could have watched their fate flying right at them.

  Inside the printing plant, the initial scene was pretty chaotic. We had only rudimentary capabilities for access to all of our data and communications networks. In the aftermath, we all realized that we needed additional backup communications capabilities if and when a similar situation arose again. People were scrambling to get the phones operational and to get in touch with Mike Morell, the president’s briefer, who was with George Bush in Florida when the first plane struck. As Mike would later tell the story, he, Karl Rove, and Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, were riding in a motorcade van when Ari took a call, then turned to Mike and asked if he knew anything about a small plane hitting the World Trade Center. Mike immediately called our Operations Center and was told that the plane wasn’t small. Shortly afterward, waiting for the president to finish meeting with elementary school students and their teachers, Mike saw the second tower struck on TV. Later, aboard Air Force One, the president queried Mike about a Palestinian extremist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, or PFLP, which was taking credit for the attack in the press. Not likely, Mike told him. PFLP simply didn’t have the capability for something like this. The president took that in and then told Mike that if we learned anything definitive about the attack, he wanted to be the first to know. Wiry, youthful looking, and extremely bright, Mike speaks in staccato-like bursts that get to the bottom line very quickly. He and George Bush had hit it off almost immediately. In a crisis like this, Mike was the perfect guy for us to have by the commander in chief’s side.

  Simultaneous with establishing contact with the president and his traveling party, we were trying to reach our office in New York City, to evaluate whether everybody was present and accounted for there, and trying to get as much data as we possibly could for ourselves. As happens in any crisis, anomalies kept surfacing, odd bleeps that in calm times would probably have meant nothing but in these times could have meant almost anything. One example: Airplanes are tracked via transponders. Every one of them emits a unique signal. At least some of the hijackers that morning had known how to turn off the transponders so that their planes would be harder to track. Now a commercial passenger jet on its way to Great Britain was emitting all kinds of squawks, with the transponder going off and on. Had al-Qa’ida launched a two-continent attack? Ultimately, the matter was resolved—there was no nefarious intent; the transponder was simply faulty—but in the interim I called Richard Dearlove, my counterpart at MI-6, to tell him what we were hearing and what we knew.

  Although in our collective gut we knew al-Qa’ida was behind the attacks, we needed proof, so CTC requested passenger lists from the planes that had been turned into weapons that morning. Incredibly, I was later told, the initial response from some parts of the bureaucracy (which parts since mercifully forgotten) was that the manifests could not be shared with CIA. There were privacy issues involved. Some gentle reasoning, and a few four-letter words later, the lists were sprung, and an analyst from CTC raced over to the printing plant. “Some of these guys on one of the planes are the ones we’ve been looking for in the last few weeks.” He pointed specifically to two names: Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. That was the first time we had absolute proof of what I had been virtually certain of from the moment I heard about the attacks: we were in the middle of an al-Qa’ida plot.

  Around this same time, the vice president called to ask if we could anticipate further attacks. By then, a fourth plane, United Flight 93, had gone down in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. There was a lull in the action, and to me that was telling. “No,” I told him. “My judgment is that they’re done for the day.” It was a gut call; I had no data to go on. But the pattern of spectacular multiple attacks within a very tight attack window was consistent with what we knew of al-Qa’ida’s modus operandi based on the East African embassy attacks and others. Events happened within a strict timeline, and then they were done.

  Like everyone else in America, we were all working through our own personal dramas as the morning progressed. My brother, who happened to be in Washington on business, called early on, anxious to get back to New York City, where his wife and family and our mother live. Was any public transportation running? Was it possible, was it safe, to fly? I told him no, and so he rented a car and headed home. My mother was in a panic, as I knew she would be. I called her and told her I was safe. Stephanie, meanwhile, was phoning other family members, assuring them that the CIA building hadn’t been hit.

  Our son, John Michael, was then starting ninth grade at Gonzaga, a Jesuit Catholic high school not far from Capitol Hill. A CIA security detail found him there, took him under its wing, and transported him out to our house. Everybody in Washington in a position like mine fears for his kids in this new, terrorist-driven world we live in. Not to John Michael’s liking in the least, this was the beginning of a permanent security detail that would follow him just about everywhere while I remained DCI.

  Stephanie had the worst of it that morning, by far. Sometime around midday she got a call from Tom Heidenberger. He and his wife, Michele, were old friends. Our sons had gone to elementary school together and now were classmates at Gonzaga. Michele was a flight attendant for American Airlines. Tom wasn’t certain, but he thought she had been scheduled to work Flight 77 that morning, the plane that had hit the Pentagon. Although Tom was a pilot himself, for USAir, he couldn’t get his own employer or American Airlines to tell him if Michele had been on board. Could Stephanie call me, he asked? She did. I asked to see the manifests that had just come into our possession. The names were in alphabetical order. Fir
st the passengers were listed. Below them were the names of the crew. My heart sank as I read the name Michele Heidenberger.

  I called Stephanie with the news, and she drove over to the Heidenbergers’ home in Chevy Chase to break it personally to Tom. Michele was fifty-seven years old, the mother of two.

  Although I didn’t immediately notice his name on the list, one of my high school buddies, Bob Speisman, was also a passenger on Flight 77.

  My staff and I left the printing plant and returned to headquarters about one o’clock that afternoon. The danger was over for the day, in our estimation, and all of us felt isolated at the printing plant. One of my senior staff later told me that not long before we left the printing plant, he said to a colleague that the attacks were going to be viewed as a huge intelligence failure, and the colleague had looked at him incredulously and replied something like, “Why would this be an intelligence failure? These things happen. This is a war. This is a battle.” I don’t know what I would have said at that moment if the same suggestion had been made to me. The death count was clearly mounting into the thousands. Finger-pointing of any kind, at us or at someone else, was the remotest thing from my mind. But somewhere, I suppose, the blaming had already begun. Maybe that’s inevitable. Maybe it’s just the way Washington works.

  That afternoon passed mostly in a blur of meetings. The historical record tells me that there was a 3:30 P.M. teleconference, again over a secure line, with the president, who had touched down at Offutt Air Force Base, in Nebraska, while zigzagging his way back to Washington. The president was speaking from the underground headquarters of the U.S. Strategic Command.

  I remember him asking me who I thought had done this. I told him the same thing I had told the vice president several hours earlier: al-Qa’ida. The whole operation looked, smelled, and tasted like Bin Ladin, and the passenger manifests had all but confirmed our suspicions. When I told the president particularly about al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, he shot Mike Morell one of those “I thought I was supposed to be the first to know” looks. Mike placed an angry call to my executive assistant, Ted Gistaro, who was in his second day on the job, asking to see the talking points I had prepared for the exchange. “Can’t do,” Ted told him. “They’re embargoed.” “Embargoed from the president of the United States?” Mike shot back. It was one of those little flaps that happen when everyone is working under great stress. Before long Mike was able to pass what information we had to the president through Andy Card. Also in my talking points that afternoon was a warning we had received from French intelligence that said another group of terrorists was within U.S. borders and was preparing a second wave of attacks.

  Throughout the teleconference, the president was focused, in control. That evening’s face-to-face meeting with him only served to confirm my first impression.

  By the time I arrived there, sometime after nine o’clock, the White House was an armed fortress. I was too busy reading briefing papers, though, to notice whatever extra protection had been laid on. My car had no sooner pulled to a stop than the Secret Service escorted me through a long, elaborate passageway to the bunker, a place I had never visited before and would never be in again. The president and vice president were both there, along with Dick Clarke, Condi Rice, Colin Powell, Don Rumsfeld, Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Hugh Shelton, and a few others, including Lynn Cheney and Laura Bush.

  “Bunker,” I realize, implies sandbag fortifications and artillery shells bursting overhead. This wasn’t that. The White House bunker is basically a stripped-down and hardened Situation Room—but there was a definite warlike feel to the room and, that day, more raw emotion in one place than I think I’ve ever experienced in my life: anger that this could have happened, shock that it had, overwhelming sorrow for the dead, a compelling sense of urgency that we had to respond and do so quickly, and a continuing feeling of dread about what might lie ahead. Al-Qa’ida was through for the day, or so we believed, but plenty of intelligence data suggested that this was intended as the opening act of a multi-day sequence. Even at this early point, too, there was a growing fear—one that would spread in the days ahead as fresh reports came in—that the terrorists had somehow secreted a weapon of mass destruction into the United States and were preparing to detonate it.

  At eight thirty that evening, speaking from the Oval Office, the president addressed the nation in terms both stirring and deeply earnest, including the first enunciation of what became known as the Bush Doctrine. “I’ve directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice,” he told a global audience of some eighty million people. “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” For us at CIA, the new doctrine meant that the restraints were finally off. We already had on our shelves the game plan for going after both al-Qa’ida and its protectors, the Taliban, in Afghanistan. Now we could begin to implement it. Amid the sorrow of the day, we realized that we were finally going to be given the authorization and the resources to do the job we knew had to be done.

  The president followed the Oval Office address with a meeting with the full National Security Council, in this same bunker. Now it was down to what amounted suddenly to a war cabinet. Back only hours earlier from Peru, Colin Powell talked about the problem in diplomatic terms: We had to make it clear to Pakistan as well as to Afghanistan that the time for equivocation was over. I was probably more forward-leaning: Yes, we needed Pakistan’s help; it was the country closest to Afghanistan and the one with the most sway over it. But the time for talking with the Taliban had come and gone. To go after Bin Ladin and his shadow army, we had to remove the curtain they hid behind. The president said we had to force countries to choose. The vice president weighed in with several questions about finding targets in Afghanistan worth hitting. But what I remember more than anything else about that meeting was the president’s manner, not his words. He was absolutely in charge, determined, and directed. He stressed the urgency of the moment, and he made it clear, by word and example, what his expectations were for us in terms of thinking through how we would respond.

  No doubt about it, 9/11 was the galvanizing moment of the Bush presidency. It transformed him in ways I don’t think any of us could have fully predicted. His leadership in the months ahead made a huge difference.

  My senior staff was waiting for me when I got back to Langley that evening. The official record of my schedule for the day ends at 11:00 P.M., but I think that just means that Dottie Hanson finally went home then. My own recollection is that I left headquarters closer to one o’clock in the morning, for not much more than a long nap, a shower, and a change of clothes. I was due back at the White House early the next morning. A day like 9/11, though, never really ends, except by the clock.

  One evening, several days after 9/11, Stephanie and I took some time to visit Tom Heidenberger to see how he was coping with the death of Michele. It was still so hard to believe. Tom wanted to see for himself where she had died, but at the time it was impossible for civilians to get anywhere near the Pentagon, where efforts to recover remains of those killed in the building were continuing. We got in my SUV and were driven to the Pentagon by my security detail. Flashing badges at countless roadblocks, we finally reached an area overlooking the twisted ruins at the Pentagon. Tom brought a bouquet of flowers to leave at the site where his wife and so many others had died. Being there with Tom and knowing that thousands of other American families were enduring similar pain was one of the saddest things I have ever experienced.

  John McLaughlin, Jim Pavitt, Cofer Black, and I talked often in the first months after the attacks about the emotional toll the attacks were taking on our employees. Everyone was working overtime; everyone was strained. We kept waiting for and preparing for an emotional response, especially on the part of Cofer’s people in the Counterterrorism Center. By and large, though, it never came. Somehow along the way, I missed my own emotional buildup. That
came to a head on the day after Thanksgiving.

  That Friday was the first day I had taken off in well more than two months, since the weekend before the attacks. I had used up whatever reserve of adrenalin I’d been running on. Sometime during my morning of supposed leisure, I went out in front of our house, sat down in my favorite Adirondack chair, and just lost it. Whatever the trigger was, the whole thing came down on me at that moment. I thought about all the people who had died and what we had been through in the months since. How in God’s name had this happened? I remember asking myself. How in hell could I have been on top of all this? What am I doing here? Why me? Why am I living through this? The questions were flying through my head. Stephanie came out about then. I’d been alone up to that moment, except for the security detail watching the house from the street, and thinking who knows what. I recall Stephanie’s saying to me, “You’re supposed to be here. This is something that you’ve been working on all your life, and you’ve got a lot more work to do.” And that did it. That snapped me out of it, but it was a black, black time until then.

  The one thing that so many people have missed about CIA and 9/11, including the 9/11 Commission so far as I could tell, is that it was personal with us. Fighting terrorism is what we do; it’s in our blood. In the months and years leading up to 9/11, we had worked this ground every day. To thwart the terrorists we disrupted attacks, we saved lives. We sacrificed our lives, too, often figuratively and sometimes literally.

  If the politicians and press and even the 9/11 Commission often failed to understand this, our global partners in the intelligence business had no doubt. We were still sorting out the details on 9/11 when Avi Dichter, the chief of Shin Bet, called from Israel to express his regrets and say that he and his people were with us, no matter what. This wasn’t a bureaucratic call. Avi and I had lived through Arafat together and much more, but there was a connection through that phone call that went far beyond anything that had preceded it. Be strong, Avi told me. Lead your people. He didn’t have to say that he had seen hundreds of his own countrymen killed by terrorists, on his watch, and I didn’t have to add that I now understood what it was like to be the chief of the service when the same thing happened on my soil. All that was implicit, and stronger because it never had to be spoken. Several years later, though, in taping a farewell message for Avi’s retirement ceremony, I put into words what I felt so strongly about 9/11: “We all became Israelis on that day,” I told Avi.