The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden

by Anthony Summers

  United dispatcher Ed Ballinger, responsible for sixteen of the airline’s transcontinental flights, had learned that a Flight 175 attendant had called reporting a hijacking. He composed a cautious message to 175 that read, “How’s the ride? Anything Dispatch can do for you?” It was too late. By the time the message went out, at 9:03, the crew and passengers on board the plane were beyond help. In the same minute, Flight 175 struck the South Tower.

  Four minutes after that, Boston area Air Traffic Control advised all commercial airplane pilots in its sector to secure their cockpits. Boston also recommended that the FAA’s Command Center issue a nationwide warning, but the Command Center failed to do so. At 9:19 at United, however, dispatcher Ballinger acted on his own initiative and began sending messages to all “his” flights. They read: “Beware any cockpit intrusion. Two a/c [aircraft] hit World Trade Center.”

  By 9:05, aware now of the Flight 11 hijacker’s transmission about having “planes,” FAA’s New York Center issued orders forbidding any aircraft to leave, arrive at, or travel through, their airspace until further notice. “We have several situations going on here,” a New York Center manager told the Command Center. “We have other aircraft that may have a similar situation going on here.” With 4,546 airplanes under their control in the United States that morning, the managers were facing into a situation covered by no training manual.

  CONTROLLERS REMAINED totally ignorant of the true status of American 77, the third plane in trouble—though not for want of trying on the part of one of its crew. At 9:12, flight attendant Renee May—assigned to First Class on this latest missing aircraft—got through by phone to her mother in Las Vegas. She spoke just long enough to say six hijackers had taken control, and that passengers and crew were being moved to the back of the plane. She asked her mother to call American Airlines and raise the alarm. Then she got out, “I love you, Mom,” before the call was disconnected.

  May’s mother got through to American in Washington, waited while she was put on hold, then relayed her daughter’s message. With staff already distracted by news of events in New York, some wondered whether Flight 77 had hit the World Trade Center. The import of May’s call became lost in the general confusion.

  In the West Wing of the White House, the videoconference of senior officials was yet to get under way. After the second strike, meanwhile, Vice President Cheney had picked up a phone and said, “I need to talk to the President … The Cabinet is going to need direction.”

  AT THE SCHOOL in Florida, the President’s reading session with the children finally came to an end. “Hoo!” he exclaimed. “These are great readers … Very impressive! Thank you all so very much for showing me your reading skills … Thanks for having us.”

  Why had Bush continued to sit in the classroom—for more than five minutes—after being told of the second strike on the Trade Center? Why, many were to wonder, had he not responded instantly—even with a single terse presidential instruction—when Card told him the second crash indicated a terrorist attack?

  Two months later, the President would offer a sort of explanation. He had gone on listening to the schoolchildren, he said, because he was “very aware of the cameras. I’m trying to absorb that knowledge. I have nobody to talk to … and I realize I’m the commander-in-chief and the country has just come under attack.”

  Once out of the classroom, Bush joined aides watching the TV news, saw the Trade Center burning, and talked on the phone with Cheney and Rice. He decided to make a brief statement, then fly back to Washington.

  Unknown to the President, though, as he mulled what to tell the national audience, crisis was spiraling into calamity.

  FIVE

  SIX TIMES, MAYBE MORE, THE PHONE HAD RUNG THAT MORNING IN THE office at the Justice Department of Theodore Olson, the solicitor general. The caller was his wife, Barbara, and she finally got through some time after 9:15. Mrs. Olson, a prominent attorney who often made television appearances, was no shrinking violet. Now, though, she sounded hysterical.

  Olson knew his wife was flying to California that day. He had seen the television coverage of the Trade Center attacks, had thanked God there had not been time for his wife’s flight to get to New York. Now Barbara was on the line—from American 77.

  Her flight had been seized, she said, by men “with knives and box cutters.” After an interruption—Mrs. Olson was cut off—she came back on the line and spoke with her husband for about ten minutes.

  The pilot, she told him, had announced that the flight had been hijacked. Had Flight 77’s legitimate pilot, Charles Burlingame, remained alive and told his passengers what was happening? Today, there is no way of knowing. Mrs. Olson, who by now sounded calmer, consulted with someone nearby and said she thought the plane was headed northeast. She could see houses below, so the plane must—she realized—have been flying fairly low. She and her husband talked of their feelings for each other, and Olson assured her that things were “going to come out okay.” In his heart, he thought otherwise.

  Nothing more would be heard from anyone aboard Flight 77. Ted Olson tried to reach the attorney general, John Ashcroft, only to find that he, too, was out of Washington and in the air. Olson spoke with the Department of Justice Command Center and provided his wife’s flight number, but the effort went nowhere. With the minutes rushing by, the solicitor general of the United States proved no more effective than had flight attendant Renee May’s mother, calling American Airlines to report her daughter’s desperate call.

  Flight 77 had been flying on undetected, for ground controllers worked on the assumption that it was still flying not east but west. Then at 9:32, controllers monitoring radar at Dulles Airport, outside Washington, spotted an unidentified airplane speeding toward the capital. Reagan National, the airport situated alongside the Potomac River in Washington itself, was notified. So were Secret Service agents, who were by now fretting both about the safety of the Vice President—still in his White House office—and of the President, still at that school in Florida.

  ISOLATED FROM THE ONRUSH of events, but very aware of the catastrophe in New York, the President was launching into his thank-you remarks to the teachers and fifth-grade students—remarks rapidly reshaped to take account of the attacks and suggest that the nation’s leader was at the helm:

  Ladies and gentlemen, this is a difficult moment for America. I unfortunately will be going back to Washington.… Today we have had a national tragedy. Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack on our country.… I have ordered the full resources of the federal government to go to help the victims and their families and to conduct a full-scale investigation to hunt down and find those folks who’ve committed this act. Terrorism against our nation will not stand. Now, if you’ll join me in a moment of silence.… May God bless the victims and their families and America.

  Bush was gone from the school moments later. A Secret Service agent emerged at a run to tell local police officers, “We’re under terrorist attack. We have to go now.” The presidential motorcade sped off, heading for the Sarasota airport. Before it got there, however, events would torpedo the plan to return to Washington.

  FROM THE TOWER at Reagan Airport in Washington, a supervisor had been talking urgently with the Secret Service’s Operations Center at the White House. “We’ve got an aircraft coming at you,” he said, “and not talking with us.” It is less than four miles from the airport to the White House. Within three minutes, by 9:36, according to the Secret Service record, the agents who had been waiting in Cheney’s outer office—submachine guns in hand—acted. “They came in,” the Vice President remembered, “grabbed me and … you know, your feet touch the floor periodically. But they’re bigger than I am, and they hoisted me up and moved me very rapidly down the hallway, down some stairs, through some doors, and down some more stairs into an underground facility under the White House.” He was on his way to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, a fortified bunker originally b
uilt for President Roosevelt in World War II, where he was to remain for many hours.

  DULLES CONTROLLERS had reported that the suspect airplane was headed toward the restricted airspace around the White House, known as P-56. It was ten miles out, still pointed that way, when radar at Reagan National picked it up. Then it turned south. A National Guard cargo aircraft pilot, asked if he had it in sight, could see it clearly. It looked “like a 757 with a silver fuselage” descending, Colonel Steve O’Brien would recall.

  Then, squinting through the haze, O’Brien saw the plane begin to turn back again toward the city. Suddenly, horrified controllers in the Reagan control tower no longer needed the reports of the National Guard pilot. There the airliner was, in plain sight and less than a mile away.

  A fire engine captain and his crew on Interstate 395, en route to a training session, saw the plane in steep descent, banking right. A policeman on a motorcycle on Columbia Pike saw it, flying so low that its fuselage reflected the shapes of the buildings beneath. A Catholic priest, on his way to a graveside service at Arlington Cemetery, saw it—flying no more than twenty feet above the road, he said. Steve Anderson, an executive for USA Today, who saw it from his 19th floor office, couldn’t believe his eyes.

  “I heard an airplane, a very loud airplane, come from behind me,” said Richard Benedetto, a reporter for the paper, “an American Airlines airplane. I could see it very clearly.”

  “I was close enough—about a hundred feet or so—that I could see the American Airlines logo on the tail,” said Steve Riskus. “It was not completely level but … kind of like it was landing with no gear down … It knocked over a few light poles on its way.”

  “I looked out my driver’s side window,” said insurance company employee Penny Elgas, “and realized I was looking at the nose of an airplane … I saw the end of the wing closest to me and the underside closest to me … I remember recognizing it as an American Airlines plane … The plane seemed to be floating as if it were a paper glider.”

  AT THE PENTAGON, on the south bank of the Potomac, the news from New York had set some people thinking. “What do we have in place to protect from an airplane?” someone had asked Pentagon police chief John Jester. “Nothing,” he replied. There were measures in place to counter a terrorist attack on the ground, but there was no antiaircraft system. Jester raised the “Protection Condition” to “Alpha,” all he could do in the circumstances.

  Controller Sean Boger, in the little tower beside the Pentagon heliport, wondered aloud why it was that no airplane had ever hit the Pentagon—even by accident. The vast complex was, after all, only a mile from Reagan National. Then, out of nowhere, Boger saw “the nose and the wing of an aircraft just like, coming right at us.”

  The plane hit just as Jester’s deputy was passing on the “Alpha” alert order. Six hundred feet from the point of impact, Jester heard the noise, felt a shaking, but—so huge and so solidly built is the Pentagon—thought it was caused by “furniture on a pallet rolling over an expansion joint.” Others heard the sound as a muffled “thwoom.”

  Flight 77, still with some 5,300 gallons of fuel in its tanks, had hurtled into the military nerve center of the United States at a speed later calculated to have been about 530 miles per hour. The plane struck the west side of the Pentagon just above ground level, going on in diagonally at an angle of about forty-two degrees.

  To Penny Elgas, watching petrified in her car, the airliner seemed to “simply melt into the building. I saw a smoke ring surround the fuselage as it made contact with the wall.”

  “I saw the plane,” another driver, Rebecca Gordon, said. “It was there … Then it was gone … it just vanished.”

  “I expected to see the tail sticking out,” recalled Sheryl Alleger, a naval officer who saw the crash site afterward. “But—nothing. It was like the building swallowed the plane.”

  As the airplane pierced the structure, a great mass of flame blossomed above the Pentagon’s roof. There were explosions. The carnage and destruction covered a ragged area of more than an acre of the vast complex.

  A total of 189 people, 64 on the airliner and 125 military and civilian staff of the Defense Department, were killed—many instantaneously, more within minutes. Some of the Pentagon’s dead would be found still seated at their desks and conference tables. Forty-nine people suffered injuries sufficient to warrant admission to hospitals.

  Christine Morrison, a survivor, described vividly what happened to her. “From the back of the room there was a heatwave-like haze … moving. Before I could register or complete that thought, this force hit the room, instantly turning the office into an inferno hell. Everything was falling, flying, and on fire, and there was no escaping it … I felt the heat and I heard the sizzling of me … Oxygen disappeared; my lungs felt like they were burning or collapsing. My mind was like sludge and thoughts took forever to form and longer to reach the brain, and even longer to make use of them … Everyone lost his or her sense of direction.”

  Morrison would emerge into the daylight relatively unharmed. Juan Cruz Santiago was terribly injured. In the words of the official Defense Department history, he was “engulfed by fire. Most of his body was scorched with second, third, and fourth-degree burns.… Hospitalized for three months, Cruz underwent some thirty surgeries, including skin grafts to his face, right arm, hands, and legs. He was left with cruel damage to his face, eyes, and hands.”

  Louise Kurtz, who had been standing at a fax machine, was—in her words—“baked, totally … I was like meat when you take it off the grill.” She lost her ears and fingers, underwent multiple skin grafts, and spent three months in the hospital.

  Astonishing escapes included Sheila Moody, in the accounts department, who had been seated near the outer wall of the building. Instead of calling out when she heard a rescuer close by—she was stifled by smoke and flames and unable to make a sound—she had been able only to clap her hands. A staff sergeant heard her and got her to safety. Thirty-four others in the department died.

  April Gallop, in information management, had brought her two-month-old son to work with her because the babysitter was sick. After the plane hit, and waist-deep in debris, she was horrified to see that the infant’s stroller was on fire—and empty. She found the baby, however, curled up in the wreckage and virtually unscathed, and both were rescued.

  The crash site being the Pentagon, trained military men were on hand at once. Marines—doing “what we’re supposed to do,” as one of them put it—went into the wreckage time and again. They and the hundreds of firefighters who arrived would more than once have to retreat—once when it became clear that part of the building was going to collapse, again when it was feared that another hijacked plane was approaching. The firefighting operation lasted thirty-six hours.

  WHEN THE PLANE HIT, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was still in his office with his CIA briefer. The room shook, even though his quarters were at the furthest point from the impact—in a building each side of which is longer than three football fields. Told that an airplane had crashed, Rumsfeld set off fast to investigate, bodyguards in his wake. They came eventually, a member of the escort recalled, to a place where “it was dark and there was a lot of smoke. Then we saw daylight through a door that was hanging open.”

  The defense secretary would remember emerging to see the building ablaze, “hundreds of pieces of metal all over the lawn,” “people lying on the grass with clothes blown off and burns all over them.” He examined a piece of wreckage, saw writing on it, and muttered: “American Airlines …” He helped push a gurney, was photographed doing so, then headed back inside.

  Assistant secretary Torie Clarke, waiting in the Executive Support Center as instructed, remembered seeing Rumsfeld arrive at about 10:15, “suit jacket over his shoulders and his face and clothes smeared with ashes, dirt, and sweat.” He was “quiet, deadly serious, completely cool.”

  WHILE DONALD RUMSFELD was on the move around the Pentagon, President Bush had been on the
short limousine ride from Booker Elementary to the Sarasota airport. News of the Pentagon attack reached the party as they were en route, leading the President’s Secret Service escort to advise against the planned return to Washington. Chief of staff Card agreed.

  From the airport, on board Air Force One, Bush spoke with Cheney at the White House. “Sounds like we have a minor war going on here,” he told the Vice President, according to an aide’s notes. “I heard about the Pentagon. We’re at war … somebody’s going to pay.”

  The Secret Service wanted Air Force One off the ground fast. “They were taxiing before the door was closed,” an officer recalled, “and the pilot shot off using only half the runway. There was so much torque that they actually tore the concrete.”

  Air Force colonel Mark Tillman, at the controls, took the plane up “like a rocket,” a passenger remembered, “almost straight up.” After flying northeast for a while, it turned west. Those recommending caution had won out. Instead of returning to Washington the President would simply fly on—destination, for the time being, undecided.

  In the skies to the north, and even before the Pentagon was hit, the crisis had become yet more serious. Unknown to the President, unknown to anyone at the White House, and once again as predicted in the children’s story at the Sarasota school, there was more to come.

  SIX

  AT HOME IN NEW JERSEY, A WOMAN NAMED MELODIE HOMER HAD been worried by the television pictures from the World Trade Center. Her concern was for her husband, Leroy, copilot that morning on United 93, a Boeing 757 flying from Newark to San Francisco. Through a contact at the airline, Mrs. Homer sent him a text message asking if all was well.