Once again, however, the investigators found themselves stalled. White House personnel sought to limit the Commission’s access to the contemporary record, while simultaneously insisting it was unreliable. Undeterred, Commission staff built a chronology as best they could from available logs and from what witness testimony they did manage to obtain.
The record, such as we have it, does not support the Bush/Cheney version of events, that the President gave Cheney shoot-down authorization during a phone conversation sometime soon after 10:00 A.M., after Cheney’s arrival in the underground bunker.
The Bush/Cheney version, with its implication of the requisite line of command—Bush granted authority, Cheney transmitted it—does not mesh with events as they unfolded.
The emergency teleconferences that morning—one in the White House Situation Room, one at the Pentagon, another at the FAA—overlapped with one another, making for confusion rather than clarity. To participate in one, senior staff would temporarily have to drop out of another. The conference in the Situation Room—below the West Wing—was not linked to the part of the Pentagon dealing with the crisis, nor was it adequately linked to the Vice President in the PEOC, beneath the East Wing. “In my mind,” one witness recalled of the teleconferences, “they were competing venues for command and control and decision-making.”
It was not only the teleconferences that added to the fog. Some were to recall having seen staff members with a phone to each ear, reliance on runners to convey messages, and the use of personal cell phones to complete calls when landlines were unavailable. The cell phone system itself was at times overwhelmed.
Alerted to an aircraft approaching the city, just before Flight 77 struck the Pentagon, the Secret Service had hustled the Vice President toward the PEOC. Cheney had been logged in there at 9:58, having paused en route to use a phone in an adjacent passageway—and was to remain in the PEOC’s conference room thenceforth.
It was from the PEOC, within moments of his arrival there, that the Vice President supposedly had his exchange with Bush about shoot-down authority. Yet, though many other key events of that morning are reflected in the contemporary record, there is no documentary evidence of the call. It is especially perplexing, moreover, that—assuming there was such a call and assuming the President did give shoot-down authority—the Vice President made no immediate move to pass on the order.
What the record does show occurred, at about the time the Cheney-Bush call is supposed to have been made, is that staff in the Situation Room received reports that further aircraft were missing, were told that a Combat Air Patrol had been established over Washington, and began attempting to reach the President.
At 10:03, in the Situation Room, NSC staffer Paul Kurtz made a note as follows: “asking Prez authority to shoot down a/c [aircraft].” That attempt to reach Bush, however, was apparently unsuccessful. The evidence is that calls reached not the President but only those with the Vice President in the PEOC. The weight of the written and spoken evidence indicates that it was between 10:10 and 10:20—on being told of the progress of a suspect airplane supposedly headed for the Washington area—that Cheney twice rapped out a shoot-down order.
The Vice President’s wife, Lynne, who was in the PEOC and not far from her husband, recorded some of the exchange about shoot-down authority in notes she made that morning.
Mrs. Cheney noted at “10:10”:
Aircraft coming in from 80 miles out
Dick asked? Scramble fighters?
Navy commander Anthony Barnes, the senior military officer on duty in the PEOC that morning, told the authors in 2010, “A call comes into the PEOC. I’m talking to a general on a secure line. He asks for permission to engage confirmed terrorists on board commercial airplanes. I went into the conference room and I posed this question to the Vice President exactly the way it was posed to me. I received permission.” Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, has recalled in an interview that the Vice President, asked whether fighters had authority to engage, barely paused before responding simply, “Yes.”
At 10:12, Mrs. Cheney noted:
60 miles out—confirmed JOC [the Secret Service’s Joint Operations Center]
hijacked aircraft
fighters cleared to engage
The Vice President’s wife would recall feeling “a sort of chill up my spine, that this is the kind of things you only read about in novels … We had to shoot down those planes if they didn’t divert.”
“I asked for confirmation on what I was being allowed to pass back to the general,” Barnes recalled. “It was twice. I said it the first time and he answered straight up.… It wasn’t indiscriminately: ‘Splat everything airborne!’ It was ‘If you can confirm there’s another terrorist aircraft inbound, permission is granted to take it out.’ … I went back to the phone and said to the general, ‘The Vice President has authorized you to engage confirmed terrorist aboard commercial aircraft.’ ”
At 10:14, a lieutenant colonel at the White House passed word to the Pentagon that the Vice President had “confirmed” fighters were “cleared to engage the inbound aircraft if they could verify that the aircraft was hijacked.” It was, another officer said, a “pin-drop moment.”
A Libby note, timed as “10:15–18,” read:
Aircraft 60 miles out, confirmed as hijack—engage? VP: Yes. JB: Get President and confirm engage order
The initials “JB” referred to Joshua Bolten, the White House deputy chief of staff—who was also with the Vice President in the bunker. He suggested that Cheney call Bush, he told the Commission, because he “wanted to make sure the President was told that the Vice President had executed the order. He said he had not heard any prior discussion on the subject with the President.”
Nor had press secretary Ari Fleischer, who was at Bush’s side aboard Air Force One and keeping a record of everything that was said—at the President’s request. His notes up to that point—like those of Scooter Libby and Lynne Cheney at the White House—contain no reference to any conversation with Cheney about shoot-down authorization. They do show, however, that at 10:20—two minutes after a formally logged call from the Vice President—Bush told Fleischer that “he had authorized a shoot-down if necessary.”
• • •
OTHER INFORMATION, reportable in detail now thanks to recent document releases, further suggests that the Vice President may have authorized the shooting down of suspect airliners without the President’s say-so. It involves exchanges between Secret Service agents at the White House and Air National Guard officers at Andrews Air Force Base, just ten miles southeast of Washington. Though not an “alert” base, its units proudly styled themselves the “Capital Guardians.”
Unlike the President—in his role as commander-in-chief—and those in the military chain of command, the Secret Service was not primarily concerned with countering the terrorist attacks. Its priority was the protection of the President and Vice President and those in the line of succession. On September 11, that meant trying to protect Air Force One and the White House itself from attack. On 9/11, according to Commission staff member Miles Kara, the missions of the military leadership—from the President as commander-in-chief on down—and the Secret Service were at times “mutually exclusive.”
A Secret Service agent and his FAA liaison had, early on, after the two attacks on New York, discussed the need to get fighters over Washington. Once the Pentagon had been hit, the phones began ringing at Andrews. Brigadier General David Wherley, the National Guard commander at the base, arrived at a run to learn that Secret Service agent Ken Beauchamp had rung with the message, “Get anything you can airborne.”
When he got back to Beauchamp, Wherley was helpful but cautious. He asked to speak with “someone a little higher up the food chain,” and was passed first to another agent, Nelson Garabito. Garabito told him, “It’s coming direct from the Vice President.” Still not satisfied, the general then spoke with the agent in charge of the Presidential Protective Division, Re
becca Ediger. Ediger repeated the request—Wherley told the 9/11 Commission—“speaking for the Vice President.”
The general asked to speak direct to Cheney, but Ediger said the Vice President was on another line. Wherley “wasn’t going to get to talk to anyone he felt comfortable getting the order from,” he realized. So he made do with Agent Ediger—and an “unidentified male voice who took the phone from Ediger” and asked him to “put aircraft over DC with orders to intercept any aircraft that approached within twenty miles and turn that aircraft around. If the aircraft would not change course, the interceptor should use ‘any force necessary’ to keep that aircraft from crashing into a building.” Wherley felt the instructions were “understandable enough.”
When did the Secret Service pass on this purported order from the Vice President? Of the various documents released, one heavily redacted Secret Service memo—dated less than a month after 9/11—is tantalizing. It states that:
After the crash at the Pentagon, Commander [Anthony Barnes of the White House Military Office] in the PEOC advised … that the Vice President had authorized them to engage any other suspect aircraft.… It was at about this time, I began fielding calls from Andrews Air Force Base. I first got a call from [several words redacted]. I verified that they had been requested to do so with the PEOC. When I conveyed this to [words redacted] I told him the Vice President [words redacted] Commander [Barnes] was more than a little incredulous. He had me tell the General to get it from the NMCC [National Military Command Center].
While Barnes cannot today pin down at what time this exchange took place, an Andrews control tower transcript shows that, beginning at about 10:04, a controller began repeatedly transmitting a warning that unauthorized flights entering the closed airspace around Washington would be shot down. Though one cannot be conclusive, the genesis of the warning was likely an instruction passed from the Secret Service.
Cheney would later tell the 9/11 Commission that he had not even been “aware that that fighters had been scrambled out of Andrews at the request of the Secret Service and outside the military chain of command.” The Wall Street Journal, however, has reported conflicting claims. While White House officials said the Secret Service “acted on its own,” the Secret Service issued a statement denying that it did so. To the contrary, the Journal reported, senior agents insisted that “the agents’ actions on September 11 had been ordered by the Vice President.”
Did Cheney give a shoot-down order on his own initiative, before consulting the President? The available evidence suggests he may have. To have done so, moreover, would certainly have been more sensible than sinister. At a moment the capital seemed to be in imminent peril, the two men properly heading the chain of command were out of touch—the secretary of defense away from his post and the President only intermittently in contact because of shaky communications. Many might think that Cheney, on the spot and capable, would have been justified in short-circuiting the system.
If he did so, and had he and the President soon acknowledged as much, it would have been pointless to blame the Vice President. If he did so and then persistently told a false story, however—and if the eventual release of all the records were to prove it—history will be less generous.
WHOEVER REALLY ISSUED the shoot-down order, it came too late to have any effect on events. At Andrews, General Wherley had no immediate way to respond to it—no planes were ready to take off, let alone planes armed and ready. He had, moreover, come away from his exchanges with the Secret Service less than certain about the Vice President’s order. He sent up the first plane available, an unarmed F-16 summoned back from a training exercise, to “check out” the situation over Washington—with no explicit instructions. Four more fighters took off a little later, one pair also without armament, the other—at 11:12 and after a rushed loading process—fully armed with heat-seeking missiles. Their instructions were to fly “weapons free,” which left the decision to fire up to the pilots.
Even then, an hour or more after the shoot-down order came to him via the Secret Service, General Wherley still felt “uncomfortable with the situation.” He did not receive formal, detailed rules of engagement from the Defense Department until long after the real action was over, five hours after the start of the attacks.
The vice presidential authorization to shoot down airliners, meanwhile, had made its way down the designated chain of command from the Pentagon to NEADS, NORAD’s Northeast Air Defense Sector—the nerve center for the two “alert” bases, as distinct from General Wherley’s outfit at Andrews—by 10:31. When the harried men in the NEADS bunker received the order, however, they hesitated:
MAJOR STEVE OVENS: You need to read this … The Region Commander has declared that we can shoot down aircraft that do not respond to our direction … Did you copy that?
MAJOR JAMES FOX, WEAPONS DIRECTOR [A MOMENT LATER]: DO [Director of Operations] is saying “No.”
OVENS: No? … Foxy, you got a conflict on that direction?
FOX: Right now, no, but …
OVENS: OK? OK, you read that from the Vice President, right? … Vice President has cleared us …
FOX [READING]: … to intercept traffic … shoot them down if they do not respond.
NEADS’s Robert Marr, and Major Nasypany commanding the fighters from Otis and Langley, were unsure of the order’s ramifications, did not know quite how to proceed. No new order was sent to the pilots at that point. General Eberhart, moreover, in overall command of NORAD, directed that pilots should not shoot until satisfied that a “hostile act” was being committed.
Not until 10:53 did Nasypany order that his pilots be sent the following tentative message:
Any track of interest that’s headed toward the major cities you will I.D. If you cannot divert them away from the major cities you are to confirm with me first. Most likely you will get clearance to shoot.
THE STORIES TOLD by Cheney, Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz, the FAA, and the military all seemed to fit neatly together after 9/11. Yet they distorted historical truths. The Air Force would not, as Wolfowitz claimed, have been in a position to shoot down United 93, because—had it not crashed—the hijacked airplane would have reached Washington before any fighter pilot in the air received a shoot-down order. The military and FAA versions were similarly misleading or inaccurate—so arousing the Commission’s suspicions that it referred the matter to their respective inspectors general for further investigation.
The FAA’s acting deputy administrator, Monte Belger, told the 9/11 Commission that his officials reacted quickly, “in my opinion professionally,” on September 11. This in spite of the fact that for a full half hour—in a crisis when every moment counted—the agency failed to alert the military to the plight of Flight 93.
“In my opinion,” NORAD’s General Myers was to say in his prepared statement, “lines of authority, communication and command were clear; and the Commander in Chief and Secretary of Defense conveyed clear guidance to the appropriate military commanders.”
That was the message they all wanted the world to hear—that the men who held power in America had been on top of the situation. What is clear, in fact, John Farmer pointed out in 2009, is that “the top officials were talking mainly to themselves. They were an echo chamber. They were of little or no assistance to the people on the ground attempting to manage the crisis.” A thoroughgoing analysis, in Farmer’s view, “would have exposed the reality that national leadership was irrelevant during those critical moments.”
The testimony offered after 9/11, Farmer wrote,
was not simply wrong about facts; it was wrong in a way that misrepresented the competence and relevance of the chain of command to the response.… It was difficult to decide which was the more disturbing possibility. To believe that the errors in fact were simply inadvertent would be to believe that senior military and civilian officials were willing to testify in great detail and with assurance … without bothering to make sure that what they were saying was accurate.
Given the significance of 9/11 in our history, this would amount to an egregious breach of the public trust. If it were true, however, that the story was at some level coordinated and was knowingly false, that would be an egregious deception.
“History,” Farmer wrote later in his book, “should record that, whether through unprecedented administrative incompetence or orchestrated mendacity, the American people were misled about the nation’s response to the 9/11 attacks.”
FOURTEEN
AMERICANS KNEW, INSTANTLY ASSUMED THEY KNEW, WHO HAD ATTACKED them on 9/11. The Arabs.
As soon as news of the attacks broke, before anything was known of the attackers, a woman phoned the FBI to report an experience she had had the previous evening. She had spotted a diary in a garbage can at Chicago’s Midway Airport, she said, and the final entry had read: “Allah will be served.” That, she thought, seemed sinister.
On an airliner en route to Australia, a flight attendant had kept an eye on a “Middle Eastern male passenger” who was busy on his laptop. Its screen carried a picture of a Boeing 747 and then, suddenly, the words “Mission failed.” The attendant hurried to tell the captain. He in turn alerted the airline and the flight was diverted to the nearest airport—where it emerged that the swarthy passenger was from not the Middle East but Guatemala. The “suspicious” activity had been a video game.
In the turmoil at the Trade Center, even before the second tower fell, a New York fire chief witnessed what was almost certainly the first arrest of the day. As he led his men down to safety, Richard Picciotto remembered, he had come across a cluster of firemen and a police officer engaged in an encounter with “a middle-aged Middle Eastern man.”
The guy was dressed in a nice suit and carrying a nice briefcase, and as I pulled close to the commotion I could see there had been something of a struggle.… One of the firemen on the floor had grown concerned at the man’s sudden appearance; the firefighter had once been a police detective, and he felt there was something fishy about this guy, something about his still being on such a high floor.
The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden Page 16
