A Pretext for War (3 page)

Another Air National Guard base with F-16s was located at Atlantic City, New Jersey—and Flight 175 would pass within just four minutes of the base before turning north to New York City. At the time, two Air Force F-16 jet fighters were simply practicing bombing runs above a scruffy patch of Pine Barrens near Atlantic City, just eight minutes away from Manhattan. But they were not armed for air-to-air combat, and to land, rearm, and get airborne again would take too long.

The two aircraft were based at the Air National Guard’s 177th Fighter Wing at Atlantic City International Airport in Pomona, New Jersey. Throughout the Cold War, two scramble-ready jets had always been on alert in Atlantic City. But because of budget cutbacks beginning in 1998, the wing’s mission had been changed. Instead of the jets being ready to take off on a moment’s notice, they were both assigned to unarmed bomb practice. On September 11, 2001, the entire United States mainland was protected by just fourteen planes spread out over seven bases.

By 8:48, there was no question that a major crisis was unfolding, possibly that the United States was under attack by terrorists. It was known that at least two commercial airliners had been hijacked. Worse, nearly half an hour earlier, at 8:24, a Boston controller had heard one of the hijackers threatening the pilots and saying, “We have more planes. We have other planes.” It was then that NORAD and the command’s top general in charge of the continental United States had been notified. He authorized a “battle stations” alert and scrambled heavily armed F-15 jet fighters into the air. Should the fighters catch up with the passenger planes, the only defense would be to shoot them down, though only the President of the United States could give such an order. Then a large plane crashed into Tower One of the World Trade Center.

At 8:47, the CNN program
Live at Daybreak
was carrying a fluffy report on a maternity-wear fashion show in New York. Then, at 8:48, anchor Carol Lin broke into a commercial about debt relief. “This just in,” she said. “You are looking at . . . obviously a very disturbing live shot there—that is the World Trade Center, and we have unconfirmed reports this morning that a plane has crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center.” CNN then switched to Sean Murtagh, the network’s vice president of finance, who had observed the crash from the twenty-first floor of 5 Penn Plaza. “I just witnessed a plane that appeared to be cruising at a slightly lower than normal altitude over New York City. And it appears to have crashed into—I don’t know which tower it is—but it hit directly in the middle of one of the World Trade Center towers,” he said during the live telephone interview. “It was a jet, maybe a two-engine jet, maybe a 737 . . . a large passenger commercial jet. . . . It was teetering back and forth, wing-tip to wing-tip, and it looks like it has crashed into—probably, twenty stories from the top of the World Trade Center—maybe the eightieth to eighty-fifth floor. There is smoke billowing out of the World Trade Center.”

At that moment, George W. Bush was sitting in the back of his limousine in Sarasota, Florida. His motorcade was about six blocks from the Emma E. Booker Elementary School, where the President was to meet a class of second-graders, when presidential press secretary Ari Fleischer, traveling in a separate car, received a phone call. “Oh, my God, I don’t believe it,” he said to the caller. “A plane just hit the World Trade Center,” he announced to others in the car.

When Bush arrived at the elementary school, Fleischer, along with aides Karl Rove and Dan Bartlett, were standing on the sidewalk waiting to brief the President on the crash. “The President was surprised,” said Fleischer. “He thought it had to be an accident.” Yet despite having a secure STU-III phone next to him in the presidential limousine and an entire national security staff at the White House, it appears that the President of the United States knew less than tens of millions of other people in every part of the country who were watching the attack as it unfolded. Once in the school, the President ducked into an empty classroom and spoke on the phone with his national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, and asked her to keep him informed. Yet even then, at almost 9:00, neither Rice nor Bush was aware that the United States had gone to “battle stations” alert and had scrambled fighter jets into the air to intercept and possibly take hostile action against multiple hijacked airliners, something that was then known by hundreds of others within NORAD, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Pentagon.

With the President in Florida and no White House briefing that morning, George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, was taking it easy. Instead of going in to work, he was having a leisurely breakfast with an old friend, David Boren, in the royal splendor of Washington’s St. Regis, a hotel built in the style of an Italian Renaissance palace. Surrounded by European antiques, Palladian windows, a Louis XVI chandelier, and rich damask draperies, the two chatted about families over omelets and triangles of buttered toast. Boren, the former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and now president of the University of Oklahoma, had been Tenet’s “godfather” as the former Intelligence Committee staff director rose to the top of the spy world.

At their table next to a window overlooking K Street, Tenet was completely unaware of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center, or of the hijackings, or of the “battle stations” alerts. It was not until sometime after the second plane hit Tower Two, after much of the country knew of the terrorism, that the Director of Central Intelligence received a phone call. “Mr. Director, there’s a serious problem,” an aide told him. Officials in the blue-carpeted CIA Operations Center on the seventh floor of the agency had learned of the attack from CNN. It would be after 9:30 when the Director was back in his office at CIA headquarters.

Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, the director of the ultrasecret National Security Agency, was in his office at the time of the attack. He was standing a few feet from his desk, behind a tall wooden speaker’s table, when he first heard the news. In the middle of a meeting with a small number of senior officials, his executive assistant, Cindy Farkus, walked in and told him about a plane hitting the World Trade Center. “The immediate image I had was a light plane, off course, bad flying,” he recalled in a January 2004 interview in his office.

High up on the eighth floor of NSA’s Ops Building 2B, in the brilliant sunshine of September 11, 2001, Hayden could clearly see the “company town,” Laurel, Maryland, from the square eavesdropping-proof window directly behind his desk. Ironically, only a few miles away in the Valencia Hotel, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi had planned and plotted with Mohamed Atta the morning’s attacks. Now they were on American Airlines Flight 77, forcing their way into the cockpit at that very moment, and changing the plane’s destination from Los Angeles to the Pentagon.

Hayden’s office, and those of his deputy and executive director, occupies the southwest corner of the top floor of a dark-glass cube-shaped building. Once known as “Mahogany Row,” the suite of offices today contains no mahogany. Instead, the walls leading to his unmarked wooden door are covered with large framed pictures of NSA’s most important listening posts, including Menwith Hill Station in England with its dozens of eavesdropping antennas hidden under giant, golf-ball-shaped radomes.

Hayden’s office reflects deep loyalty to his native Pittsburgh. Against a beige wall is a large bookcase containing mementos from his hometown football and baseball teams, the Pittsburgh Steelers and Pirates. On another wall is a framed, yellowing newspaper article from October 1941 announcing that his father, Harry V. Hayden, Jr., had been inducted into the service as a private and had arrived in Northern Ireland. In the center of the large office is a dark conference table surrounded by eight chairs; a maroon-colored couch sits off to the side.

On a table behind his high-backed, padded leather chair are two computers, one for classified and the other for unclassified work. There are also a series of telephones on the table. One is for internal calls, another is a secure STU-III for secret external calls, a black “executive phone” connects him to other senior officials, and a white phone has buttons that can put him through instantly to the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Earlier, at 8:00
A.M
., Hayden had gone down to the National Security Operations Center (NSOC, pronounced “n-sock”) in the Ops 1 Building for his regular meeting with all of his senior staff. “It’s something I started here because I wanted the seniors to get a sense of the ops tempo,” he said. Among the more worrisome items that morning was the assassination two days earlier of Afghan opposition leader Ahmed Shah Massoud. Two suicide bombers posing as journalists detonated a bomb hidden in their TV camera during an interview with Massoud on Sunday, and it was suspected that Osama bin Laden and the Taliban were responsible. The assassins were believed to have been Arabs who had come from the Taliban-controlled capital, Kabul.

Following the ops briefing, Hayden went to the small attached conference room for a quick staff meeting. He returned to his office for a meeting with his senior staff just as American Airlines Flight 11, piloted by Mohamed Atta, plowed into Tower One of the World Trade Center.

Notified of the crash, Hayden walked over to his walnut desk, neatly arranged with a penholder from his days as the number-two commander in Korea, a notepad printed with the word “DIRECTOR,” and a Brookstone world clock. On the left side were two television sets, one connected to the outside world with CNN muted, and the other connected to the agency’s own secret internal television network. Hayden glanced at CNN just as they began showing scenes from the first strike. “I thought that was a big fire for a small plane,” he said, and then continued with his meeting.

In Tower One, fighting the blinding, choking, oily smoke, black as chimney soot, Steve McIntyre made his way out to the nearly impassable hallway and began looking for the emergency stairwells. The first one he tried was filled with water and debris. After locating the second emergency exit, he found it dark and worse than the first. “Where the hell is the third fire-stair?” he cursed. A few seconds later he found it, but in the rubble-filled darkness he slipped on a piece of gypsum board and fell, sliding down to the next landing and then bouncing down to another. Fellow worker George Sleigh also made it to the stairwell after going back for his briefcase. Minutes later, the entire office exploded in flames.

Throughout the building, terrorized people were dialing 911 on cell phones and pleading for help from fire rescue, which was sending every piece of emergency equipment in its inventory to the Trade Center. At 8:56, a man from the eighty-seventh floor called in, yelling that his office was on fire and there were four other people with him.

Picking himself up from his long tumble, Steve McIntyre knew that he had found the only way out and headed back up to get the other employees. He noticed that very few people were passing him coming down. Above McIntyre’s office was the giant insurance, consulting, and financial firm Marsh & McLennan, occupying floors 93 to 100. And above them, from 101 to 105, was Cantor Fitzgerald, a large bond dealer. One of the World Trade Center’s oldest tenants, it had gradually taken over five floors as it grew. Finally, there was Windows on the World, the famous restaurant with its breathtaking views, on the 106th and 107th floors.

Christopher Hanley, who worked for a division of Reuters on Sixth Avenue, was among 150 people attending a special breakfast conference at Windows on the World. At 8:57, he called fire rescue to tell them the room was filling with smoke and people could not get down the stairs.

A few minutes later, Christine Olender, the thirty-nine-year-old assistant general manager of Windows on the World restaurant, called the Port Authority requesting help for the approximately 170 guests and staff with her. “We’re having a smoke condition,” she said. “We have most people on the 106th floor—the 107th is way too smoky. We need direction as to where we need to direct our guests and our employees, as soon as possible.” A Port Authority police officer responded, “Okay. We’re doing our best—we’ve got the fire department, everybody, we’re trying to get up to you, dear. All right, call back in about two or three minutes, and I’ll find out what direction you should try to get down.” Olender continued, “The stairways are full of smoke . . . and my electric . . . phones are out . . . The condition up on 106 is getting worse,” she said. The officer asked her to call back in two minutes.

By then the situation had rapidly deteriorated. Olender called back, this time pleading for help. “The situation on 106 is rapidly getting worse,” she yelled. “We . . . we have . . . the fresh air is going down fast! I’m not exaggerating.” Port Authority police officer Ray Murray answered the call. “Uh, ma’am, I know you’re not exaggerating,” he said. “We’re getting a lot of these calls.” By now she was desperate. “What are we going to do for air?” “Ma’am,” said Murray, “the fire department—” Olender cut in, “Can we break a window?” Murray responded, “You can do whatever you have to to get to, uh, the air.”

Other people were trapped in elevators and calling the Port Authority Police for help. “Listen, this is Tony Savas,” said a seventy-two-year-old Port Authority construction inspector. “If you can, I’m on the seventy-eighth floor, I’m trapped in the elevator. Water and debris is coming down. And I’m in car number 81-A. Please send somebody to open the doors.”

Many feared more planes were on their way. A Port Authority police officer named Tommy telephoned his mother to tell her not to go out. “I’m at work,” he said. “Just stay in. Don’t do nothing. There’s . . . this is bad. They got planes all over the radar, coming into the New York area. They think everything is going to start hitting.” “Oh, Tommy,” his mother pleaded, “please promise you’ll call me again!” “Right, Ma,” said Tommy, “it’s going to be a while, all right? But just don’t even go out. I mean, they got planes on the radar. They think they are going to start crashing all over Manhattan.”