At the time of the impact, NORAD’s two fighters from Otis Air National Guard Base were still seventy-one miles away—seven minutes’ flying time.
When United 175 rammed into Tower Two, NORAD’s public affairs officer, Maj. Don Arias, was talking to his brother in the building. “Well, I better get out of here,” his brother said quickly, then hung up. He never made it out.
CHAPTER 2
DULLES
Hearing of the second explosion, Beverly Eckert once more grabbed the phone to call her husband, Sean Rooney. Again, another message was waiting—but it had come in prior to the most recent event. “Just letting you know I’ll be here for a while,” Rooney said. “They’ve secured the building.” After trying unsuccessfully to call him, she rushed home to Glenbrook, Connecticut.
By then, the two had been married for twenty-one years, and had known each other since meeting in their native Buffalo in 1967. For Rooney, it was a long commute to the World Trade Center every day, but he greatly enjoyed playing carpenter, plumber, electrician, and mason at his home in Connecticut. Since buying the house fourteen years earlier, he had added cement steps to the front door, built a fireplace mantel in the living room, and laid marble floors in the master bathroom. He even cultivated an herb garden. Eckert especially liked the way her husband laughed—and how it would make his shoulders shake. But now she was very worried.
In Tower Two, dense smoke had engulfed the upper floors and the stairwells. People tried to decide whether to fight their way down through the choking darkness or up to the roof and possible rescue by helicopter. On the eighty-fourth floor, Brian Clark pushed the fallen rubble off his back and began organizing a rescue. “Come on, everyone. Let’s go,” he yelled to fellow workers. A fire warden for his company, Clark was carrying a whistle and a flashlight as he led five colleagues to Stairway A.
Three floors down, on the eighty-first floor, two people heading up warned them about going any farther. “You can’t go down,” said a woman. “The floors are in flames. We have to get above the smoke and fire.” For a moment or so, the group pondered, then four decided to go up and Clark and coworker Ronald DiFrancesco continued down. Suddenly, there was a noise—bang, bang, bang—coming from the destroyed offices of Fuji Bank. “Help! I’m buried!” someone yelled. “Can anybody help?’’ The shouts were coming from loan officer Stanley Praimnath. Clark managed to free him from the debris, and he joined the two as they continued down the stairwell and into the heavy smoke.
By then the smoke was becoming thicker and breathing was difficult. DiFrancesco turned around and climbed to the ninety-first floor. Exhausted, he rested there for ten minutes and then, determined to get out, headed back down the stairwell and began pushing into the black, suffocating soot.
Soon after Beverly Eckert reached her house, only about a mile away, the phone rang. It was Rooney. “Sean,” she yelled, elated, “where are you?” But the news was not good. Coughing and gasping for air, he said he was trapped on the 105th floor of the burning Tower Two. “Why are you there?” Eckert asked, confused and afraid, knowing he worked seven floors below. As with the employees of Euro Brokers, Rooney had first tried to climb down the emergency stairwell, making it to somewhere around the seventy-sixth floor. But the heat and smoke had become too intense, driving him back.
Then, like Brian Clark’s colleagues, Rooney turned around and tried to escape to the observation deck on the 107th floor. But when he got there, he found the thick steel door firmly sealed. “The roof doors were locked,” he told Eckert. “How could they be locked?” she said, frantic for Rooney to find a way out. “Please, just try it again. Try it again, maybe it was just jammed when the building got hit.” But Rooney said there was no use, he was sure it was locked.
He told Eckert that he was now on the north side of the building, and Eckert said she would pass the information on to the rescue workers. Confused as to what was happening around him, Rooney asked his wife what she could see on the television. “Where’s the fire?” he said. Eckert said there was fire on his side of the building, but it was many floors below. “The smoke is heavy,” Rooney said. “I don’t understand why the fire suppression isn’t working.”
“Maybe they can get a helicopter to you,” said Eckert, desperately trying to get her husband to the roof and possible rescue. “Please try the door again. Pound on it. Maybe someone is on the other side and will hear you. Who is with you?” she asked. “I’m alone,” said Rooney. “Some other people are in a conference room nearby.” He then went back to the observation deck to try the door once again.
Shortly after nine at NSA, Cindy Farkus again broke into Lieutenant General Hayden’s meeting, but this time she was almost running. Another plane had hit the second tower, she said. “One plane’s an accident, two planes is an attack,” said Hayden, who immediately adjourned his meeting and asked Farkus to quickly summon the agency’s top security officials to his office.
That was not the way it was supposed to be. NSA was not supposed to find out about an airborne attack on America from CNN, after millions of other Americans had already witnessed it. It was supposed to find out first, from its own ultrasecret warning center, and then pass the information on to the White House and the strategic military forces.
Among the agency’s most secret units is the Defense Special Missile and Astronautics Center (DEFSMAC), located within the NSA center. At the entrance is its seal: an orbiting satellite and a patch of stars above the earth. Even within the intelligence community, DEFSMAC (pronounced “deaf-smack”) remains little known. In fact, its purpose is to serve as the nation’s chief warning bell for a planned attack on America. It serves as the focal point for “all-source” intelligence—listening posts, early-warning satellites, human agents, and seismic detectors.
Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara established the joint NSA-DIA activity at NSA on April 27, 1964, largely as a result of the Cuban missile crisis. “You didn’t want NORAD fooling around in technologies that they didn’t understand, or trying to evaluate a bunch of raw data, so DEFSMAC was put in,” said Lt. Gen. Daniel O. Graham, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Since its beginning, the organization has been headed by an NSA civilian with a DIA colonel as deputy director.
As other warning organizations shrank with the end of the Cold War, DEFSMAC more than doubled its size to more than 230 people. This included a new, eighty-five-person operations center. Where once DEFSMAC had only Russia and China to monitor, its widely dispersed targets continued to grow to include India, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan.
DEFSMAC watches the earth as a physician listens to a heart, hoping to detect the first irregular beat indicating that an attack is about to take place. “It has all the inputs from all the assets, and is a warning activity,” a former senior NSA official once explained. “They probably have a better feel for any worldwide threat to this country from missiles, aircraft, or overt military activities, better and more timely, at instant fingertip availability, than any group in the United States.”
Upon receiving indicators that an attack was imminent, DEFSMAC officials would immediately send out near-real-time and in-depth, all-source intelligence alerts to almost two hundred “customers,” including the White House Situation Room, the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon, the DIA Alert Center, and listening posts around the world. At the same time, elsewhere within DEFSMAC, analysts would be closely monitoring all intercepts flooding in; examining the latest overhead photography; and analyzing data from early-warning satellites 22,300 miles above the equator. DEFSMAC would then flash the intelligence to the U.S. Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, NORAD at Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado, and other emergency command centers.
But on the morning of September 11, DEFSMAC learned of the massive airborne attacks after the fact—not from America’s multibillion-dollar spy satellites or its worldwide network of advanced listening posts, or its army of human spies, but from a dusty, off-the-shelf TV set.
Shortly after 9:00, General Hayden’s principal concern was not finding the next target but becoming the next target. He summoned his top internal and physical security people to his office. “My intention,” he said, “was to plumb their minds, to determine what do we do now to protect ourselves.”
From the ground, NSA is one of the most well-protected facilities on earth. Hidden from the outside world by tall earthen berms and thick forest trees, it is surrounded by a labyrinth of barbed-wire fences, massive boulders placed close together, motion detectors, hydraulic antitruck devices, thick cement barriers, and cameras that peer down from rooftops. As part of the agency’s perimeter-security antiterrorism program, all vehicles and cargo passing through the inner fences must first be inspected for bombs and other threats in a $4 million screening center. There, an Explosive Detection Canine Unit, consisting of a team of handlers and eleven specially trained Dutch Shepherd and Belgian Malinois bomb-sniffing dogs, inspect the vehicles.
The agency also has its own police force, complete with a mobile Emergency Response Communications Command Post equipped with both STU-III secure cellular telephones and also encrypted closed-circuit television systems. Should a threat be detected, the director could call out the agency’s Special Operations Unit/Emergency Reaction Team. Dressed in black paramilitary uniforms and wearing special headgear, they brandish an assortment of weapons, including Colt 9mm submachine guns. Attached to the team are two military medics assigned to NSA’s Medical Center. During periods of heightened alert, and at other times as a deterrent, the team, known as the “Men in Black,” are posted at the perimeter gates.
But all of that security was designed to prevent a ground attack. From the air, NSA was just as vulnerable as a large unprotected shopping mall.
Disturbingly, the story George W. Bush often tells of his learning of the attacks cannot possibly be true. “I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in,” he told an audience in Florida on December 4, 2001, “and I saw an airplane hit the tower—the TV was obviously on, and I used to fly myself, and I said, ‘There’s one terrible pilot.’ And I said, ‘It must have been a horrible accident.’” He repeated the story a month later, on January 5, 2002, to another audience in California. It is the version that is on the White House Web page. “When we walked into the classroom, I had seen this plane fly into the first building. There was a TV set on. And you know, I thought it was pilot error and I was amazed that anybody could make such a terrible mistake.”
The problem with the account is that there was no video of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center until later that day. The only video was of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center at 9:02:54. It’s possible that he saw those images on live television when he ducked into an empty room set up so he could talk with Condoleezza Rice at the White House. He reportedly did not enter the class until 9:04, more than a minute after the United Flight 175 smashed into Tower Two. Thus, he may have learned of the second plane even before he went in to address the seven-year-olds. That would raise a serious question of judgment: How could a president ignore what to millions of people was an obvious terrorist attack and just go about a political photo op as if nothing had happened?
If he had not seen the second attack and could not have seen the first attack, then how could he make the later claims? Few people can ever forget the moment they first learned of the events of 9/11, especially if the person happens to be the President of the United States.
Whether or not Bush learned of the second attack before he went into Sandra Kay Daniels’s second-grade class, he certainly knew about it after his chief of staff, Andrew Card, notified him of the event minutes later, at 9:06. “A second plane hit the second tower,” said Card. “America is under attack.” At that moment, a look of befuddlement passed over the President’s face, the look of a man who couldn’t—or wouldn’t—believe what he was hearing.
Bush would later boast to reporters that at that moment he made his decision in favor of war. “They had declared war on us,” he said, “and I made up my mind at that moment that we were going to war.”
For a commander-in-chief who had just decided to launch his country into a war, a rare and enormous event, George Bush seemed strangely uninterested in further information. He did not demand to speak to the Secretary of Defense. Nor did he ask for George Tenet, the Director of the CIA, to determine what kind of intelligence there was on what had taken place. There were no questions to Andy Card or Condoleezza Rice about whether there had been any additional threats, where the attacks were coming from, how to best protect the country from further devastation, or the current status of NORAD or the FAA or the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Nor did he ask that Air Force One prepare to return him to Washington at once.
Instead, he simply turned back to the photo op. “Hoo!” he cheered as the electronic flashes continued to blink and the video cameras rolled. “These are great readers. Very impressive!” Precious minutes and seconds were ticking by and many more lives were still at risk, but the President of the United States did not budge from his small, second-grade chair. The enormity of the reality waiting for him would have to wait.
By then, at one of the most critical moments in American history, the country had essentially become leaderless. Both towers of the World Trade Center had been blown up by large commercial airliners with thousands of people feared dead. One crash took place on live television. At least one other commercial jet—American Flight 77 from Washington’s Dulles Airport, bound for Los Angeles—was missing. And unknown yet was the presence of hijackers on a fourth plane waiting to take off at Newark International Airport. NORAD had launched fighters to intercept and possibly shoot down one of the aircraft, but such a decision would require the President’s order.