At the White House the warning came into the tightly packed Situation Room, down a flight of stairs from the Oval Office, where three watch officers continuously monitor computers carrying reports from the various intelligence agencies. A rush of fear suddenly washed over Franklin C. Miller, the Director for Defense Policy.
The White House could be going down,
he thought. Then he had an aide send out an e-mail with the names of those present “so that when and if we died, someone would know who was in there,” he said.
Secret Service officers quickly rushed into Vice President Dick Cheney’s office. “We have to move,” said one agent. “We’re moving now, sir; we’re moving.” Once out, they hustled him down to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, a special tubelike bunker under the East Wing of the building. The rest of the White House staff were told to get out and away from the building as quickly as possible. “Get out, get out, this is real,” shouted members of the bomb squad running through the building. “All the way to H Street, please,” one uniformed Secret Service officer yelled. “Women, drop your heels and run, drop your heels and run,” yelled one Secret Service agent. “Suddenly, the gates that never open except for authorized vehicles just opened and the whole White House just flooded out,” recalled Press Secretary Jennifer Millerwise.
“Six miles,” said the superviser. “Five miles, four miles.” He was just about to say three miles when the plane suddenly turned away. “In the room, it was almost a sense of relief,” recalled air traffic controller Danielle O’Brien. “This must be a fighter. This must be one of our guys sent in, scrambled to patrol our capital and to protect our president, and we sat back in our chairs and breathed for just a second. In the meantime, all the rest of the planes are still flying and we’re taking care of everything else.”
But then the plane suddenly turned back, making a 180-degree half-loop. “He’s turning back in!” O’Brien yelled. “He’s turning back eastbound!” O’Brien’s fellow traffic controller, Tom Howell, also saw the turn and began to yell to the supervisor. “Oh my God, John, he’s coming back!”
“We lost radar contact with that aircraft,” recalled O’Brien. “And we waited. And we waited. And your heart is just beating out of your chest waiting to hear what’s happened.”
Arlington, Virginia, police officer Richard Cox could hardly believe his eyes. He grabbed for his microphone and called dispatch. “It’s an American Airlines plane, headed east down over the pike, possibly toward the Pentagon,” he said excitedly.
At that same moment, Father Stephen McGraw was in traffic so heavy it was almost at a standstill. A Catholic priest, he was driving to a graveside service at Arlington National Cemetery but mistakenly took the Pentagon exit onto Washington Boulevard. Suddenly, McGraw felt the teeth-rattling roar of a large aircraft only about twenty feet above the roof of his car. He looked out just as the plane clipped an overhead sign and then toppled a light pole, injuring a taxi driver a few feet away. “It looked like a plane coming in for a landing,” he said. “I mean, in the sense that it was controlled and sort of straight.” A second later, American Flight 77 smashed into the gray concrete wall of the Pentagon. The jet hit with such force that it penetrated four of the five concentric rings of corridors and offices surrounding a gazebo in the center court, long nicknamed Ground Zero.
“I saw it crash into the building,” said McGraw. “There was an explosion and a loud noise, and I felt the impact. I remember seeing a fireball come out of two windows [of the Pentagon]. I saw an explosion of fire billowing through those two windows. I remember hearing a gasp or scream from one of the other cars near me. Almost a collective gasp, it seemed.”
It was 9:37
A.M
.
Nearby in another car was Aydan Kizildrgli, a student from Turkey who was just learning English. “Did you see that?” he shouted to the next car. Traffic along the highway came immediately to a halt as people jumped out of their cars and began putting their cell phones to their ears. Stunned and dazed, Kizildrgli left his car on the road and began walking aimlessly for half an hour.
Minutes later, in the Dulles Airport tower, the words of an air traffic controller at Reagan National Airport came over the loudspeaker. “Dulles, hold all of our inbound traffic,” said the voice. “The Pentagon’s been hit.”
“I remember some folks gasping,” recalled O’Brien. “I think I remember a couple of expletives.”
“It’s just like a big pit in your stomach because you weren’t able to do anything about it to stop it,” said Tom Howell. “That’s what I think hurt the most.”
At the Justice Department, Ted Olson heard on the television that an explosion had taken place at the Pentagon. Although no one identified the aircraft involved, he knew it was Flight 77, carrying his wife. “I did and I didn’t want to,” he recalled. “But I knew.” Late that night, when he finally got to bed around 1
A.M
., Olson found a note under his pillow that Barbara had left for his birthday. “I love you,” she wrote. “When you read this, I will be thinking of you and will be back on Friday.”
CHAPTER 3
CLEVELAND
Minutes after the crash, Maj. Dean Eckmann and his two fellow NORAD fighter pilots from Langley Air Force Base were approaching Washington and could see the smoke. At first Eckmann thought it might be a plane crash near Reagan National Airport. Then, about twenty miles away, he saw that it was coming from the Pentagon. “My initial thought was that it was a truck bomb,” he said. “We didn’t actually find out it was an airliner until the next day.” Then he heard an air traffic controller say, “The Secret Service is now in the building,” followed by another military message saying, “We need to protect the house.” “What I drew from that is, we need to protect the White House.” He added, “It was the first time in my career that I ever actually wanted to go out and use my airplane to kill someone.”
Thousands of feet below and only minutes before, the Secret Service had placed an emergency call to the Air National Guard unit at nearby Andrews Air Force Base. Answering the phone was Lt. Col. Marc H. Sasseville, director of operations for the 113th Air National Guard Wing. Get whatever you have in the air immediately, he was told, to protect Washington and particularly the White House.
Given that much of America had realized that the country was under attack since a few minutes after nine, it would seem logical that those aircraft should have been sent aloft well before the Pentagon was attacked. In fact, protecting the Washington, D.C., area is part of its charter: “. . . as part of its dual mission, the 113th provides capable and ready response forces for the District of Columbia in the event of a natural disaster or civil emergency.” Why there were no aircraft launched earlier has never been adequately explained.
Sasseville quickly grabbed three F-16 pilots. “I have no idea what’s going on, but we’re flying,” he told them. “Here’s our frequency. We’ll split up the area as we have to. Just defend as required. We’ll talk about the rest in the air.” The four rushed to the prep area and zipped up their g-suits and checked their parachute harnesses.
As the pilots were grabbing for their helmets, another urgent call came in from the Secret Service. “Get in the air now!” someone screamed. At almost the same instant, another White House official telephoned on a different line and said the entire Washington area had been declared “a free-fire zone.” Sasseville told his three fellow pilots, “That meant we were given authority to use force, if the situation required it, in defense of the nation’s capital, its property and people.”
But these aircraft were part of the 121st Fighter Squadron of the D.C. National Guard—not NORAD. Thus they were not on alert. As a result, they had little or no weapons. Sasseville raced to the flight line with his wingman and jumped into the waiting F-16s armed only with five seconds’ worth of nonexplosive 20mm training rounds—metal slugs. AIM-9 missiles were being installed on two other fighters, but Sasseville felt he had no time to waste. “I was still turning things on after I got airborne. By that time, the [NORAD] F-16s from Langley were overhead—but I didn’t know they were there,” he recalled. “We all realized we were looking for an airliner—a big airplane . . . the track looked like it was headed toward D.C. at that time.”
Another F-16 pilot, Maj. Billy Hutchison, just landed after being recalled from a training operation in North Carolina. He also had no active weapons but was told to get airborne immediately. Like Sasseville and his wingman, if it came to preventing another airborne terrorist attack, Hutchison knew he had few options. All, however, were prepared to likely sacrifice their lives by using their aircraft to ram the hijacked plane.
Sasseville at least had a five-second burst of dummy rounds. His first option was to shoot from behind the passenger jet and “try to saw off one wing. I needed to disable it as soon as possible—immediately interrupt its aerodynamics and bring it down.” But if that didn’t work, the only shot he had left was “to hit it—cut the wing off with my wing. If I played it right, I’d be able to bail out. One hand on the stick and one hand on the ejection handle, trying to ram my airplane into the aft side of the [airliner’s] wing,” he said. “And do it skillfully enough to save the pink body . . . but understanding that it might not go as planned. It was a tough nut; we had no other ordnance.”
News of American Flight 77’s crash into the Pentagon removed any doubt from Ben Sliney’s mind. At the FAA’s control center, about fifteen miles south of the Pentagon, he boomed, “Order everyone to land! Regardless of destination! Let’s get them on the ground!’’ It was a breathtaking decision. For the first time in history, every commercial and private plane over the United States was immediately ordered out of the sky. At that moment, there were 3,949 planes over the country. A few minutes later, Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta agreed. But when told that even with the order it could still be overridden by pilot discretion, Mineta snarled, “Fuck pilot discretion, bring down all the planes.”
L. Kemp Ensor, the National Security Agency’s associate director for security, walked into the director’s office with his assistants just as Lieutenant General Hayden heard some early reports about the explosion at the Pentagon. “As they were walking through the door, I knew exactly what we needed to do and I said all nonessential personnel out of here. Out of the complex,” said Hayden. “A couple of reasons for it—one was just pure safety. Second was . . . the strength of the agency is our intellectual capital. The agency goes down in the elevators at night. Computers are nice, but what makes it run is the people. And there was certainly no better way to protect the people than to send them home on the dispersal plan. Everyone knows where they’re going, and everyone can protect in place in their own quarters. So all nonessential personnel were to leave the building.”
NSA was an easy target to hit. Nicknamed Crypto City, it consists of more than fifty buildings containing more than seven million square feet of space. The parking lots alone cover more than 325 acres and have room for 17,000 cars.
A key problem was that much of NSA’s most critical functions were consolidated in single buildings. Among the most important was the Tordella Supercomputer Building, which housed the agency’s electromagnetic brain. A 183,000-square-foot facility with nearly windowless walls decorated with light-colored enamel metal panels, it contains probably the largest collection of supercomputers in the world. The thinking machines are so powerful, they require the same amount of electricity (29 megavolt-amperes) needed to power half the city of Annapolis, Maryland’s capital. Among the machines whirring out code-breaking solutions and analyzing intercepted messages were the CRAY Y-MP EL, the Silicon Graphics Power Challenge, and the IBM RS/6000 SP, with a capability of crunching through two billion instructions per second.
Not only did the building contain NSA’s electronic brain, it also housed much of its memory. To store the massive amounts of data flowing in from its worldwide listening posts, NSA linked together several computers the size of telephone booths. The system is capable of storing five trillion pages of text—a stack of paper 150 miles high.
But it was NSA’s human brainpower that most concerned Hayden.
Throughout NSA, loudspeakers began sounding. “All nonessential personnel are to leave the building,” came the announcement over and over. But many of the 16,000 employees in “Crypto City” and its surrounding facilities were unsure as to whether that meant for a brief time or for the day, so quite a few went to their cars and just waited. Eventually, a massive traffic jam formed as they all began heading for the Baltimore-Washington Parkway.
Following definite word that the Pentagon had been struck and that there was still one or more hijacked aircraft headed toward Washington, NSA Director Hayden ordered the three to four thousand remaining essential personnel to immediately leave the agency’s three tall towers. They were to relocate to the three-story Ops 1 Building, the old low-rise A-shaped structure that was the agency’s first home in Fort Meade. All four buildings were interconnected, so employees never had to go outside.
In Ops 1, Hayden and his top staff marched through the automatic glass doors of the third-floor National Security Operations Center (NSOC), which was the agency’s “war room.” Above the door was the seal of the Central Security Service, NSA’s own military, and below, inlaid in the flooring, were the Center’s initials.
Normally quiet and sedate, the NSOC suddenly became a beehive of activity, with watch officers and signals intelligence officials fielding messages to and from the worldwide listening posts searching for answers in the dim light. All were watching for a CRITIC (Critical Intelligence) message—the highest precedence—warning of where the next attack might come.