McIntyre was helping a fellow employee named Ruth, who had sprained her ankle. Having made it to the lobby floor, the two managed to get across the plaza to an exit on the eastern side of the center where there was an escalator up to Church Street. “We’re okay,” McIntyre said to Ruth. “We get up this escalator and we’re okay.” Just at that moment, Tower Two collapsed.
“And then there was a big rumble and a huge roar,” recalled McIntyre. “Everybody shouted ‘Run,’ and then a huge wind came through there. I remember distinctly being lifted off my feet and blown down the hall, I don’t know how far. Ruth was holding on to me, but we were ripped apart. I had no conception of what was happening. It went through my mind that a bomb had gone off in the subway. Then the plume came through and there was an opaque blackness. It was not an absence of light. It was opaque. My glasses were gone. I put my hand in front of my face and I couldn’t see it. I thought, ‘A bomb has gone off and I’m going to die right here of smoke inhalation.’
“Then I realized that it wasn’t smoke, that it was just very heavy air. There was all this stuff on the floor, but it was light stuff. I was coated in it, as if I’d been immersed in a vat of butter. And the exposed skin on my arm was all pocked from tiny glass shards, maybe a hundred of them. We must have been on the very edge of the blast field when number two came down.” In the darkness, McIntyre ran into a glass storefront, but eventually he saw a flashlight and heard someone yelling, “Come to me.” A short time later, McIntyre again saw daylight and freedom. Half an hour later, at 10:28:31, Tower One also collapsed.
As Tower Two began to crumble, the presidential motorcade was crossing DeSoto Road as it came onto the tarmac of Sarasota’s Bradenton International Airport. Off to the side was Jones Aviation, where less than a year earlier Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi had taken flying lessons. Moments later, the presidential limousine came to a stop at the foot of the portable stairway and Bush quickly rushed for the doorway of the giant jet. “The President, famous for his courtesy, hurried past the local officials who had gathered to see him off,” said surprised Florida Republican Congressman Dan Miller, who had earlier been invited to fly back to Washington with Bush.
Once inside, Bush turned left and then right and walked into his airborne office on the right side of the forward portion of the plane. For security, whenever the jet lands, the pilot keeps the right side away from a terminal. The presidential suite was the ultimate in luxury. Decorated in muted brown and beige tones, the office featured a sleek wraparound wooden desk against the right bulkhead facing aft. Behind his tall, executive-style chair was a matching wooden credenza. The next room forward, taking up the nose of the plane, was his stateroom with two long tan leather couches that converted into beds with dark blue blankets decorated with the gold presidential seal. The forward bulkhead featured a wall mural that resembled a desert sunset. Between the stateroom and the office was a bathroom with full shower.
To many in the presidential party, the sight of the massive blue and white jet brought a sense of safety and relief. Miller and a fellow Florida Republican, Congressman Adam Putnam, were led up the rear stairs and into the aft section of the plane. Within five minutes, just about the time Tower Two was about to collapse, Air Force One
was moving down the runway. Hanging from the wings like giant silver locomotives, the four General Electric turbofan engines let out a Niagara-like thunder as 56,750 pounds of thrust shot from them.
“As the President sat down in his chair, [he] motioned to the chair across from his desk for me to sit down,” said Karl Rove, Bush’s chief political advisor. “Before we could, both of us, sit down and put on our seat belts, they were rolling the plane. And they stood that 747 on its tail and got it about 45,000 feet as quick as I think you can get a big thing like that up in the air.”
The first call Bush made was to Vice President Cheney in the White House presidential bunker, where officials were viewing the rogue odyssey of United Airlines Flight 93 with growing fear. By now they were certain that it had been hijacked somewhere over the Midwest and was heading back toward Washington. Along with the Capitol Building, the White House was the most logical next target. Deep underground, a staffer would enter the bunker every few minutes and update Cheney, as well as Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, with the plane’s latest position and trajectory.
By then, most workers had fled from the White House and the Capitol Building. From the beginning, the Secret Service had been constantly urging Cheney to leave by helicopter for the secret presidential relocation headquarters on the Maryland–Pennsylvania border known as Site R. That was the appropriate procedure when time permitted, as in this case. But Cheney refused to budge from the bunker.
The thought that the White House might be destroyed while the president or vice president was in the presidential bunker had worried doomsday planners in the 1950s. The small shelter was originally built in 1934, at the same time that the East Wing was constructed. In 1942, when Franklin D. Roosevelt had the wing rebuilt, it was updated but it was still considered just an “air raid shelter” and designed to survive little more than a few conventional bombs. There were also rumors at the time that the shelter was connected to an escape tunnel that led to the Treasury Building, with its thick vaults, across the street.
Because of the bunker’s vulnerability, an enormously secret plan was developed to attempt a rescue of the president and vice president from it. Code-named Outpost Mission, the operation involved the creation of a secret unit known as the 2857th Test Squadron, stationed outside the Washington blast zone at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Masquerading as a rescue force for civil and military emergencies, its sole job was to extract the president and vice president from the rubble of the White House after a nuclear attack.
Following a blast over Washington, the team was to board helicopters packed with decontamination kits, acetylene torches, crowbars, and other rescue equipment and land on the White House lawn. Extra radiation suits in canvas bags were carried for the presidential family. If the rubble covering the bunker was too heavy for their equipment, another secret presidential rescue unit stood by with large cranes and other heavy equipment. But the units were disbanded in 1970 and never replaced.
As United 93 got closer and closer to the White House, covering a mile every seven seconds, Cheney conferred with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and then asked Bush to order the United jetliner shot down.
At the time, however, there was still a chance that the plane might be saved. Unlike the earlier flights, passengers using cell phones were able to talk to loved ones who told them about the other hijackings and their tragic outcomes. Believing they had no other choice, they grabbed everything they could muster as improvised weapons. Armed with little more than plastic knives, broken dishes, and boiling hot water, a number of passengers began rushing the cockpit, where the hijackers had barricaded themselves in. With the angry mob on the other side of the door, the hijackers may have realized that they had waited too long to take over the plane. As Flight 93 began slowly making its way back toward the East Coast from Cleveland, the passengers had time to organize.
“The significance of saying to a pilot that you are authorized to shoot down that plane full of Americans is a, you know, it’s an order that had never been given before,” said Cheney. On Air Force One, Bush issued the order. “The President did give the order to shoot down a civilian plane if it was not responding properly,” Condoleezza Rice said. Bush, however, immediately passed the buck back to Cheney, leaving the decision to him as to whether to give the final okay to shoot down the plane. “The President gave the VP authority to make that call. It was a chilling moment, chilling moment,” recalled White House photographer David Bohrer, who was present at the time.
A few minutes later, Cheney passed the order to Army Brig. Gen. W. Montague Winfield in the Pentagon’s War Room. “The President had given us permission to shoot down innocent civilian aircraft that threatened Washington, D.C.,” Winfield said. “In the National Military Command Center, everything stopped for a short second as the impact of those words sunk in.”
“DOD, DOD.” Richard Clarke was sitting at a conference table facing a bank of blinking television monitors in the White House Secure Video Conferencing Center. Located on the ground floor of the building, the center was used during emergencies to bring senior government officials together to try to work out the problem. Finally reaching the Pentagon, Clarke passed on Bush’s message:
“Three decisions. One, the President has ordered the use of force against aircraft deemed to be hostile. Two, the White House is also requesting fighter escort of Air Force One. Three, and this applies to all agencies, we are initiating COG. Please activate your alternate command center and move staff to them immediately.” COG was Continuity of Government, a supersecret doomsday plan to keep the Federal government running no matter how badly it was attacked.
Sitting in the glassed-in Battle Cab of NORAD’S Northeast Air Defense Sector Operations Center at Rome, New York, Air Force Colonel Robert Marr received the call. Then he sent out word to air traffic controllers to instruct fighter pilots to destroy the United jetliner and any other threatening passenger plane. “United Airlines Flight 93 will not be allowed to reach Washington, D.C.,” said Marr.
Maj. Daniel Nash, the F-15 pilot from Cape Cod, heard the message while patrolling over Manhattan. “The New York controller did come over the radio and say if we have another hijacked aircraft we’re going to have to shoot it down,” he said. “From where we were sitting, you could see there were people dying and it had to stop. So if that’s what it’s going to take, that was our job. We would have done it.”
At the time, the closest fighters to United Flight 93, now over Pennsylvania, were two F-16 pilots engaged in a training exercise in the vicinity of Selfridge Air National Guard Base near Detroit. They were instructed to immediately turn south and attempt to intercept Flight 93. But since they were being diverted from a training mission, the fighters were unarmed. “Sir, what are they gonna do?” asked Colonel Marr’s mission crew commander. “We’re gonna put them as close to that airplane as they can get,” Marr said, “in view of the cockpit, and convince that guy in that airplane that he needs to land.”
But Marr knew they were dealing with more than hijackers; they were faced with suicide terrorists with whom there could be no gentle persuasion or threats of force. Thus, admitted Marr, the only solution would be for one of the fighter pilots to give up his own life by crashing into the United Airlines jet. “As military men,” he said solemnly, “there are times you have to make sacrifices.”
Knowing they were fighting for their lives, the passengers on Flight 93 began storming the locked cockpit. On the other side of the door, there were frantic discussions about fighting back. One of the hijackers suggested turning off the oxygen—they themselves could breathe through their face masks. As the confusion increased, the plane began to wobble and then lose altitude.
Soon after, people for miles around could see a cloud of gray smoke billowing above the trees and low-rise buildings of Shanksville, Pennsylvania, about 175 miles north and west of Washington. The cloud, coming from a fifty-foot crater, was all that remained of United Airlines Flight 93. At 10:03, one hundred and ten minutes after the takeoff of American Flight 11, the terrorist attacks of September 11 at last came to an end, amid the red barns, white churches, and copper pastures of rural Somerset County.
CHAPTER 4
SITE R
Even the reporters in the rear of Air Force One were surprised at the quick getaway. “It seemed we were ‘wheels up’ in nanoseconds,” said Ellen Eckert, a White House stenographer. “The chatter in the press section of the plane where I was sitting was ‘Where are we going? Where are we going?’ And we were looking out the windows, trying to see if we could figure out geographically where we were going.”
Within minutes, it became clear to everyone that Air Force One was not going back to Washington. For the first time in history, it became not a symbol of power but of escape as the nation’s commander-in-chief searched for a safe haven. The flight of George W. Bush from Sarasota was in stark contrast to the flight of Lyndon B. Johnson from Dallas, Texas, following the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
As on September 11, there were great worries on November 22, 1963, that the assassination was part of a larger plot to destroy or take over the government. It was during the fearsome days of the Cold War when missiles armed with nuclear warheads were pointed at cities across the United States. Yet Johnson flew straight back to Washington immediately after being sworn in on the plane in Dallas and gave a short talk on the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base several hours later, an act that brought confidence and stability to a shattered nation.
Bush could have easily ordered Vice President Cheney to a secure location outside Washington to preserve the continuity of government and then flown back to Andrews Air Force Base and given a defiant, Johnson-like speech. Then, with the public—and the rest of the world—feeling confident that despite the terrorist actions the U.S. government remained stable and firm, he could have gone back either to the White House or to one of the other highly protected, secure locations. That would have been the courageous thing to do.