Against All Enemies (5 page)

Stafford slipped me a note. “Radar shows aircraft headed this way.” Secret Service had a system that allowed them to see what FAA's radar was seeing. “I'm going to empty out the complex.” He was ordering the evacuation of the White House.

Ralph Seigler stuck his head into the room, “There has been an explosion in the Pentagon parking lot, maybe a car bomb!”

“If we evacuate the White House, what about the rest of Washington?” Paul Kurtz asked me. “What about COG?” Continuity of Government was another program left over from the Cold War. It was designed to relocate administration officials to alternate sites during periods of national emergency. COG was also planned to devolve power in case the President or key Cabinet members were killed.

Roger Cressey stepped back into the video conference and announced: “A plane just hit the Pentagon.” I was still talking with FAA, taking down a list of possibly hijacked aircraft. “Did you hear me?” Cressey was on loan to the White House from the Pentagon. He had friends there; we all did.

“I can still see Rumsfeld on the screen,” I replied, “so the whole building didn't get hit. No emotion in here. We are going to stay focused. Roger, find out where the fighter planes are. I want Combat Air Patrol over every major city in this country. Now.”

Stafford's order to evacuate was going into effect. As the staff poured out of the White House compound, the Residence, the West Wing, and the Executive Office Building, the Uniformed Secret Service guards yelled at the women, “If you're in high heels, take off your shoes and run—run!” My secretary, Beverly Roundtree, was on the line to Lisa, telling her that she and the rest of my staff were still in our vault in the Executive Office Building. “Okay, okay,” Lisa was saying, knowing she could not persuade her to leave, “then bring over the chem-bio gear.”

Our coordinator for Continuity of Government (we will call him Fred here to protect his identity at the request of the government) joined us.

“How do I activate COG?” I asked him. In the exercises we had done, the person playing the President had always given that order.

“You tell me to do it,” Fred replied.

At that moment, Paul handed me the white phone to the PEOC. It was Fenzel. “Air Force One is getting ready to take off, with some press still on board. He'll divert to an air base. Fighter escort is authorized. And…” He paused. “Tell the Pentagon they have authority from the President to shoot down hostile aircraft, repeat, they have authority to shoot down hostile aircraft.”

“Roger that.” I was amazed at the speed of the decisions coming from Cheney and, through him, from Bush. “Tell them I am instituting COG.” I turned back to Fred: “Go.”

“DOD, DOD.” I tried to get the attention of those still on the screen in the Pentagon. “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 centers and move staff to them immediately.”

Rumsfeld said that smoke was getting into the Pentagon secure teleconferencing studio. Franklin Miller urged him to helicopter to DOD's alternate site. “I am too goddamn old to go to an alternate site,” the Secretary answered. Rumsfeld moved to another studio in the Pentagon and sent his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, to the remote site.

General Myers asked, “Okay, shoot down aircraft, but what are the ROE?” ROE were Rules of Engagement. It was one thing to say it's okay to shoot down a hijacked aircraft threatening to kill people on the ground, but we needed to give pilots more specific guidelines than that. I asked Miller and Greenwood to make sure DOD had an answer to that question quickly. “I don't want them delaying while they lawyer that to death.”

Lisa slipped a note in front of me: “CNN says car bomb at the State Department. Fire on the Mall near the Capitol.”

Ralph Seigler stuck his head around the door: “Secret Service reports a hostile aircraft ten minutes out.”

Beverly Roundtree arrived and distributed gas masks. Cressey suggested we activate the Emergency Broadcast System.

“And have them say what?” I asked.

“State, State…” I called to get Rich Armitage's attention.

The Deputy Secretary of State had been a Navy SEAL and looked it. He responded in tactical radio style: “State, here, go.”

“Rich, has your building just been bombed?” I asked.

“Does it fucking look like I've been bombed, Dick?”

“Well, no, but the building covers about four blocks and you're behind a big vault door. And you need to activate your COG site.”

“All right, goddamn it, I'll go look for myself,” Armitage said, lifting himself out of the chair and disappearing off camera. “Where the hell is our COG site…”

Fred returned. “We have a chopper on the way to extract the Speaker from the Capitol. Did you want all departments to go to COG or just the national security agencies?” The Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, was next in line to the presidency if Bush and Cheney were killed or incapacitated. Soon, he would be skimming across the backed-up traffic and on his way to a cave.

“Everybody, Fred, all departments. And check with the Capitol Police to see if there is a fire.”

“Already did,” Fred replied. “It's bogus. No fires, no bombs, but the streets and Metro are jammed with people trying to get out of town. It's going to be hard to get people to alternate sites.”

Seigler was back: “Hostile aircraft eight minutes out.”

Franklin Miller pulled me aside. Miller and I had been staff officers together at the State Department in 1979. Ever since then we had been friendly, but competitive. Miller went to the Pentagon, while I stayed at State. We had both become office directors, then Deputy Assistant Secretaries, then Assistant Secretaries, now Special Assistants to the President. “We gotta get these people out of here,” Frank said and then looked me in the eyes. “But I'll stay here with you, if you're staying.”

The White House compound was now empty except for the group with Cheney in the East Wing bomb shelter and the team with me in the West Wing Situation Room: Roger, Lisa, and Paul from my counterterrorist staff, Frank Miller and Marine Colonel Tom Greenwood and a half dozen Situation Room staff.

Roger Cressey, sitting on my right, was a career national security practitioner. I had hired him as a civil service employee at the State Department ten years earlier. To give him some real-world experience, I had sent him on assignment to the embassy in Tel Aviv. Later, in 1993, I asked him to go to Mogadishu as an aide to Admiral Jonathan T. Howe, who had left the White House job as Deputy National Security Advisor to be, in effect, the U.N.'s governor in Somalia. Cressey drove the darkened streets of Mogadishu at night in a pickup truck with a 9mm strapped to his hip, listening to the gunfire rippling around town. Two years later when another American, General Jacques Klein, was appointed by the U.N. to run bombed-out Eastern Slavonia, Cressey had gone into the rubble with him. Together they dealt with warring Croatians and Serbs, including war criminals, refugees, and organized crime thugs. From there, he had gone to the civilian office in the Pentagon that reviewed the military's war plans. Cressey had joined me at the White House in November 1999 just as we placed security forces on the first nationwide terrorist alert. Now thirty-five years old, he was married to a State Department expert on weapons of mass destruction and had a beautiful two-year-old daughter. He thought his father-in-law was on American 77. (Later Cressey would learn that Bob Sepucha was safe.)

Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, sitting behind me, had started her career at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as an expert on nuclear weapons and the health effects of radiation. Blonde and stylish, she stood out among the White House staff. Lisa had helped to create and organize NEST, the Nuclear Emergency Support Team. The support that NEST was supposed to give was to U.S. military Special Forces trained to seize and disarm nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists. Lisa had trained with Delta Force and SEAL Team Six. I was impressed by her understanding of weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and biological devices, especially during the Tokyo subway attack in 1995 when terrorists had sprayed sarin nerve gas. In 1998 I asked her to join me in the White House to design and implement a new national plan to defend against terrorist attacks using chemical and biological weapons. Three weeks after her arrival, al Qaeda attacked the two U.S. embassies in Africa. Lisa had stayed up for three days straight coordinating the flow of FBI, State, Marine, and disaster response teams to Kenya and Tanzania.

Paul Kurtz, on my left, was another career civil servant. I had first hired him in 1987 in the Intelligence Bureau at State. There he became an expert on nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Following the first Gulf War, he went into Iraq repeatedly for both the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the U.N. Special Commission to hunt down hidden Iraqi weapons. Kurtz then became the Political Advisor to the U.S. Commander of Operation Northern Watch, based in Turkey and taking a Blackhawk flight every week into the Kurdish areas of Iraq. The week after he left that job, his successor died when the U.S. Air Force mistakenly shot down the U.S. Army Blackhawk. Kurtz then went on to North Korea, inspecting for a nuclear weapons program. On his first inspection, Kurtz and his team were forced into a concrete block building and surrounded by loudly jeering Korean troops who thrust bayonets in the windows at them. He joined the White House terrorism team in December 1999 and spent Christmas Day that year accompanying the National Security Advisor to the terrorism centers at CIA and FBI as part of the Millennium Terrorist Alert. Like Cressey, he had run marathons and he was the kind of guy that no one disliked.

These people did not flap. They were like family to me, but suddenly I realized that I wanted them to leave for their own safety. I checked again with FAA to see if they still thought there were hijacked aircraft aloft. There were 3,900 aircraft still in the air and at least four of those were believed to be in the hands of the terrorists.

I huddled everyone together just outside the Video Conferencing Center and asked them to leave. Lisa spoke for the group: “Right, Dick. None of us are leaving you, so let's just go back in there.”

“Hold on. We will be the next target. It's no shame to relocate. Some of you have kids too—think about them,” I said, looking at Roger, whose second child was due in a few months.

Roger did not hesitate. He said, “If we don't hold this thing together, no one will and we don't have time for this.” Then he brushed by me and walked back into the Video Conferencing Center. Frank Miller grabbed a legal pad and said, “All right. If you're staying, sign your name here.”

“What the hell's the point of that?” Paul Kurtz asked.

Frank slowly scanned the group, “I'm going to e-mail the list out of the compound so the rescue teams will know how many bodies to look for.”

Everyone signed and walked back in. We resumed the video conference. “DOD, DOD, go.” I asked the Pentagon for an update on the fighter cover.

Dick Myers had a status report. “We have three F-16s from Langley over the Pentagon. Andrews is launching fighters from the D.C. Air National Guard. We have fighters aloft from the Michigan Air National Guard, moving east toward a potential hostile over Pennsylvania. Six fighters from Tyndall and Ellington are en route to rendezvous with Air Force One over Florida. They will escort it to Barksdale. NORAD says that it will have AWACS over New York and Washington later this morning.”

DOD Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz had relocated to the Alternate National Military Command Center outside Washington and had now rejoined the conference. “We have to think of a message to the public. Tell them not to clog up the roads. Let them know we are in control of the airways. Tell them what is happening. Have somebody go out from the White House.”

“Paul, there is nobody in the White House but us and no press on the grounds. I think the President will have something to say when he lands in Barksdale, but we have to be careful…we really don't know what is going on, are attacks still under way…anybody?”

Dale Watson, counterterrorism chief at FBI, was waving at the camera indicating he had an update. “Go ahead, Dale.”

“Dick, got a few things here. Our New York office reports that the Port Authority is closing all bridge and tunnel connections into Manhattan. We have a report of a large jet crashed in Kentucky, near the Ohio line.

“We think we ought to order all landmark buildings around the country to evacuate, like the Sears Tower, Disney World, the Liberty Bell, the TransAmerica Building in San Francisco. This thing is still going on. And Dick, call me in SIOC when you can.” SIOC—the Strategic Information and Operations Center—is FBI's command center. Dale had something he did not want to share with everyone in the conference.

Frank Miller took over the video conference and I stepped out and called Watson on a secure line. “We got the passenger manifests from the airlines. We recognize some names, Dick. They're al Qaeda.” I was stunned, not that the attack was al Qaeda but that there were al Qaeda operatives on board aircraft using names that FBI knew were al Qaeda.