I slept fitfully in my hotel room in Sarasota in the early-morning hours of September 11, eyeballing the hotel alarm clock as it ticked toward three thirty a.m., the time I would get up to go to work. My recurring nightmare was oversleeping and standing up the president of the United States.
It was the second week of September, and the president was on a two-day trip to Florida for events focused on his new education policy. As had become standard practice, I had come along to deliver to him the latest intelligence.
As I was stirring in Sarasota, two young men were checking out of the Comfort Inn in Portland, Maine, the same hotel I had stayed in two months earlier when the president spent a long weekend at his father’s ocean-side summer home in Kennebunkport. As I was showering and dressing in Florida, fifteen hundred miles away, these men took a short drive to the Portland International Jetport, where they boarded a six a.m. flight to Boston, connecting to American Airlines Flight 11, bound for Los Angeles. Their names were Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz al-Omari.
Because we were traveling, only one of the other usual senior participants, Chief of Staff Andy Card, was scheduled to sit in on the president’s briefing that morning. Navy Captain Deborah Loewer, the director of the White House Situation Room, was also to be present to receive policy-related questions the president might raise and, more important, to communicate items of interest to Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Steve Hadley back in Washington.
At 7:55 a.m., Loewer and I went up the stairs to the presidential suite at the Colony Beach & Tennis Resort. We passed through Secret Service checkpoints and waited in the hallway outside the president’s room. The president had just returned from a four-and-a-half-mile run and was dressing. While we waited and chatted with one of the president’s personal aides, American Airlines Flight 11—a Boeing 767 with ninety-two passengers and crew members aboard—took off from Boston’s Logan Airport. It was the first of the four hijacked flights to take to the air.
A little after eight a.m., Chief of Staff Card opened the door and motioned us in. We found President Bush seated at a table with a cup of coffee and a newspaper. He seemed surrounded by pastries, none of which he had touched. When he saw us, he asked if we had enjoyed our night at the beach. I told the president I had heard some waves but had not actually seen any. “Michael, you need to get a new job,” he joked. He put down the newspaper and asked, “Anything of interest this morning?” On the most important day of President Bush’s tenure, his intelligence briefing was unremarkable, focusing on the most recent developments in the Palestinian uprising against Israel. Contrary to some media reports, there was nothing regarding terrorist threats in the briefing.
An intelligence report about a phone conversation that the United States had intercepted between two (non-allied) world leaders that I had placed in the president’s binder caught his attention and caused him to pick up the phone to call Dr. Rice in Washington. They talked for only a couple of minutes. The briefing was over by 8:25 a.m. Only six minutes earlier one of the flight attendants on Flight 11 had contacted American Airlines ground personnel to say, “I don’t know, but I think we are getting hijacked.” And just one minute earlier Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker, was trying to communicate with the cockpit on Flight 11 but had actually contacted air traffic control, saying, “We have some planes. Just stay quiet and you will be okay.”
I left the presidential suite and took the elevator down to take my place in the motorcade that would carry the president to the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, where he was scheduled to speak. Soon joining me in the van were several senior White House officials, including political advisor Karl Rove, Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, and Director of White House Communications Dan Bartlett. I had become friendly with both Rove and Fleischer during the previous eight months. Fleischer and I would often talk sports, and Rove and I would frequently banter about the PDB. (He was not among the handful of White House officials cleared to see it.) “You don’t have anything in that briefcase that CNN doesn’t have,” he would tease me. “Karl, if you only knew what I know,” I would respond.
During the drive to the school, at 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the north side of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, between the ninety-third and ninety-ninth floors. It was traveling at 490 miles per hour.
Just as we were pulling up to the school, Fleischer’s cell phone rang. He listened for a few seconds and flipped his phone closed. He turned to me and asked, “Michael, do you know anything about a plane hitting the World Trade Center?” I said, “No,” but told him I would make some calls. As the motorcade came to a stop, I said, “Ari, I sure hope this is an accident and not terrorism.” He paused for a second or two—the word terrorism hanging in the air—and said, “I sure hope so too.”
My guess at the time was that a small plane had lost its way in bad weather and, by accident, had crashed into the World Trade Center. From just outside the classroom, I called CIA’s Operations Center. When I got the duty officer on the line he quickly told me that the plane in question was a large commercial airliner. My hope that this was not terrorism started to fade.
As I flipped my phone shut and walked into the senior staff room, I looked at my watch. It was nine a.m. Booker Elementary had placed a television in the room, and everyone was glued to the coverage coming out of New York. At 9:03 we watched as United Airlines Flight 175, a Boeing 767 with sixty-five passengers and crew members on board, slammed into the south side of the South Tower of the World Trade Center between the seventy-seventh and eighty-fifth floors. At impact, UAL Flight 175 was traveling at nearly six hundred miles per hour.
There was now no question—this was a deliberate act of terrorism. In the classroom next door, Andy Card made his way to the president, who was listening, along with sixteen second graders and a large number of reporters and others, to a story about a girl and her pet goat. At 9:05 a.m. Card whispered in the president’s ear, “A second plane has hit the World Trade Center. America is under attack.”
Back at CIA headquarters, one of the many odd coincidences of the day was playing out. While I was briefing the president, several senior CIA officers were having a long-planned breakfast with Commander Kirk Lippold, the commander of the USS Cole when it was attacked in Yemen. The group was lamenting that the American public was not sufficiently seized with the threat of terrorism, and Lippold suggested that it would take some “seminal event” to get the public’s attention. Minutes later news of that event reached the room. The Agency officers quickly turned to their duties, and Lippold rushed back to the Pentagon—arriving just in time to see American Airlines Flight 77 slam into the building.
In Alec Station the reaction was a grim realization. When reports of the second plane’s hitting the World Trade Center reached the Station, everyone instantly thought and said the same thing: “So this is what al Qa‘ida was planning. This is what we were waiting for.”
The president finished the session with the students and joined the senior staff. He made a number of calls on a secure phone that is always with the president for such a contingency. He spoke with the vice president and national security advisor. During one of these calls, on a nearby television, one of the networks played a recording of the second plane hitting the South Tower. A staff member called the president’s attention to the footage, a moment his photographer captured in an unforgettable image that would be published in hundreds of newspapers and magazines. I am in the far left of the photo, holding my briefcase.
I could only stand and watch as the president spoke on the phone and as Ari Fleischer sat at a nearby table writing out the first draft of remarks that the president would soon deliver to the nation. Standing there, being photographed, I was growing increasingly concerned about the president’s safety as well as the safety of others at the school. The fact that the president would be at Booker Elementary at this hour, on this day, had been public knowledge for days. I wondered when a plane might come crashing into the school. I thought about mentioning this to the head of the president’s Secret Service detail, but I figured that he’d probably thought of that, as he looked as nervous as I felt.
At nine thirty a.m. President Bush went back to a classroom to speak to the nation. Surrounded by students, teachers, and reporters, he said the country had suffered an apparent terrorist attack and promised to hunt down those who had committed the act, adding that “terrorism against our country will not stand.”
At 9:37 a.m., a few minutes after the president concluded his remarks, American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757 carrying sixty-four passengers and crew members, crashed into the west side of the Pentagon. One of CIA’s professional drivers, a gentleman with whom I had become well acquainted during my briefing assignment, was waiting at the Pentagon’s River Entrance for a colleague who was delivering the PDB to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. He said the impact of the crash lifted his vehicle off the ground.
The father of some of my children’s closest friends since preschool, a teacher in Arlington County, Virginia, home to the Pentagon, told me later that the plane passed directly over the trailer in which he was teaching. Tom said the roar made it seem as though the jet’s landing gear might touch the school’s roof. It was a sound he had never heard before. He said to a colleague or a student, “Wow, that’s really low!” He then went back to teaching. It was only a few minutes later that a student coming in late to class said that a plane had crashed into the Pentagon. “Sure,” Tom said to this boy, thinking that the student was simply being silly. “Sit down and open your math book.” A few minutes later, Tom apologized to the boy as the trailers were being evacuated.
While the president was still speaking at Booker Elementary, the Secret Service told those of us in the staff area to take our places in the motorcade as quickly as possible. They said that once the president was finished speaking and was in his limousine the motorcade would wait for no one. I climbed into the back of the senior staff van. Within minutes we were speeding to the Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport, just three and a half miles away.
When we arrived at the airport we received news of the attack on the Pentagon. Dire speculation took hold: how many planes had been hijacked and how many more targets might there be? I also thought of my family. I wondered if Mary Beth, who was at home, even knew yet what horrors had been unleashed on New York City and Washington. My children were at school in Fairfax County, Virginia, and I prayed that they would not be too frightened by what was going on—or too concerned about my safety. After all, I was about to board the most secure aircraft in the world.
Once everyone was aboard, Air Force One’s engines roared to life. The aircraft accelerated down the runway and began a rapid climb—one steeper than I had ever imagined a wide-bodied aircraft could achieve. It was ten a.m.
We were off and I asked the president’s military aide—the keeper of the nuclear “football” (a briefcase containing the codes needed by the commander in chief to launch a nuclear war)—where we were going. He responded, “We are just flying around for a bit.” I huddled with several others in Air Force One’s senior staff compartment, a small room with four seats not far from the president’s airborne office, where we looked in horror at live news reports. We watched people jump to their deaths from the top floors of the World Trade Center. Then we watched the South Tower collapse and disappear into a plume of smoke and dust. For a number of seconds no one said a word. Then someone broke the silence by whispering, “My God.”
Back at CIA, George Tenet was making a decision to evacuate the complex. In a meeting in his conference room, Tenet was reminded that years earlier, Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, had developed a plan to crash a plane into CIA headquarters. With planes still in the air, Tenet was taking no chances.
The evacuation order, not surprisingly, did not apply to the Counterterrorism Center. In Alec Station, supervisors told their employees that they could go if they wanted, if they felt they needed to get home to their families. No one left. Not a single person. They all stayed. Food, cots, and air mattresses began to appear.
The officers in Alec went to work on a number of questions—the most important of which were “Who exactly did this?” and “Are additional attacks coming?” The staff sent urgent priority messages to CIA stations around the globe, asking each of them to reach out to its foreign counterparts and vacuum up any shred of information that might shed light on the attacks and what might come next. And the officers began thinking about a much-expanded operational plan to go after al Qa‘ida.
A few minutes following Tenet’s order to evacuate, United Airlines Flight 93, a Boeing 757 carrying forty-four passengers and crew members, crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Flight 93 passengers, who had become aware of the hijackers’ intentions by speaking to loved ones on cell phones, had revolted and attacked the hijackers. Their actions may have saved the lives of hundreds of others, as the hijackers were targeting the US Capitol building.
While I continued to stand in the senior staff cabin, news wires reported that a Palestinian terrorist group, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), had claimed responsibility for the attacks. The president called me to his airborne office and asked what I made of it. “Mr. President,” I said, “DFLP is a Palestinian rejectionist group with a long history of terrorism against Israel, but they do not possess the capability to do this.” (Later a senior member of the DFLP would deny the initial claim.) As I turned to leave, the president asked me to tell Tenet to let him—the president—know the instant Tenet had anything definitive on the perpetrators of the attacks. The president said, “Michael, I want to be the first to know. Got that?” He said it in a tone that meant he was deadly serious. “Yes, sir,” I replied.
As I was leaving the president’s office, Andy Card asked to speak with me and pulled me into the president’s cabin on Air Force One. He told me that the White House had received a threat against Air Force One and that what was particularly worrying was that the caller had used Air Force One’s code name—Angel. I thanked Card for sharing the information with me, but my instinct was that this was not a major concern. I figured that if a bomb had been on board, it would have already detonated, and since we now had fighter escorts and an Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) plane above us, we were safe from anyone trying to fly a plane into us.
I returned to my seat in the staff section of the plane and picked up one of the phones that sit beside almost every seat on the aircraft. The phone rang twice, and one of the Air Force crew members working on the upper deck of the 747 said, “Yes sir. What can I do for you?” I asked to be connected to Tenet’s office in Washington and gave him the number. “Sir, we have been ordered to keep all phone lines open for the president and the military aide,” he replied. I told him that the president had personally asked me to make the call. “I’ll put you right through,” he said, and within seconds the phone in the director’s office was ringing.
Tenet’s office, like much of the federal government, was in crisis mode. With Tenet’s order to evacuate, he and his staff were in the process of relocating to a secure site. Tenet wasn’t nearby but his secretary handed the phone to the nearest senior official, Cofer Black, the head of the Agency’s Counterterrorism Center. Black was calm and collected and passed on what the Agency knew at that point, which was little beyond what the rest of the world knew. I relayed the president’s request that he be informed instantly if and when information came in regarding responsibility for the attacks and asked him to get word to the director. When I hung up, I somehow knew it wasn’t going to happen.
The president’s military aide told me that we were heading for Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. There the president would make another public statement and the aircraft would be re-provisioned—taking on additional food and water since it was unknown where it would go next or how long we would be airborne. The military aide advised me that a number of Air Force One’s passengers, all those deemed not essential to national security, would be left behind in Barksdale. Shortly before landing I was told that I would not be booted off—unlike all of the White House staff working on domestic issues, a couple of members of Congress from Florida who had been on the trip, and a large portion of the traveling press pool.
On our landing at Barksdale, the president was whisked off under heavy guard. I elected to remain on the aircraft. A Secret Service agent came through the cabin and said that no one would be permitted to make cell phone calls or to give out the president’s location. My heart sank. I had planned to call Mary Beth to let her know that I was safe and to make sure that she and the kids were OK as well.
Among those still on the aircraft were the two congressmen who had just been informed that they would have to find alternative means of onward travel. Together we watched the ongoing news coverage. One of them, aware that I was the president’s intelligence briefer, asked me who I thought was behind the attacks. I told him I would bet every dollar I had that Usama bin Ladin’s al Qa‘ida was responsible.
(The next day I found on my desk a press report quoting one of the Florida congressmen, who had told reporters that a “senior national security official traveling with the President” had told him just hours after the attack that Bin Ladin was the culprit. A handwritten note on the piece, from one of my colleagues, asked, “Are you the senior official?” I hadn’t planned on making news—but I guess I did.)
At 1:45 p.m. Air Force One departed with considerably fewer passengers than when we had arrived. The military aide told me that we were flying to Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Nebraska, home of the US Strategic Command (STRATCOM), where the president would conduct a meeting of the National Security Council over a secure video link from the STRATCOM bunker. The aide was keeping me informed of our every move, and I appreciated it.
About fifteen minutes after we left Barksdale, Andy Card walked into the staff section of the plane and said, “Michael, the president wants to see you.” When I entered his airborne office I could tell the president was focused and determined. In the last couple of hours, I had seen him transformed from a peacetime president to a wartime commander in chief. He asked me point-blank, “Michael, who did this?” I said, “Sir, I haven’t seen any intelligence that would point to responsibility, so what I’m going to say is simply my personal view.” He told me he understood. I said that there were two terrorist states capable of conducting such a complex operation—Iraq and Iran—but that neither had much to gain and both had plenty to lose from attacking the United States. Rather, I said, the culprit was almost certainly a non-state actor, adding that I would bet my children’s future that the trail would lead to the doorstep of Usama bin Ladin and al Qa‘ida.
The president asked me, “When will we know?”
“I can’t say for sure,” I replied, and I reviewed for him how long it had taken CIA to have any certainty about responsibility for past terrorist attacks—the bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia (which had not been an al Qa‘ida operation), the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen. With the length of time in each case varying dramatically, I concluded by saying, “It might be soon and then again it might take some time.”
During my discussion with the president, I had no way of knowing that analysts at CIA headquarters had already tied the attacks to al Qa‘ida. They had acquired the passenger manifest of the four flights from the Federal Aviation Administration and run the names against CIA databases of known terrorists. Hits came up on American Airlines Flight 77. Three passengers on that flight had known and definitive links to al Qa‘ida (prior to 9/11 there was no national no-fly list that would have flagged the hijackers before they got on the plane). And none of this information had been passed to me to share with the president, despite the commander in chief’s “tell me first” order.
A little after three p.m. Eastern Time we landed at Offutt. We were taken on buses to the entrance of the STRATCOM underground bunker. A secure videoconference call was set up in the bunker’s command center. As I entered I saw the president, Andy Card, and the STRATCOM commander, Admiral Richard Mies, at a table in front of a large screen. On the screen, transmitting from three or four different locations, were senior officials in Washington. George Tenet walked the president and others through the information that tied three of the hijackers to al Qa‘ida. When Tenet finished, the president turned and looked me straight in the eye. He didn’t say a word, but his look told me that he felt he had been let down. He hadn’t wanted to learn about this after the fact on a conference call. My look back at him was meant to convey, “I’m sorry but I don’t know what happened.”
I was angry that we had failed to follow through on the president’s order. I went through every possibility in my mind—was I not clear when I spoke to Cofer Black, did Black not pass on my message to Tenet, did Tenet just forget in the intense activity of the day, or did Tenet knowingly hold back the information because he wanted to brief it himself? I didn’t wait for the videoconference to end but rose from my seat in the back of the command center and walked out the door. I went to a nearby office and phoned the CIA Operations Center and asked to speak with Tenet’s executive assistant. After expressing my frustration—in colorful language—over not having been able to meet the president’s expectations, I asked that the information Tenet had just given the president be sent immediately to Air Force One, as I was certain that Tenet had not covered everything in the teleconference. The president felt he had been let down, I said, and so did I. The assistant told me that he could not send it because the information was embargoed from leaving the building. “Embargoed from the president of the United States?” I shouted. “Just send it!” I slammed the phone down. The stress of the day was starting to get to me.
When I returned to the secure videoconference there was a debate going on about whether the president should return to Washington. The director of the Secret Service, in Washington, argued, “No, we still do not know if it would be safe for you to come back, Mr. President,” but it was not much of a debate because the president simply and firmly said, “I’m coming home.”
Shortly thereafter we returned to Air Force One and departed for Washington. A few minutes after takeoff, a steward brought me a written communication from Tenet’s executive assistant. On the cover sheet was a short note: “Michael, sorry. Here’s everything we have.”
I went through the material several times and highlighted several passages. Andy Card took me forward to see the president and I walked him through the material—some of which suggested that follow-up attacks were a very real possibility. We had already been sobered by the day’s events, and the news brought a new jolt of concern. After reading the documents, the president simply handed them back to me and said, “Thank you, Michael.”
It was early evening as we approached Andrews Air Force Base. Everyone on board was tired. Inside Air Force One, the lights had been dimmed. The military aide pointed out the window and told me to look. One hundred yards off the tip of our wing was an F-16. The military aide whispered that there was another one off our other wing as well. “They are from the D.C. Air National Guard,” he said. The fighter was so close we could see the pilot’s facial features. In the distance below we could see the Pentagon, smoke still rising from the crash earlier in the day, and lights flashing from emergency vehicles on the scene. It was the darkest of hours. Tears welled up in my eyes for the first but not the last time that day.
Immediately on arrival at Andrews AFB, the president flew off in Marine One back to the White House, while most of the staff piled into vans to follow him. I waited at the Andrews visitors lounge for a CIA car to take me back to headquarters. For the first time that day, I was able to call Mary Beth. I told her that I was at Andrews and waiting for a ride, adding that I would have much to tell her later. Her voice was reassuring. She simply said, “Get home soon.” Eventually I made it back to the Agency, retrieved my car, and made the trek back home. As I drove off the Agency compound the weight of everything that had happened sank in and I began to cry.
I pulled into our driveway in northern Virginia, with the radio on and the president about to speak. I sat and listened for a few minutes before going into the house. I found Mary Beth on the sofa in our family room watching the president address a grieving nation. He asked for prayers for the families of the victims, said America would overcome the terrible tragedy, and promised that it would emerge even stronger. And, in a major change in policy that would become part of the Bush Doctrine, the president said the United States “would make no distinction between terrorists and nations that harbor them.”
After the president finished, I went into each of my three children’s rooms and found them asleep, surrounded by stuffed animals. They looked as they did on any other night, peaceful and content. I thought of the thousands of other children who would never see their parents again. I kissed my three on their foreheads and softly told them I loved them.
* * *
Back at Langley, a stunningly patriotic dynamic was playing out. Many of those who had been sent home earlier in the day fought their way back through traffic to return to our headquarters—unable and unwilling to stay away. And we had scores of recently—and not-so-recently—retired Agency officers just drive up to the even-more-heavily-defended-than-usual front gate and say, “I want to come back. I will do anything that needs to be done.”
* * *
The 9/11 Commission said that the September 11 attacks resulted, in part, from a failure of imagination. I have never agreed with that characterization. Had I walked into the Oval Office in the spring and early summer of 2001—when the threat reporting was at its highest—and said “Mr. President, the analysts at CIA can imagine that one of the possibilities here is that al Qa‘ida operatives could hijack multiple aircraft in the United States using box cutters missed by airport X-ray machines, take over control of the cockpits, and use the aircraft themselves as weapons by flying them into prominent buildings here at home,” the president’s reaction would have been, “Well, I’m sure analysts can imagine lots of possibilities. What I want to know is exactly what al Qa‘ida is planning.” Imagination, without substantial facts to back it up, never has been and never will be the basis for policy decisions, nor should it be.
9/11 was a not a failure of imagination. It was a national failure. It is true that one can point to specific lapses by the CIA, FBI, and NSA that might have made a difference—the failure of FBI field offices to follow up on and report to Washington unusual flight training by young Arab men, and the failure of CIA to report to the FBI the travel of two of the 9/11 hijackers to the United States, among others. It is also true that the intelligence community did not penetrate al Qa‘ida sufficiently enough to discover the threat. But the failures that ultimately led to 9/11 are much deeper than those lapses. They include not funding national security–related agencies to a level commensurate with the threat; not implementing all of the twenty sensible recommendations on aviation security made by the 1996 Gore Commission, established by President Clinton after the crash of TWA Flight 800; and not aggressively pursuing al Qa‘ida following the East Africa and Cole bombings.
I believe that, taken together, these represent a national failure because the American people would not have supported the actions required. They would not have supported significant increases in the resources of the national security community at a time when the rest of the government was facing deep budget cuts; they would not have supported changes to aviation security that would have inconvenienced hundreds of thousands of travelers—the airline industry fought the recommendations of the Gore Commission, for example—and they would not have supported going to war in Afghanistan after the embassy bombings or the Cole bombing. No, it took 9/11 itself to galvanize the necessary support for these steps. One of the defining characteristics of America is that we tend to be reactive to events, not proactive. And on 9/11 we paid a significant price for this national trait.