EIGHTEEN

“Protect the White House at All Cost”

Shortly after 9:00, President Bush was sitting in S. Kay Daniel’s second-grade classroom in Sarasota, Florida, where she was giving a reading lesson to sixteen seven-year-olds at the Emma E. Booker Elementary School. The president was carrying out the sort of duty that presidents carried out in those innocent days, publicizing his ideas for education, being on hand for one of the more conventional routines of American life. And then, at 9:05, the president’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, walked into the room and whispered in his ear. Reporters on the scene remember seeing the color drain out of Bush’s face, and then he looked at the children, at the television cameras that follow every public presidential appearance, and at the textbook he was holding in his hands.

“Really good readers,” the president said. “Whew! This must be sixth grade.”

Then, at 9:12, he got up abruptly and left the room to confer with advisers. At 9:30 he went to the school library, where reporters had gathered together with children, parents, and teachers who had been waiting for an hour. Normally, the president, who stood in front of a suddenly irrelevant “Read to Succeed” banner, would have made a little speech about the importance of improving American education. Instead he announced what millions already knew, that both towers of the World Trade Center had been struck, and he made his first statement about the new American era: “Terrorism against our nation will not stand,” he said.1

What followed was one of the strangest days in the history of the American presidency. At that point, two planes were known to have been hijacked and to have struck targets in New York, killing who knew how many thousands of people. A third plane, American Airlines flight 77, had also been commandeered, and its whereabouts were unknown. Later declarations from the White House had it that Bush wanted to return to Washington right away, but the Secret Service demurred. The situation was far too dangerous. The president himself might be a target. And so, the president left the Emma E. Booker Elementary School and was whisked back to Air Force One at the Sarasota Airport.

*   *   *

At about 9:25, something without precedent in the history of American aviation took place. The administrator of the FAA, Jane Garvey, ordered all aircraft in the United States out of the sky, and for no planes to take off. At about the same time, while most of the world’s eyes were on the twin towers burning but still standing in New York, air traffic control radar picked up flight 77 moving toward the restricted air space over Washington, D.C. At 9:30, while the president was making his terrorism-will-not-stand statement in Sarasota, three F-16s belonging to the Air National Guard’s 119th Fighter Wing, nicknamed the Happy Hooligans, were scrambled from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia and, for reasons that are not clear, ordered to head toward New York. Three minutes after that, at 9:33, a controller informed an operational supervisor that flight 77 had been detected moving toward Washington. The Secret Service was informed. While President Bush was not in the White House, Vice President Cheney was, and the Secret Service grabbed him and hustled him to an underground bunker.

At 9:36, controllers at National Airport, just across the Potomac from Washington, told a C-130 military cargo plane that had just taken off from nearby Andrews Air Force Base to identify the renegade plane. The C-130 reported that it was a Boeing 757 moving low and very fast.

In fact, flight 77 was in the final stages of a 360-degree turn just south of the Pentagon, which it had nearly overflown, at about eight thousand feet, a few minutes earlier. Now it descended as it banked right in an enormous circle over northern Virginia, and then headed northeast with the Pentagon directly in its path and the three F-16s not yet in the vicinity.

“I happened to look up and I saw this airplane not more than fifty feet coming right at us,” said Alan Wallace, a Defense Department firefighter who was badly burned in the attack. “I yelled to my partner, and we dove underneath a van for protection.”2

The Pentagon, as its name indicates, is an immense five-sided structure, with five concentric rings that together provide more floor space than the Empire State Building and have room for twenty-four thousand employees. It is an eerie fact that even as flight 77 got into position overhead to crash into them, many of the employees in the building at the time, fully aware that the United States was under attack, were, like people all over the world, watching the news of the World Trade Center disaster unfold on television. One person at least, Mike Slater, a former marine, even muttered “We’re next” to those around him. But even though the entire Defense Department was aware of the Trade Center attacks, and even though flight controllers knew that flight 77 was heading toward Washington, there was no order to evacuate the Pentagon.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had met that morning with some congressmen in a conference room and, coincidentally, had urged them to support greater defense spending, warning them specifically that every ten years or so the country is hit by a surprise, and that such a surprise would come again. Then he went to his office in the outer ring of the third floor and was receiving a briefing from the CIA. Though he had been told of the attacks on the World Trade Center, he wasn’t watching the television accounts of the disaster in New York.

The pilot of flight 77 is assumed by the FBI to have been Hani Hanjour, even though he had been so inept on check-out flights he’d taken in the previous few weeks that no flight center had been willing to rent him a single-engine plane. Still, aviation experts say that a maneuver such as the one performed by flight 77 as it darted toward the Pentagon could be programmed into the automatic pilot. Or, perhaps it was not Hani Hanjour at the controls; perhaps Khalid al-Midhar, who had spent several months before the summer away from the United States, had gotten pilot training someplace else, and was the man flying the plane that day. In any case, flight 77 finished its turn, and, at 9:38, now oriented toward the northeast, it was barely skimming the ground and traveling at five hundred miles per hour. It slammed into the Pentagon, penetrating three of the five rings on the southwest side of the building, killing 125 people inside the building and all 59 on the plane (not including the hijackers).

After being ordered toward New York, the three F-16s from Langley, traveling at subsonic speeds at an altitude of 25,000 feet, were ordered to vector west and then south toward Washington. As they reached their new destination, they got this message:

“Hooligan flight, can you confirm that the Pentagon is on fire?”

The lead F-16 pilot looked down and confirmed that, indeed, such was the case.

The next message the F-16s received came from somebody who said he was with the Secret Service.

“I want you to protect the White House at all costs,” it said.

*   *   *

At 9:55, Air Force One with the president aboard took off from Sarasota, escorted by a squadron of fighter planes, going on a zigzag, high-altitude course—east to the Atlantic, then north, then south—that eventually took the president to Barksdale Air Force Base in Shreveport, Louisiana, a destination chosen at random. As reporters had scrambled up the rear stairway of the plane, word had come of the strike at the Pentagon, and during the flight, the unbelievable news kept coming in over the television screens on board—the White House, the Executive Office Building, the State Department, the Treasury Department, and the Congress had all been evacuated. The government had in essence gone into hiding and the president was in the air heading for an undisclosed location that was not the national capital. Reporters on the plane were not told where they were going, and they spent time looking out their windows trying to figure out where they were. They were prohibited from using their cell phones for fear that terrorists would be able to use the signals to trace the location of Air Force One. There were reports, false as it turned out, that there had been explosions at the State Department and at the Capitol. Then, a bit after 10:00 came word that the south tower of the Trade Center had collapsed and that there was still one hijacked plane unaccounted for.3

That plane was United Airlines flight 93, which had been scheduled to leave Newark at 8:01 on a flight to San Francisco, but had been held on the ground. One can imagine that the delay worried the hijackers on board—four on this flight, as opposed to five on the other three—because they knew that, eventually, when the first planes hit their targets, all flights would quickly be grounded, which is why they had chosen to hijack planes scheduled to leave within a few minutes of each other.

But flight 93 did take off, at 8:42, four minutes before flight 11 hit the north tower. It headed west across Virginia into Pennsylvania and then over northern Ohio. On board were Jeremy Glick, Lauren Grandcolas from San Rafael, California, on her way home from her grandmother’s funeral, and Mark Bingham, thirty-one, heading a day later than expected to San Francisco for a meeting that afternoon with a client. (Like Glick, he was supposed to have flown on Monday but he delayed because he wasn’t feeling well.)

Shortly after 8:53, seven minutes after flight 11 crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center, the pilot of flight 93, Jason Dahl, and the first officer, LeRoy Homer, would have heard a kind of ping, a signal that a message was arriving on the cockpit computer, and then they would have read, in green letters against a black background, a three-word warning, “Beware, cockpit intrusion,” which was sent out to all United flights in the wake of the crash of flight 11. Dahl and Homer replied by pushing a button confirming the receipt of the message, but there is no indication that they took any measures to prevent a hijacking of their flight. Probably, as one aviation official put it afterward, they thought, “It’s already happened; it’s probably not going to happen again.”

But it did happen. At almost exactly the moment when flight 77 was observed heading toward Washington, flight 93 experienced the very “cockpit intrusion” that pilot Dahl and First Officer Homer had been warned about. It happened as the plane was over northern Ohio heading toward Lake Erie. At about 9:20 passengers in first class would have seen four Middle Eastern men—Ziad Jarrah, in seat 1B, and three others, Ahmed Alhaznawi, Ahmed Alnami, and Saeed Alghamdi, in seats 3C, 3D, and 6B—get up and put red bandannas around their heads. We know about the bandannas because a bit later, after 9:30, Jeremy Glick called his wife, Lyzbeth, on his cell phone and told her that three “Arab-looking men” wearing red headbands and saying they had a bomb had taken control of the plane.

In the wake of the disaster, the FBI seized the tape of the communications between flight 93 and air traffic control, and it has released no transcript of those communications. The FBI, which took over the investigation from the National Transportation Safety Board, which usually investigates plane crashes, has also declined to release the contents of the cockpit voice recorder that was recovered at the crash site—though, in April, it did allow families of passengers to hear that tape, on condition that they not disclose its contents. But reporters for several news organizations interviewed investigators who listened to both the cockpit voice recorder and the ground control tapes, which together gave a rough outline of what happened on that flight.

At 9:25, Dahl contacted Cleveland air traffic control and said “good morning.” After that, at 9:28:19, or almost exactly the moment when flight 77 was slamming into the Pentagon, Cleveland air traffic control began to hear the sounds of a scuffle in the background. There were no calls of mayday from the crew, just the sounds of a fight and after a few seconds, a voice, probably Dahl’s or Homer’s saying, “Hey, get out of here.” A foreign language was also heard being spoken on the frequency, and ground controllers thought it was Arabic. Ground control also heard a man speaking in a heavy accent saying, “This is your captain speaking. Remain in your seats. There is a bomb on board. Stay quiet. We are meeting with their demands. We are returning to the airport.” Again, the hijackers seem inadvertently to have been speaking over the radio to ground control when they were trying to use the public address system. In one case, flight 11, the man making the announcement identified himself as a hijacker; on flight 93, he pretended, not very convincingly, to be the pilot. In both cases, and very likely on the other two flights as well, a part of the plan was to make some sort of announcement aimed at keeping the passengers from taking action.

On flight 93, and, it seems, only on flight 93, that stratagem didn’t work. The rebellion organized by passengers and that probably prevented the plane from hitting a target in Washington—very likely the White House or the Congress or possibly the CIA—has already entered into American legend. The first step seems to have been a cell phone call that Tom Burnett made to his wife, Deena, in San Ramon, California, to tell her that his flight had been hijacked. Deena informed Tom of the news that two other hijacked planes had already hit the World Trade Center. There were several other calls. Jeremy Glick spoke to Lyz in Windham, New York, and, after describing the Arab-looking men with red bandannas, he asked her if the stories about the World Trade Center were true, and she told him they were. A flight attendant, Sandy Bradshaw, called her husband, Phil, in Greensboro, North Carolina, and told him that several of the flight attendants were filling coffee pots with hot water to throw at the hijackers. At about 9:45, Tom Burnett called Deena again and she told him the latest, that flight 77 had hit the Pentagon. Tom, according to Deena, replied: “My God. They seem to be taking planes and driving them into designated landmarks all over the East Coast. It’s as if hell has been unleashed.”

On board flight 93, as it happens, were a number of passengers capable of taking action. Besides Glick, the judo champion, there was Mark Bingham, a six-foot-five former college rugby player. One flight attendant, CeeCee Lyles, was once a detective on a Florida police force; William Cashman, sixty, was a former paratrooper with the 101st airborne; Alan Beaven, six-three, was a former Scotland Yard prosecutor. Rich Guadagno had been trained in hand-to-hand combat; Tom Burnett had played football in college and Todd Beamer had played basketball. Burnett told his wife in his last call to her, “We’re going to do something.” Glick told Lyz that several of the passengers were thinking of rushing the hijackers; Todd Beamer was talking on his cell phone to a GTE customer center supervisor named Lisa Jefferson in Oakbrook, Illinois, and Mrs. Jefferson says the last words she heard him say were, “Are you guys ready: Let’s roll.”

It is not clear exactly what happened. In the public address announcement accidentally relayed to ground control, the hijackers told passengers to remain in their seats. But the passenger cell-phone calls to relatives and others indicate that they were grouped in the back of the plane, guarded by a single hijacker who claimed to have a bomb strapped to his waist. Perhaps, the hijackers never did succeed in making an announcement to the passengers over the P.A. system, or perhaps they changed their minds and, after that announcement, told the passengers to go to the back of the plane, away from the cockpit. In any case, according to Newsweek magazine, which obtained a detailed account of the contents of the cockpit voice recorder, there were sounds of a death struggle in the cockpit beginning around 9:57. A lot of screaming could be heard and the crashing of galley dishes and the sound of a passenger calling, “Let’s get them.” One of the hijackers called out “Allah’u Akbar,” God Is Great.4

On the ground in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, Paula Pluta, who lives about a mile from where the plane crashed, said that she heard a rumbling sound that made her house vibrate. Going to her porch, she saw the plane dip down at a sixty or seventy degree angle before disappearing behind a line of trees. When it crashed it sent a fireball a hundred feet into the air above the tree line, she said. Another witness, Terry Butler, working at a salvage yard a half mile from the crash site, said he saw a jetliner flying just above the treetops. The plane, he said, lifted slightly, turned sharply to the right, and nose-dived into an open field. The time was 10:10, exactly two hours and eleven minutes since AA flight 11 had taken off from Boston.

*   *   *

That was the end of the hijackings, though it took some time for government authorities to assure themselves that there were no more airplanes unaccounted for. Throughout the rest of the day, the federal government remained, essentially, closed down. President Bush made a short statement in Louisiana, saying, “Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward, and freedom will be defended.” Then he reboarded Air Force One and flew to Offut Air Force Base near Omaha, Nebraska, the command center of the country’s nuclear forces and one of the world’s most secure military installations. He spoke by phone with Vice President Cheney and with his national security adviser Condoleeza Rice. He also spoke to his wife, Laura, and their twin daughters, who had been taken to an undisclosed location by the Secret Service.

It wasn’t until about 7:00 P.M. that the president returned to the White House. All flights over American territory were grounded at that point, and cities like Washington and New York were being guarded by airborne fighter planes. Flights from overseas had either returned to their destinations or been diverted, mostly to Canada. The United States was effectively sealed off from the rest of the world. The name bin Laden was already being mentioned by senior government officials as the likely terrorist commander in chief. The president went on national television at 8:30, looking grim, his eyes a bit red.

“The pictures of airplanes flying into buildings, fires burning, huge structures collapsing, have filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness and a quiet, unyielding anger,” he said. “These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat. But they have failed; our country is strong.”

*   *   *

What happened on the hijacked planes? How did Atta on flight 11 and the hijackers of flights 175, 77, and 93 manage to take over their planes without any apparent resistance from the pilots or crew?

In the wake of September 11, senior government officials, including Attorney General John Ashcroft and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, said that the hijackers had used box cutters and plastic knives as their weapons. “It was beyond one’s imagination that plastic knives and our own commercial aircraft with our own people would be used as the implement of war,” Rumsfeld said on the Lehrer NewsHour on November 7. One newspaper report said that the hijackers “worked with legal instruments: box cutters and homemade knives fashioned with blades shorter than the FAA limit of 4 inches.”5

That claim is credible, in part because boarding with box cutters and short knives, which were allowed on passenger planes before September 11, would have enabled the hijackers to avoid any risk of detention as they passed through security checks—though it is not clear what led the newspaper to conclude that some of the knives were homemade. On American Airlines flight 77, which hit the Pentagon, Barbara Olson, a lawyer and television commentator, used a cell phone to call her husband, Theodore Olson, who is the United States solicitor-general. According to Mr. Olson, his wife described the weapons as “knives and box cutters.” Olson also said that she and the other passengers had been herded into the back of the plane, so it would seem that she could only know what the men guarding the passengers had in the way of weapons. She couldn’t have known anything about the weapons used by the men who killed or disabled the pilots and took over the controls in the front of the plane.

In addition to Olson’s testimony about box cutters, the FBI found at least one box cutter at the Pennyslvania crash site of flight 93, and a box cutter was inside the flying school tote bag thrown into a Dumpster by three of the hijackers in Florida. So, box cutters would seem a likely weapon, though the fact is that Barbara Olson’s remark, as conveyed later by her husband, is the only mention of box cutters in any of the calls made from the four hijacked planes. And, in truth, it is simply not known exactly what weapons the hijackers were able to get on board with them. Certainly plastic knives had nothing to do with the hijackings. It was Jeremy Glick on flight 93 who, talking about what weapons the passengers would use to storm the hijackers, had joked about the butter knife on his tray left over from breakfast, but no passenger on any flight said anything about plastic knives in the hijackers’ hands.

Several callers talked about knives, including Barbara Olson. On flight 11, two flight attendants made calls; one of them, Betty Ong, told American Airlines ground control that four men had come from first-class seats. They killed one passenger, and they used, she said, “some sort of spray” that burned her eyes and made it difficult to breathe. Ong did not identify the weapons the hijackers used other than the chemical spray. Another attendant, Madeline Amy Sweeney, called ground control from the economy-class section. Her call was not recorded and it is not clear exactly what she said. One report, issued by the FAA, quoted her as saying that a passenger had been “shot,” but a subsequent report changed “shot” to “stabbed.”6 According to the indictment of Zacarias Moussaoui, Mohammed Atta bought a knife on or about July 8 at the airport in Zurich, Switzerland. Presumably, the prosecutors put this knife into the indictment because they feel it was used in the hijack operation. However, it is unlikely that you could buy a hardware store item like a box cutter at the Zurich airport duty-free shop, though Swiss airports usually have good collections of Swiss Army knives for sale.

Could they have had guns? It seems unlikely that they would have taken the chance of smuggling guns or bombs through security, even though they might have had a good chance of succeeding. In 1998, special FAA “red teams” that test airport security by trying to smuggle what are called “major weapons”—meaning guns and bombs—past security checkpoints succeeded 85 percent of the time in American domestic airports. Still, the hijackers themselves wouldn’t have known that, and, even if the FAA teams succeed most of the time, they don’t succeed all of the time, and there was not a single report of any person caught with a gun at any airport on September 11. Not a single one of the nineteen hijackers was stopped at any of the four different security checkpoints that they went through. Probably they didn’t have either guns or bombs.

Most likely, in other words, the weapons used by the hijackers were box cutters and other knives, augmented possibly by mace or some other disabling spray.

Whatever the weapons used, it is clear that the seizures of the airplanes happened very quickly. The recordings of communications between the planes and ground control indicate that, with the exception of flight 93, they happened so quickly there wasn’t even a struggle. No pilot on any of the flights issued a mayday or had time to tell ground control what was happening, and no passengers reported actually seeing a struggle in or near the cockpit. By the time the passengers realized that anything had happened, the planes had already been commandeered.

Entry into the cockpits, whose doors are normally kept closed on commercial flights, was critical to the hijackings. Very likely, the hijackers, having studied flight procedure, simply seized the cockpit door key from a flight attendant and used it to gain quck and quiet access to the pilots who would have been killed right away. Possibly, the cockpit crews opened their doors when hijackers threatened to kill passengers or flight attendants. It is a little bit strange, if that were the case, that no pilot took a few seconds to notify ground control that passengers were making such threats before opening the doors. It is also possible that the hijackers were simply able to break open the cockpit doors—which are built to withstand only about 150 pounds of pressure—and move in quickly with knives to stab the pilots or cut their throats while they were still sitting in their seats. In his cell phone call to Lisa Jefferson of GTE, Todd Beamer said that a flight attendant had told him that two people, presumably Captain Dahl and First Officer Homer, were lying dead or gravely wounded on the floor in first class.7 It would certainly make sense, given that the hijackers didn’t need or want the pilots, that they would have killed them and pulled their bodies out of the cockpits as they took over the planes’ controls themselves.

We will never know for sure, but probably what happened on the hijacked planes was something like this:

The hijackers, responding to a signal from their leader, got up from their seats, which were in first or business class, and at least two of them got into the cockpit either with a key or by force. They slit the throats of the pilots, or they stabbed them to death, as they sat in their seats. While two or three of the hijackers returned to the passenger cabins, the designated hijacker-pilot began to fly the plane, probably by programming the automatic pilot. He turned off the transponder, which is controlled by a simple on-off switch, and made a public address announcement to the effect that everybody would be all right as long as nobody tried to interfere with the hijacking. It is peculiar that passengers who described what was happening on their planes on their cell phones seem to have reduced the number of hijackers by one. Betty Ong on flight 11 said there were four hijackers, when, in fact, there were five, and Jeremy Glick said there were three on flight 93, rather than four. It is possible that as part of the plan, one of the hijackers remained concealed among passengers, continuing to sit in his seat, possibly to serve as a kind of surprise backup should anything go wrong. Because most hijackings in the past involved flying planes safely to some destination, where the hijackers then announced demands, passengers would not have suspected that this was a suicide mission on which everybody, including the hijackers, was going to die—except for flight 93, which had been delayed on the ground for forty-five minutes and therefore got under way late enough for passengers to learn about the events at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. If flight 93 had left Newark Airport on time, at 8:01, it is more than likely that there would never have been a passenger rebellion and that the flight would have struck its intended target, maybe the White House itself.

The foot soldiers on each flight—four of them on flights 11, 175, and 77; three on flight 93—stayed in the main cabin to keep the passengers in line, killing one or two people. Betty Ong and Madeline Sweeney, flight attendants on flight 11, both said that at least one passenger and one attendant were killed by the hijackers. Possibly these victims disobeyed some order by the hijackers, or perhaps they were killed simply to intimidate the others. Again, with the important exception of flight 93, the hijackers met with no resistance, no opposition, no trouble at all, as they mounted the most costly surprise attack on the United States since Japan struck Pearl Harbor sixty years before.

And they didn’t need battleships or carrier-based aircraft to do it. All they needed were knives, plane tickets, our own Boeing jets, and a willingness to die for their cause.