Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct.… The violent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civilian and political rights. To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free.…
ALEXANDER HAMILTON, “THE FEDERALIST NO. 8”
Mary Cheney, the vice president’s youngest daughter, was scuba diving with her partner, Heather Poe, on the tiny Caribbean island of Bonaire on 9/11, seemingly another American citizen a world away.
As she tells the story, the two emerged from an “amazing dive” to a minivan tearing down the beach road filled with Secret Service agents, one of her protective detail jumping out and saying something had happened and “we’ve got to go.” Given the call sign Alpine by the Secret Service because of her love of skiing, Mary was one of an exclusive thirty or so—the president and his wife, the vice president and his wife, their children, even their grandchildren—who are the First Family of the XYZ.
They were taken back to their hotel, where a protective screen of agents and encryption was established; Mary spoke to her mother—call sign Author—who had been rushed back to the White House from an early-morning meeting blocks away.1 Then she spoke to her father—call sign Angler. A little more than twenty-four hours after that, Mary and Heather were exclusive passengers on a specially laid-on US Customs Service jet. The skies were still closed to commercial and private traffic; people were stranded everywhere and anywhere; but not the vice president’s adult daughter and her partner.2
Elizabeth Cheney (call sign Apollo), the elder daughter, was in her car on her way to work at the State Department when the first plane hit.3 After she heard the news on the radio, she also called her father, still in his office; he assured her that he was safe but said he had to go.4 The Secret Service informed Liz that her husband and her toddler children, the vice president’s grandkids, were already being whisked away from their upper Northwest Washington home in a hush-hush maneuver, with the nanny.5
Vice President Cheney relocated behind the heavy steel doors inside the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC, pronounced “pea-ock”) underneath the East Wing of the White House, perhaps the most exclusive command bunker of all.6 A military officer there that day describes the facility as plain and functional, with a large conference room at its center and living accommodations for the chief executive off to one side. Adjacent to it and accessed from a separate entrance is the emergency apparatus of the White House Military Office, a thirty-by-twenty-foot operations center with desks, computers, telephones, and televisions.7 Among those joining Cheney: Condi Rice and her deputy Steve Hadley;8 Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby; one of his national security advisors, Eric Edelman; his counselor Mary Matalin; deputy White House chief of staff Josh Bolten; economic advisor Lawrence Lindsey; director of media affairs Tucker Eskew; assistant to the president Nick Calio; Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta; and Cheney’s wife, Lynne.9
Others were summoned. Cheney’s counsel and bureaucratic doppelgänger David Addington (he of the “insurgents” label during Hurricane Katrina) had fled the building, only to be called back by the vice president.10 The vice president also gave authorization for presidential counsel Karen Hughes to be brought in by military drivers; she was late for work that day because she was with her son Robert at school.11 There was also the PEOC operations section day shift on duty, Cheney’s Secret Service agents, the White House communications team, and various military officers of the White House Military Office and the National Security Council staff who had gone to the PEOC bunker after the Pentagon was hit and served as go-betweens, with the White House Situation Room literally overhead.12 At one point the oxygen in the overcrowded bunker dropped to such a dangerous level, all but the most essential senior officials were asked to leave.13
First Lady Laura Bush, call sign Tempo, was on Capitol Hill when the news came in, scheduled to meet with the Senate Education Subcommittee. Senators Edward Kennedy and Judd Gregg of New Hampshire met her as her limo pulled up, making small talk and playing it cool in Kennedy’s office as they waited to either carry on with the hearing or implement some kind of emergency procedure. Then the Pentagon was hit. Mrs. Bush’s Secret Service detail hustled her to Senator Gregg’s hideaway office on the lower-level interior of the massive Capitol until a heavily armed emergency response team from the uniformed division arrived. The head of her protective detail wanted to take Tempo to a secure location, leaving the staff behind, but the First Lady stood firm and they all ran behind black-clad men with guns drawn through the Capitol basement and the Russell Senate Office Building garage to waiting limos and vans and were taken to a Secret Service building less than a mile away. There Tempo waited in an underground conference room for most of the day, watching television and trying to get her husband, daughters, and parents on the phone. One of the First Lady’s aides was sent back to retrieve a few days of clothes for her just in case; her advance man retrieved Spot, Barney, and Kitty, the Bushes’ two dogs and cat.14
Turquoise, the code name for the president’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Barbara, was shuttled from her classes at Yale University to the New Haven office of the Secret Service. Twinkle, the call sign for her twin sister, Jenna, a freshman at the University of Texas in Austin, was awoken in her dorm room and taken to the downtown Driskill Hotel.15
In Sarasota, when President Bush—call sign Trailblazer—was told of the attack by his communications officer on the way to Emma E. Booker Elementary School, his first words were “I want to talk to my wife.” It was the most human of reactions; it took almost until noon before a reliable line could be established.16 “Take care of my wife and daughters,” he snarled at his supervisory agent as he was hustled away.17 “I couldn’t believe that the president of the United States couldn’t reach his wife in the Capitol Building,” Bush later wrote.18
When it comes to the government’s survival, there’s both a white and a black system. The white system, the ABCs of continuity, is the one that is open to federal agencies and emergency responders (and even states and private businesses) and is contained in federal budgets and government regulations; it complies with the laws, promotes cooperation and uniformity, provides incentives—even if one of them is merely access and membership—for participation from everyone. The black system appears in no public budget, does not follow any laws, and merely commandeers power in the name of continuity, of doing “its job,” and of providing key services.
Internally, this multibillion-dollar enterprise19 is deeply striated, with at least four different programs and four different lists. At the very bottom is continuity of operations—called COOP—which is the noncaloric pabulum doled out to civil departments and state and local governments. Every agency, every command, every base has a COOP plan, the outlines directed by higher headquarters and vaguely compliant with openly published plans and laws: backed-up computers and alternate headquarters and set procedures for devolution of authorities.
Next higher up is continuity of government—or COG—often used as a catchall but really representing the contingency plans for survival of government in the case of a national emergency. Like DEFCONs—the Defense Readiness Conditions—that guide military readiness, executive branch departments and agencies operate according to centrally declared Continuity of Government Readiness Conditions (or COGCONs). These establish response levels for government agencies, in theory running what remains.20 (“In theory” because FEMA is in charge of COG;21 but since FEMA doesn’t include the national security agencies or the White House under the Program, COG is not the primary focus of executive agent survival.)
Enduring Constitutional Government is COG’s cousin, the effort that reaches beyond the executive branch to the legislative and judiciary as well. This is not to say that everything dealing with Congress or the Supreme Court falls within ECG; they each have their own COOP plans at lower levels that are also uncontrolled by the executive, and higher plans as well for those parts that conform with the Program dealing with succession to the presidency.
The third-highest level—for want of a better term—is national security continuity. Though also officially COG, this is the realm of military command, nuclear command and control, intelligence continuity, and the extraordinary plans of the national mission force all above and beyond the COG of FEMA and the civil agencies. And one assumption of national security COG is the active involvement of some enemy (or at least the threat of terrorist attack), thereby necessitating protective and preemptive measures because some entity is assumed to be intent on thwarting the best-laid plans.
There is something even higher, something rarely spoken about and the realm of the most secret plans of government: it is called Continuity of the President. COP is the true domain of the executive agents and governs the existence of the First Family and a chosen few. Unlike with COOP, COG, or ECG, though encompassing them all, no one declares continuity of the president; it is just the day-to-day automaticity. Following the attack on the Pentagon, President Bush was urged not to return until Cheney and Rice could “find out what the hell was going on.”22 The essential staffers traveling with the president that day crammed into five hardened Secret Service cars and Suburban support vehicles and roared down Route 41 to Sarasota-Bradenton airport, where Air Force One was waiting, destination literally unknown. With the president were Andrew Card, White House chief of staff; Karl Rove, senior advisor; Harriet Miers, the presidential staff secretary; Dan Bartlett, deputy assistant to the president; Ari Fleischer, press secretary; Gordon Johndroe, assistant press secretary; and Brigadier General Mark Rosenker, director of the White House Military Office.23 In addition, there were Representatives Dan Miller and Adam Putnam of adjacent Sarasota districts, back in Florida that day because of the president’s visit; and Matt Kirk, the White House congressional liaison.24
Air Force One also carried the men and women who make up what is commonly called “the package,” the administrative, security, intelligence, and military support structure that travels with the chief executive, a group that both protects him and isolates him from any chaos that is going on feet or heartbeats away:25 There was Colonel Mark Tillman, the presidential pilot and commander of the Presidential Airlift Group and the rest of the crew of Angel, the call sign for the plane; Bush’s military aide with the football, the President’s Emergency Satchel; there was Blake Gottesman, one of the president’s “body men,” or personal aides; the president’s Secret Service protection detail; Navy Captain Deborah Loewer, director of the White House Situation Room and the presidential communications officer that day; and the president’s CIA briefer, who that day was just coincidentally Mike Morell, a man who would himself become director in 2012 after David Petraeus’s indiscretions.26 Also present were the nameless audiovisual specialists, communicators, and IT experts and the drivers from the White House; the galley stewards, flight attendants, engineers, mechanics, and security for Angel itself; the official White House photographer; and the fourteen members of the White House press assigned to the primary pool that day, who get to fly in the back of the plane.27
It was a lot of ballast, and as soon as the plane landed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, the superfluous press and the congressmen were dumped. The original plan, once the Pentagon was hit, was to fly directly to Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, the headquarters of the Strategic Command, but according to the head of the White House Military Office, Andrew Card felt that that would take too long. “It was very important to the President to address the nation and make sure that the people could see that he was safe and in total control of the situation,” Rosenker said.28 So they landed at Barksdale so the president could make a public statement.29 Then it was on to Offutt.
Once Air Force One landed in Nebraska, the Secret Service was still adamant about the president not returning to Washington; they wanted him to hunker down at Offutt for twelve hours or more. Bush argued with his handlers and with Cheney, who was also urging him to stay away. “Unless they tell me something I haven’t heard,” Bush seethed, “this ass is going back to Washington.”30 So after less than an hour on the ground, Colonel Tillman was told that he’d better get ready to move again; the decider had decided to be the decider. The Program went through all of the motions, requiring who knows what strings to be pulled and what superhuman feats to extend the bubble, launching the Strategic Command’s Airborne Command Post, a plane reserved for nuclear war that looks much like Air Force One, as a decoy a few minutes before Air Force One took off.31
One of the reasons the executive agents exist is that on any random Tuesday, and with all of the live scenarios swirling, plans are sure to fail, things are sure to go wrong. But on this Tuesday, one of the oddest of things that went wrong was that the head of the Program—the chief executive agent—wasn’t where he was supposed to be.
Joe Hagin, officially deputy White House chief of staff in charge of operations, former body man for Bush I and a man who had become part of Bush II’s inner circle on the campaign trail—“part of the family,” Andrew Card later said 32—was the president’s man who oversaw the Program. But on that day, Hagin was with an advance team scouting an upcoming presidential visit in New York City, uncharacteristically separated, neither with the apparatus of the presidency nor at the White House. A testament to Hagin’s abilities (or his power), the NYPD assigned a set of squad cars to rush him and his crew across the Hudson River, where they were handed off to New Jersey state troopers, who roared with them down the Jersey Turnpike to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where they boarded a waiting military jet, destination Omaha and President Bush. Halfway to Nebraska, in the air over Missouri, Hagin learned that Air Force One was unexpectedly returning to Washington, so he ordered his plane turned around as well: destination Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, where a flashing-lights convoy of Secret Service, military, and police awaited to drive them all to the White House.33
At about 10 a.m., almost an hour and a half after the first plane hit the World Trade Center and twenty-five minutes after the Pentagon was hit, the Program kicked in with an announcement: “By executive order of the President of the United States, Continuity of Government and Continuity of Presidency programs are now in effect.”34 Up to that point, executive agents and protective details all across the government had been operating in precautionary mode, but now everything was official, mandatory, and automatic. The plans would be implemented. An aide even informed the vice president that he had to evacuate; but Cheney looked at him like he was insane and said he wasn’t going anywhere.35
That day, third in line to be president was House Speaker John Dennis “Denny” Hastert of Illinois, a man Rolling Stone magazine named one of the ten worst members of Congress ever and the weakest House speaker in history.36 Cheney at first had trouble reaching him on the phone, but when he did, he suggested that Hastert go to a secure location—Mount Weather in Bluemont, Virginia.37 Hastert was taken to Andrews Air Force Base and from there was helicoptered to Mount Weather, arriving by 11 a.m.38 Hastert went to the bunker with other senior legislators, only to return to Washington that afternoon before the official all-clear was given, joining others members to sing “God Bless America” on the Capitol steps.39
The next in line for the presidency, the president pro tempore of the Senate—the longest-serving member, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, then eighty-three years old—refused to move anywhere and was taken to his Capitol Hill home instead.40
Following Byrd on the constitutional succession chart was Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was in Peru; airborne and headed back to the US by 11:58 a.m.41 At 3:30 p.m., an impromptu National Security Council meeting was held in the White House, now with Cheney, Rumsfeld, and CIA director George Tenet present, Powell still in the air on his way back.42
Left on the tarmac in Sarasota that morning to fend for himself was Secretary of Education Rod Paige, the sixteenth in line for the presidency. Paige, a constitutional successor, drove back to the nation’s capital in a rental car with his chief of staff.43 An argument could be made—if anyone noticed—that it was a good idea to separate the various constitutional successors to the presidency, leaving one in Florida just in case. But it wasn’t intentional and it wasn’t part of any plan. Don Evans, secretary of commerce and tenth in line for the presidency, sat in his office all morning on 9/11 awaiting some kind of order or word, even after Continuity of Government measures were implemented; those in charge had completely forgotten about him and his department. Evans finally had an aide drive him home to McLean, Virginia, and sat around at home for the rest of the day watching television.44 After almost fifty years of preparations and practice, after constructing an elaborate and foolproof edifice, the executive agents had overlooked a major branch of the executive office, or were too busy—or had their own plans.
Attorney General John Ashcroft, eighth in line for the presidency, was also in the air when he learned about the Twin Towers, ordering his government plane to turn around and return to Washington. ESCAT had been declared by the Pentagon—Emergency Security Control of Air Traffic—a kind of martial law in the skies, which meant that no plane could now fly without military authorization. Evidently Ashcroft wasn’t important enough to clear his own way through, and he had to wait for a military fighter escort to come and accompany him before proceeding into Washington airspace: the attorney general, the chief law enforcement officer of the United States, on a government plane.45
Within twenty-four hours, an army of some 4,000 serfs had taken care of the family—Trailblazer and Tempo, Twinkle, Turquoise, Angler and Author, Alpine, Apollo, the grandkids, the nanny, and their pets—driving and flying them here and there, protecting them and feeding them. Former President Bill Clinton, who was in Cairns, Australia, got his Secret Service detail to falsely invoke a threat to him so that he could get clearance (and a government plane) to fly home that night.46 President Bush’s parents—former President George H. W. Bush and his wife, Barbara—were also away from home, on their way from Washington, DC, to Houston for a speaking engagement, when their commercial plane was ordered to the ground in Milwaukee; the former First Family were secured at a nearby motel by their Secret Service detail. After the harrowing experience of eating dinner at an Outback Steakhouse, the next morning Timberwolf and Tranquility somehow also got the okay—and a government plane—to fly back to Kennebunkport. “Flying from a totally closed-down airport, through a total [sic] empty sky, to a totally closed-down airport was eerie. But it was nice to be home,” the former First Lady recounts.47
While the First Family was being catered to, what’s called the survivors’ core was evacuated, with just enough time to notify their families and loved ones, who were given a toll-free phone number to contact them but were otherwise left behind.48 General Dick Myers, then vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recalls that once Continuity of Government was declared, the core—a rotating staff of around 150 senior officials from every Cabinet department, each with orders to join up with the envelopes at underground bunkers to implement continuity plans if Washington is decimated—went into action.49 Sort of. Myers, who normally would be in the survivors’ core, stayed at the Pentagon—the Joint Chiefs chairman, Army General Hugh Shelton, also being out of the country that day—leaving survival to a third-ranking army reserve three-star general who later publicly bragged that for a while he was the ranking military man at the bunker on 9/11.50
Many of the survivors’ core did evacuate, and some were indeed in some official chain of command and confirmed by the Senate: because Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld also refused to move, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was driven to Davison Army Airfield, not far from the Pentagon, where he was then helicoptered to Site R—commonly known as Raven Rock—on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border.51 Secretary of the Army Thomas White, the top executive agent in the Pentagon hierarchy, not just the coordinator of continuity for the Pentagon but also the middleman for military support to civil authorities, insisted on staying at the Pentagon but was forcibly herded out of the building and off to Site R by his handlers, leaving Army Vice Chief of Staff General Jack Keane in charge of the army (and of decisions relating to military support to civil authorities) for the day, until the Program implementers recognized that they had operated contrary to their own plans and brought White back.52
Many other midlevel officials who worked at the White House—some of whom were also supposed to be part of the survivors’ core—also declined to evacuate, pulling in information and feeding it to Cheney and Bush, acting as the intermediaries to Air Force One and the underground bunker. There was an awkward moment when gas masks were brought into the White House Situation Room and there weren’t enough to go around for all who stayed; one executive agent also compiled a “death list” so that if the building was destroyed there would at least be a record of who was there in the national rubble.53
Had the worst come then, the men and women in the aboveground White House Situation Room would have been gone as well, as might have the vice president, national security advisor Rice, and her deputy, Hadley, both of whom stayed in the underground bunker. In other words, the survivors’ core that day was whoever it ended up being, who happened to be in or out of town, who evacuated or who was superfluous, who was wherever they were at the moment they were there, because other than Cheney, who stayed in the imaginary safety of a hole in the ground, everyone else was hypothetically vulnerable.
At about 4 p.m., President Bush had had enough with “this continuity-of-government thing,” as he called it, the faceless and nameless authority that was implementing plans and purporting to help but also, in his opinion, making the country and the presidency look like a horse’s ass. Enough with going along with these self-declared rules, Bush said, telling the White House additionally that he now wanted every effort expended to bring the Cabinet home, highest priority. The president listened to the arguments of the Secret Service one more time, and to Cheney and Rice, about how it was much wiser to let the system remain in charge and about the need for him to stay away. Bush thanked them for their input and announced that he was canceling the executive order for Continuity of the Presidency. He was returning to Washington.54
Six hours later, back in the White House, address to the nation delivered, orders given to get the entire Cabinet home for a morning meeting,55 rescues and cleanup under way, panic somewhat subsided, Vice President Cheney, his wife, his military aide with the football, his vice presidential communications officer, his doctor, three Secret Service agents, and his two top staffers—Scooter Libby and David Addington—got into Marine Two, embarking from the South Lawn, from which only the president had ever before taken off previously, for a helicopter trip to Camp David, that night’s “undisclosed location.”56
In his autobiography, Cheney tersely says only that “the Secret Service evacuated Lynne and me to Camp David, a secure location apart from the president.”57 He strangely makes no mention of the mountains moved on behalf of his broader family. By September 13, Aspen Lodge filled with the Cheney clan, the kids and spouses, the grandkids, and the nanny, with an invisible cadre in the background doing the dishes and doing the laundry—no doubt an elite, but still made up of men and women who all kissed their own families good-bye to serve the First Family.