Zero fail, p.27
Zero Fail, page 27
A Secret Service agent called the Intelligence Division, the arm of the Secret Service responsible for assessing threats to the president. “Is there any direction of interest towards the president?” the agent asked. “Or is this just an attack on New York?”
The question hung there. The Intelligence Division didn’t know.
A few agents, along with the local sheriff, Karl Rove, and White House military aide Paul Montanus, meanwhile scrounged around for a television. They finally found one in the school office and turned it on in time to see a nightmare unfolding. News stations were replaying tape of Flight 175 hitting the South Tower at 9:03 a.m.
CNN cut away to an ABC broadcast, which at that very moment had been interviewing an eyewitness about the North Tower crash when the dark silhouette of a plane soared across the right side of the screen. The CNN signal flashed momentarily, as if there was a technical glitch, and then another fireball rose from the South Tower.
“Oh my God! There’s more explosions right now, hold on!” the eyewitness shouted.
Montanus, the Marine Corps officer, processed what he was seeing and then turned to the local sheriff. His officers helped clear the roads for the president’s motorcade.
“We gotta get out of here!” Montanus said. “Can you get everyone ready?”
Wilkinson and other agents began coordinating with the JOC, planning the president’s rapid evacuation, along with requesting extra police cars to block every intersection on the way to Air Force One. There was good reason to be on alert for a larger plot to incapacitate the government and kill Bush. The Tampa event had been publicized for more than a week. Another plane could be inbound to torpedo the school at that very moment. The tension in the staff holding room rose as Bush political aides and Secret Service agents disagreed about what to do next. The political team, led by Card, didn’t want to abruptly stop the reading and scare the children—or the viewers watching on live television. They wanted to let the president finish the classroom event and then go to another location nearby so the president could make a statement about the attack—and hopefully calm the nation. “You can’t do it in front of second-graders,” one staffer said.
But the Secret Service was thinking in terms of seconds. On the slightest chance that some unseen enemy had drawn a bull’s-eye on the president, the detail wanted POTUS on the move right away. And preferably on his way to a plane specifically designed to jam enemy radar and foil incoming missiles—not pausing at yet another vulnerable spot on the ground. “We need to get him secure,” a Secret Service agent said.
The Secret Service and the White House were fighting their age-old battle: whether the president’s ability to speak to his public or the president’s security was more important.
Meanwhile, Card knew he had to tell the president, who was still on camera, reading with the class. Rove saw the chief of staff linger in the threshold collecting his thoughts. Card was trying to figure out how to discreetly deliver such dire news. “I have to say something so that the president won’t feel compelled to ask a question,” Card thought.
It was about 9:07 a.m. Card leaned down and whispered in Bush’s right ear: “A second plane has flown into the World Trade Center. America is under attack.”
Bush’s face froze into a tense expression. As Card retreated from the camera frame and whispered the same news to Marinzel, the president stayed in place for seven more minutes, listening as the children continued to read. At one point, Bush noticed the reporters in the back of the room putting their phones to their ears for incoming calls. They were getting the same alert Bush had received.
Ari Fleischer, Bush’s press secretary, held up a piece of paper from the side of the room. On it was written, in big block letters: DON’T SAY ANYTHING YET.
When the reading program ended and Marinzel whisked Bush into a staff holding room adjacent to the classroom at 9:15 a.m., he and senior aides saw that the affable, relaxed man they knew had vanished.
“We’re at war,” Bush said. “Get me the vice president and the director of the FBI.”
In the holding room, Bush reached Cheney to discuss the best intel on the attacks and the FAA’s order to ground all planes. With Fleischer and Card offering their ideas, Bush then scribbled on a legal pad the statement he wanted to make to the nation.
Marinzel, however, was itching to leave. He feared the attackers could be planning to fly a plane into the school. Any half-organized enemy plotting an assassination attempt could have learned the president’s location, which had been posted on a public website for the last three days. “We need to get you to Air Force One and get you airborne,” Marinzel told the president.
Card proposed a compromise. More than a hundred parents, teachers, and students were waiting at that moment in the school library, where Bush was scheduled to talk about literacy, Card said. They could use this opportunity for Bush to speak about the recent attacks and reassure the public. Then they would bolt. Marinzel reluctantly agreed. There was no evidence of an imminent attack on POTUS. But this delay went against any agent’s training.
* * *
—
THE INSTANT AFTER the second plane struck, Truscott called an emergency meeting to discuss how to harden security around the White House, one of his overall responsibilities as the head of the Presidential Protective Division. He paged three top lieutenants and told them to come to his office ASAP to discuss adding snipers and emergency response teams to the complex. He knew nothing about suspicious planes heading toward Washington. By the time they gathered at 9:18 a.m. in room 10 of the Old Executive Office Building, the danger to the complex was headed in their direction, about thirty miles out.
At the same time, air traffic controllers in Cleveland were trying to find a plane they presumed had crashed: American Airlines Flight 77. It had vanished from their radar thirty minutes earlier. At about 9:27 a.m., Danielle O’Brien, a controller at Dulles International Airport in northern Virginia, spotted a green blip in the southwest corner of her radar screen. She could tell this plane had all the signs of trouble: the jet, then twelve miles out from Washington, had turned off its transponder and shut off radio contact. It was moving due east toward D.C. at full throttle—roughly 500 miles an hour. O’Brien didn’t know it was the same plane Cleveland had lost. But she could see that this aircraft had charted a course straight for Area P-56. That was the code name for the restricted airspace around the White House. She flagged her co-worker and supervisor, who contacted the Secret Service headquarters to warn them. It was about 9:30 a.m.
At around the same time, Danny Spriggs had walked into the Director’s Crisis Center, a ninth-floor battle station. With terrorists attacking New York, he had one goal at the top of his mind: making sure all nineteen people the Secret Service protected, including the First Family, were holed up somewhere safe. Spriggs had been a young agent who helped establish control outside the Washington Hilton when President Reagan was shot. Two decades later, he had risen to become a trusted confidant of the director and an assistant director over protective operations.
The crisis center was outfitted with a series of live camera feeds and monitors, a First Family locator board, and desks for intelligence gathering teams to process minute-by-minute reports. From this room in the Secret Service’s new headquarters on G Street in Chinatown, the director was supposed to be able to manage any emergency. But this crisis was quickly overwhelming Director Stafford’s new center. The Intelligence Division agents were fielding a barrage of reports and burning a lot of time responding to reports that turned out to be bogus. Many could have been easily checked and discounted. They dispatched a team to deal with a car bomb that had detonated in front of the State Department. There was no bomb. They scurried to track down more details on a plane that had crashed near Camp David. Also false. On top of that, Spriggs found many of the phones in the crisis center weren’t working. Spriggs had been trying to reach Becky Ediger, the deputy agent in charge of the Presidential Protective Division, who he thought was stationed at the Joint Operations Center, to discuss plans for quickly securing all the First Family members and shoring up the perimeter around the White House. A JOC officer told him she was at an emergency meeting with Truscott, so Spriggs rang Truscott’s line.
But just as Spriggs had begun his phone call with Truscott, the deputy director of the Secret Service, Larry Cockell, rushed over to Spriggs to share urgent news from local air traffic controllers. The FAA was warning headquarters that an inbound plane was rapidly approaching downtown Washington. It was an update on the warning Garabito had received just after 9:05 a.m. and said he had passed to the JOC.
As Truscott heard Spriggs’s report and repeated it aloud, Ediger was on an extra phone line and staring at Truscott in disbelief. Garabito, who had just called Truscott’s office to alert him to the two inbound planes, was giving Ediger a similar report. Key phrases rang in her ears: “Two more outstanding aircraft…not responding to the Tower…considered suspect…at least one headed toward D.C.”
All the top bosses in the Secret Service were learning this same scary news at the same time—and far too late. It was twenty to thirty minutes after the FAA had first warned the Secret Service about the two rogue planes coming in the general direction of Washington. Truscott thanked Spriggs and hung up. He checked with his team in the White House to help implement an emergency evacuation.
Some White House employees had earlier decided to leave the building on their own after the second plane struck. They calmly streamed out to their cars in different directions—toward the Ellipse, the Metro, or their children’s daycare centers. But with the FAA’s warning now reaching senior managers, Secret Service officers and agents ran from room to room, sometimes with assault rifles at their side. At a series of doorways, agents paused and bellowed: “Get out of the building. Everyone needs to leave. Get out now!”
Staffers described a chaotic exodus. Some were told to go north to Lafayette Park, because the plane was reportedly approaching from the south. But others were shooed out the closest door and exited onto the South Lawn. In the East Wing, agents found clusters of well-dressed young women in high heels, who worked for First Lady Laura Bush. They grew wide-eyed at the barking agents’ approach.
“Take off your shoes,” one agent commanded. “Run!”
As aides fled, some officers and agents ran past them in the Cross Hall and through the stairways with long guns, running in the opposite direction of the exits. A small cluster of agents bounded up the White House stairs two risers at a time. Their bosses had told them to get up on the roof.
“What the hell are we supposed to do up there?” one of them asked. They’d never be able to shoot a plane out of the sky with rifles. If the jet stayed on its current collision course, they’d all just accepted their last assignment.
* * *
—
WATCHING THE PLANE from the Dulles radar, O’Brien could feel her heart pounding in her chest as she, her seatmate, and her supervisor counted down the distance. Eleven miles out. Ten miles. Nine. She kept hoping the plane would change course or respond.
At eight miles out, her whole body clenched. Traveling at this speed, the jet plane could hit the White House in sixty more seconds. A tower supervisor at Reagan National Airport, just across the river from downtown, was watching too and called the Secret Service hotline in the JOC. It was 9:33 a.m. Secret Service officer Gregory LaDow answered the line.
“We have an aircraft, moving very fast,” the supervisor said. “Coming at you and not talking with us.”
This was a very grim update on the warning the FAA headquarters had shared with Garabito nearly a half hour earlier. LaDow prepared to push the emergency alert button to broadcast the news to the whole complex, but suddenly the Reagan National tower supervisor reported a change in course. “The plane is turning,” he said. “Looks like it’s coming back to the airport.”
The green blip that had been on a collision course for the White House had turned south in a semicircle, as if looping back to Reagan National Airport. In the Dulles control tower, O’Brien sat back in her chair and took her first deep breath in what felt like an hour.
Oh, thank God, the controller thought, assuming it had to be a fighter that had scrambled to protect the city. It’s one of our jets. It’s one of ours.
As agents cleared staff out of the White House, Truscott told his lieutenants gathered in his office that they should all head to the White House’s underground shelter. Built for President Truman with reinforced concrete in the early 1950s, the subterranean structure was designed to withstand a nuclear blast. The vice president, cabinet members, and national security team would be rushed there for their own protection. For the foreseeable future, they would have to run the country from inside the PEOC, the underground Presidential Emergency Operations Center.
But Becky Ediger, a Kansas native who spoke plainly, shook her head. “No,” she told Truscott. “I need to go back upstairs.”
“There’s no time,” Truscott warned.
Ediger, who had returned to her old field office in Oklahoma in the wake of the bombing there to help recover the bodies of her co-workers, was a trailblazer for women because of her senior role as deputy in charge of presidential protection. She was now effectively proposing to place herself in the path of an incoming plane. The plane heading toward the White House would likely have to crash through the top of the JOC in order to crash into the stately white mansion. Truscott outranked her, but he acquiesced. They both knew Truscott needed to be in the bunker to help relay communications to Marinzel, who was traveling with POTUS, while she needed to be up in the JOC, located on one of the top floors of the Old Executive Office Building, to help coordinate with all the Secret Service teams protecting other officials and family members aboveground.
“I’ll catch up to you guys later,” she called as she ran up the five flights of stairs to the rafters of the OEOB.
When she reached the Emergency Operations Center, Ediger found that the office deadbolt had been left open. She saw Garabito standing in the central conference room, holding down a noisy but understaffed fort. He had a phone receiver tucked against one ear and four more open phone lines set on speaker. On one open phone line was the director’s crisis center. On another was the Reagan tower.
As Ediger arrived, a technician on an open conference call line with the FAA warned that one plane suspected of being hijacked was about five minutes out, and the FAA alerted the Secret Service. It was American Airlines Flight 77, flying low and fast. It had departed Dulles early that morning but had made a U-turn near Cleveland back toward D.C. At 500 miles per hour, the plane was covering a mile every seven seconds. Ediger took a breath, then turned to a specialist on duty and dictated a text message to send to Truscott several stories belowground. “Don’t wait on me,” it said. “I’m staying upstairs with the guys.”
When the incoming plane was three minutes out, an officer helping with the White House evacuation asked if she wanted to evacuate the JOC. Ediger told the crew that anyone who wanted to leave could. There would be no judgment, she said. The White House now had a bull’s-eye on it.
Everyone stayed.
The FAA supervisor relayed a new alert: The plane had dropped off their radar, signaling it was heading to the ground. Ediger and Garabito looked at each other. They braced for what they expected next: impact.
* * *
—
WHEN THAT HORRIBLE morning started and the first plane rammed into the side of Lower Manhattan’s iconic North Tower at 8:46 a.m., the vice president had no idea what was going on. He was closeted in his office. But a senior budget aide who arrived for a meeting with Cheney just before 9 a.m. urged the vice president to turn on his office television to see what was happening in New York.
“How the hell could a plane hit the World Trade Center?” Cheney later reported thinking.
Outside the closed door, an agent on the vice president’s detail sat biding his time and chatting with John McConnell, Cheney’s chief speechwriter. McConnell was waiting there too, hoping to speak to the veep after his budget meeting about an upcoming event. After Cheney’s meeting began, the agent got a call from the Intelligence Division alerting him that the plane that had crashed into the tower that morning had been a jumbo jet. The agent frowned and told McConnell. The speechwriter got a sick feeling in his stomach. A passenger aircraft is not going to crash into the World Trade Center, McConnell thought. The agent and the speechwriter wondered aloud about the odds. Something was not right.
James Scott, the whip for Cheney’s detail that day, heard about the second crash shortly after 9:05 a.m., while he was in the Old Executive Office Building. Scott alerted the shift to the news by radio. He consulted with his supervisor on the Cheney detail about what they should do. With the second crash, they knew that some mystery terror group or foreign power had attacked New York. Scott then walked over to the West Wing sometime before nine-thirty and briefed each of the shift agents outside Cheney’s office. He ran through the contingency plans they might put in place if any danger came to Washington. Scott had no way of knowing, but danger was rapidly coming their way.
In the JOC in the Old Executive Office Building, Officer Greg LaDow thought they had just averted Armageddon in the nation’s capital. The white Boeing 757 approaching downtown at such a rapid speed hadn’t dived straight into the White House, but had instead turned south. But after a few moments, controller O’Brien in Dulles and her counterpart in the Reagan tower winced as the plane continued its loop. LaDow heard the Reagan tower supervisor narrate the path: The plane was heading back in the direction of the White House.
