Zero fail, p.28
Zero Fail, page 28
This time, a JOC officer hit the emergency alert button. It was 9:33 a.m. The broadcast traveled over the Charlie and Tango frequencies, used for the White House and the vice president:
“Unidentified aircraft coming toward the White House!”
As they stood talking outside Cheney’s office, a familiar crackling sound came over their radios. The agents instinctively fell silent. Scott didn’t miss a beat. He had to evacuate the vice president. He flung open the door to Cheney’s office, and four fellow detail agents rushed in behind him. The surprised vice president was monitoring the news coverage on a TV next to his desk.
“Sir, we have to leave immediately,” Scott said, looming in front of his desk.
Cheney began to ask a question, but Scott didn’t wait for him to finish. He slammed his open palm on Cheney’s desk and bellowed: “Now!”
Scott then put his left hand on the back of Cheney’s shoulder and the right hand on the back of Cheney’s belt and partially lifted the vice president a few steps toward the door. Cheney got the point. He and Scott then began jogging together, down a narrow West Wing corridor to what Scott hoped would be safety.
But Scott’s forceful character made up for a major hole in the Secret Service’s emergency planning. Neither Scott nor other key members of the vice president’s detail were fully briefed and empowered to get into the military-controlled shelter below the White House. An agent standing at a post usually manned by an officer—near the West Wing’s front desk—shouted out directions to make sure agents knew how to get to the stairs and tunnel leading to the shelter under the East Wing. Odd as it sounds, no one had envisioned the kind of attack that kept the president away from home and required safeguarding the vice president at the White House.
When Scott and Cheney reached the bottom of the stairs in a tunnel leading to the bunker, called the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, Scott still had one major problem. He couldn’t enter the shelter on his own authority. The military tightly guarded access to the PEOC, and unlike top presidential detail agents, many vice presidential agents hadn’t been given the S-keys to get inside.
The Secret Service would later tell the world that Cheney and his detail had reached safety underground, a “secure location,” just a minute or so before the Pentagon crash. They reported that he got to safety by 9:37 a.m.
But the truth of what happened was kept a closely held secret for years. The suspicious hijacked plane crashed into the west side of the Pentagon at 9:38 a.m. At that moment, Cheney was standing at the base of the stairs outside the bunker, powerless and far more exposed if there had been a crash. Cheney had to wait a few more moments for someone to open the door and let him inside. If American 77 had kept heading toward the White House that morning, Vice President Cheney and his detail would more likely have been added to the long list of victims of the 9/11 attacks.
* * *
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AT ROUGHLY 9:30 a.m., President Bush spoke to the nation from the podium at the Emma E. Booker Elementary library. A group of students, their parents, and teachers had gathered to hear him talk about education reform. Some of the teachers’ mouths dropped open and a few children looked confused as he uttered the first sentences.
“Today, we’ve had a national tragedy,” he said. “Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack on our country.” He assured the audience he had directed all the nation’s resources to help the victims and catch the enemy. “Terrorism against our nation will not stand,” he said.
The president had no idea that as he spoke, the White House was being evacuated and a hijacked plane was flying fast and low toward downtown Washington. His speech lasted one minute and seventeen seconds. When he finished, the president and his entourage vanished.
“Poof, he was gone,” Principal Gwendolyn Tosé-Rigell recalled.
After Bush stepped back into the Beast, his fourteen-car motorcade sped away, doing 80 miles an hour, nearly double its normal speed. As they flew down an empty highway, Bush noticed a stream of police cars riding alongside. The Service had asked that they be placed there in case the enemy tried to launch a rocket-propelled grenade into the side of the limo.
In the quick eight-minute ride to the Sarasota airport, at about 9:40 a.m., the president took a call in the limousine from National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. Marinzel, riding in the right front seat, and Rove, riding in the back, could hear only one side of the conversation.
“Oh, no,” Bush said, sounding alarmed. There was a pause, then he asked, “Is Rumsfeld alive?”
Bush’s fellow passengers learned the grim news when the president hung up. A hijacked plane had hit the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m. and a massive fire had engulfed the west side. Massive casualties were expected. It was almost too much to absorb. On this day, nobody knew exactly where or when the next plane would drop out of the sky.
* * *
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IN THE COURSE of fifty-one minutes, three commercial passenger planes had been used as missiles to attack symbols of U.S. power. After the U.S. government had first learned it was under attack, the Secret Service’s presidential detail allowed the president of the United States to remain in a fixed location for thirty minutes. His advisers and agents had broadcast his location to the world by allowing him to spend some of that time sitting in a chair or standing at a lectern on live television. The vice president, too, had been a vulnerable target without his or his detail’s knowing it, despite a warning thirty minutes before his evacuation about suspicious planes heading to Washington. Because no one had planned for this kind of attack, Cheney did not reach the safety of a bombproof bunker and control room before a third plane crashed a half mile from the White House.
The 9/11 attacks had caught federal agencies flat-footed. So many individuals acted with heroism and sound instincts, and yet the attacks revealed gaping holes in the ability of the government to spot risks and respond to crises. The Service’s role was protecting the stability of the democracy, and on this day, they’d been lucky not to lose the head of that government. In the wake of the attacks, the Service quietly shredded and rewrote its emergency action plans. In the case of a terror attack or incident, the Service’s first command would be to evacuate the president to a secure and unknown location. No political staffer could overrule them.
The Joint Operations Center and Emergency Operations Center—which had been co-located on the top floor of the Executive Office Building, next to terrorists’ top target, the White House—would have to be moved. The Secret Service leaders realized a plane crash at the White House that day could have paralyzed the Secret Service’s command center for all communications and decision making.
“There is a line of demarcation in the Service: before and after 9/11,” said former presidential detail agent Jonathan Wackrow. Before 9/11, “we talked about an attack like Squeaky Fromme. No one ever thought of the option of this type of attack, including the military. The military considered a nuclear attack. The Secret Service worried, what if the president is shot at? But this type of attack was completely unknown.”
* * *
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AFTER 9/11, DETAIL agents drilled over and over how to respond to a terrorist attack similar to those of that day, with multiple bombings or chemical releases scattered around the country. “The goal is getting the president airborne within minutes. It’s not even a debate anymore,” Wackrow said. “Internally, we spent a lot of time criticizing the decisions on those days. But nobody thought about relocation before. Relocation from where? They’d never had to make that kind of decision before.
“It comes back to the fact that the policies and procedures of the Secret Service are born out of blood,” he said. “The Service will get better once it’s tested. Every time it is tested, it gets better. As the global threat environment constantly changes, the Service has to change in response.”
* * *
—
JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT on this horrendous day, an agent working the midnight shift and standing at post F8 got a radio call with a chilling warning—and an equally daunting assignment. The Air National Guard’s combat air patrol had spotted a plane nearing downtown Washington and not communicating with the tower.
“You have to wake up the president and the First Lady right now,” the supervisor explained. “Go get them and take them to the basement.”
The agent knew this was important, and dreadful.
“I’m telling you, he didn’t like to have to go into that bedroom,” a fellow agent recalled.
The president didn’t like it either. His detail leader, Truscott, had earlier tried to persuade Bush and his wife to sleep in the underground bunker for the night. But Bush had seen that dusty room with a pullout bed and refused. Still, despite the comforts of his own bed upstairs, Bush had struggled to fall asleep that night. Suddenly he realized someone was at the door, breathing heavily as if they had been running. “Mr. President,” the agent said. “You’ve got to come now. The White House is under attack!”
The president put on running shorts, the First Lady got her robe. Together they grabbed their cat, Ms. Kitty, and Scottish terrier, Barney, and called for their springer spaniel Spot to follow. Two agents, one in front and one behind, ran toward the basement with the First Couple and their pets, carrying automatic rifles at their hips.
Down in the 1940s-style bunker, the Bushes were met by Condoleezza Rice, who had been staying at the White House for safety reasons. An Air Force military aide was there as well.
“What the hell is going on?” Bush asked.
The airman explained the inconvenience. The military had spotted a suspicious plane that wasn’t communicating flying just south of the Capitol. The suspicious plane turned out to be an F16 that had switched on the wrong transponder code while returning to Andrews Air Force Base.
“Don’t worry, Mr. President, it’s one of ours,” he said.
The president snorted. His day had started in Florida with a jog at dawn, then a wave of shocking, bloody attacks. It ended eighteen hours later, with a bogus threat, and his protectors walking him and his wife back upstairs in their bedclothes to get some rest.
CHAPTER 14
“YOU DON’T BELONG HERE”
September 11 shook the moorings of the country, and the public’s faith in the nation’s security shield. The startling success of the terrorists revealed a “failure of imagination”—a failure to see and fend off a gathering threat in al-Qaeda. The attacks also made clear some basic weaknesses in the nation’s ability to respond to a crisis, including the Secret Service’s preparation for an attempt to decapitate the government.
“Nineteen men armed with knives, box cutters, Mace and pepper spray penetrated the defenses of the most powerful nation in the world. They inflicted unbearable trauma on our people,” Thomas Kean, the chairman of the 9/11 Commission, said when releasing his panel’s extensive report. “On that September day we were unprepared.”
The Secret Service thought it had prepared for an attack by air, in the wake of the 1994 aircraft crash at the White House’s South Grounds. But the FAA Tigerwall system hadn’t helped much on 9/11. Any antiaircraft weaponry the Service had was viewed as either insufficient or unwise to use because of the carnage it could cause to bring down a plane in downtown Washington. Agents were flabbergasted as their bosses told them to go up to the roof with their rifles. Years before 9/11, Richard Clarke, a top national counterterrorism adviser, had raised his concern that the Secret Service’s solution was inadequate. In 1998, he led a tabletop exercise with the Secret Service, the FAA, and the Defense Department to game out what they could do if terrorists flew a hijacked Learjet loaded with explosives toward a target in downtown Washington.
The catastrophic losses of 9/11 strengthened the country’s resolve to prevent anything like it from catching our government off guard again. In the days and weeks after the World Trade Center towers fell, the White House and Congress were consumed with how to ramp up the nation’s defenses. At the Secret Service, Director Stafford instructed his staff to prepare a plan for hardening the White House’s borders on all four sides. After conferring with Chief of Staff Andy Card, the Service decided against closing Fifteenth and Seventeenth streets—two major downtown arteries to the east and west of the White House complex. But at 1:30 a.m. on the Monday after 9/11, crews finished installing the Jersey barriers that would indefinitely close E Street to cars and dramatically expand the White House’s southern flank. That was window dressing compared to the much bigger changes that were coming to the Secret Service.
On September 20, nine days after the attacks that killed nearly three thousand people in two of America’s largest cities, President Bush made a rare address to a joint session of a somber Congress. “Night fell on a different world” after the attacks on New York and Washington, the president said to the still chamber. “Tonight, we are a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom.”
He said the military would be called to action soon, a foreshadowing of the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan, al-Qaeda’s headquarters. But the nation had to also forge a new coordinated plan to shield the homeland, he said. “Our nation has been put on notice, we’re not immune from attack. We will take defensive measures against terrorism to protect Americans. Terror unanswered can not only bring down buildings, it can threaten the stability of legitimate governments. And you know what? We’re not going to allow it.”
Bush announced he had asked Tom Ridge, a Vietnam combat veteran and the governor of Pennsylvania, to join the White House staff as his point man on protecting the homeland.
Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut clapped wanly from the Democratic side of the chamber.
* * *
—
LIEBERMAN WOULD HAVE been vice president then—if the Supreme Court had ruled differently almost a year earlier in the bitter Bush v. Gore 2000 election recount decision. He was not persuaded that simply adding a new czar for homeland security would fix the problem. Before September 11, some of his Democratic peers had pushed for a wholesale reorganization of the government’s many splintered agencies that dealt with security. Lieberman believed September 11 had further proved the need for their plan. Thousands of border control, air travel, investigative, and intelligence agents who were scattered across separate departments and reported to different cabinet secretaries needed to work in concert.
In early October, Lieberman pitched this plan to President Bush in a private meeting with a small group of lawmakers at the White House. A security czar needed the power that came with a new department, the senator said, with his own budget and troops. But the president politely waved him off. Just as Vice President Cheney had done before the attacks, Bush warned that creating a new bureaucracy was a knee-jerk response.
“It’s just more big government, Joe,” he said.
But Lieberman left the White House meeting with the same resolve. In the early weeks of 2002, Lieberman had whipped up so much support among his colleagues for a new Department of Homeland Security that Congress was close to passing a bill to create what the president had rejected. The White House Legislative Affairs Office started to count the votes. Lieberman’s Homeland Security bill had enough. That was bad news for the White House and the GOP leadership. Neither wanted to cede a powerful national security win to the Democrats. “That was driving decisions,” one senior Ridge aide told The Washington Post.
* * *
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PUBLICLY, THE WHITE House maintained a veneer of mild opposition. “Creating a cabinet office doesn’t solve the problem,” Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters in March. But secretly, in a basement conference room in the White House, a stealth team of White House aides chosen by Chief of Staff Andy Card began meeting in April to create just such a new department. Their task: Build a new civil defense agency and choose which parts of forty different agencies should join it. They worked on a blueprint, which would reassign tens of thousands of employees and likely piss off half of them, for six difficult weeks without one leak.
A devastating revelation in mid-May intensified the pressure for Bush to take concrete action. CBS News, citing anonymous sources, reported that the president had been vaguely warned about a possible Osama bin Laden plot in the weeks before September 11. Bush’s Daily Intelligence Briefing in early August mentioned specifically some chatter that the attack could involve the hijacking of planes.
On June 6, Bush sprang the new department on his cabinet secretaries, the day before he planned to announce it to the public. Ridge, who had been battered with endless kvetching from cabinet members when he proposed a similar reorganization plan, had to stifle a chuckle as each one politely lied to Bush: “Seems like a good idea, Mr. President,” they said.
In truth, nearly every one of them hated it. Some, like Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, weren’t even out of the cabinet room before they started calling their aides on the phone, working ferociously to reclaim parts of their turf the new department would swallow.
There was one cabinet member, however, who didn’t put up a fight. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill viewed the president’s centralization of security agencies as ill-conceived and unlikely to make the country safer. But he readily relinquished the Treasury law enforcement divisions that Card’s “basement team” had tentatively chosen to put in the new larger Homeland Security Department. One of them was the United States Secret Service. Without a tear, O’Neill said so long to a three-thousand-employee agency that had been a part of the Treasury Department since 1865.
