A Pretext for War (11 page)

“We don’t even have to turn on the news. We hear planes and we know right away what is going on,” said local resident Jerre Snider. “When they hid the Vice President, well, we knew where he was.”

Two thousand miles to the west, another mammoth underground command center was going to war conditions for the first time in its history. Buried deep inside the bored-out heart of Colorado’s Cheyenne Mountain, and protected by 1,750 feet of granite, is NORAD’s citylike Operations Center, the principal node for America’s air, missile, and space early-warning system. Spread out over four and a half acres, it contains fifteen two- and three-story buildings, each with its own tunnel; a convenience store; a chapel; and even a restaurant, the Granite Inn.

To prevent a cave-in, the 115,000 bolts shoring up the walls are constantly checked and tightened. And to cushion the shock of a nuclear blast, the entire facility rests on more than 1,300 half-ton springs that allow the entire city and its 1,100 residents to sway up to a foot horizontally in any direction in the event of a nuclear explosion or an earthquake.

Since the enormous construction project was completed in 1965, the prime task of the center was to look outward across the seas and over the pole for threatening missiles and bombers. Its data comes from early-warning satellites in geostationary orbit and giant radar complexes around the country. Every day, technicians track more than 8,000 objects in near-Earth orbit, most of which is “space junk.” But since its start, the early-warning system has always been focused on what was coming in, not on what was already present in the country.

On the morning of September 11, Lt. Col. John Donovan, a forty-two-year-old missile officer, had not a hint of what was about to happen fifteen minutes after he went off duty. “We told the [next] crew it was pretty quiet,” he said. His boss, Command Director Jerry Hatley, an Army colonel, was partway down the mountain when he heard about the first attacks on the radio.

Also within the mountain was NORAD’s Air Warning Center. Caught by complete surprise as well, the group was in the middle of a twice-yearly exercise when the attacks began. “We were correlating our reports with what we were seeing up there, and it’s just disbelief,” said Air Force Lt. Col. William Glover, in charge of the Center at the time. As the devastation began, they closed the massive three-foot-thick, twenty-five-ton baffled steel doors, built a third of a mile into the mountain. Using hydraulic pressure, it took less than a minute to slam them shut.

Once sealed inside and surrounded by billions of dollars’ worth of the most sophisticated intelligence and early-warning equipment, tied into advanced spy satellites and building-size surveillance antennas, the nation’s guardians were left to watch the country undergo its worst attack in nearly two centuries on $300 television sets tuned in to CNN. To many, it was impossible to escape thoughts of Pearl Harbor.

“The blast doors were closed that morning for the first time in anger since this place was opened for operations in 1966,” said Canadian Air Force Brig. Gen. Jim Hunter, vice commander for the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center. “We did what we call buttoning up the mountain. We closed the blast doors and everybody that was in the mountain was going to stay for a while. I’ve never been in combat, and that morning was the first morning that I had ever really faced a real threat. . . . Once I realized we had those blast doors closed, I think they could have launched airliners at this mountain all day and we never would have felt the effects of it, because we have twenty-six hundred feet of granite above us.”

As the Bush administration’s shadow government began setting up at Mount Weather and Site R, senior congressional leaders were also looking for a place to hide, and the decision, say intelligence officials, was to fly them to Mount Weather.

For decades, Congress had their hideout, code-named Casper and later Greek Island, secretly attached to the five-star Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Completed in 1962, the 112,000-square-foot bunker, in the remote Allegheny Mountains five hours’ drive southwest of Washington, sits more than six stories beneath the hotel’s luxury-suite West Virginia wing. In addition to a complete medical clinic, television studio, and decontamination showers to wash off radiation, the buried facility included separate chambers for the House of Representatives and the Senate, as well as a larger room for joint sessions.

The covert construction project took two and a half years to complete and used 50,000 tons of concrete. The steel-reinforced concrete walls are two feet thick, and the blast doors weigh more than twenty-eight tons and are twelve feet tall. The hinges alone weigh one and a half tons. It was constructed so that its large wheel-locking mechanism could operate only from within.

Inside there was enough space to accommodate about 1,000 people for two months. Should the crisis go on longer, however, the plans were to commandeer the entire resort, which can house 6,500 people. But with the Cold War over, the decision was made in 1995 to deactivate the facility, and by September 11, 2001, it had become a sightseeing attraction. Thus the need to send the senior congressional leaders to Mount Weather. With the Greenbrier bunker crawling with tourists, the rest of Congress was left to fend for itself.

Shortly after the Pentagon was attacked, House Majority Leader Dennis Hastert (R–Ill.), next in line of succession behind Vice President Dick Cheney, was whisked out of his office. “Two of my security people grabbed me—one on each side—and said we think a plane’s coming for the Capitol,” he said. “And so I was exited out, down through the tunnels, into our car and shuttled off at high speed to Andrews Air Force Base.

“I’m thinking to myself,” Hastert recalled, “here I am Speaker of the House, something I never dreamed would ever happen to me, and we’re evacuating the Capitol. It just can’t be happening to us. I was put in a . . . one of our secure automobiles, and the next thing I knew I was hurtling through the back streets of Washington.” From there he was put on a helicopter and flown to the secret facility. About a half hour later, Daschle and the rest of the Senate and House leadership followed.

“Immediately upon landing,” recalled Daschle, “we were met by armed guards who escorted us through two massive steel doors and down into the underground ‘secure location.’ The room we were first taken into was more bare bones than I had imagined. It had nothing in it but a couple of tables, a few folding chairs, and bright fluorescent lights. It could almost have passed for a police interrogation room. We waited there a short while before we were led down a cavelike tunnel into a more spacious room, furnished with desks and cubicles and a console of television monitors arrayed much like a NASA command center.” Sitting at some of those consoles were representatives of the alphabet soup of intelligence agencies, from the NSA to the CIA.

Like NSA, the CIA also evacuated many of its employees from its headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Director of Operations James Pavitt sent a message to all of the agency’s stations. “I expect each station and each officer to redouble efforts of collecting intelligence on this tragedy,” he said. But it was the officials assigned to the agency’s secret New York City station who were facing the most serious jeopardy. The station was located at 7 World Trade Center, a sleek forty-seven-story office building in the shadow of the twin towers. Masquerading as an office of the U.S. Army Logistics Command, the station was part of the Directorate of Operations’ National Resources (NR) Division.

NR case officers attached to the station were responsible for attempting to recruit foreign officials, mostly those assigned to the United Nations from high-priority countries. Others specialized in debriefing U.S. citizens who had traveled to countries of high interest to the CIA. The office also played a major role in providing intelligence to the FBI for their cases against defendants charged in the August 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa and the October 2000 attack on the USS
Cole
.

Soon after the two towers were attacked, all of the occupants of 7 World Trade Center, across Vesey Street from the towers, were safely evacuated. Later, blown debris would set the sixteen-year-old steel building on fire, and with the fireproofing systems completely inoperable, it would burn for hours. Eventually, the heat and flames likely reached tanks, stored just above and at ground level, containing some 36,000 gallons of diesel fuel used to run backup generators for the city’s emergency command post, also located in the building. About seven seconds after the lower levels of the building began giving way, all two million square feet of it completely collapsed into its own footprint.

Because the attack caught the entire intelligence community by complete surprise, the information reaching the President on Air Force One was a jumble of disparate facts, rumors, and hypotheticals. There were only questions and no answers. The most reliable information was coming not from the CIA, NSA, FBI, or DIA, but from ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN. Where the intelligence community was emptying its buildings and running for cover, the news organizations in New York and Washington were pulling everyone in and jumping on the story.

But the television signal aboard the presidential jet was haphazard. As a result, the President and those around him on the plane continually knew less than millions on the ground below them. “Everyone is watching the monitors, trying to get snippets of visual information, and the reception keeps going in and out,” recalled Eric Draper, President Bush’s personal photographer. “It was like a bad dream,” he said.

Seated in one of the eight chairs around the plane’s conference table, Florida Congressman Dan Miller also had difficulty getting much news from the flickering words and images on the television set. As a result, information—and rumors—were passed throughout the plane the old way, from mouth to mouth. Then, about twenty-five minutes into the flight, while flying over northern Florida, Miller and many of the others noticed the plane suddenly bank to the west. Through the window, he could see the unmistakable coastline of the Florida Panhandle, followed by Alabama and then Mississippi. “This is like a Tom Clancy novel,” Miller kept thinking. “It can’t be happening.”

At that point, Bush had made a dramatic decision. Instead of going back to Washington, he would fly inland and seek a secure shelter. “We seemed to be flying forever,” said ABC News White House correspondent Ann Compton. “And one of the Secret Service agents leaned over to me and said, ‘Look down there, we’re at 44,000 feet, and we’re not going back to Washington.’” At the White House, presidential advisor Karen Hughes attempted to place a call to Bush. “The military operator came back to me and in—in a voice that, to me, sounded very shaken, said, ‘Ma’am, I’m sorry. We can’t reach Air Force One,’” said Hughes.

The plan was to fly to Barksdale Air Force Base near Shreveport, Louisiana. According to intelligence sources, a key reason for deciding to land there was that Barksdale was home to the U.S. Strategic Command’s alternate underground command post, a bunker from which Bush could run a war if necessary.

It was also a place where the President could rendezvous with “Night Watch,” the “doomsday plane.” Once a specially outfitted Boeing 707 known as the National Emergency Airborne Command Post, by 2001 it had become a heavily modified military version of the Boeing 747-200, similar to Air Force One. Renamed the National Airborne Operations Center (NAOC), the aircraft was designed to be used by the President to direct a war in case of nuclear attack. During the Cold War, one of the four Night Watch aircraft was always in the air, twenty-four hours a day. But in the 1990s, the decision was made to keep the alert aircraft on the ground with the ability to take off on fifteen minutes’ notice.

Whenever the President travels, one of the heavily shielded Night Watch alert aircraft, complete with battle staff, is moved to a base in his general vicinity. In a bit of black humor, crewmembers occasionally wear ball caps with the image of the grim reaper holding a sickle in one hand and a button in the other, with a mushroom cloud in the background. The caption reads: “Doomsday Aircrew Member—Don’t Push Me.”

In a matter of minutes, Air Force One had gone from a flying limousine to an airborne command post. With an onboard refueling capability through a small hump in the nose, airborne tankers could keep the plane aloft indefinitely, though after about five or six days the engine oil would begin to break down and it would have to land.

To protect against heat-seeking missiles, the plane has a sophisticated infrared jammer, code-named “Have Charcoal,” flares designed to confuse the missiles, and other electronic countermeasures hidden inside its tail section. Its 238 miles of wire—more than twice the wiring found on a typical 747—is shielded to protect it from electromagnetic pulse generated by a thermonuclear blast.

In the cockpit of Air Force One, Col. Mark Tillman, the pilot, worried about security even on the presidential aircraft and ordered an armed guard posted outside his door. Then the Secret Service rechecked the identity of everyone on board and went over the emergency evacuation procedures. Another concern was that communications with air control on the ground would be overheard. “We actually have to consider everything we say,” he told his crew. “Everything we do could be intercepted, and we have to make sure that no one knows what our position is.”

On the upper deck, behind the cockpit, was the plane’s near-windowless communications suite. There three radio operators controlled the plane’s eighty-five air-to-ground telephones and its sophisticated encryption and communications systems—running the gamut from extremely low to ultrahigh to satellite frequencies. But during the flight, secret, encrypted calls were slow and they would occasionally cut out. At one point as Bush was talking to Cheney, the connection broke off in midsentence. “This is inexcusable,” Bush shouted. “Get me the Vice President.”