A Pretext for War (8 page)

The one group Hayden could not move to Ops 1 was the counterterrorism unit, eight floors up on the top of Ops 2B. Hayden visited the unit and described the employees working there as “emotionally shattered.” “One of the more emotional parts of the day, for me,” said Hayden, “I went into our CT [counterterrorism] shop and our logistics folks were tacking up blackout curtains because we can’t move the CT shop in the midst of this.” Maureen Baginski, the head of signals intelligence, visited the group and tried to calm them down. Hayden called his wife, Jeanine, at their home a few miles away in Fort Meade and asked her to locate their children.

Shortly after the Pentagon attack, Hayden ordered the counterterrorism unit to focus their attention on Middle Eastern intercepts and to translate and analyze them immediately as they were received, rather than starting with the oldest in the stack first, as was normally the case. At 9:53
A.M.
, less than fifteen minutes after Flight 77 hit the Pentagon, analysts picked up a phone call from a bin Laden operative in Afghanistan to a phone number in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. The person in Afghanistan said that he had “heard good news,” and indicated that a fourth target was yet to be hit—a possible reference to United Flight 93 that would crash in Pennsylvania before reaching its intended target in Washington. “I got in touch with George Tenet,” said Hayden. “He said, ‘What do you have?’ and I passed on whatever information we had.” Hayden then called his wife back, said he was okay, and found out that his children had been located and were safe.

As rescue workers began racing to the Pentagon, it was quickly becoming clear to air traffic controllers in Cleveland that still another passenger jet—the fourth—was in the process of being hijacked. This time it was United Flight 93, which had taken off at 8:42 that morning from Newark International Airport en route to San Francisco. At the controls was Capt. Jason Dahl, a NASCAR fan from Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after nine, following the attacks on the World Trade Center, he had heard a brief
ping
on his company computer. It was an electronic alert notifying him of a message from United’s operations center near Chicago. In green letters on a black background came a warning to be careful of someone trying to break into the flight deck. “Beware, cockpit intrusion,” it said. “Confirmed,” typed one of the pilots, acknowledging the message.

At about 9:28, as the plane was flying near downtown Cleveland, Captain Dahl radioed Cleveland Control a cheerful greeting. “Good morning, Cleveland,” he said. “United 93 with you at 3-5-0 [35,000 feet]. Intermittent flight chop.”

But back in the main cabin there was pandemonium. Three men who had tied red bandannas around their heads were taking over and herding the passengers to the back of the plane, near the galley. Seconds later, the Cleveland controller heard the frightening sound of screaming in the cockpit. “Somebody call Cleveland?” he asked. There was no answer, just the muffled sounds of a struggle, followed by silence for about forty seconds. Then the Cleveland controller heard more struggling, followed by someone frantically shouting, “Get out of here! Get out of here!” Finally, the microphone once again went dead.

Unsure of what he actually heard, the controller called another nearby United flight to see if they might have picked up the broadcast. “United 1523,” he said, “did you hear your company, did you hear some interference on the frequency here a couple of minutes ago, screaming?” “Yes I did,” said a crewmember of the United flight. “And we couldn’t tell what it was either.” The pilot of a small executive jet also heard the commotion. “We did hear that yelling, too,” he told the Cleveland controller.

“Any airline pilot with any experience, and I’ve had quite a bit,” said veteran commercial pilot John Nance, “who sits up there strapped into a seat knows what happened here: two of my brethren being slashed to death. In the cockpit, I think what happened is the pilots had been subdued. I think their necks had been slashed. And they’re strapped in, they’ve got no way of defending themselves. You can’t turn around and fight. They’re just sitting ducks.”

Suddenly, the microphone aboard United Flight 93 came to life again, but this time with a foreign-sounding voice. “Ladies and gentlemen, here it’s the captain, please sit down. Keep remaining sitting. We have a bomb aboard.” Startled, the Cleveland controller called back. “Say again slowly,” he said. But silence returned to Flight 93.

Despite having just seen the twin attacks on the Trade Center on television, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle decided to go ahead with his weekly leadership team meeting in Room 219 of the Capitol Building. But at about 9:45, Senator Patty Murray glanced out the conference room’s windows and let out a yell. “Look,” she hollered. “There’s smoke!”

“With that we all rushed to the window,” recalled Daschle. “None of us could believe what we were seeing. There, beyond the Washington Monument, just across the Potomac, thick plumes of black smoke were billowing up from the spot where the Pentagon stands. I know it’s a cliché, but I really could not believe my eyes.” Daschle and the other senators raced back to their offices in utter confusion. “It’s hard to fathom,” Daschle later candidly admitted, “that our leaders in the upper levels of government in Washington, the people we turn to for confidence and security in times of crises, might, at just such a time, be as utterly clueless as everyone else.”

Within Washington, evacuation of federal and congressional officials—something that should have been well planned after nearly half a century of Cold War tensions—instead became more like an episode of
Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
Congress, like the rest of government, knew far less about what was going on than someone watching CNN from their bed.

“A plane is heading for the Capitol!” said a reporter excitedly. Suddenly senators, members of Congress, staff, and visitors all began charging down hallways, pushing through doors, crowding onto elevators, and running down stairwells in a mad effort to escape the building. “Get off the sidewalks,” yelled a Capitol police officer. “Moving everybody back. Moving everybody back.”

“The scene was total chaos,” said Daschle. At the same time, because no alarm system was ever activated, other people remained in their offices oblivious to what was going on around them. It was the first time in history that the entire United States Capitol had been evacuated. “There was starting to be a sense of panic,” said one congressional official with detailed knowledge of the security measures.

After wandering around aimlessly outside of the Capitol Building for about half an hour, many senators and members of Congress were directed to the Capitol Police offices, located about a block and a half away on the top of a decrepit brick building. The worried officials feared that they were the next targets and, lacking any better ideas, quickly yanked down the shades. “People were just as fearful as I’ve seen,” said Daschle. “I saw looks in senators’ faces, looks in staff faces that I’ve never seen before.”

In New York, the situation in Tower Two had grown even more critical and the calls to fire rescue more desperate. At 9:36, a woman called from an elevator saying she and others were trapped inside. “They are dying,” said the report. Eighty-three elevator mechanics from ACE Elevator had left the two buildings following the crash into Tower Two. Dozens of people were left trapped inside the elevators—ninety-nine in each tower—at the time. One elevator mechanic from another company charged into the burning buildings from the street but died trying to rescue people.

Another call was from a woman named Melissa. The floor was very hot, she said. There were no available doors. She was going to die, she said, but first wanted to call her mother. Still another call had no voice, only the sound of people crying.

Back on the 105th floor, Sean Rooney again called his wife, Beverly Eckert. She could hear her husband was having tremendous difficulty breathing. “I can’t get the door open,” he said. “I pounded and the smoke is very thick. I passed out.” Eckert asked him how bad the smoke was now. “It’s getting bad,” said Rooney. “The windows are getting hot.” Eckert asked him if anyone else was there. Rooney said there were other people nearby but he was alone. Gathered in a conference room on the same floor were at least two hundred other people who had also hoped to escape to the roof and be rescued. Instead, like Rooney, they were all trapped.

By now Eckert knew there was little hope left. “Sean,” she said with great sadness, “it doesn’t seem to me that they are going to be able to get to you in time. I think we need to say good-bye.” For the next few minutes, the two talked about their love and the happy years they had spent together. Eckert said she wished she were there with him. Rooney asked her to give his love to everyone. “I love you,” he said.

The time was getting very short in Tower Two. At 9:47, in an office near Rooney on the 105th floor, a woman called fire rescue with an ominous message. The floor underneath her, she said, was beginning to collapse.

About the same moment, Ronald DiFrancesco, who had changed his mind after climbing to the ninety-first floor and turned around and headed back down through the smoke, finally emerged from Tower Two. A short while before, fellow worker Brian Clark and Fuji Bank’s Stanley Praimnath had also made it out successfully. But just then, a short distance from the entrance, DiFrancesco saw a fireball racing toward him and he tried to block it with his arms in front of his face.

Over the phone, Eckert suddenly heard an enormous explosion followed by a crack and then a roaring sound. “The floor fell out from underneath him,” she said. “It sounded like Niagara Falls. I knew without seeing that he was gone.” With the phone cradled next to her heart, she walked into another room and on the television she could see Tower Two collapsing—the first tower to go down.

“I will always be grateful that I was able to be with him at the end and that we had a chance to say good-bye,” Eckert said. “He was so calm. It helped me in those final moments. So many people missed the last phone call. So many are saying, ‘If only I had a final chance to say good-bye.’”

DiFrancesco was thrown to the ground, bones were broken, his arms were burned, and his lungs were singed, but he was alive. Rescue workers quickly gathered him up and took him to St. Vincent’s Hospital, where he later recovered. He would be the last person out of Tower Two.

Mable Chan, the NBC
Dateline
producer, had just spotted a police helicopter near the top of Tower Two. “I thought to myself that it must have been the rescue chopper trying to save people trapped inside. I wanted that shot, I needed that shot.” Then she suddenly let out a chilling scream. “Ahhhhh—Oh my God! Oh my God!” She recalled, “Everyone around me started screaming and squealing.”

“It’s down!” shouted a reporter in a helicopter. “The whole tower, it’s gone! Holy crap!” The time was 9:59:04.

A stampede began on the streets as everyone began pushing and rushing to escape the collapsing skyscraper. Producer Mable Chan, wafer-thin with black flowing hair, was immediately swept up as if caught helplessly in a raging rapid. “Soot and fragments were gushing out and the crowd was about to run me over,” she recalled. “I finally turned around and started fleeing for my life, but thick layers of charcoal gray dirt came over me.”

She was knocked facedown on the hard cement, and a shoe kicked her in the side, another crushed her left knee, and still another struck her neck. Bleeding, her jeans ripped, she looked up. “I only saw feet running in front of my eyes and heard screaming men and women swirling around me. I asked myself, ‘Is this it?’” But she struggled to her feet and found temporary safety in a satellite truck owned by the local cable televison channel, New York One.

At that moment, F-15 pilots Daniel Nash and Timothy Duffy, who had scrambled into the air from Otis Air National Guard Base on Cape Cod an hour earlier in a futile attempt to catch up with Flight 11, were patrolling the skies over New York City. Although they had been unable to reach the aircraft before it crashed into Tower One, there was probably nothing they could have done anyway. “If we had intercepted American 11, we probably would have watched it crash,” said Nash. “We didn’t have the authority to [shoot it down]. We didn’t suspect they would use kamikaze tactics that morning. We weren’t ready for that type of an attack, to quickly shoot down one of our own airplanes.”

As they were steering aircraft away from Manhattan, facing away from the city, they turned to see Tower Two vanish in a gray cloud. “When we turned around, all we saw was lower Manhattan covered in dust and debris,” said Nash, who thought he was witnessing another attack. “Then Duff said over the radio, ‘It looks like the building collapsed.’ I thought to myself, ‘There were just tens of thousands of people killed.’ I thought it was the start of World War III.”

Back at NORAD’s Battle Cab in Rome, New York, Col. Robert Marr saw the building collapse on television and felt a profound sense of helplessness. “I have determined, of course, that with only four aircraft, we cannot defend the whole northeastern United States,” he said. “That was the sensation of frustration, of ‘I don’t have the forces available to do anything about this.’”

It was nearly ten o’clock when the eleven exhausted, blackened, but alive employees of the American Bureau of Shipping at last reached the bottom of Tower One, having started down from the ninety-first floor nearly an hour before. “I was thinking, ‘Okay, great, we’re safe,’” recalled Steve McIntyre. “But outside I could see all this falling debris flying around. I thought, ‘We’ve being coming down for an hour, what the hell is this?’” Fellow worker George Sleigh, bruised and bloodied, had separated from his colleagues and made it to an ambulance just as a police officer began shouting. “Get out!” he yelled. “Get out! The building is coming down!”