Against All Enemies (6 page)

“How the fuck did they get on board then?” I demanded.

“Hey, don't shoot the messenger, friend. CIA forgot to tell us about them.” Dale Watson was one of the good guys at FBI. He had been trying hard to get the Bureau to go after al Qaeda in the United States with limited success. “Dick, we need to make sure none of this gang escapes out of the country, like they did in '93.” In 1993 many of the World Trade Center bombers had quickly flown abroad just before and after the attack.

“Okay, I've got that.” As we talked, we both saw on the monitors that WTC 2 was collapsing in a cloud of dust. “Oh dear God,” Dale whispered over the line.

“Dale, find out how many people were still inside.” I had often been in the World Trade Center and the number that popped into my head was 10,000. This was going from catastrophe to complete and total calamity.

“I'll try, but you know one of them. John just called the New York Office from there.” John was John O'Neill, my closest friend in the Bureau and a man determined to destroy al Qaeda until the Bureau had driven him out because he was too obsessed with al Qaeda and didn't mind breaking crockery in his drive to get Usama bin Laden. O'Neill did not fit the narrow little mold that Director Louis Freeh wanted for his agents. He was too aggressive, thought outside the box. O'Neill's struggle with Freeh was a case study in why the FBI could not do the homeland protection mission. So, O'Neill retired from the FBI and had just become director of security for the World Trade Center complex the week before.

We were silent for a moment. “Dale, get the word out to evacuate the landmarks and all federal buildings across the country.”

“You got it…and Dick…hang in there, we need you.”

I walked over to the communications desk where one of the longest-serving Situation Room staff was still there. Gary Breshnahan had come to the White House as an Army sergeant during the Reagan administration. To insure communications back to the Situation Room, Gary had accompanied National Security Advisor Bud McFarlane on the secret mission to Tehran that became the central act of the Iran-Contra fiasco. Later Gary had videotaped Bill Clinton's deposition during the impeachment process. He was a single father of three.

“You shouldn't still be here, Gare,” I tried.

“You want this fuckin' video to work, don't you?”

“Okay, well if you're staying…can you pull up Coast Guard and Treasury?”

“Coast Guard, no problem. But I'll bet the mortgage nobody is home at Treasury.”

When I walked back to the Video Conferencing Center, Cressey told me what had happened to one of the aircraft we thought was headed toward us. “United 93 is down, crashed outside of Pittsburgh. It's odd. Appears not to have hit anything much on the ground.”

A new site was appearing on a wall monitor, a row of men in light blue, Coast Guard Commandant Jim Loy in the middle of them. He was one of the most competent people in federal service, quiet and effective. (Loy would later run the new Transportation Security Administration and then be promoted to run the new Department of Homeland Security as its Deputy Secretary.)

“Dick,” the commandant informed me, “we have a dozen cutters steaming at flank speed to New York. What more can we do to help?”

“Jim, you have a Captain of the Port in every harbor, right?” He nodded. “Can they close the harbors? I don't want anything leaving till we know what's on them. And I don't want anything coming in and blowing up, like the LNG in Boston.” After the Millennium Terrorist Alert we had learned that al Qaeda operatives had been infiltrating Boston by coming in on liquid natural gas tankers from Algeria. We had also learned that had one of the giant tankers blown up in the harbor, it would have wiped out downtown Boston.

“I have that authority.” Loy turned and pointed at another admiral. “And I have just exercised it.”

“Justice, Justice, over.” I signaled to Larry Thompson, the DAG, Deputy Attorney General. “Larry, can you have Immigration get together with Customs and close the land borders?”

“Consider it done, but you know what the borders are like. You can just walk across in a lot of places, especially along the Canadian border. By the way, we need some help getting the AG back. Can we get approval for an aircraft out of Milwaukee?” All flights were now banned, except for the fighters and AWACS.

Frank Miller reported that DOD had gone on a global alert, DEFCON 3: “That hasn't happened since the '73 Arab-Israeli War.” I remembered it. It was the first time I had worked a crisis. I was a young staffer in the National Military Command Center when Soviet nuclear warheads were discovered en route to Egypt. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger had ordered DEFCON 3 and sent U.S. forces racing all over Europe without telling our NATO allies.

“State, State, go.” Armitage acknowledged the call. “Rich, DOD has gone to DEFCON 3 and you know what that means.” Armitage knew; he had been an Assistant Secretary of Defense in the first Bush administration.

“It means I better go tell the Ruskies before they shit a brick.” Armitage activated the Nuclear Risk Reduction Center, down the hall from the State Department Operations Center. The NRRC was connected directly to the Russian Ministry of Defense just outside the Kremlin. It was designed to exchange information in crises to prevent misunderstanding and miscalculation.

Armitage reappeared. “Damn good thing I did that. Guess who was about to start an exercise of all their strategic nuclear forces?” He had persuaded his Russian counterpart to defer the operation. “By the way, we are taking calls here from countries all over the world who want to help. We are going to close all our embassies to the public and skinny down the staffs, step up security.”

Jane Garvey was waving her arms at the camera. “We're down to 934 aircraft aloft, but we have a problem in Alaska.” A Korean Airlines 747 looked like it had been hijacked. “KAL 85, NORAD is scrambling.”

“Has Alaska Center got comms with it?” I wanted to know if FAA could talk to the 747. Garvey indicated a thumbs-up, yes. “Okay, tell KAL it will obey orders from the F-15s or we will blow it up. We are not about to have them fly into Prudhoe Bay.” I had an image of the 747 taking out the port that exported all the oil from the North Slope.

President Bush had landed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, escorted by fighter aircraft. He called Cheney on a secure landline. On the basis of Frank Miller's recommendations, Cheney pressed the president to proceed to a bunker, either Strategic Command headquarters in Omaha or NORAD in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado. The press corps on board were told not to report where they were.

Before lifting off again, Bush taped a statement to be broadcast only after he was airborne. “Make no mistake. The United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts.” At this point, they hardly seemed cowardly. “Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward. And freedom will be defended.” He seemed tentative.

Cressey told me that Fenzel was looking for me. I picked up the open line to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, only to find that once again it had a dial tone. When I punched the PEOC button, the person answering the line grunted and passed the phone to Major Fenzel. “Who is the asshole answering the phone for you, Mike?” I asked.

“That would be the Vice President, Dick. And he'd like you to come over.” Frank Miller again took over the chair of the video conference, becoming, as I was most of the day, the nation's crisis manager.

I had walked from the Situation Room in the West Wing through the Residence to the East Wing many times before, flashing my badge at the many guard posts along the way. Now, as I walked through the West Wing and the Residence, there was no one there. No sound. The guards had been ordered by Brian Stafford to assume a perimeter a block outside the White House fence. They had cordoned off streets and set up machine guns. Inside the fence, the White House itself was eerily empty.

In the quiet of that walk, I caught my breath for the first time that day:

• This was the “Big al Qaeda Attack” we had warned was coming and it was bigger than almost anything we had imagined, short of a nuclear weapon. With the towers collapsed, the death toll could be anywhere from 10,000 to maybe as high as 50,000. No one knew. And it wasn't over. I kept hearing in my mind Marlon Brando's whispered words from
  Apocalypse Now,
  “The horror, the horror.”
  
• Now we would finally bomb the camps, probably invade Afghanistan. Of course, now bin Laden and his deputies would not be at the camps. Indeed, by now the camps were probably as empty as the White House. We would begin a long fight against al Qaeda, with no holds barred. But it was too late. They had proven the superpower was vulnerable, that they were smarter, they had killed thousands.
  
• The recriminations would flow like water from a fire hose. There was no time for thinking like that. Not now. We had to move fast. Other attacks were probably in the works and had to be stopped. The country was in shock. The government had largely fled Washington. The nation needed reassurance. We needed to find our dead.
  

As I made it to the bottom of the stairs in the East Wing, I turned the corner and found a machine gun in my face. Cheney's security detail had set up outside the vault doors, with body armor, shotguns, and MP5 machine guns. Although they knew me, they were not about to open the vault door.

“Hey guys, it's me. The Veep called me over here. At least call inside and let him know I'm here.” While they did that, they frisked me. Condi Rice's deputy, Steve Hadley, came to the vault door to identify me and escort me in. Inside the vault there were more MP5s and shotguns in the narrow corridor lined with bunk beds.

In the Presidential Emergency Operations Center the cast was decidedly more political. In addition to the Vice President and Condi Rice, there was the Vice President's wife, Lynne; his political advisor Mary Matalin; his security advisor, Scooter Libby; Deputy White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten; and White House communications director Karen Hughes. The monitors were simultaneously blaring the coverage from five networks.

On one screen, I could see the Situation Room. I grabbed Mike Fenzel. “How's it going over here?” I asked.

“It's fine,” Major Fenzel whispered, “but I can't hear the crisis conference because Mrs. Cheney keeps turning down the volume on you so she can hear CNN…and the Vice President keeps hanging up the open line to you.” Mrs. Cheney was more than just a family member who had to be protected. Like her husband, she was a right-wing ideologue and she was offering her advice and opinions in the bunker.

I moved in and squatted between Cheney and Rice. “The President agreed to go to Offutt,” Cheney informed me. His manner implied that it had been a hard sell.

“He can't come back here yet,” I insisted. “Do you need anything?” I asked the Vice President.

“The comms in this place are terrible,” he replied. His calls to the President were dropping off.

“Now you know why I wanted the money for a new bunker?” I could not resist. The President had canceled my plans for a replacement facility.

“It'll happen,” Cheney promised. “Are you getting everything you need, everybody doing what you want?” Cheney asked, placing his hand on my shoulder. I had known Dick Cheney for a dozen years and for that long been fascinated at how complex a person he was. On the surface, he was quiet and soft-spoken. Below that surface calm ran strong, almost extreme beliefs. He had been one of the five most radical conservatives in the Congress. The quiet often hid views that would seem out of place if aired more broadly. It had been speculated in the press that he would really be the president for national security affairs, not the inexperienced Governor from Texas. Yet now he was wanting to make sure that the President knew what we had been doing in his absence. “I want you to prepare a briefing for him when he lands in Omaha. And I need a timeline of everything that you have done.”

I retraced my route through the abandoned Executive Mansion. It was 12:30 p.m.

Back in the West Wing, I discovered that Gary Breshnahan had been right: no one was able to get to the Treasury video conferencing site. I grabbed Paul Kurtz. He and I had spent two days literally crawling around Wall Street a few weeks before. We had gone on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, but we had also gone through the tunnels carrying the fiber optic cable to the Verizon and AT&T switches. We had identified several buildings that were they taken out, would disconnect Wall Street from the world. “Paul, get Treasury, get the Fed, activate the National Communications System. We have to make sure the markets can close their books and we're going to have to protect the comms centers and SIAC.”

SIAC is the Securities Industry Automation Corporation, the mainframes, fiber, and data backup that made the American and New York Stock Exchanges work. Kurtz and I had been in their computer rooms. The National Communications System was yet another Cold War relic, housed in DOD but working for the White House. NCS was mandated to insure that critical telephony and data flowed even under attack. In their Arlington center, all the major telephone companies sat together around the table. Kurtz called the manager there, Brent Greene, and said, “Tell them all they need to support Verizon.” A Verizon switching center for Wall Street was next to the World Trade Center and we could see from the television coverage that the building, filled with routers and switches, was punctured.