Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

Dooley: “Okay.”

Scoggins: “I’m going to try to confirm an ID for you, but I would assume he’s somewhere over, uh, either New Jersey or somewhere farther south.”

The confusion quickly deepened.

Dooley: “Okay. So, American Eleven isn’t the hijack at all then, right?”

Scoggins: “No, he is a hijack.”

Dooley: “He, American Eleven is a hijack?”

Scoggins: “Yes.”

Dooley: “And he’s heading into Washington?”

Scoggins: “This could be a third aircraft.”

Dooley pulled away from the call and yelled to Nasypany: “Another hijack! It’s headed towards Washington!”

“Shit!” Nasypany answered. “Give me a location.”

Two hijacked planes had already crashed into buildings in New York. Hearing this new report of a possible third hijacked plane, Nasypany wanted to throw all available assets toward preventing a catastrophe in the nation’s capital.

“Okay,” he told his team, “American Airlines is still airborne—Eleven, the first guy. He’s heading towards Washington. Okay, I think we need to scramble Langley right now. And I’m, I’m gonna take the fighters from Otis and try to chase this guy down if I can find him.”

Colonel Robert Marr at NEADS approved Nasypany’s plan to launch more fighters. The two F-16s from Langley and an unarmed training jet scrambled into the air.

As they focused on an airliner that no longer existed, neither Nasypany nor anyone else in the U.S. military knew that a different disaster was developing. A third passenger jet had in fact been hijacked: American Airlines Flight 77 out of Dulles Airport.

AROUND 8:51 A.M., the five Saudi Arabian men aboard Flight 77 executed their plan. They used swift, coordinated takeover methods similar to those used during the previous half hour on Flight 11 and Flight 175.

Twenty minutes later, the phone rang in the Las Vegas home of Ron and Nancy May. Nancy was getting ready for work as an admissions clerk at a community college and she missed the call. The phone rang again a minute later, and this time Nancy May heard the voice of her flight attendant daughter, Renée. They’d last spoken two days earlier, and Renée and Ron had talked the previous day. Renée had sounded happy on both of those calls.

Now Renée sounded serious. She calmly, but erroneously, told her mother that six men had hijacked her flight and forced “us” to the rear of the plane. Renée didn’t say how she arrived at the number six, and she didn’t explain whether the people crowded together were crew members, passengers, or both. She didn’t know the fate of the pilots. Renée told her mother the flight information and gave Nancy three telephone numbers to call American Airlines.

“I love you, Mom,” Renée said. The line went dead.

Nancy yelled upstairs for Ron. Using one of the numbers from Renée, Nancy reached Patty Carson, an American Airlines flight services employee at Reagan National Airport in Washington, who had just returned to her desk from a staff lounge where she watched on television as United Flight 175 exploded into the South Tower. When Nancy relayed Renée’s hijacking message, along with Renée’s flight number and employee identification number, Patty Carson seemed confused. She told Nancy that she didn’t think the plane that struck the World Trade Center was an American Airlines jet.

“No, no,” Nancy May interrupted. “We are talking about Flight 77, in the air.” She told Carson that Renée had said “We are being hijacked and held hostage.”

Ron May took the phone and told Carson that since Renée had just called, it stood to reason that she couldn’t have been in a plane that crashed into the World Trade Center.

Carson took the Mays’ telephone number and promised to call back as soon as she knew anything. After speaking with Carson, Nancy and Ron May tried to call Renée on her cellphone but the call didn’t connect. They turned on the television, hoping for news.

When she hung up with Ron and Nancy May, Carson learned that she had to evacuate the airport, a precaution prompted by reports of hijackings. On her way out of the building, Carson described the call to a flight services manager, Toni Knisley, who called her boss, American Airlines base manager Rosemary Dillard. At first there was some confusion about which plane Renée was on. When they confirmed it was American Flight 77, Rosemary Dillard stumbled backward into a chair. That morning, she’d raced to Dulles Airport with her husband, Eddie, the sharp-dressing, dominoes-playing real estate investor who was going to California to work on a property they owned. She’d kissed him goodbye and told him to come home soon.

Eddie was aboard hijacked Flight 77.

INSIDE THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE building in Washington, a telephone rang in a fifth-floor office near a mural that depicted a robed figure protecting a cowering man from a lynch mob. Secretary Lori Keyton answered and heard the voice of an operator ask her to accept an emergency collect call from Barbara Olson.

Keyton accepted the charges, and Barbara calmed herself enough to choke out the words: “Can you tell Ted …”

Keyton cut her off and rushed into the ornate office of the U.S. solicitor general.

“Barbara is on the line and she’s in a panic,” Keyton told Ted Olson.

When Barbara reached him from Flight 77, Ted Olson was watching television, viewing a replay of a still unidentified passenger jet hitting the South Tower. When he heard that Barbara was on the phone, Olson’s first thought was relief. It meant that Barbara wasn’t on either of the planes that had crashed. Then he picked up the call.

“Ted,” she said, “my plane’s been hijacked.”

Barbara told him the hijackers had knives and box cutters. Olson asked if they knew that she was talking on the phone, and she answered that they didn’t. She said they’d ordered the passengers to the back of the plane. The call cut off.

Unlike callers from the previous two hijacked planes, neither Barbara Olson nor Renée May mentioned violence against the pilots or anyone else, nor the use of Mace or the threat of a bomb.

Ted Olson tried his direct line to Attorney General John Ashcroft, but Ashcroft was on a flight to Wisconsin. He called the Justice Department’s Command Center and reported the hijacking. For some unexplained reason, Olson’s call didn’t trigger notification of the U.S. military. Olson asked that a security officer come immediately to his office, to offer suggestions if Barbara called again. Before the officer arrived, the phone rang.

Barbara told Ted that “the pilot” had announced that the plane had been hijacked, but it wasn’t clear if she knew whether the speaker on the intercom was one of the hijackers or the original cockpit crew. She might have been operating under the old “rules” and believed the terrorists were forcing the legitimate pilots to do their bidding. Barbara said the plane was flying over houses. Another passenger told her they were headed northeast.

“What can I tell the pilot?” Barbara asked Ted. “What can I do? How can I stop this?”

Ted wasn’t sure how to answer. He decided that he had to tell Barbara about the other two hijackings and crashes at the World Trade Center. Flight 77 seemed bound for the same fate; the question was where the hijackers intended to crash. Barbara absorbed the news quietly and stoically, though Ted wondered if she’d been shocked into silence.

They expressed their feelings for each other. Each reassured the other that it wasn’t over yet, the plane was still aloft, and everything would work out. Even as he said the words, Ted Olson didn’t believe them. He suspected that neither did Barbara.

The call abruptly ended.

AT THAT MOMENT, no one at the FAA had any idea what was happening aboard American Flight 77, or where it was.

Shortly after nine, controllers at Indianapolis Center began spreading word that Flight 77 had disappeared from their screens. At 9:09 a.m., controllers at Indianapolis Center reported the loss of contact with the plane to the FAA regional center. Fully fifteen minutes later, a regional FAA official relayed that information to FAA headquarters in Washington.

By 9:20 a.m., after the distress calls from Renée May and Barbara Olson and nearly twenty-five minutes after someone turned off the transponder on Flight 77, Indianapolis controllers finally learned that two other passenger jets had been hijacked. At that point, they doubted their initial assumptions about a crash. They and their FAA supervisors began to consider the evidence that a third passenger plane had been hijacked.

Overall, confusion and uncertainty were almost universal during the first hour after the hijackings, extending far beyond the FAA. At 9:10 a.m., a United dispatch manager wrote in a logbook: “At that point a second aircraft had hit the WTC, but we didn’t know it was our United flight.” As late as 9:20 a.m., dispatchers from United Airlines and American Airlines were still trying to confirm whose planes had hit the World Trade Center. During one phone call, an American Airlines official said he thought both planes belonged to his airline, while a United official said he believed that the second plane was Flight 175. He reached that conclusion in part because enlarged slow-motion images on CNN showed the plane that flew into the South Tower didn’t have American Airlines’ shiny metallic skin.

In fairness to FAA and airline officials, these were extraordinarily fast-moving events for which they had never trained. Also, the officials were hamstrung by a mix of incorrect or fragmentary information, as well as by a false sense of security that developed during the years since a U.S. air carrier had been hijacked or bombed. Just four years earlier, a presidential commission on air safety chaired by Vice President Al Gore focused on the dangers of sabotage and explosives aboard commercial airplanes. It also raised the possibility that terrorists might use surface-to-air missiles, and it cited concerns about lax screening of items airline passengers might carry onto planes. The commission’s final report never mentioned a risk of suicide hijackings.

Ultimately, though, the FAA bore responsibility as the government agency with a duty to protect airline passengers from piracy and sabotage. Despite that mission, the FAA had significant gaps in domestic intelligence and multiple blind spots. Some of this was attributable to a lack of communication, and perhaps a lack of respect, from federal intelligence-gathering agencies. On September 11, 2001, the FAA’s “no-fly list” included a grand total of twelve names. By contrast, the State Department’s so-called TIPOFF terrorist watchlist included sixty thousand names. Yet the FAA’s head of civil aviation security didn’t even know that the State Department list existed. Two names on that State Department list were Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, both on board Flight 77. That wasn’t the only example of other federal agencies’ not sharing information about potential threats with the FAA.

Earlier in the summer, an FBI agent in Phoenix named Kenneth Williams had written a memo to his superiors in Washington expressing concern about Middle Eastern men with ties to extremists receiving flight training in the United States. Williams’s memo presciently warned about the “possibility of a coordinated effort by [O]sama bin Laden” to send would-be terrorists to U.S. flight schools to become pilots to serve al-Qaeda. Among other recommendations, he urged the FBI to monitor civil aviation schools and seek authority to obtain visa information about foreign students attending them. The FBI neither acted on the memo nor shared it with the FAA. The FBI took a similar approach in the case of a French national named Zacarias Moussaoui who’d been receiving flight training in Minneapolis. Moussaoui was arrested less than a month before September 11 for overstaying his visa, and an FBI agent concluded that he was “an Islamic extremist preparing for some future act in furtherance of radical fundamentalist goals.” The agent believed that Moussaoui’s flight training played a role in those plans. On August 24, eighteen days before the attacks, the CIA described him as a possible “suicide hijacker.” But when the FBI told the FAA and other agencies about Moussaoui on September 4, its summary didn’t mention the agent’s belief that Moussaoui planned to hijack a plane.

In the summer of 2001, the FAA seemed to ignore even its own recent security briefings. A few months before September 11, an FAA briefing to airport security officials considered the desirability of suicide hijackings from a terrorist perspective: “A domestic hijacking would likely result in a greater number of American hostages but would be operationally more difficult. We don’t rule it out… . If, however, the intent of the hijacker is not to exchange hostages for prisoners, but to commit suicide in a spectacular explosion, a domestic hijacking would probably be preferable.”

Now that scenario had come to pass, and the FAA found itself unaware and unprepared.

THE FAA’S INDIANAPOLIS Center controllers continued to search their radar screens to the west and southwest along Flight 77’s projected path, having missed the plane’s sharp turn back to the east. Although the plane had disappeared from radar at 8:56 a.m., it actually reappeared at 9:05 a.m. But because some controllers had stopped looking when they thought it crashed, and some looked in the wrong direction, they never saw it return to their radar screens. Neither Indianapolis Center controllers nor their bosses at the FAA command center issued an “all-points bulletin” for other air traffic control centers to look for the missing plane.

American Airlines Flight 77 traveled undetected for thirty-six minutes.

The plane’s new flight path pointed it on a direct course for Washington, D.C. But yet again, no one told the U.S. military, this time about a threat to the nation’s capital.

BY 9:25 A.M., even as American Flight 77 remained missing and a mystery, one top FAA official grasped the severity and growing scope of the crisis.

At the agency’s operations center in Herndon, Virginia, FAA national operations manager Ben Sliney knew about the North Tower crash and had seen United Flight 175 hit the South Tower on CNN some twenty minutes earlier. He worried about the disappearance of Flight 77 and feared that more hijackings might be under way. Sliney also had heard about Mohamed Atta’s “We have some planes” remark. He felt haunted by the question of how high the hijacking total might eventually reach. He couldn’t undo what already happened, but Sliney hoped that he might help prevent the next attack.

Fifty-five years old, with a shock of white hair, an Air Force veteran and a lawyer by training, Sliney concluded that he had both the authority and the responsibility to take drastic action. Accordingly, he declared a “nationwide ground stop,” the first order of its kind in U.S. aviation history, which prevented all commercial and private aircraft from taking off anywhere in the United States.

Making Sliney’s order even more remarkable, he had only recently returned to the FAA after several years in a private law practice. The morning of September 11 was Sliney’s first shift on his first day in his new job as the FAA’s National Operations Manager, boss of the agency’s command center.

MEANWHILE, BETWEEN ABOUT 9:23 and 9:28 a.m., American Flight 77 dropped from an altitude of 25,000 feet to about 7,000 feet as it continued on its undetected eastward path. By about 9:29 a.m., while controllers fruitlessly searched the Midwest, the Boeing 757 was almost on the East Coast, about thirty-eight miles west of the Pentagon, the physical and symbolic heart of the U.S. military, located a short hop across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C.

Hani Hanjour—or whoever was in the cockpit—disengaged the autopilot destination that he’d previously set to Reagan National Airport and took manual control of the plane.

AS AMERICAN FLIGHT 77 approached the prohibited airspace of the nation’s capital, confusion about the plane spread further through the U.S. government.

At 9:31 a.m., an agent from the FBI office in Boston called the FAA seeking information on the planes that had hit the World Trade Center.

An FAA official told him: “We have two reports, preliminary information, ah, believe to be American Airlines Flight 77 and Flight 11, collided with World Trade Center. Also, a preliminary report, ah, United Airlines Flight 175 off radar. Ah, no further information.”

AT 9:32 A.M., air traffic controllers at Dulles airport saw a green dot on their radar screens that no one expected, traveling eastbound at the surprisingly fast speed of about 500 miles per hour.

Among those who noticed the unidentified aircraft was Danielle O’Brien, the air traffic controller who for some reason had wished Flight 77’s pilots “good luck” when she handed them off an hour earlier. From its speed and how it turned and slashed across the sky, she and other controllers initially thought the object on their radar was a nimble military jet.

O’Brien slid to her left and pointed it out to the controller next to her, her fiancé, Tom Howell, who recognized it as a threat. “Oh my God,” Howell said. He yelled to the room: “We’ve got a target headed right for the White House!”

A Dulles manager called the FAA’s control center and controllers at Reagan airport in Washington to warn them. Still no one from the FAA called NEADS or anyone else in the military’s air defense system. An FAA supervisor at Dulles, John Hendershot, used a dedicated phone line to alert the Secret Service of the incoming danger. He told the men and women who protect the president and the vice president: “We have an unidentified, very fast-moving aircraft inbound toward your vicinity, eight miles west.”

President Bush wasn’t in Washington, but Vice President Dick Cheney was in his White House office. Secret Service agents rushed in, lifted Cheney from his chair, and hustled him to a tunnel leading to an underground bunker beneath the White House called the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. The agents also told White House staffers to run from the building.

Simultaneously, Reagan airport officials sought urgent help identifying the mystery jet. They called the closest plane in the sky: a military cargo plane that had just taken off from Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, fifteen miles from the District of Columbia. The FAA’s newly issued ban on takeoffs didn’t apply to military planes, and the cargo plane’s pilots hadn’t heard about it, anyway.

AS THE FAA tried to identify the plane approaching the White House, little more than ten minutes had passed since Major Kevin Nasypany speculated about using a Sidewinder missile “in the face” to stop terrorists from creating another large-scale disaster.

The F-16s from Langley were airborne by 9:30 a.m. with orders from NEADS to fly to Washington. But no one briefed them about exactly why they were scrambled. The pilots defaulted to an old Cold War plan and flew out to sea, to a training area known as Whiskey 386. The lead pilot, who’d heard about a plane hitting the World Trade Center but knew nothing about hijackings, thought he and his two wingmen were supposed to defend the capital against Russian planes or cruise missiles.

As the Langley F-16s took flight, headed the wrong way, a member of Nasypany’s team pressed the issue of how they’d respond if they encountered a hijacked passenger jet being readied for use as a weapon.

“Have you asked … the question what you’re gonna do if we actually find this guy?” wondered Major James Anderson. “Are we gonna shoot him down if they got passengers on board? Have they talked about that?”

At that moment, the man on whom shootdown authority rested stood before two hundred students, a handful of teachers, and a clutch of reporters in an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida.

PRESIDENT BUSH BEGAN his September 11 at 6 a.m. with a four-mile run at a golf course with his Secret Service protectors. Afterwards he showered, dressed, and sat for a routine, fifteen-minute intelligence briefing from CIA official Mike Morell in the president’s suite at Sarasota’s swanky Colony Beach Resort. Many of the president’s summer 2001 briefings had included mentions of a heightened terrorism risk.

One of those briefings, received by the president on August 6, marked the first time that Bush had been told of a possible plan by al-Qaeda to attack inside the United States. Titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US,” the memo read in part: “Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Laden implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and ‘bring the fighting to America.’”

But there wasn’t a word about terrorism in Bush’s security briefing on the morning of September 11. Much of it focused instead on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

By 8:40 a.m., Bush’s motorcade had left the resort for the nine-mile drive to the Emma E. Booker Elementary School. The president intended to use the school as a backdrop to promote his “No Child Left Behind” education policy with a press-friendly event: a reading lesson with a diverse class of second graders.

On his way into the school, Bush shook hands with teachers and students. Meanwhile, senior White House adviser Karl Rove answered a call from his assistant: a plane had hit the World Trade Center. Rove passed the information to the president but said he didn’t have details and didn’t know what type of plane. Three decades earlier, during the Vietnam era, Bush had served as a fighter pilot in the Texas National Guard. He’d later say that his first thought was pilot error involving a light airplane. Bush also would say he wondered, “How could the guy have gotten so off course [as] to hit the towers?”

Bush ducked away from the receiving line into a classroom. At 8:55 a.m., less than ten minutes after the first crash, he spoke on a secure phone line with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. A half hour had passed since the FAA first learned about the hijacking of Flight 11, but no one had immediately informed the White House, the nation’s national security agencies, or the Secret Service. Rice didn’t know much more than Bush’s other aides.

Bush told the school’s principal the situation, then walked to teacher Kay Daniels’s classroom. “Good to meet you all!” he said as he entered. “It’s really exciting for me to be here.” Bush smiled, clapped, and followed along as Daniels led her sixteen students through rapid-fire phonics exercises.

At about 9:05 a.m., two minutes after United Flight 175 struck the South Tower, White House chief of staff Andy Card hesitated a moment at the door to the classroom. He collected his thoughts, then walked to Bush’s side. Reporters watching from the back of the classroom perked up, knowing that no one would interrupt the president’s event unless something major happened. Card bent at the waist and whispered in Bush’s ear:

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