Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

CHAPTER 6

“THE START OF WORLD WAR III”

American Airlines Flight 77

AFTER A CELEBRATORY DINNER THE NIGHT BEFORE, BARBARA OLSON woke beside her husband, Ted, on his birthday, just as she’d planned. The lawyer, author, and conservative activist got ready for an early flight to Los Angeles, where she was to appear on that night’s edition of Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher.

Before leaving her Virginia home for Dulles International Airport, before Flight 11 or Flight 175 met their fiery ends, Barbara placed a note on Ted’s pillow: “I love you. When you read this, I will be thinking of you and I will be back on Friday.”

AS THE MORNING progressed, the defenders of American airspace were forced to rely almost as much at times on television news updates as on their radar scopes and official reports. From their limited vantage point inside the NEADS bunker in upstate New York, Major Kevin Nasypany, Colonel Robert Marr, and their team struggled to make sense of confusing, conflicting, inaccurate, and occasionally devastating information about events in New York and whether more threats loomed.

When a NEADS technician saw the burning North Tower on television shortly before nine, those images marked the first notice anyone there received about what had happened. The technician gasped, “Oh God!” Her colleague answered, “God save New York.”

A report soon reached them that the plane was a Boeing 737, perhaps as a result of the CNN broadcast that mentioned that model. Otherwise, the plane that struck the North Tower appeared to match the Boeing 767 passenger jet they’d been trying without luck to find: American Flight 11. The NEADS team still hadn’t heard about United Flight 175 or any other hijacked planes. When they confirmed that the North Tower crash involved Flight 11, that presumably would mean the end of NEADS mission. NEADS staffers asked Nasypany what he wanted to do with the two F-15s they’d scrambled from the Otis base on Cape Cod.

Unsure whether the CNN report and other information they’d received was accurate, concerned that the plane they sought was a Boeing 767, not a 737, and lacking official confirmation, Nasypany continued to play defense. “Send ’em to New York City still,” he ordered. “Continue! Go!”

A NEADS identification technician, Senior Airman Stacia Rountree, sought more information about the crashed plane from the FAA Boston Center’s military liaison, Colin Scoggins. The call initially seemed to confirm the loss of Flight 11, but soon it did the opposite, increasing confusion about which plane had struck the tower.

Scoggins: “Yeah, he crashed into the World Trade Center.”

Rountree: “That is the aircraft that crashed into the World Trade Center?”

Scoggins: “Yup. Disregard the tail number [for American Flight 11].”

Rountree: “Disregard the tail number? He did crash into the World Trade Center?”

Scoggins: “That, that’s what we believe, yes.”

Another NEADS technician interrupted, saying that the military hadn’t received official confirmation that the North Tower crash involved American Flight 11. Media reports still mentioned a small Cessna that had supposedly gotten lost over Manhattan. To top it off, American Airlines officials had yet to confirm to anyone that Flight 11 had even been hijacked, much less that it had crashed. Rountree’s supervisor, a no-nonsense master sergeant named Maureen “Mo” Dooley, took over the call.

Dooley: “We need to have—are you giving confirmation that American 11 was the one?”

Scoggins: “No, we’re not gonna confirm that at this time. We just know an aircraft crashed in and—”

On the other hand, Scoggins acknowledged, that didn’t mean they had any idea where to find American Flight 11. Dooley asked him: “[I]s anyone up there tracking primary [radar] on this guy still?”

Scoggins replied: “No. The last [radar sighting] we have was about fifteen miles east of JFK [Airport], or eight miles east of JFK was our last primary hit. He did slow down in speed. The primary that we had, it slowed down below, around to three hundred knots.”

Dooley: “And then you lost ’em?”

Scoggins: “Yeah, and then we lost ’em.”

With incomplete information, Nasypany couldn’t rule out the possibility that American Flight 11, with a hijacker at the controls, remained airborne and hiding from radar with its transponder off, somewhere over one of the most heavily populated areas of the United States. Meanwhile, Nasypany and the NEADS team didn’t learn about United Flight 175 until 9:03 a.m.

Rountree cried out: “They have a second possible hijack!”

But again, just as with Flight 11, the notification came far too late. At almost that exact moment, Flight 175 smashed into the South Tower. Colonel Marr and others at NEADS watched it live on CNN. The two F-15 fighter jets from Otis still hadn’t reached New York.

America’s air defense system couldn’t stop those crashes, but Nasypany still wanted the F-15s in the sky over New York. The United States had just experienced its first simultaneous multiple hijackings, and no one could say whether the terrorists had more planned. As he prowled the room at NEADS, bottling his frustration while he pressured, calmed, and cajoled his team, Nasypany hadn’t yet heard Mohamed Atta’s ominous statement, “We have some planes.” But he didn’t need to.

“We’ve already had two,” Nasypany thought. “Why not more?”

EARLIER THAT MORNING at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C., before either Flight 11 or Flight 175 was hijacked, passengers walked calmly onto the sparsely filled American Airlines Flight 77. The plane was a Boeing 757, a single-aisle passenger jet smaller and slimmer than the wide-bodied 767, but nonetheless a large plane suited to transcontinental flights. Bound nonstop for Los Angeles, Flight 77’s fuel weighed just under 50,000 pounds, more than a fully loaded city bus.

Two Flight 77 passengers, one in first class, the other in coach, represented the two distinct worlds of Washington, D.C. One, Barbara Olson, enjoyed great celebrity and clout as a member of the capital’s ruling elite. The other embodied great possibility.

Bernard C. Brown II stepped aboard Flight 77 with a complete set of useful tools: looks, brains, charisma, an eye for sharp clothes, and a fair shot at fulfilling his dream of becoming either a professional basketball player or a scientist. But Bernard was still only eleven, which meant that his nimble mind sometimes wandered to subjects other than school.

Fifth grade had gone well, and Bernard’s parents and teachers wanted him to remain on a high-achieving trajectory at the Leckie Elementary School in the southwest corner of Washington, D.C., near what was known as Bolling Air Force Base. Some students at Leckie lived in a homeless shelter, but Bernard was among the fortunate ones: he lived in military housing with his younger sister, his mother, Sinita, and his father, Bernard Brown Sr., a chief petty officer in the Navy who worked at the Pentagon. The two men of the family were known as Big Bernard and Little Bernard.

As the new school year began, Little Bernard’s fifth-grade teacher successfully urged her best friend at Leckie, sixth-grade teacher Hilda Taylor, to pick Bernard to join her for a special treat: a four-day trip to study marine biology at a sanctuary off the California coast. A native of Sierra Leone, Hilda Taylor believed that American children needed to look beyond their borders to gain a deeper understanding of the wider world. With that goal in mind she’d become involved with the National Geographic Society, which sponsored the trip.

Two National Geographic staff members also found seats aboard Flight 77, along with two other pairs from Washington schools: teacher James Debeuneure and eleven-year-old Rodney Dickens, and teacher Sarah Clark and eleven-year-old Asia Cottom.

Bernard had been nervous about his first flight, but he felt reassured by Big Bernard, who coached his precocious son in basketball and life. For added confidence, and to stay true to his alternate career choice, Little Bernard marched down the aisle toward seat 20E wearing a new pair of Air Jordan sneakers.

BARBARA OLSON, BERNARD BROWN II, and the National Geographic group were among the fifty-eight passengers who filed through the door onto Flight 77, less than one-third the plane’s capacity. They ranged across every age, stage, and station in life.

In the seat next to Bernard was Mari-Rae Sopper, who before boarding wrote an email to family and friends with the subject line “New Job New City New State New Life.” Thirty-five years old, she’d quit working as a lawyer to head west for her dream job: women’s gymnastics coach at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Five foot two, so determined that even her mother called her bullheaded, Mari-Rae had been an All-American gymnast at Iowa State University. She upended her life and accepted the coaching job even though she knew the school intended to phase out women’s gymnastics after one year. Mari-Rae had a stubborn plan: she intended to persuade her new bosses to reverse the decision and continue the women’s gymnastics program.

Scrambling into four seats of Row 23 were economist Leslie Whittington, her husband, Charles Falkenberg, and their daughters, Zoe and Dana, about to begin a two-month adventure in Australia. An associate dean and associate professor of public policy at Georgetown University, Leslie had accepted a visiting fellowship at Australian National University in Canberra. Along with teaching, the trip would allow her to test theories for a book she was writing about women, work, and families. A computer engineer and scientist, Charles took a leave from his work developing software that organized and managed scientific data. Earlier in his career, he developed a software system for researchers in Alaska trying to measure impacts of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. At eight, Zoe was a Girl Scout, a swim team member, a ballet student, an actress in school musicals, and a devoted reader of the Harry Potter books. At three, curly-haired, irrepressible Dana found comfort in her stuffed lamb and joy in stories about princesses. (She regularly dressed as one.)

A married couple occupied the other two seats in Row 23: quiet, retired chemist Yugang Zheng and his outgoing, retired pediatrician wife, Shuying Yang. They were on their way home to China after a nearly yearlong visit with their daughter, a medical student and cancer researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. They’d just returned from a week of sightseeing, hiking, and swimming in Maine and had delayed their flight to spend one more day with their daughter and her husband. As a wedding gift, they’d given the young couple a statue of the goddess of compassion, Bodhisattva Guanyin, who hears the cries of the world and brings care to those in need.

In the row in front of them, Retired Rear Admiral Wilson “Bud” Flagg and Darlene “Dee” Flagg had plans for a family gathering in California. Both sixty-two, the high school sweethearts had recently celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary and Bud’s fortieth reunion at the U.S. Naval Academy. One story that made the rounds at the reunion explained how Bud had stopped his classmates from raiding his stash of Dee’s cookies: he substituted a batch he’d baked with laxatives. (It was a lesson he didn’t have to teach twice.) Bud served three tours as a fighter pilot in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Later, he had a dual career as a pilot for American Airlines and an officer in the Naval Reserve. The Flaggs had two sons and four grandchildren, and together they ran a Virginia cattle farm.

In a window seat seven rows away sat Dr. Yeneneh Betru. He’d moved to the United States from Ethiopia as a teenager in order to fulfill a promise to his grandmother that he would become a doctor and cure whatever ailed her. Soft-spoken but determined, thirty-five years old, Yeneneh traveled throughout the United States training other doctors in the care of hospitalized patients, while spending his personal time and money assembling equipment to create the first public kidney dialysis center in Addis Ababa.

In 5B of business class sat a man known for his dapper clothes and mastery of dominoes and whist: Eddie Dillard. At fifty-four, Eddie had retired four years earlier from a career as a district manager for the tobacco company Philip Morris. Since then, he’d transformed into a savvy real estate investor. He was flying to California to work on a rental property he owned with his wife, Rosemary, an American Airlines base manager at Reagan National Airport in Washington.

In first class, newlyweds Zandra and Robert Riis Ploger III buckled into second-row seats on the first leg of a two-week honeymoon to Hawaii. Despite previous marriages and four grown children between them, Zandra and Robert acted like teenagers, holding hands and exchanging pet names: Pretty for her, Love for him. He was a systems architect at Lockheed Martin, she was a manager at IBM. Both were dedicated fans of Star Trek.

Predictably for a flight from Washington, spread throughout the cabin were passengers with connections to the government and the military. Bryan Jack was a PhD numbers cruncher for the Defense Department who’d won the department’s Exceptional Service Medal twice in the past three years. William Caswell was a physicist with a PhD from Princeton who served in the Army during Vietnam and now worked for the Navy as a civilian. Both men were on official business trips that took them away from their offices in the Pentagon.

Dr. Paul Ambrose was a fellow at the Department of Health and Human Services, on his way to California for a conference on how to prevent youth obesity; Charles Droz was a retired lieutenant commander in the Navy who’d built a career in computer technology; Dong Chul Lee spent eighteen years working for the U.S. Air Force and the National Security Agency before taking an engineering job with Boeing; consultant Richard Gabriel had lost a leg in battle during the Vietnam War; and John Yamnicky Sr. was a barrel-chested retired Navy captain who flew fighter jets in Korea and on three tours in Vietnam.

In the cockpit, Captain Charles “Chic” Burlingame formerly flew F-4 Phantom fighters as a medal-winning pilot and honors graduate of the Navy’s “Top Gun” school. Married to an American Airlines flight attendant, Chic Burlingame was an Eagle Scout, an Annapolis graduate, a father, a grandfather, and a stepfather of two. He was one day shy of fifty-two. Tucked in his wallet was a laminated prayer card from his mother’s funeral, ten months earlier, with part of a poem: “I am the soft stars that shine at night. Do not stand at my grave and cry; I am not there, I did not die.” Joining him at the controls was First Officer David Charlebois, a young pilot dedicated to his partner. Together they enjoyed their row house in Washington, D.C., and the border collie he’d rescued when it was a puppy.

Strapped into a jump seat in the back of the plane was senior flight attendant Michele Heidenberger, wife of a US Airways pilot and mother of two, who’d been flying for thirty-one years. Before takeoff she called her husband, Thomas, to make sure their fourteen-year-old son was awake and had packed a lunch for school.

Serving first class, flight attendant Renée May was an artist who knitted blankets for her friends and had recently accepted her boyfriend’s proposal. At thirty-nine, Renée had learned only a day earlier that she was seven weeks pregnant. After landing in Los Angeles, she planned to hop a quick flight to visit her parents in Las Vegas. She’d spoken with them twice in the past two days but had told them only that she had big news to share.

Also working the flight was a couple whose friends called them Kennifer. Married for eight years, flight attendants Ken and Jennifer Lewis normally flew separately, but they used their seniority to mesh their schedules so they could vacation when they reached Los Angeles, their favorite city. A magnet on their refrigerator read HAPPINESS IS BEING MARRIED TO YOUR BEST FRIEND. When they were home, in the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, Ken and Jennifer liked to drag lawn chairs to the end of their driveway, trailed by their five cats. As night fell, they would gaze at the stars.

ALSO ON BOARD were five young Saudi Arabian zealots who’d pledged their lives to al-Qaeda. Like their collaborators on American Flight 11 and United Flight 175, the men chose seats strategically, clustered toward the front of the plane.

Unlike their associates aboard the other two flights, three of the al-Qaeda members on American Flight 77 nearly had their plans foiled by airport security.

At 7:18 a.m., Majed Moqed and Khalid al-Mihdhar set off alarms when they walked through a Dulles Airport metal detector. Security workers sent them to a second metal detector. Mihdhar passed, but Moqed failed again. A private security officer hired by a contractor for United Airlines scanned Moqed with a metal detection wand and sent him on his way. Neither was patted down.

Almost twenty minutes later, Nawaf al-Hazmi set off alarms at both metal detectors at the same security checkpoint. Two weeks earlier, he’d purchased Leatherman multitool knives, and a security video showed that he had an unidentified item clipped onto his rear pants pocket. A security officer hand-wanded Hazmi and swiped his shoulder bag with an explosive trace detector. No one patted him down, and he walked on toward Flight 77 with his brother, Salem al-Hazmi.

All five were chosen for another security screening, three by the CAPPS computer algorithm and two, the Hazmi brothers, because an airline customer service representative judged them to be suspicious. One, apparently Salem al-Hazmi, offered an identification card without a photograph and didn’t seem to understand English. The airline worker who checked them in thought he seemed anxious or excited.

In the end, the selection of all five men for a second layer of security screening proved meaningless. Just as with their collaborators, it only meant that their checked bags were held off the plane until after they boarded.

Hani Hanjour, who’d trained as a pilot, took seat 1B in first class. Four rows back in the same cabin, in seats 5E and 5F, sat the Hazmi brothers. They were the only two passengers on Flight 77 to request special meals: the Hindu option, with no pork.

On the opposite side of the plane, in coach seat 12A sat Majed Moqed. Next to him, in 12B, was Khalid al-Mihdhar, slim and dark-haired, a man who U.S. intelligence officials had known for several years was a member of al-Qaeda, yet who traveled under his real name.

AMERICAN AIRLINES FLIGHT 77 pushed back from Dulles Gate D-26 at 8:09 a.m. It was airborne eleven minutes later.

At that moment, United Flight 175 had been in flight for six minutes, with no signs of trouble. American Flight 11 had already stopped communicating with air traffic controllers, and soon after, flight attendant Betty Ong began her distress call to American Airlines.

THREE MINUTES INTO their flight from Cape Cod to New York in pursuit of American Flight 11, Otis F-15 pilots Tim Duffy and Dan Nash learned that the World Trade Center had been struck by a plane, presumably the one they were supposed to find. They saw rising smoke from more than a hundred miles away. The clouds of smoke intensified minutes later with the strike on the South Tower.