Ordinary Heroes

by Joseph Pfeifer

  “Ahhh . . . yes, sir,” he replied. “I would be proud to start the process for Chief Pfeifer to get a clearance from the FBI.”

  Tim became a good friend who was able to get me the highest clearances. More importantly, he made sure I got the intelligence the FDNY needed to make critical decisions on preparedness and response.

  Once a week, I would go to the JTTF for an interagency intelligence briefing. As soon as I got back to headquarters, I would brief the senior chiefs on any plots against New York City. One particular plot, later reported by the New York Times, was against JFK Airport. Since the Fire Department dealt with JFK on a regular basis, I was able to contribute to the building of intelligence. This was a fundamental change. Not only was the FDNY a consumer of intelligence, but we were also a contributor. In other words, we were partners with the intelligence community and law enforcement.

  * * *

  • • •

  While our work with West Point was fun and inspiring, other tasks, like securing the budget, could not be ignored. In mid-2003, we had to justify to New York City’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) why the FDNY should receive significant federal grant funding for our counterterrorism preparedness efforts. Hayden and I would do the presentation in uniform, but it was up to Kate and me to develop the arguments.

  We had to produce an exceptional presentation that could be worth millions of dollars to the FDNY and define how well prepared the city was for the next extreme event. Kate and I knew if we wanted additional funding for our firefighters, we had to touch people’s hearts.

  Hayden started the presentation by reading a statement that Kate and I had discovered in the Department of Homeland Security documents. Any city that wanted its grant funding must first adopt the National Incident Management System (NIMS). The Incident Command System was a three-decade-old system that worked at the Pentagon on 9/11 and was now required by the new Department of Homeland Security.

  We explained it was critical for agencies to have a unified command system during times of crisis, especially during terrorist attacks. The FDNY had already done this and had trained our people. However, there was resistance from law enforcement, thinking that NIMS was just a fire department system imported from the West Coast.

  But we knew that change swiftly happens when funding is the motivating factor. Hayden explained that the NYPD and Office of Emergency Management had to do the same, or the city would forfeit $150 million in grants. That got their attention.

  It was now my turn. I knew that most people at OMB took the subway to work.

  “It’s a little before 9 a.m., and you are getting off the train only minutes from work when you hear a loud boom,” I said. “You are okay but shaken by the sound, and then you see a light haze of smoke. This is no ordinary smoke; this is a terrorist chemical attack. You and everyone else are coughing, it is not easy to breathe, and you cannot find your way out. It has only been a few minutes, and things are getting worse, and you cannot even speak to call for help. You think of your family and wonder, who is coming to save you?”

  I paused to let that image sink in. There was silence in the room.

  “The only agency with self-contained breathing apparatuses for every member and who has some protection from their bunker gear is FDNY. Our firefighters are the ones running in to save you. We need funding to protect them better so they can go home to their families, too.”

  People were nodding their heads in agreement. It was not that I had scared those decision makers around the table; I gave them hope for surviving the crisis.

  Kate gave me a small smile. After her experience on 9/11, the subway scenario deeply resonated with her. The OMB increased FDNY’s DHS grants by $20 million annually. They knew that their lives in a chemical attack, and most other kinds of attacks, would depend on firefighters.

  * * *

  • • •

  A magical post-9/11 moment was when the FDNY was given a special showing of the movie The Guys, starring Sigourney Weaver and Anthony LaPaglia, based on a play by Anne Nelson

  The story is about a grief-stricken captain who lost eight men. Anne Nelson, an editor who lived in the neighborhood, stopped by the firehouse to express condolences. Swallowing his pride, the captain asked her for help writing their eulogies. Together, they found the words.

  Before showing the film, Anne Nelson and Sigourney Weaver spoke to the audience about the fire company the movie was based on. Kate sat to my left.

  “I know that captain and the fire company,” I told Kate. “It’s about the captain of Ladder 15, which is part of Battalion 1. These were my guys.”

  Ladder 15, with Lieutenant Joe Leavey and his firefighters, had been in the South Tower with Battalion Chief Orio Palmer. On radio transmissions, we had heard Leavey talking to his guys as they rescued people shortly before the collapse of the South Tower.

  Now the captain of Ladder 15 had to talk about “the guys” at each of their funerals. The captain resembled Mr. Rogers, a mild-mannered person who saw the best in everyone. I enjoyed going down to his firehouse near the South Street Seaport. It was not easy for him or any captain to find the right words to describe the unique traits and personalities of the ordinary heroes who were part of his firehouse family.

  About halfway through, the movie flashed to real footage of a firefighter’s 9/11 funeral.

  My heart skipped a beat as I recognized the scene outside the church. The line of firefighters at attention in dress blue uniforms stretched for blocks. Slowly the casket of the hero firefighter resting on top of a fire engine passed.

  Shocked, I turned to Kate and whispered, “Oh my God, that is my brother’s funeral.” She gently touched my hand. As a chief at a public event, I had to keep up my stoic appearance. But it was not easy.

  * * *

  • • •

  After being touched by the movie, I saw the play version of The Guys with Ginny at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park City, only a few blocks from WTC. The context was powerful. Being at the Holocaust museum pointed to other crimes against humanity, each with deeply personal stories of human suffering and emerging from the unthinkable.

  Walking through the Holocaust museum reminded me of the words of Anne Frank, writing in 1944: “It’s difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams, and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals; they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet, I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.”

  In the aftermath of 9/11, there was so much pain and, for many, anger. While that anger was properly directed at terrorist groups like al-Qaeda, some were wrongly blaming an entire religion. I believed, like Anne Frank, that people were “truly good at heart” as we came together to help each other after this tragedy.

  One afternoon, I was at the FBI field office down the block from the Duane Street firehouse for an Intel briefing by Assistant Special Agent in Charge Tim Herlocker on the most current terrorist threats. After the meeting, he asked if I was interested in going with him to a Ramadan service at a mosque, followed by a light dinner. The FBI was trying to build bridges with the Muslim community, since there had been a lot of anti-Islam sentiment in the aftermath of the attacks.

  I immediately said yes. I saw this as an opportunity to make a difference by reaching out to the Muslim community. In my white shirt with the FDNY logo, I took my shoes off and sat on the floor for evening prayer, amid dozens of men from the community and my two FBI friends.

  The imam announced that the fast was broken. Then we ate dates, prayed, and broke bread together. The president of the mosque was glad to see me and said, with a heavy heart, “We saw firefighters from the local firehouses on Staten Island leave for the World Trade Center, and we saw that many of them never came back, which broke our hearts.” He wanted me to know that his communi
ty grieved the loss of their neighborhood firefighters.

  In my own way, I was saying that we are in this together and trust in each other’s goodness.

  20

  GLOWING RED

  In April 2004, at a small restaurant in Monterey, California, a fire chief, police chief, CIA agent, and FBI special agent were having dinner together. We were classmates in a master’s degree program at the Center for Homeland Defense and Security at the Naval Postgraduate School.

  Our discussion turned to our testimony at the ongoing hearings being held by the 9/11 Commission. The FBI agent from Minneapolis described his experience when he wanted to obtain a search warrant to search Zacarias Moussaoui’s computer hard drive. Moussaoui would later become known as the twentieth hijacker, tasked to fly a plane into the White House or Capitol but instead was arrested in August 2001.

  The special agent had become so frustrated with a system that lacked any urgency for gathering and sharing information that, at one point, he blurted out to supervisors that he was “just trying to stop someone from taking a plane and crashing it into the World Trade Center.” His statement—like Fire Marshal Ronnie Bucca’s warning—turned out to be prophetic.

  Then I talked about my experience as the first fire chief at the World Trade Center. I related how I’d heard stories that NYPD helicopters circling the buildings from above had transmitted urgent messages to their officers to get out—information that had not been shared with the FDNY. For twenty-nine minutes on 9/11, I had not known a whole building had collapsed. Though I had immediately given an evacuation order, how many firefighters could have been saved if I had known the North Tower was likely to collapse?

  Our firsthand accounts illustrated how the CIA and FBI, as well as the FDNY and NYPD, did not share information at critical times. I knew in my heart that it was not intentional by anyone to withhold vital information. But why, when it counted the most, was information not shared?

  The 9/11 Commission had started holding hearings into the circumstances surrounding the attacks. After taking testimony from those in the intelligence and law enforcement communities, the commission had reported that the system was “blinking red” with many warnings in the months before the attack.

  In January 2004, Pete Hayden and I were asked to testify. I was happy to tell the story, but I had a bigger goal in mind: to get agencies to work together.

  In front of a handful of the commission’s staffers, in a big conference room at FDNY headquarters, we described the events of that day, backed up by video from the Naudets’ film. The staggering loss of life remained as horrific as it had been almost three years earlier. Even though one of the FDNY lawyers had heard much of the story before, she was in tears.

  Repeatedly during the six-hour proceedings, I asked the commission to include one sentence in their report: “On 9/11, first responders at the World Trade Center attacks had stovepipe situational awareness.” The intent was to mirror the commission’s earlier reporting of a lack of intelligence sharing between the FBI and CIA, which they called “stovepiped.” Information, like smoke, flowed only one way: up the stovepipe flue.

  Everyone who responded that day was doing the best they could to save lives under extreme conditions. But there were issues we had to make public, key among them the habit of using separate command posts and the failure to share information.

  I had to dispel the misconception that this was purely a technology issue with radios. The real 9/11 disconnect was a behavioral problem. At the time, I had little knowledge about political forces that push back on things that are difficult to hear. I was merely trying to get first responders to share information so we could handle the next large-scale disasters. But I did not succeed. Even though I called the commission back so I could testify for an additional four hours, stressing the importance of situational awareness, my phrase “stovepipe situational awareness” was not included. However, they did include my point on the importance of information sharing between agencies.

  Two years later, when one of the 9/11 commissioners spoke at the Harvard Kennedy School, I learned that they thought it was too painful for the American people to hear that New York City’s esteemed first responders did not talk to each other.

  * * *

  • • •

  For years, I wondered what the NYPD’s helicopter pilots had said to each other and to their dispatchers, and what they’d broadcast over the radio to members of the police force at the WTC. We needed that material during our work on the McKinsey Report. But the radio transmissions were considered so sensitive that the NYPD steadfastly declined to make them public.

  After years of searching, I got the NYPD helicopter radio transmissions from two sources: the 9/11 Commission and investigative reporters Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn from the New York Times. These transmissions revealed that the NYPD had had much more knowledge of what was happening than did the FDNY.

  At 9:59 a.m., when the South Tower collapsed, an NYPD helicopter pilot immediately radioed that it had fallen and advised everyone in the complex to evacuate the other buildings.

  An Emergency Service Unit police officer in the North Tower heard the message but couldn’t comprehend how a 110-story building could collapse, so he asked that the message be repeated. The next transmission reiterated that the South Tower was gone and that the North Tower was in imminent danger of coming down as well.

  At 10:07 a.m., the pilot of Aviation 14 advised that the top fifteen stories of the North Tower looked like they were “glowing red. It’s inevitable.” Only a minute later, the pilot of Aviation 6 reported: “I don’t think this has too much longer to go. I would evacuate all people within the area of the second building.”

  At 10:20 a.m.: “NYPD Aviation Unit reports that the top of the tower might be leaning.”

  That was followed a minute later with this: “NYPD Aviation Unit reports that the North Tower is buckling on the southeast corner and leaning to the south . . . NYPD officer advises that all personnel close to the building pull back three blocks in every direction.”

  And finally, at 10:27 a.m.: “NYPD Aviation Unit reports that the roof is going to come down very shortly.”

  Each subsequent message had a cumulative effect of added urgency, plus multiple validations of the original report. Eyewitnesses indicated that ESU officers evacuated so quickly that, at one point, they were sliding down stair banisters.

  The situation for the FDNY was vastly different. At 9:59 a.m., firefighters in the North Tower heard a violent roar but did not know what had happened. Most firefighters in the North Tower had no idea how dire the situation was during the following twenty-nine minutes, nor did I. What the world saw on the news, we could not see.

  The lack of available information for the Fire Department translated into an unhurried evacuation—with lethal consequences. I radioed to firefighters, “Evacuate the building!” Had I known the full picture, my message to evacuate would have been preceded with the words, “Mayday, mayday, mayday”—signaling the urgency to get out of the building. I could only imagine how that warning would have been a game changer for all of us in the North Tower, including my brother and Engine 33.

  It was painful to ponder the idea that many deaths could have been avoided had the FDNY and NYPD shared situational awareness. Some observers wanted to reduce this issue to only a technological problem with the repeater radio.

  An investigation by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) found that the WTC repeater was incapable of working in the critical moments after the South Tower had collapsed and would not have assisted in the evacuation of firefighters from the North Tower. The debris from the South Tower destroyed the repeater located in WTC-5 that received a command channel message on one frequency and rebroadcast the signal on another frequency at a higher wattage.

  It turned out that we were lucky that the chiefs in the North Tower were not on the WTC repeater c
hannel. If those of us in the North Tower had been using the repeater, all communication would have ended. Even if you were standing next to each other, you would not have heard any radio transmission. Like a mobile phone, without the cellular tower, you have no communications.

  Since then, I made sure that every FDNY response vehicle with a radio has the handie-talkie radio frequencies programmed into the vehicle’s high-powered 25-watt radios. With an innovation from Captain Mike Stein, we also created a portable high-powered post radio, the size of an attaché case, to carry inside a building. This avoids having a single point of communications failure.

  However, even with the best technology in the world, if agencies don’t talk to each other, there is no communication. The 9/11 Commission reported that the radios were “not the primary cause of firefighter fatalities in the North Tower” and confirmed that my evacuation messages were indeed heard. NIST also concluded that emergency responders’ lives were likely lost resulting from the lack of timely information sharing.

  However, these reports did not answer the most important question: Why did the NYPD and FDNY not talk to each other? What could have caused this behavior during extreme events? Why wasn’t a unified command set up at the WTC, the way Chief Jim Schwartz of the Arlington County Fire Department and FBI Special Agent Christopher Combs did at the Pentagon that same day? Regardless of any prior power struggles among first responders in NYC, it is inconceivable that anyone on 9/11 would ever consciously withhold vital information that could potentially save lives. I had to find out why—for my guys and all first responders.

  * * *

  • • •

  The Incident Command Post was established on 9/11 by FDNY opposite both burning towers on the far side of West Street. Yet, even with fire and smoke coming from the top of the WTC, the NYPD set up a separate command post on Church Street, on the opposite side of the WTC, more than a block and a half away.