Fall and Rise

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  One minute later, at 9:26 a.m., Ed Ballinger’s intrusion warning registered with the pilots of Flight 93. Jason Dahl’s chatty messaging tone changed. He wrote a hasty, misspelled ACARS reply: “Ed cofirm latest mssg65 plz—Jason.”

  In a stressful atmosphere, it wouldn’t have been hard to overlook the “plz” in Jason Dahl’s reply and focus instead on the misspelled word “confirm.” That was especially true for Ballinger, as he kept track of fifteen flights after having just learned from one of United’s top officials that the sixteenth plane on his roster, United Flight 175, had crashed in New York. Without the word “plz,” the response from Flight 93 pilot Jason Dahl could easily read as a simple acknowledgment of a message received—“Ed cofirm latest mssg”—as opposed to a worried request for more information.

  Ballinger didn’t immediately reply to Flight 93. In the meantime, at 9:27 a.m., the pilots responded to a routine radio call66 from a Cleveland air traffic controller, who told them to watch for another plane twelve miles away and two thousand feet above them.

  “Negative contact,” Jason Dahl replied. “We’re looking.”

  Seconds later, at 9:28 a.m., every missed opportunity, every minute of delay in the spread of information and warning, every bit of bad luck and timing, coalesced in the cockpit of United Flight 93. The terrorists’ element of surprise remained intact, and Melodie Homer’s and Ed Ballinger’s worst fears came true.

  Chapter 8

  “America Is Under Attack”

  American Airlines Flight 77

  Even after two hijacked jets struck the World Trade Center, even as concern mounted among Indianapolis Center controllers about strange behavior by American Airlines Flight 77, no one from the FAA informed the U.S. military that a plane that took off from Dulles Airport had stopped communicating by radio and had disappeared from radar screens after someone turned off its cockpit transponder.

  Meanwhile, based on a combination of wrong and misleading information, Major Kevin Nasypany’s team at NEADS began to chase a different plane, a phantom jet that no longer existed, supposedly heading south from New York toward the nation’s capital: American Airlines Flight 11, which had crashed more than a half hour earlier.

  The after-it-crashed search for American Flight 11 represented a striking illustration of the confusion and failed communication between the United States’ air traffic control system and the nation’s military during the chaotic first hour after al-Qaeda hijackers executed a plan of unanticipated complexity. Whether by design, chance, or a combination of both, the terrorists’ simultaneous multiple hijackings vividly and fatally exposed vulnerabilities of America’s national defense system on a scale unseen in the sixty years since Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.

  The boondoggle search for Flight 11 kicked into gear when NEADS Master Sergeant Maureen “Mo” Dooley fielded a call from the FAA’s Boston military liaison, Colin Scoggins. He’d just taken part in a frenzied conference call with FAA headquarters in Washington and several regional air traffic control centers about the hijackings.

  During that FAA conference call, Scoggins heard someone—he wasn’t sure who—say that American Airlines Flight 11 remained aloft, flying south. If true, that meant some other plane had struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Scoggins consulted with a supervisor, then passed the information to Mo Dooley at NEADS in a phone call at 9:21 a.m.,1 roughly thirty-five minutes after Flight 11 had in fact crashed.

  “I just had a report that American 11 is still in the air,” Scoggins told Dooley, “and it’s on its way towards, heading toward Washington.”

  Dooley: “Okay, American Eleven is still in the air?”

  Scoggins: “Yes.”

  Dooley: “On its way toward Washington?”

  Scoggins: “That was another, it was evidently another aircraft that hit the tower. That’s the latest report we have.”

  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!2 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 down3 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.,4 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 work5 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 happy6 on both of those calls.

  Now Renée sounded serious. She calmly, but erroneously, told her mother7 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,”8 Renée said. The line went dead.

  Nancy yelled upstairs for Ron. Using one of the numbers from Renée, Nancy reached Patty Carson,9 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.”10

  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 fli
ght 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 backward11 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 Keyton12 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 line13 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.14 When he heard that Barbara was on the phone, Olson’s first thought was relief.15 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.”16

  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.17 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?”18

  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 other19 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.20 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.21 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.22 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 security23 that developed during the years since a U.S. air carrier had been hijacked or bombed. Just four years earlier, a presidential commission24 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.25 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.26 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 memo27 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 extremist28 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 belief29 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,30 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.31 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.32

  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.