The threat reporting spiked at the end of July and then receded. The President finally got an answer to his question about bin Laden and the homeland threat in the famous August 6 memo. Yes, everyone knew that bin Laden was determined to attack the United States. We were not told how he might carry out such an attack, only that he had been impressed by the partially successful attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.
That memo was the only PDB item that addressed the homeland threat in the 192 PDBs that the President had seen since assuming office. On August 6 the President was in Crawford and George Tenet was, as he put it to me in 2003, “on a beach in New Jersey.” A homeland threat was simply not the focus of the myriad intelligence briefings the President received.
The fact is that the United States was poorly prepared for September 11, 2001, for systemic and psychological reasons. Our homeland had been spared a major foreign attack since the British burned the White House in the War of 1812. Yes, there had been the devastating attack on a military base in Pearl Harbor and there had been fears of a homeland threat during World War II. But the homeland had not been hit. No one was prepared for what happened on that awful day.
Ironically, the al Qaeda strategy was finally ready for the Principals’ review on September 4. The meeting was fruitful. We were able to agree on a strategy of implementing an ambitious covert-action program in Afghanistan and launching the Predator drone for reconnaissance missions. Because its armed capabilities were not ready, the Predator, the Principals agreed, could provide us with actionable intelligence to target the locations of key al Qaeda leaders. I forwarded the strategy to the President for his approval on September 10.
6
“THE UNITED STATES IS UNDER ATTACK”
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, began like every other day. The night before I’d dined with David Manning, Tony Blair’s foreign policy advisor, after attending the President’s meeting that day with John Howard, the prime minister of Australia.
I arrived at my office around 6:30 A.M. and read through the various news clippings, cables, and intelligence reports. There was nothing remarkable. I was to give a speech later in the day at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
I planned to make a case for missile defense, noting that we had to deal with both the low-tech terrorism threat and the high-tech missile capabilities of rogue states such as North Korea and Iran. To be fair, I did not dwell on the terrorist threat, which was being worked through the NSC system. Steve and I had talked about that and decided that he or I, or maybe the President, would give a speech when we revealed our new strategy for combating al Qaeda. Rather, I concentrated my remarks on missile defense, countering the critics who thought the President to be too focused on the missile threat.
The President was traveling that morning to Florida for an education event. Usually Steve or I traveled with him, but this was to be a short day trip and we sent the director of the Situation Room, U.S. Navy Captain Deborah Loewer, to accompany the President.
Shortly before 9:00 A.M., I was standing at my desk when my executive assistant, then U.S. Army Major Tony Crawford, came in and said that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. “That’s odd,” I said, thinking that it was probably a small plane that had gone off course. Not too long before, the golfer Payne Stewart had died in a crash when the cabin had depressurized and knocked the pilot unconscious. That was the kind of scenario that immediately came to mind.
A few minutes later, Tony came in and said that it was a commercial airliner that had hit the Trade Center. I got the President on the phone and told him what had happened. “That’s a strange accident,” he said. We agreed that I would be back in touch.
I went down to the Situation Room for my staff meeting. I was going around the table to hear from the senior directors when Tony burst in with a note. A second plane had hit the World Trade Center. People have told me that I said, rather calmly, “I have to go.” Maybe. But at that moment I knew that there had been a terrorist attack, and I was shaken to my core.
The Situation Room at that time (it has since been remodeled) was just a paneled conference room abutted by a kind of operations center staffed by civilians and military officers who monitored intelligence traffic and managed the phone calls for the President and the National Security Council staff. They kept in constant communication with the operations centers at the CIA and at State and with the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon.
I headed into the operations center, where phones were ringing and people were talking loudly while watching multiple television screens playing the footage from New York. I tried to reach the NSC principals. George Tenet had already gone to a safe location at Langley. Colin Powell was in Latin America, and I had a momentary scare because I thought he was in Colombia, then a hotbed of terrorism. Fortunately, he was in Peru attending a meeting of the Organization of American States. I tried to reach Don Rumsfeld but couldn’t. His phones were just ringing, I was told. I turned around and saw on the television screen that a plane had gone into the Pentagon.
Before I could do anything else, the Secret Service came and said, “Dr. Rice, you must go to the bunker. Now! Planes are hitting buildings all over Washington. The White House has got to be next.” I turned to head toward the bunker, and there was suddenly a report (a false one) that there had been a car bomb at the State Department.
The next moments passed quickly. I did stop to call my Uncle Alto and Aunt Connie in Birmingham. “There will be awful pictures from Washington,” I said. “Tell everyone I’m okay.”
Then I called the President. “I’m coming back,” he said.
“Mr. President,” I said, “stay where you are. You cannot come back here.”
Frank Miller, my trusted senior director for defense policy and arms control, was standing next to me. “Tell him he can’t come back.”
“I know,” I said. I then did something that I never did again. I raised my voice with the President and in a tone as firm as I could possibly muster, I said, “Mr. President, you cannot come back here. Washington, I mean the United States, is under attack.” He didn’t answer, and the Secret Service lifted me physically and pushed me toward the bunker.
I know the routes to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) very well. But I don’t remember how we got there that day. The first person I saw and acknowledged was the Vice President who was on the telephone with the President. I spotted Norman Mineta, the secretary of transportation and as decent a public servant as one would ever know. He had been the Democratic congressman from a district not far from my home in northern California. He is Japanese American with one of those amazing personal histories of a family that remained loyal to the United States despite despicable treatment by the U.S. government during World War II.
Norm was seated at the corner of the long table with a legal pad; he was tracking the tail numbers of aircraft! We had no idea how many planes had been designated to crash into buildings, so the first task was to get every plane out of the air and onto the ground as fast as possible. There was enormous confusion as several planes were reported to be “squawking” inappropriately, meaning that they were not giving the standard response when air traffic control contacted them. Other aircraft would appear in the communications and then disappear. At one point a plane was said to have taken off unauthorized from Madrid, headed for the United States. A few minutes later it was said to have landed in Portugal, then supposedly it was still in the air headed for New York, then inexplicably back in Madrid. Commercial airliners had become weapons, and we needed to know the location—and intention—of all 4,500 planes in U.S. airspace that day.
The Vice President had contacted the President and asked what he wanted to do if a plane did not identify itself. Should we shoot it down? The President gave the order, which the Vice President transmitted to the Pentagon: if a plane did not “squawk” properly, treat it as a foe and shoot it down. That was a chilling prospect. The President had just made t
he unthinkable decision to have the U.S. Air Force shoot down a commercial airliner, killing its innocent passengers. That, though, was the kind of Hobson’s choice that we suddenly faced. Really, no choice at all.
Sometime after the order was given, Norm was told that a plane had disappeared from the air traffic control radar. It was United Airlines Flight 93. For a few awful minutes we all thought that we had shot it down. The Vice President was on the line with the Pentagon. Steve Hadley established a second contact with the National Military Command Center. “You must know if you engaged a civilian aircraft,” the Vice President kept saying. “How could you not know if you engaged a civilian aircraft?” It took what seemed like an eternity to get an answer: no, the air force had not shot down a civilian aircraft. We learned later, of course, that the passengers and crew of Flight 93 had driven it into the ground so that the terrorists could not destroy another building—most likely the Capitol or perhaps the White House. Those brave souls had saved hundreds of their fellow citizens.
A year later I went to a memorial service in Pennsylvania for the victims of Flight 93. One of the families was African American, a group of sisters who reminded me of my own relatives. Their brother LeRoy Homer, Jr., clearly the apple of their eye, had been the copilot on that flight. I told them that I wanted them to know that their brother had quite possibly saved my life, along with many others.
On 9/11, though, I do not remember feeling any sense of personal danger. I’ve been asked many times whether I was frightened, but frankly I didn’t have time to entertain such thoughts. Rather, I fell into a mode consistent with all that I’d been taught and that I had taught myself about crisis management.
Not long after I got to the bunker, it occurred to me that we should contact the Russians. Russian military forces operate worldwide and sometimes in close proximity to our own. There was always a concern during the Cold War that raising the alert level of U.S. forces would spark the Soviet Union to do the same, causing a dangerous spiral of alerts.
As it turned out, Putin had been trying to reach the President, who by now was somewhere between Florida and a secure location in Louisiana. I asked to speak to Sergei Ivanov, but Putin got on the phone. “Mr. President,” I said, “the President is not able to take your call right now because he is being moved to another location. I wanted to let you know that American forces are going up on alert.”
“We already know, and we have canceled our exercises and brought our alert levels down,” he said. “Is there anything else we can do?”
I thanked him, and for one brief moment the thought flashed through my head: the Cold War really is over.
Another priority was to make sure that the world knew that the United States was still functioning. I could imagine the pictures being viewed in other countries around the world and the uncertainty provoked by the silence of the U.S. government. With buildings going down in New York and an attack on the Pentagon in Washington, we needed to send a message to friend and foe that the United States of America had not been decapitated: our leadership was intact, and we were functioning properly. Steve Hadley asked the State Department to send a cable to all posts to convey those important facts.
In retrospect it is amazing that we functioned as well as we did. There were certainly difficulties: we learned that the screens in the bunker could display the Situation Room or television channels but not both simultaneously. There was a moment when there were so many people in the room that the oxygen level dropped precipitously and we had to expel a number of “nonessential” personnel.
In the first few hours, we also failed to communicate convincingly with the outside world and, more important, the country. That was in large part due to the President’s being out of Washington. Looking back, I can see that the first statement by the President, which Karen Hughes cobbled together with Ari Fleischer, was neither informative nor reassuring. But at the time no one wanted to say too much or too little about what might happen next.
In the final analysis, we just kept going. We were all veterans of the Cold War. I was grateful that I never had to use my training in nuclear war survival for the purpose for which it was intended. But it sure helped to have those instincts kick in reflexively when I was suddenly forced to deal with a different kind of “unthinkable” event.
The remainder of that day was a blur. The President arrived at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana and then decided that we had insufficient secure communications there. He was transferred to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, where we held a video-conference meeting of the National Security Council at about 3:00 P.M. Colin Powell was still in the air, returning from Peru, so Rich Armitage represented State. Don and George managed to get to the White House. The meeting was brief, with the President saying only that this was an act of war and that combating terror was the new priority of his administration. At the moment, though, the most important task was to protect the country from further attack and deal with the injured. The victims in New York and at the Pentagon were to get any and all help they needed, but we were surprised at how few injured there were. The attack had been so devastating that most of the victims had never had a chance.
A few hours after the meeting, the President called me. “I’m coming back,” he said. “And I don’t want to hear any argument about it!” I knew it was fruitless to say anything more.
The President landed on the South Lawn of the White House by helicopter at about 7:00 P.M. I walked out toward him and he asked, “Where’s Laura?” She was in the emergency operations center. He headed to the Oval and then immediately down to see the First Lady. When he returned, he joined Karen Hughes, Ari Fleischer, and me in his small private dining room located off the hallway from the Oval. We’d told the networks that the President would speak to the nation at 9:00 P.M., and a CBS crew was already in the process of transforming the Oval for the broadcast.
Mike Gerson had done a draft of the speech, which said what one might expect: the President was at once mourning the dead and reassuring the nation that the United States would be just fine. But the question arose regarding what to say about the terrorists. Though we could have a more considered policy discussion later, the first message would be read everywhere, particularly in the circles of al Qaeda and those who would do us more harm.
The statement said categorically that we would find the terrorists and bring them to justice. But the important issue was what to say about the state sponsors that supported them. One of the problems with terrorists is that they have little at stake in a conventional sense. Unlike states, they have no territory to threaten and no sovereignty to lose. We could, however, send a message to the states that supported them.
Thus we decided to put state sponsors on notice: “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” The President paused over that line and looked at me. I asked him if he felt that he needed to say that now. He said that he did but asked if I had a different view. I told him that I thought he had to say it in the first message because later on it would lose its impact. I consulted with the Vice President and called Colin and Don and read the line to them. Everyone agreed, and that line became known as one of the most important elements of the “Bush Doctrine.”
After the President delivered his address, we held another meeting of the National Security Council, which ended at about 10:00 P.M. Colin had returned from Peru and attended in person along with the other principals. Each principal gave a brief situation report, and George Tenet said that he was sure that al Qaeda had been the culprit but would wait until the next morning to make a definitive call.
I was struck that the President didn’t even look tired. He was determined to keep everyone focused on what we needed to do in the immediate aftermath. He kept saying that we would punish those who attacked us. That, however, was a matter for another day. I remember thinking that he was absolutely in control and showing no strain whatsoever.
I’d been told earlier in
the evening that the Secret Service didn’t want me to go home to my Watergate apartment. I did not have a security detail, and their agents would assign me one the next day. Until then it was better that I stay at the White House. I didn’t question them on this point and had planned to just sleep in my office. But the President nicely invited me to stay in the residence, so I asked a member of my staff, Sarah Lenti, to go to my apartment and pick up a change of clothes for the next day. From that time on, I kept a packed suitcase in my office, just in case I needed it again.
After the NSC meeting, Steve Hadley and Andy Card joined me in my office. I was finally tired. Bone tired. We were about to outline the tasks for the next day when a Secret Service agent burst into the office. “Go to the bunker! Another plane is headed for the White House!” We jumped up and walked quickly back toward the emergency operations center. The first “evacuees” I saw were Barney the dog and then Spot, the other dog. I then noticed the President’s brother Neil, who happened to be staying at the White House, Maria Galvan, the Bushes’ housekeeper, and then Laura and the President. Laura was in her bathrobe and, she later told me, without her contacts—so she couldn’t see. The President was dressed for bed in a T-shirt and shorts. It was a motley crew.
It turned out to be a false alarm, but in solemn tones the Secret Service agent said, “Mr. President you should sleep here tonight.” They had planned for him to sleep on a creaking, moth-eaten pullout sofa bed that looked as though it hadn’t been opened since the 1960s. The President took one look at it and said, “I’m going to bed,” whereupon he turned and started upstairs, Laura and the family and pets trailing after him. Steve, Andy, and I followed. It was for me a moment of comic relief. “No one would believe this,” I whispered to Steve.
No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington Page 10