by Steve Vogel
Cooke did not give up. He and the head of the Pentagon police force, John Jester, raised alarms after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 that killed 168 people in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Center, the deadliest terrorist attack yet on American soil. They did so again after an enormous truck bomb exploded in front of the Khobar Towers housing complex in Dhahran in 1996, killing nineteen U.S. servicemen. Still no funding was available, and eighteen-wheelers backed into the Pentagon every day.
The embassy bombings in Africa brought the issue to a tipping point. In the fall of 1998, Cooke got signals from Capitol Hill that he was likely to get money for his Mall annex. Cooke called Lee Evey into his office. “I want you to take a project on,” Cooke said. The mall extension needed to be built, and fast. Construction of the Remote Delivery Facility was soon under way. In the interim, Pentagon police began using a warehouse in nearby Crystal City to screen truck deliveries.
The loading docks were hardly the Pentagon’s only vulnerability. Before the embassy bombings, Wedge 1 project leaders warned Evey that the planned renovation did not adequately protect the building against potential threats. The demolition had revealed an unwelcome surprise. The renovation team had anticipated that the backup walls behind the limestone façade would be made of the same reinforced concrete seen everywhere else in the building. But when crews pulled down the wallboard on the outer E Ring walls, they discovered the façade was backed with brick inside a concrete frame.
Brick was simply not as strong as reinforced concrete. To make it worse, the hurry with which McShain’s crews had thrown up the brick walls was plain to see. Bricklayers had taken some shortcuts; rather than putting mortar between each layer of brick, they put down two layers of brick in some places before applying mortar.
Before departing the program, the Corps of Engineers performed classified simulations at a research center in Mississippi measuring the damage the Pentagon would suffer from a truck bomb. Depending on the amount of explosive and its proximity, it could be catastrophic.
Putting blast-resistant, two-inch-thick windows on the outer walls of the Pentagon would be expensive. In Wedge 1 alone, there were 312 outer windows, plus another 70 facing the inner courtyard, and the windows cost $10,000 apiece. But it was an easy decision. Evey, with Cooke’s approval, agreed to buy the windows.
The tougher problem was figuring out how to strengthen the walls. One recommendation was that the limestone be temporarily removed, the brick torn down, and the wall recast with reinforced concrete, but the cost was prohibitive. Project engineers came up with a plan to reinforce the brick walls with steel. They would frame the windows with six-inch-thick steel beams. It would all be bolted together, floor by floor, creating a steel web backing the wall. To further protect occupants, a Kevlar-type ballistic cloth would be hung between the steel beams, almost as if the building were being dressed in a bullet-resistant vest. The cloth was designed to catch shards of masonry, which analysis showed had killed many of the victims in the Africa bombings.
The Pentagon’s bus-and-subway system was another vulnerability. The old bus tunnel—considered such a marvel of mass transit when the Pentagon opened—was replaced by a surface-level bus station in 1977 and closed off altogether in December 1983, a few months after a terrorist bombing killed 260 Marines in Beirut. (The tunnel was converted in 1987 into the headquarters for the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization—President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” program.) But the surface-level bus station allowed buses to drive within nine feet of the building. Moreover, an escalator from the Metro subway station below carried passengers directly into the building—Pentagon security officials dubbed it the “terrorist delivery tube.” The 1995 sarin-gas attack on the Tokyo subway only heightened their concerns.
In the spring of 2000, the renovation program revealed plans to close the escalator and build a new subway entrance away from the Pentagon. The bus station would be moved three hundred feet from the building. The plan brought howls of protests from local politicians and bus passengers angry at the long walk exposed to the elements. “We were severely criticized, and in fact even to some extent ridiculed,” Evey later said. “One particular quote that sticks with me is somebody thought that this was kind of a stupid thing to do, and made the comment that, ‘Don’t you know that terrorists don’t arrive on buses?’”
From an old VW Bug to a big Cadillac
The Arleigh Burke Bell was about the only reminder of the old Navy Command Center to make it to the new one. The eight-inch-diameter bronze ship’s bell had been given to the Navy as a gift by the legendary “31 Knot” Burke, the hard-charging World War II destroyer squadron commander who later served three tours in the Pentagon as chief of naval operations, longer than anyone in the building’s history.
Everything else in the Navy Command Center in Wedge 1 was new—the furniture, floors, lighting, and computers. To Lieutenant Kevin Shaeffer, a junior action officer in the Navy’s Strategy and Warfighting Concepts Branch, even the odor was different—everything smelled fresh. The old command center on the fourth floor had been stale, bursting at the seams with equipment and personnel.
When Shaeffer and his colleagues moved into the new command center on August 15, 2001, it was “like stepping from an old VW Bug to a big Cadillac,” recalled Lieutenant William Wertz. Officers went about putting up home touches in their cubicles, pinning family photographs and “Beat Army” stickers into the light gray fabric. Shaeffer, a twenty-nine-year-old from Peters Township, Pennsylvania, put up a photograph of his wife, Blanca, a fellow Naval Academy graduate. Navy Commander Patrick Dunn, who shared a four-person cubicle with Shaeffer and two other officers in their branch, set up a big jar of candy on his desk where everybody helped themselves to sweets, accompanied by a few of Dunn’s trademark jokes. The new command center was in business, monitoring the whereabouts of the Navy’s 317 ships.
Wedge 1 was on cost and on schedule, as Lee Evey had promised. The first employees—a group of a hundred Air Force personnel—had begun occupying the renovated section six months earlier, and people were moving in at the rate of almost 150 per week.
In some respects, it was like a brand-new building. The corridors were bright and modern, painted in light colors and well-lit, with polished terrazzo floors. At the apex of corridors 3 and 4 at the inner courtyard, a gleaming bank of escalators with glass balustrades traversed all five floors. There were even passenger elevators, a revolution in Pentagon travel. In the restrooms, modern fixtures with electronic sensors had replaced the ancient toilets and sinks. A new cafeteria, lit by a skylight, was bright and airy.
Other changes were barely noticeable, like the sprinklers installed in the ceilings overhead, the blast-resistant windows, and the interlocking steel tubes and geotechnical mesh hidden behind the drywall. The windows did not open like the old ones, but included faux handles to replicate the historically certified look.
The Pentagon was a markedly safer building. The Remote Delivery Facility had opened on schedule in August 2000. The triangle of lawn where demonstrators had frolicked thirty years earlier during the 1967 march on the Pentagon was now home to the 250,000-square-foot annex, which housed loading docks, thirty truck bays, maintenance shops, and offices. Deliveries were screened by dogs and X-ray machines and then carried on carts through a tunnel underneath the Mall plaza that connected to the first floor of the Pentagon; in effect the annex was part of the building, with its hallways accordingly marked as the J and K rings. At the dedication ceremony, Evey read a proclamation naming it the David O. Cooke Delivery Facility; it was less formally known as Doc’s Dock.
Evey, for his part, was making plans to retire in January after thirty years of government service. He was ready to slow down after a quadruple heart bypass the previous year. He had been in charge of the Pentagon renovation for nearly four years, and the program was firmly set on a new course. Wedge 1 was scheduled to be fully occupied by the end of October, and they were days away from signing a contract
for renovating the rest of the building.
By September 10, 2001, fewer than a hundred renovation workers were still on the job. They were down to punch-list items, checking the floor tiles for cracks and hooking up computers and telephones. Frank Probst, the retired Army officer overseeing quality assurance for the communications facilities, was having trouble with some computer-room air-conditioning units. They kept shutting off when they were not supposed to. He would go check on them again the following morning.
The Pentagon, September 11, 2001.
I’m never going to see my boys again
Frank Probst checked the new computer rooms on the morning of September 11, 2001, and found the air-conditioning was working fine. Finishing up his inspection in a first-floor telephone closet on the E Ring, Probst looked at his watch. It was 9:25 A.M. He had a ten o’clock meeting at the renovation headquarters, a good hike away at the far end of the North parking lot.
Thin and taciturn, Probst had left his home of Altoona, Pennsylvania, at eighteen for West Point and had never gone back. He arrived in Vietnam in June 1966, serving as a platoon leader with the 173rd Airborne Brigade until he was wounded the following January when a Viet Cong tunnel he was clearing exploded during search-and-destroy operations in the “Iron Triangle,” a Communist stronghold in the rural provinces near Saigon. Probst returned for a second tour in 1969 with the 1st Cavalry Division. He burned out on the infantry and in 1973 transferred to the Signal Corps, an assignment that gave him a chance to raise two young boys with his wife, and the expertise for his present job overseeing the installation of new communications equipment in the Pentagon.
Leaving the building, Probst stopped in a construction trailer in front of the renovated wedge. On a little black-and-white television in the break area, Probst looked in disbelief at a news report showing the second of two planes crashing into the World Trade Center in New York earlier that morning. “You know what would be a good target?” another worker remarked. “This building would be a good target.”
“Yeah, I guess it would,” Probst thought. He picked up his notebook and left the trailer at 9:35 for his meeting, walking along a sidewalk toward the heliport in front of the Pentagon’s west wall. The day was spectacular, that same pristine late-summer weather that had greeted the construction crews when they broke ground that day exactly sixty years earlier, just a few dozen yards from where Probst was walking.
Probst did not notice the jet until he looked up and saw it heading right at him. The aircraft had just come over the hill at the south end of the Navy Annex overlooking the Pentagon. Probst had not heard a thing until he saw the plane, and then all he could hear were the engines cranking, as if the pilot were flying full bore. The nose was dropped, no lights were on, and the wheels were up. The plane seemed impossibly low—its wings clipped off several light poles and the antenna on a Jeep Grand Cherokee as the jet crossed over Washington Boulevard, flying toward the Pentagon. Probst did not even notice that—his eyes were focused on the engine on the plane’s right wing, heading straight at his face. “I’m dead,” he thought.
Probst dove to the pavement—the quick reactions honed in Vietnam had not abandoned him. A fleeting, sad thought passed through his head as he fell: “I’m never going to see my boys again.”
It’s headed toward the Pentagon
American Airlines Flight 77 had departed Washington Dulles International Airport at 8:20 A.M. that morning bound for Los Angeles. Pilot Charles “Chic” Burlingame III, a former naval aviator who had spent years assigned to the Pentagon, brought the jet up to its assigned cruising altitude of 35,000 feet twenty-five minutes later.
The Boeing 757, more than fifty yards long and with a wingspan of 124 feet, could accommodate two hundred people, but the Tuesday morning flight was unusually light, with fifty-nine passengers and five crew members. A mix of businesspeople and tourists were aboard. Among them were Leslie Whittington and Charles Falkenberg, starting a two-month adventure to Australia with their daughters Zoe, eight, and curly-headed Dana, three. Whittington, a popular and sharp-witted associate professor of public policy at Georgetown University, had been appointed a visiting fellow at the Australian National University, and the whole family was accompanying her, hoping to explore the land.
Three more children were on board: eleven-year-olds Bernard Brown, Rodney Dickens, and Asia Cottom, all sixth-graders from Washington public schools who were traveling with their teachers to a marine sanctuary near Santa Barbara, California. The children had been selected for the National Geographic Society–sponsored trip because of their good grades and potential. Navy Chief Petty Officer Bernard Brown, Sr.—who worked in the newly renovated Wedge 1 but was taking the day off—was proud of his mischievous, basketball-loving son, but could not help feeling nervous as the boy set off on the journey.
Barbara Olson, a former federal prosecutor who had come to prominence as a television commentator in the late 1990s with her fiery skewering of President Bill Clinton, sat in first class. She had been booked on a flight to Los Angeles the day before but had delayed her departure to have breakfast that morning with her husband, Theodore Olson, the solicitor general of the United States. It was his birthday.
Hani Hanjour was also sitting in first class, in Seat 1B. He was a devout Muslim from Taif, Saudi Arabia, with a thin face and an ascetic manner. In the spring of 2000, at an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, Hanjour’s prior training as a pilot came to the attention of Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda chief of operations, Mohammed Atef. Hanjour was selected to be one of the pilots for a plot to fly hijacked airliners into prominent American buildings. The idea had been proposed to bin Laden in mid-1996 by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and bin Laden had approved the plan in the months following the August 1998 African embassy bombings. At a series of meetings at a camp outside Kandahar, Afghanistan, in the spring of 1999, bin Laden, Atef, and Mohammed selected an initial list of targets, among them the White House, the U.S. Capitol, and the World Trade Center. It was bin Laden himself who insisted the Pentagon be included.
Hanjour was joined in the first-class section by two Saudi accomplices, Nawaf and Salem al Hazmi, baby-faced brothers from Mecca. Two more hijackers, Majed Moqed, also a Saudi, and Khalid al Mindhar, a Yemeni, sat in seats 12A and 12B in the coach section.
The Hazmi brothers had attracted some scrutiny during check-in at Dulles because one of the brothers lacked a photo ID, but they were nonetheless given boarding passes. Moqed and Nawaf al Hazmi both set off metal detectors and were checked with a hand wand by a screener, who allowed them through without bothering to resolve what had set off the alarm. It may have been the box cutters and knives they were carrying.
The hijackers made their move shortly after 8:51 A.M., probably around the time the plane crossed out of West Virginia and into southern Ohio. They took control of the cockpit and herded the passengers and possibly the crew to the rear of the plane. At 8:54, with Hanjour likely at the controls, the plane turned south toward Kentucky; radar contact with the aircraft was lost minutes later. The plane was soon streaking eastward back over West Virginia toward Washington, its transponder turned off, its whereabouts unknown to authorities.
In the back of the plane, Barbara Olson used her cell phone to call her husband at his office, reaching him sometime after 9:16 A.M. “Our plane has been hijacked,” she told him. As Ted Olson listened, the line went dead. Then she called again. “What can I tell the pilot to do?” she asked. Then the phone cut off, and there were no more calls.
At 9:32, air traffic controllers at Dulles spotted an aircraft on the radar “tracking eastbound at a high rate of speed” toward Washington. A minute later, as the plane crossed the Capital Beltway about five miles west of the Pentagon, a tower supervisor at Reagan National Airport telephoned the Secret Service to warn that the aircraft posed a threat to the White House. At 9:34, the plane turned south away from the White House and flew over Alexandria, continuing for a minute before turning to the west and circling back. Two
minutes later, Secret Service agents at the White House grabbed Vice President Dick Cheney from his chair and hustled him down to a basement bunker.
But the aircraft was heading to a different target. At the end of its tight 330-degree turn, the plane was down to 2,200 feet and still descending rapidly, so low it disappeared from controllers’ radar screens. It was by then over Arlington, flying east, following Columbia Pike toward the Pentagon. Arlington County motorcycle patrol officer Richard B. Cox, standing near Bob and Edith’s Diner on Columbia Pike less than a mile from the Pentagon, heard a sudden roar, turned, and was astonished to see a plane directly overhead, trees and buildings and cars reflected on its belly. It was no more than a hundred feet off the ground. Cox rushed to his radio to call in a warning: “It’s an American Airlines plane and it’s headed toward the Pentagon, I think.”
In the last seconds, as the jet plunged toward the Pentagon’s west wall, its two Rolls Royce engines screaming with 44,000 pounds of combined thrust at full throttle, witnesses could see the silhouettes of passengers huddled in the rear.
Something can happen in this world
“My God! What’s happened?” Petty Officer Michael Allen Noeth jumped out of his chair in the Navy Command Center and pointed to a bank of large televisions that framed one side of the watch section. News broadcasts from New York City showed a plume of black smoke rising from the North Tower of the World Trade Center. An airplane had crashed into the building at 8:46 A.M.
It was the first inkling of trouble in what had been a routine morning in the command center. Coats were slung over chairs and briefcases sat beside desks. The daily briefing for the Navy leadership—“Around the World in Fifteen Pages” as the staff liked to call it—was already over. Lieutenant Kevin Shaeffer had reviewed his e-mail and digested The Early Bird, the compilation of military-related news stories put out every weekday morning by the Defense Department. The lead item reported plans by the new secretary of defense to cut the Pentagon bureaucracy by 15 percent. “I have no desire to attack the Pentagon,” Donald Rumsfeld was quoted as saying. “I want to liberate it. We need to save it from itself.” The Early Bird had missed one of the more interesting stories of the day—a centerpiece feature on the front of The New York Times Arts section about Bill Ayers, now a distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He had just published a memoir on his life with the Weather Underground in which he described, among other acts, the 1972 bombing of the Pentagon. “I don’t regret setting bombs,” Ayers was quoted as saying in the first paragraph of the story. “I feel we didn’t do enough.”