While key sources stalled, Commission investigators puzzled over further versions of what supposedly happened on 9/11—according to NORAD. Colonel William Scott suggested that fighters had been scrambled at 9:25 A.M., flying from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia to intercept the third hijacked plane, Flight 77, before it could reach Washington. Radar data, however, showed the fighters had headed away from Washington. As for the fourth plane, United 93, Scott appeared to corroborate the notion that the military had had notice of Flight 93’s hijacking as early as 9:16, forty-seven minutes before it crashed at 10:03.
The senior officer who supervised NORAD’s efforts on 9/11, Air Force Major General Larry Arnold, appeared to second what Scott had said about Flight 77—but in a very different context. “9:24,” he said, “was the first time we had been advised of American 77 as a possible hijacked airplane. Our focus—you have got to remember that there’s a lot of other things going on simultaneously here—was on United 93, which was being pointed out to us very aggressively, I might say, by the FAA.” According to the general, fighters had been launched out of the base at Langley to “put them over the top of Washington, D.C., not in response to American Airlines 77, but really to put them in position in case United 93 were to head that way.”
There had been time to intercept Flight 93, Arnold indicated. The “awful decision” to shoot the plane down had been obviated only by the bravery of its passengers in storming the cockpit, and the ensuing crash. In one breath, however, General Arnold appeared to say that his airmen could have shot down planes as of 9:25, when all civilian airplanes were ordered to land, in another that shoot-down authority was not forthcoming until about 10:08, five minutes after the crash of Flight 93.
John Farmer and the Commission’s Team 8 grew ever more leery of information offered by the military. Farmer stumbled on proof positive, too, that NORAD was failing to provide vital tapes. It took pressure at the very top, and a subpoena, to get them released. The more material team members obtained, the more they boggled in astonishment. Farmer heard one of his staffers, an Annapolis graduate named Kevin Schaeffer, muttering, “Whiskey tango foxtrot, man. Whiskey tango foxtrot.” That phrase, Schaeffer and a colleague explained to Farmer, was a “military euphemism for ‘What the fuck!’ ”
As the Commission zeroed in on the truth behind the military’s failures, the phrase was used often.
THE MOST POWERFUL military nation on the planet had been ill-prepared and ill-equipped to confront the attacks. Time was, at the height of the Cold War, when NORAD could have called on more than a hundred squadrons of fighter aircraft to defend the continental United States. By September 2001, however, with the Soviet threat perceived as minimal—bordering on nonexistent—the number had dwindled to a token force of just fourteen “alert” planes based at seven widely scattered bases. Only four of those fighters were based in the Northeast Air Defense Sector—NEADS—which covered the geographical area in which the hijackings took place.
Practice runs aside, moreover, the airplanes had never been scrambled to confront an enemy. They were used to intercept civilian aircraft that strayed off course, suspected drug traffickers, planes that failed to file a proper flight plan. Hijackings were rare, and countermeasures were based on the concept of hijacking as it had almost always been carried out since the 1960s—the temporary seizure of an airliner, followed by a safe landing and the release of passengers and crew. FAA security had recently noted the possibility that suicidal terrorists might use a plane as a weapon—but only in passing, without putting new security measures in place.
The cumbersome protocol in place to deal with a hijacking involved circuitous reporting, up through the FAA and on to the Pentagon, all the way up to the office of the defense secretary. At the end of the process, if approval was granted, NORAD would launch fighters. The pilots’ mission would then be to identify and discreetly follow the airplane until it landed. Nothing in their training or experience foresaw a need to shoot down an airliner.
On September 11, faced with swift-moving, complex information about multiple hijackings, the FAA was overwhelmed. The internal communications mix—multiple Air Traffic Control Centers, Eastern Region Administration, a command center in Herndon, Virginia, an operations center and FAA headquarters in Washington—proved too muddled to be effective.
There was some confusion over operational language. At the FAA, a “primary target” denoted a radar return. At NORAD, it meant a search target. In FAA parlance, to speak of a plane’s “coast mode” was to project its direction based on its last known appearance on radar. On 9/11, one NEADS staff technician interpreted the word “coast” as meaning that one of the hijacked flights was following the coastline, the eastern seaboard. One senior FAA controller admitted having not even known, on September 11, what NORAD was.
NORAD, for its part, ran into problems when units not designated for defense were called in. Such units had different training, different regulations and equipment, used a different communications net. In one area, NORAD fighter pilots found themselves unable to communicate with airmen from other units. Of three relevant radio frequencies, none worked.
Transcripts of FAA and NEADS conversations, when finally obtained by the Commission, were found to feature exchanges like this:
NEADS VOICE: In that book … we used to have a book with numbers [Dial tone]
NEADS IDENTIFICATION TECHNICIAN: Wrong one [Beeps] I can’t get ahold of Cleveland. [Sigh] [Dial tone, dialing, busy signal] … still busy. Boston’s the only one that passed this information. Washington [Center] doesn’t know shit …
FAA BOSTON CENTER: … We have an F-15 holding … He’s in the air … he’s waiting to get directions …
NEADS IDENTIFICATION TECHNICIAN: Stand by—stand by one. Weapons? I need somebody up here that …
And so on. One NEADS technician would keep saying of Washington air traffic control, “Washington [Center] has no clue … no friggin’ … they didn’t know what the hell was going on … What the fuck is this about?” A staffer at the FAA’s Command Center, speaking on the tactical net, summed up the situation in four words: “It’s chaos out there.”
“The challenge in relating the history of one of the most chaotic days in our history,” a Commission analyst wrote at one point in an internal document, “is to avoid replicating that chaos in writing about it.” So copious is the material, so labyrinthine the twists and turns it reflects, that a lengthy treatise would barely do it justice. Miles Kara, a member of the team that analyzed the military’s failures—himself a former Army intelligence officer—was still producing learned essays on the subject as late as 2012. The Commission’s basic findings, however, were in essence straightforward, and—based on the incontrovertible evidence of the tapes and logs—revelatory.
THE NERVE CENTER for the military on September 11 was an unprepossessing aluminum bunker, the last functional building on an otherwise abandoned Air Force base in upstate New York. From the outside, only antennas betrayed its possible importance. Inside, technicians manned rows of antiquated computers and radar screens. They did not, though, expect to have a quiet day on September 11. Their commander, Colonel Robert Marr, moreover, expected to have to respond to a hijacking.
A simulated hijacking. For the Northeast Air Defense Sector’s headquarters was gearing up for its part in the latest phase of Vigilant Guardian, one of several large-scale annual exercises. This one, old-fashioned in that it tested military preparedness for an attack by Russian bombers, included a scenario in which an enemy would seize an airliner and fly it to an unnamed Caribbean island.
At 8:30 that morning, the exercise proper had not yet got under way. The colonel was munching apple fritters. His mission control commander, Major Kevin Nasypany, was away from the ops floor—in his words, “on the shitter.” The general to whom they answered, Larry Arnold, was at NORAD’s regional command center in Florida.
On the ops floor at NEADS, Master Sergeant Maureen Dooley, Technical Sergeant Sh
elley Watson, and Senior Airman Stacia Rountree were chatting about furniture at the mall—wondering whether an ottoman and a love seat were on sale. To be sure, the orders for the day’s training exercise provided for the team to be capable of responding to a “Real World Unknown,” but no one expected much to happen.
Then the unknown arrived, in the form of a call from FAA controller Joe Cooper, at Boston Center, to Sergeant Jeremy Powell. It was 8:38.
COOPER: Hi, Boston Center TMU [Traffic Management Unit]. We have a problem here. We have a hijacked aircraft headed towards New York, and we need you guys to, we need someone to scramble some F-16s or something up there, help us out.
SGT. JEREMY POWELL: Is this real-world or exercise?
COOPER: No, this is not an exercise, not a test.
The sergeant, and the women who moments earlier had been discussing home furnishings, needed some persuading. Fazed by the advent of real-life excitement, Shelley Watson even exclaimed, “Cool!” A moment later, after an “Oh, shit,” she was all business. “We need call-sign, type aircraft. Have you got souls on board, and all that information? … a destination?” Boston Center could say only that the airplane seized was American 11—as would become clear, the first of the four hijacks. No one could have imagined the destination its hijackers had in mind.
By 8:41, Colonel Marr had ordered the two alert jets at Otis Air National Guard Base, on Cape Cod, to battle stations. At 8:46, having conferred with General Arnold, he ordered them into the air—to no avail. Absent any detailed data, they were assigned merely to fly to military-controlled airspace off the Long Island coast. In the same minute, 153 miles away, American 11 smashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
The NEADS technicians, who had glanced up at a TV monitor, saw the tower in flames. “Oh, God,” one technician said quietly. “Oh, my God …” A colleague at her side cried, “God save New York.”
FAA controllers had meanwhile lost contact with the second hijacked plane, United 175. “It’s escalating big, big time,” New York Center manager Peter Mulligan told colleagues in Washington. “We need to get the military involved.” The military was involved, in the shape of the two NEADS fighters, but impotent.
The Air Force knew nothing of the second hijack until 9:03, the very minute that Flight 175 hit the South Tower. News of that strike reached the Otis pilots Lieutenant Colonel Timothy Duffy and Major Dan Nash while they were still holding off the coast of Long Island.
Five minutes after the second strike, NEADS mission commander Nasypany ordered his fighters to head for Manhattan. Now, though, there was no suspect airliner in New York airspace to intercept. When the pilots began to fly a Combat Air Patrol over Manhattan, as soon they did, there was no enemy to combat. As catastrophe overwhelmed the city, they could only watch from high above. “I thought,” Nash remembered, “it was the start of World War III.”
The Air Force officers and the FAA controllers rapidly began to fear—correctly—that they had seen only the start of something, that there were more strikes to come. Where might they come from? It was perhaps no coincidence, they figured, that both the planes so far hijacked had started their journeys from Logan Airport. “We don’t know how many guys are out of Boston,” mused mission commander Nasypany. “Could be just these two—could be more.” An FAA manager voiced the same thought. “Listen,” he said, “both of these aircraft departed Boston. Both were 76s, both heading to LA.”
“We need to do more than fuck with this,” Nasypany told Colonel Marr, urging him to scramble the other alert fighters available to them—at the Langley base, three hundred miles south of New York. Marr agreed at first only to put Langley on standby. Then, at 9:21, came a call with information that changed the colonel’s mind—and later led to lasting controversy.
The caller was Colin Scoggins, an FAA controller at Boston Center who—in part because of his own previous military service—had special responsibility for liaison with the Air Force. On the phone to NEADS, he shared stunning news:
SCOGGINS: Military, Boston. I just had a report that American 11 is still in the air, and it’s on its way towards—heading towards Washington.
NEADS: OK. American 11 is still in the air?
SCOGGINS: Yes … It was evidently another aircraft that hit the tower … This is a report in from Washington Center. You might want to get someone on another phone talking to Washington Center.
One of the technicians did check with Washington, more than once—only to be told that they knew nothing about American 11 still being airborne. “First I heard of that,” said one supervisor. The source could not be Washington Center, another said. He added, correctly, that “American 11 is the airplane, we’re under the premise, that has already crashed into the World Trade Center.” Scoggins, however, insisted that he had heard “from Washington” that American 11 was still in the air, going “southwest.”
After Flight 11’s transponder was switched off, FAA controllers at New York Center had entered a new “track” for the flight into the system in order to alert other controllers to the airliner’s projected southerly direction. The track remained in the system for a while even after the real Flight 11 had crashed into the Trade Center. 9/11 Commission staff conjectured that it was that track, and emerging information about the loss of Flight 77, that sparked the rumor that Flight 11 was still airborne.
Scoggins never has been able to recall his source of the erroneous information—only that he picked it up while “listening on a Telcon with some people at Washington HQ, and other facilities as well, but I don’t know who they were.”
The information was a red herring. In the chaos of the moment, however, no one knew for certain that it was Flight 11—as opposed to some other aircraft—that had hit the North Tower. If it had not, and if hijackers were taking the captured plane southwest—as Scoggins suggested—their target had to be Washington, D.C. The realization galvanized NEADS.
“Shit!” exclaimed Nasypany. Then, “OK. American Airlines is still airborne, 11, the first guy. He’s heading toward Washington. OK. I think we need to scramble Langley right now … Head them towards the Washington area.”
So it was that at 9:30, chasing a plane that did not exist, three more Air National Guard fighters raced into the air—three, not just the two on alert duty, because NEADS had asked for every plane available. If a hijacked airliner was headed for Washington, Nasypany figured, he would send the fighters to the north of the capital, and block its way. NEADS duly ordered a course that would take them there, but the order was not followed. The tower at the base sent the fighters in another direction—east, out over the Atlantic. Where they were of no use at all.
Chaos prevailed. Four minutes into the fighters’ flight, at 9:34, NEADS finally learned something American Airlines had known for more than half an hour and FAA controllers had known for even longer. “Let me tell you this,” said Cary Johnson, the Washington Center operations manager. “We’ve been looking. We also lost American 77 … Indianapolis Center was working this guy … They lost contact with him … And they don’t have any idea where he is.”
Two minutes later, at 9:36, Scoggins came up on the phone again. “Latest report,” he said. “Aircraft VFR [Visual Flight Rules, meaning the plane was not under the direction of Air Traffic Control], six miles southeast of the White House … We’re not sure who it is.” NEADS technician Stacia Rountree dialed Washington, only to be told, “It’s probably just a rumor.” This time, though, Scoggins’s information was accurate. The plane maneuvering near the nation’s capital was no phantom Flight 11. It was the very real, hijacked, American 77—lining up to strike.
In the NEADS bunker, mission commander Nasypany had no way of knowing that. What he knew, thought he knew, was that his Langley fighters were by now close to Washington, well positioned for an intercept. “Get your fighters there as soon as possible,” he ordered.
Two minutes later, at 9:38, the major asked where the fighters were and learned that they were out o
ver the ocean, 150 miles from where they were needed. Nasypany hoped against hope there was still time to respond. He urged them to fly supersonic—“I don’t care how many windows you break.” And, in frustration, “Why’d they go there? Goddammit! … OK, push ’em back!”
Too late, far too late. Even before Nasypany asked the whereabouts of his fighters, American 77 had scythed into the Pentagon.
Then, and even before the devastating news reached NEADS, Colin Scoggins was back on the phone again from Boston Center—this time with information as misleading as had been his report that Flight 11 was still airborne. “Delta 1989,” he said, “presently due south of Cleveland … Heading westbound.” Delta 1989 was a Boeing 767, like the first two planes seized, and like them it had left from Boston. “And is this one a hijack, sir?” asked Airman Rountree. “We believe it is,” Scoggins replied.
They believed wrong. Boston Center speculated that Delta 1989 was a hijack because it fit the pattern. It had departed Boston at about the same time as the first two hijacked planes. Like them it was a 767, heavily laden with fuel for a flight across the continent. Unlike them, however, it was experiencing no problems at all—until the false alarm.
NEADS promptly began tracking the Delta plane—easy enough to do because as a legitimate flight it was transmitting routine locator signals. It was the only airplane the military was able to tail electronically that day for any useful period of time. On seeing that Delta 1989 was over Ohio, NEADS sent a warning to the FAA’s Cleveland Center. For the airliner’s pilots, already jolted out of their routine by what little they had learned of the attacks, hours of puzzlement and worry began.
First came a text message, instructing Captain Paul Werner to “land immediately” in Cleveland. When the captain sent a simple acknowledgment, back came a second message reading, “Confirm landing in Cleveland. Use correct phraseology.” A perplexed Werner tried again—more wordily, but still too casually for Cleveland. Phrases like “confirmed hijack” and “supposedly has a bomb on board” began flying across the ether. Information from Delta 1989, a controller would report, was “really unreliable and shaky.”
The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden Page 14