By 9:45, only six minutes after his initial warning, Scoggins was saying the plane “might not be a hijack … we’re just not sure.” By then, though, the Air Force was busy trying to get fighters to the scene, Cleveland airport was in a state approaching panic, and 1989’s pilots feared they might have a bomb on board.
“I understand,” Cleveland control radioed Captain Werner meaningfully, “you’re a trip today,” The word “trip” was an established code for hijack, and Werner assured control he was not—only to be asked twice more. Once on the ground, at 10:18, he was ordered to taxi to the “bomb area,” far from the passenger terminal. Passengers and crew would not be allowed to disembark for another two hours, and then under the wary eyes of gun-toting FBI agents and a SWAT team in full body armor.
It had all been, a Cleveland controller would recall, like a “scene out of a bad movie.” Even before the innocent Delta 1989 landed, however, the latest phase of the aviation nightmare had become real-life horror—for Cleveland, for the Air Force team in its bunker, and, for the fourth time that day, for the nation. At 10:07, a phone call between the FAA’s Cleveland Center and NEADS produced a revelation.
FAA: I believe I was the one talking about that Delta 1989 … Well, disregard that. Did you? …
NEADS: What we found out was that he was not a confirmed hijack.
FAA: I don’t want to even worry about that right now. We got a United 93 out here. Are you aware of that?
NEADS was completely unaware. During the wild-goose chase after Delta 1989, NEADS had been told nothing of the very real hijacking, also over Ohio, of United 93. An FAA controller had heard screams from Flight 93’s cockpit, followed by a hijacker’s announcement about a “bomb on board,” some seven minutes before Scoggins alerted NEADS to the imagined problem aboard Flight 1989.
The controller had reported the new hijack promptly, and word had been passed to FAA headquarters. Cleveland control then came up again, purposefully asking whether the military had been alerted. A quarter of an hour later, nevertheless, the following pathetic exchange took place:
FAA COMMAND CENTER: Uh, do we want to think, uh, about scrambling aircraft?
FAA HEADQUARTERS: Uh, God, I don’t know.
FAA COMMAND CENTER: Uh, that’s a decision somebody is going to have to make, probably in the next ten minutes.
FAA HEADQUARTERS: Uh, you know, everybody just left the room.
Five minutes after that, at 9:53 and as United 93’s passengers prepared to attack their captors, an FAA staffer reported that—almost twenty minutes after word of the hijack had reached the agency’s headquarters—senior FAA executive Monte Belger and a colleague were discussing whether to ask for fighters to be scrambled. Belger would tell the 9/11 Commission that he “does not believe the conversation occurred.”
At 10:03, ten minutes after the reported discussion, a full half an hour after FAA headquarters learned of the hijack, United 93’s passengers and crew all died when the airliner plunged into the ground in Pennsylvania. NEADS knew nothing at all of the airliner’s plight until several minutes later—and were then given only vague, out-of-date information.
“In a day when we were already frustrated,” the FAA’s Colin Scoggins recalled, “we were always a day late and a dollar short. We just could never catch up.”
THAT, THE LOGS and documents clearly show, is the true story of the effort to defend America on 9/11. Why, then, did senior military and political men say otherwise? Why, within days, did General Myers and Paul Wolfowitz suggest that fighters had been in pursuit of Flight 93 and would have been able to bring it down? Why did senior officers, and in particular General Arnold—who had been in charge at the NORAD command center in Florida on the day—make similar claims to the 9/11 Commission?
“We believe,” Arnold wrote as late as 2008, “we could have shot down the last of the hijacked aircraft, United 93, had it continued toward Washington, D.C.” It was a statement founded on sand, one that airbrushed out of history the inconvenient facts of the general’s previous claims. Four months after the attacks, he asserted that NORAD had already been “watching United Flight 93 wander around Ohio” at the time the Trade Center’s South Tower was hit. That strike had occurred at 9:03, twenty-five minutes before Flight 93 had even been attacked.
Two years later, as noted earlier, Arnold would claim that NORAD’s focus had been on Flight 93 by 9:24—when the hijack “was being pointed out to us very aggressively, I might say, by the FAA.” This assertion also suggested a magical feat by the military, that the Air Force had been concentrating on United 93 before the plane was seized. The documented reality—damning to the FAA—is that no one at the agency reported the hijack to NORAD in any way, let alone “aggressively,” until after it crashed.
General Arnold would eventually concede that his testimony had been inaccurate. What he, General Myers, and Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz had said about Flight 93 had been nonsensical—though just how nonsensical would emerge only after the disentangling by Commission staff of a maze of logs and tapes—a prodigious task.
Why the officers initially told inaccurate stories is rather clear. In the fuzzy immediate aftermath of 9/11, before the facts and the timings could be analyzed, they conflated the flap over Delta 1989, the hijack that never was, with the very real hijack of Flight 93. That does not explain, however, why they continued to perpetuate the fiction long afterward, when there had been ample time to check the facts.
Former Commission analyst Miles Kara has likened NORAD’s account to an attempt to solve a Sudoku puzzle—fated to fail if a single early mistake is made. He put the inaccurate story down to shoddy staff work and repeated misreadings of the logs.
Commission general counsel Daniel Marcus, though, pointed to disquieting discrepancies, including the “suspicious” omission of key times from an FAA document, the alteration of a NORAD press release, and a disputed claim about the reason for a supposed tape malfunction. Referring the matter to the inspectors general of both the Department of Defense and the Department of Transportation, he raised the possibility that the FAA and Air Force accounts were “knowingly false.”
NORAD’s commander-in-chief, General Ralph Eberhart, for his part, had assured the Commission he and his fellow officers “didn’t get together and decide that we were going to cover for anybody or take a bullet for anybody.”
Senator Mark Dayton, speaking at a hearing on the Commission’s work, would have none of it. “NORAD’s public chronology,” he declared, “covered up … They lied to the American people, they lied to Congress, and they lied to your 9/11 Commission, to create a false impression of competence, communication, coordination, and protection of the American people … For almost three years now NORAD officials and FAA officials have been able to hide their critical failures, that left this country defenseless during two of the worst hours in our history.”
The senator called on President Bush to fire “whoever at FAA or NORAD, or anywhere else who betrayed the public trust by not telling us the truth. And then he should clear up a few discrepancies of his own.”
“At some level of the government, at some point in time …,” Commission counsel John Farmer has written, “there was a decision not to tell the truth about what happened.” The troubling questions about the way the government really functioned on 9/11, Farmer made clear, also involved the White House.
THIRTEEN
WHILE THE FIRE AND SMOKE OF THE ATTACKS WERE STILL IN THE AIR, top Bush administration officials had hurried out statements on a highly sensitive issue—the decision made on 9/11 to shoot down civilian airliners if they appeared to threaten Washington. Who issued that momentous order, and when?
First there had been the flat statement by Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz that—had United 93 not crashed—Air Force pilots had been poised to shoot it down. Next, on the Sunday, had come Vice President Cheney’s account, in a Meet the Press interview, of how the shooting down of hijacked airliners had been authorized. C
heney said the “horrendous decision” had been made—with his wholehearted agreement—by the President himself. There had been moments, he said, when he thought a shoot-down might be necessary.
Bush took the decision during one of their phone calls that day, Cheney told Newsweek’s Evan Thomas. “I recommended to the President that we authorize … I said, ‘We’ve got to give the pilots rules of engagement, and I recommend we authorize them to shoot.’ We talked about it briefly, and he said, ‘OK, I’ll sign up to that.’ He made the decision.”
Bush himself, speaking with The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, said Cheney had indeed suggested that he issue the order. His response, as he remembered it, had been monosyllabic. Just “You bet.” Later still, speaking with the 9/11 commissioners, Bush recalled having discussed the matter in a call made to him by Cheney, and “emphasized” that it was he who authorized the shoot-down of hijacked aircraft.
By the time the President wrote his 2010 memoir, that call from the Vice President had become a call he made to Cheney. Bush’s monosyllabic authorization, moreover, had transmogrified into a well thought-out plan.
“I called Dick Cheney as Air Force One climbed rapidly to forty-five thousand feet …,” the President wrote. “He had been taken to the underground Presidential Emergency Operations Center—the PEOC—when the Secret Service thought a plane might be coming at the White House. I told him that I would make decisions from the air and count on him to implement them on the ground.
“Two big decisions came quickly. The military had dispatched Combat Air Patrols—teams of fighter aircraft assigned to intercept unresponsive airplanes—over Washington and New York.… We needed to clarify the rules of engagement. I told Dick that our pilots should contact suspicious planes and try to get them to land peacefully. If that failed, they had my authority to shoot them down.”
It would have been unthinkable for the U.S. military to down a civilian airliner without a clear order from the President, as commander-in-chief. In his absence, the authority belonged to the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld. “The operational chain of command,” relevant law decreed, ran “from the President to the Secretary of Defense,” and on through the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to individual commanders. The Vice President was not in the chain of command.
The generals understood that. In an earlier exercise, one that postulated a suicide mission involving a jet aimed at Washington, they had said shooting it down would require an “executive” order. The defense secretary’s authority, General Arnold told the Commission, was necessary to shoot down even a “derelict balloon.” Only the President, he thought, had the authority to shoot down a civilian airliner.
The Commission made no overt statement as to whether it believed Cheney’s assertion—that he recommended and Bush decided. Shown the final draft of the Report’s passage on the shoot-down decision, however, Cheney was furious. For all its careful language, the Report dropped a clear hint that its staff had found Cheney’s account—and Bush’s—less than convincing.
“We just didn’t believe it,” general counsel Daniel Marcus declared long afterward. “The official version,” John Farmer would say, “insisted that President Bush had issued an authorization to shoot down hijacked commercial flights, and that that order had been processed through the chain of command and passed to the fighters. This was untrue.”
Why might a phony scenario have been created? “The administration version,” Farmer noted, “implied, where it did not state explicitly, that the chain of command had been functioning on 9/11, and that the critical decisions had been made by the appropriate top officials.… None of this captures how things actually unfolded on the day.”
THE POTENTIAL NEED to shoot down an airliner occurred to the man in the hot seat at NEADS, Major Nasypany, as early as 9:20 on 9/11—after two successful terrorist strikes and the realization that there might be more to come. “My recommendation if we have to take anybody out, large aircraft,” he was taped saying, “we use AIM-9s [heat-seeking air-to-air missiles] in the face.” Nasypany began asking his team whether they could countenance such an act. Everyone knew, though, that a shoot-down would require authorization from the top.
“I don’t know,” said Technical Sergeant Watson, on the line to the FAA, “but somebody’s gotta get the President going.” “I’m amazed,” responded the operations manager at New York Center, “that we’re not at a higher level of Defcon readiness already.”
It was 9:30 by then. The President had yet to leave the school in Florida. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, whose responsibility it was to set Defcon—the forces’ Defense Condition, or military alert status—knew of the New York attacks but had so far taken no action. A few minutes later, when the Pentagon was hit at 9:37, that key figure in the chain of command would head off to view the damage—and have no contact with the President or Vice President until after 10:00.
Staff at the National Military Command Center, whose task it was to connect the President and the defense secretary to those charged with carrying out their orders, looked for Rumsfeld in vain. It was “outrageous,” an unnamed senior White House official would later complain, for the man responsible for the nation’s defense to have been “out of touch” at such a time.
Official reports disagree on what Rumsfeld did after leaving the scene of the crash and before his reappearance at the Pentagon’s Executive Support Center around 10:15. Rumsfeld said in his Commission testimony that he had “one or more calls in my office, one of which I believe was with the President.” The Defense Department’s own report, however, states that he “tried without success to telephone the President.”
When the President and Rumsfeld did finally speak, according to the secretary’s communications assistant, the conversation covered only such questions as “Are you okay?” and “Is the Pentagon still intact?” The Commission decided that it was “a brief call, in which the subject of shoot-down authority was not discussed.”
Rumsfeld was still “just gaining situational awareness”—as he put it—as late as 10:35, when he finally joined a conference call that included Vice President Cheney. Shoot-down authority had already been issued, Cheney said, and—as the transcript of the conversation makes clear—that was news to the defense secretary:
CHENEY: There’s been at least three instances here where we’ve had reports of aircraft approaching Washington—a couple were confirmed hijack. And, pursuant to the President’s instructions, I gave authorization for them to be taken out … [Long pause] Hello?
RUMSFELD: Yes, I understand. Who did you give that direction to?
CHENEY: It was passed from here through the [Operations] Center at the White House, from the PEOC [shelter beneath the White House].
RUMSFELD: OK, let me ask the question here. Has that directive been transmitted to the aircraft?
CHENEY: Yes, it has.
RUMSFELD: So we’ve got a couple of aircraft up there that have those instructions at this present time?
CHENEY: That is correct. And it’s my understanding they’ve already taken a couple of aircraft out.
Later, interviewed for his own department’s report, Rumsfeld was asked whether shoot-down authorization “had come from the Vice President.” “Technically,” he replied, “it couldn’t. Because the Vice President is not in the chain of command. The President and he were talking, and the President and I were talking, and the Vice President and I were talking. Clearly he was involved in the process.”
That fuzzy answer was of no use in establishing when and by whom the shoot-down authority was issued. Rumsfeld’s public testimony to the 9/11 Commission was no more useful. The record of what he told staff in closed session is still withheld, and his 2011 memoir added no substantive detail.
The White House itself ought to have been the best source of information on communications between Bush and Cheney, but the White House proved unhelpful. Though the Commission did manage to get clearance to interview a few of the staff members who had been a
round the President and Vice President that morning, what they learned on the shoot-down issue was of virtually no use.
“Very little new information has been gained in the five White House meetings conducted thus far,” a frustrated staffer noted in the final months of the Commission’s work. “To a person, no one has any recollection of the circumstances and details surrounding the authorization to shoot down commercial aircraft.… Our sense is that the White House will take the position that it is not possible to reconstruct—with any degree of accuracy or reliability—what went on that morning.”
Investigators also asked for interviews with relevant Secret Service agents, but the White House stalled. Then it offered limited access to some of them, with an attorney present. It was next to impossible, the staffer reported, to probe beyond the vague stories told by Bush and Cheney in their media interviews.
Faced with this obstruction, the Commission team concentrated on the paper trail. The White House famously keeps track of all high-level communications, maintains records of phone calls, logs of Secret Service operations, logs kept by military officers, a Situation Room log, a log of activity in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center—PEOC—the bunker in the bowels of the White House where Cheney spent much of the day on September 11, and logs kept aboard Air Force One. For the day of 9/11, there were also notes kept by individuals: President Bush’s press secretary, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, and his wife, Lynne Cheney.
The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden Page 15