The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS

by Michael Morell

  An intelligence report about a phone conversation that the United States had intercepted between two (non-allied) world leaders that I had placed in the president’s binder caught his attention and caused him to pick up the phone to call Dr. Rice in Washington. They talked for only a couple of minutes. The briefing was over by 8:25 a.m. Only six minutes earlier one of the flight attendants on Flight 11 had contacted American Airlines ground personnel to say, “I don’t know, but I think we are getting hijacked.” And just one minute earlier Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker, was trying to communicate with the cockpit on Flight 11 but had actually contacted air traffic control, saying, “We have some planes. Just stay quiet and you will be okay.”

  I left the presidential suite and took the elevator down to take my place in the motorcade that would carry the president to the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, where he was scheduled to speak. Soon joining me in the van were several senior White House officials, including political advisor Karl Rove, Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, and Director of White House Communications Dan Bartlett. I had become friendly with both Rove and Fleischer during the previous eight months. Fleischer and I would often talk sports, and Rove and I would frequently banter about the PDB. (He was not among the handful of White House officials cleared to see it.) “You don’t have anything in that briefcase that CNN doesn’t have,” he would tease me. “Karl, if you only knew what I know,” I would respond.

  During the drive to the school, at 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the north side of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, between the ninety-third and ninety-ninth floors. It was traveling at 490 miles per hour.

  Just as we were pulling up to the school, Fleischer’s cell phone rang. He listened for a few seconds and flipped his phone closed. He turned to me and asked, “Michael, do you know anything about a plane hitting the World Trade Center?” I said, “No,” but told him I would make some calls. As the motorcade came to a stop, I said, “Ari, I sure hope this is an accident and not terrorism.” He paused for a second or two—the word terrorism hanging in the air—and said, “I sure hope so too.”

  My guess at the time was that a small plane had lost its way in bad weather and, by accident, had crashed into the World Trade Center. From just outside the classroom, I called CIA’s Operations Center. When I got the duty officer on the line he quickly told me that the plane in question was a large commercial airliner. My hope that this was not terrorism started to fade.

  As I flipped my phone shut and walked into the senior staff room, I looked at my watch. It was nine a.m. Booker Elementary had placed a television in the room, and everyone was glued to the coverage coming out of New York. At 9:03 we watched as United Airlines Flight 175, a Boeing 767 with sixty-five passengers and crew members on board, slammed into the south side of the South Tower of the World Trade Center between the seventy-seventh and eighty-fifth floors. At impact, UAL Flight 175 was traveling at nearly six hundred miles per hour.

  There was now no question—this was a deliberate act of terrorism. In the classroom next door, Andy Card made his way to the president, who was listening, along with sixteen second graders and a large number of reporters and others, to a story about a girl and her pet goat. At 9:05 a.m. Card whispered in the president’s ear, “A second plane has hit the World Trade Center. America is under attack.”

  Back at CIA headquarters, one of the many odd coincidences of the day was playing out. While I was briefing the president, several senior CIA officers were having a long-planned breakfast with Commander Kirk Lippold, the commander of the USS Cole when it was attacked in Yemen. The group was lamenting that the American public was not sufficiently seized with the threat of terrorism, and Lippold suggested that it would take some “seminal event” to get the public’s attention. Minutes later news of that event reached the room. The Agency officers quickly turned to their duties, and Lippold rushed back to the Pentagon—arriving just in time to see American Airlines Flight 77 slam into the building.

  In Alec Station the reaction was a grim realization. When reports of the second plane’s hitting the World Trade Center reached the Station, everyone instantly thought and said the same thing: “So this is what al Qa‘ida was planning. This is what we were waiting for.”

  The president finished the session with the students and joined the senior staff. He made a number of calls on a secure phone that is always with the president for such a contingency. He spoke with the vice president and national security advisor. During one of these calls, on a nearby television, one of the networks played a recording of the second plane hitting the South Tower. A staff member called the president’s attention to the footage, a moment his photographer captured in an unforgettable image that would be published in hundreds of newspapers and magazines. I am in the far left of the photo, holding my briefcase.

  I could only stand and watch as the president spoke on the phone and as Ari Fleischer sat at a nearby table writing out the first draft of remarks that the president would soon deliver to the nation. Standing there, being photographed, I was growing increasingly concerned about the president’s safety as well as the safety of others at the school. The fact that the president would be at Booker Elementary at this hour, on this day, had been public knowledge for days. I wondered when a plane might come crashing into the school. I thought about mentioning this to the head of the president’s Secret Service detail, but I figured that he’d probably thought of that, as he looked as nervous as I felt.

  At nine thirty a.m. President Bush went back to a classroom to speak to the nation. Surrounded by students, teachers, and reporters, he said the country had suffered an apparent terrorist attack and promised to hunt down those who had committed the act, adding that “terrorism against our country will not stand.”

  At 9:37 a.m., a few minutes after the president concluded his remarks, American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757 carrying sixty-four passengers and crew members, crashed into the west side of the Pentagon. One of CIA’s professional drivers, a gentleman with whom I had become well acquainted during my briefing assignment, was waiting at the Pentagon’s River Entrance for a colleague who was delivering the PDB to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. He said the impact of the crash lifted his vehicle off the ground.

  The father of some of my children’s closest friends since preschool, a teacher in Arlington County, Virginia, home to the Pentagon, told me later that the plane passed directly over the trailer in which he was teaching. Tom said the roar made it seem as though the jet’s landing gear might touch the school’s roof. It was a sound he had never heard before. He said to a colleague or a student, “Wow, that’s really low!” He then went back to teaching. It was only a few minutes later that a student coming in late to class said that a plane had crashed into the Pentagon. “Sure,” Tom said to this boy, thinking that the student was simply being silly. “Sit down and open your math book.” A few minutes later, Tom apologized to the boy as the trailers were being evacuated.

  While the president was still speaking at Booker Elementary, the Secret Service told those of us in the staff area to take our places in the motorcade as quickly as possible. They said that once the president was finished speaking and was in his limousine the motorcade would wait for no one. I climbed into the back of the senior staff van. Within minutes we were speeding to the Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport, just three and a half miles away.

  When we arrived at the airport we received news of the attack on the Pentagon. Dire speculation took hold: how many planes had been hijacked and how many more targets might there be? I also thought of my family. I wondered if Mary Beth, who was at home, even knew yet what horrors had been unleashed on New York City and Washington. My children were at school in Fairfax County, Virginia, and I prayed that they would not be too frightened by what was going on—or too concerned about my safety. After all, I was about to board the most secure aircraft in the world.

  Once everyone was aboard, Air Force One’s
engines roared to life. The aircraft accelerated down the runway and began a rapid climb—one steeper than I had ever imagined a wide-bodied aircraft could achieve. It was ten a.m.

  We were off and I asked the president’s military aide—the keeper of the nuclear “football” (a briefcase containing the codes needed by the commander in chief to launch a nuclear war)—where we were going. He responded, “We are just flying around for a bit.” I huddled with several others in Air Force One’s senior staff compartment, a small room with four seats not far from the president’s airborne office, where we looked in horror at live news reports. We watched people jump to their deaths from the top floors of the World Trade Center. Then we watched the South Tower collapse and disappear into a plume of smoke and dust. For a number of seconds no one said a word. Then someone broke the silence by whispering, “My God.”

  Back at CIA, George Tenet was making a decision to evacuate the complex. In a meeting in his conference room, Tenet was reminded that years earlier, Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, had developed a plan to crash a plane into CIA headquarters. With planes still in the air, Tenet was taking no chances.

  The evacuation order, not surprisingly, did not apply to the Counterterrorism Center. In Alec Station, supervisors told their employees that they could go if they wanted, if they felt they needed to get home to their families. No one left. Not a single person. They all stayed. Food, cots, and air mattresses began to appear.

  The officers in Alec went to work on a number of questions—the most important of which were “Who exactly did this?” and “Are additional attacks coming?” The staff sent urgent priority messages to CIA stations around the globe, asking each of them to reach out to its foreign counterparts and vacuum up any shred of information that might shed light on the attacks and what might come next. And the officers began thinking about a much-expanded operational plan to go after al Qa‘ida.

  A few minutes following Tenet’s order to evacuate, United Airlines Flight 93, a Boeing 757 carrying forty-four passengers and crew members, crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Flight 93 passengers, who had become aware of the hijackers’ intentions by speaking to loved ones on cell phones, had revolted and attacked the hijackers. Their actions may have saved the lives of hundreds of others, as the hijackers were targeting the US Capitol building.

  While I continued to stand in the senior staff cabin, news wires reported that a Palestinian terrorist group, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), had claimed responsibility for the attacks. The president called me to his airborne office and asked what I made of it. “Mr. President,” I said, “DFLP is a Palestinian rejectionist group with a long history of terrorism against Israel, but they do not possess the capability to do this.” (Later a senior member of the DFLP would deny the initial claim.) As I turned to leave, the president asked me to tell Tenet to let him—the president—know the instant Tenet had anything definitive on the perpetrators of the attacks. The president said, “Michael, I want to be the first to know. Got that?” He said it in a tone that meant he was deadly serious. “Yes, sir,” I replied.

  As I was leaving the president’s office, Andy Card asked to speak with me and pulled me into the president’s cabin on Air Force One. He told me that the White House had received a threat against Air Force One and that what was particularly worrying was that the caller had used Air Force One’s code name—Angel. I thanked Card for sharing the information with me, but my instinct was that this was not a major concern. I figured that if a bomb had been on board, it would have already detonated, and since we now had fighter escorts and an Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) plane above us, we were safe from anyone trying to fly a plane into us.

  I returned to my seat in the staff section of the plane and picked up one of the phones that sit beside almost every seat on the aircraft. The phone rang twice, and one of the Air Force crew members working on the upper deck of the 747 said, “Yes sir. What can I do for you?” I asked to be connected to Tenet’s office in Washington and gave him the number. “Sir, we have been ordered to keep all phone lines open for the president and the military aide,” he replied. I told him that the president had personally asked me to make the call. “I’ll put you right through,” he said, and within seconds the phone in the director’s office was ringing.

  Tenet’s office, like much of the federal government, was in crisis mode. With Tenet’s order to evacuate, he and his staff were in the process of relocating to a secure site. Tenet wasn’t nearby but his secretary handed the phone to the nearest senior official, Cofer Black, the head of the Agency’s Counterterrorism Center. Black was calm and collected and passed on what the Agency knew at that point, which was little beyond what the rest of the world knew. I relayed the president’s request that he be informed instantly if and when information came in regarding responsibility for the attacks and asked him to get word to the director. When I hung up, I somehow knew it wasn’t going to happen.

  The president’s military aide told me that we were heading for Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. There the president would make another public statement and the aircraft would be re-provisioned—taking on additional food and water since it was unknown where it would go next or how long we would be airborne. The military aide advised me that a number of Air Force One’s passengers, all those deemed not essential to national security, would be left behind in Barksdale. Shortly before landing I was told that I would not be booted off—unlike all of the White House staff working on domestic issues, a couple of members of Congress from Florida who had been on the trip, and a large portion of the traveling press pool.

  On our landing at Barksdale, the president was whisked off under heavy guard. I elected to remain on the aircraft. A Secret Service agent came through the cabin and said that no one would be permitted to make cell phone calls or to give out the president’s location. My heart sank. I had planned to call Mary Beth to let her know that I was safe and to make sure that she and the kids were OK as well.

  Among those still on the aircraft were the two congressmen who had just been informed that they would have to find alternative means of onward travel. Together we watched the ongoing news coverage. One of them, aware that I was the president’s intelligence briefer, asked me who I thought was behind the attacks. I told him I would bet every dollar I had that Usama bin Ladin’s al Qa‘ida was responsible.

  (The next day I found on my desk a press report quoting one of the Florida congressmen, who had told reporters that a “senior national security official traveling with the President” had told him just hours after the attack that Bin Ladin was the culprit. A handwritten note on the piece, from one of my colleagues, asked, “Are you the senior official?” I hadn’t planned on making news—but I guess I did.)

  At 1:45 p.m. Air Force One departed with considerably fewer passengers than when we had arrived. The military aide told me that we were flying to Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Nebraska, home of the US Strategic Command (STRATCOM), where the president would conduct a meeting of the National Security Council over a secure video link from the STRATCOM bunker. The aide was keeping me informed of our every move, and I appreciated it.

  About fifteen minutes after we left Barksdale, Andy Card walked into the staff section of the plane and said, “Michael, the president wants to see you.” When I entered his airborne office I could tell the president was focused and determined. In the last couple of hours, I had seen him transformed from a peacetime president to a wartime commander in chief. He asked me point-blank, “Michael, who did this?” I said, “Sir, I haven’t seen any intelligence that would point to responsibility, so what I’m going to say is simply my personal view.” He told me he understood. I said that there were two terrorist states capable of conducting such a complex operation—Iraq and Iran—but that neither had much to gain and both had plenty to lose from attacking the United States. Rather, I said, the culprit was almost certainly a non-state a
ctor, adding that I would bet my children’s future that the trail would lead to the doorstep of Usama bin Ladin and al Qa‘ida.

  The president asked me, “When will we know?”

  “I can’t say for sure,” I replied, and I reviewed for him how long it had taken CIA to have any certainty about responsibility for past terrorist attacks—the bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia (which had not been an al Qa‘ida operation), the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen. With the length of time in each case varying dramatically, I concluded by saying, “It might be soon and then again it might take some time.”

  During my discussion with the president, I had no way of knowing that analysts at CIA headquarters had already tied the attacks to al Qa‘ida. They had acquired the passenger manifest of the four flights from the Federal Aviation Administration and run the names against CIA databases of known terrorists. Hits came up on American Airlines Flight 77. Three passengers on that flight had known and definitive links to al Qa‘ida (prior to 9/11 there was no national no-fly list that would have flagged the hijackers before they got on the plane). And none of this information had been passed to me to share with the president, despite the commander in chief’s “tell me first” order.