When he got back to Beauchamp, Wherley was helpful but cautious. He asked to speak with “someone a little higher up the food chain,” and was passed first to another agent, Nelson Garabito. Garabito told him, “It’s coming direct from the Vice President.” Still not satisfied, the general then spoke with the agent in charge of the Presidential Protective Division, Rebecca Ediger. Ediger repeated the request—Wherley told the 9/11 Commission—“speaking for the Vice President.”
The general asked to speak direct to Cheney, but Ediger said the Vice President was on another line. Wherley “wasn’t going to get to talk to anyone he felt comfortable getting the order from,” he realized. So he made do with Agent Ediger—and an “unidentified male voice who took the phone from Ediger” and asked him to “put aircraft over DC with orders to intercept any aircraft that approached within twenty miles and turn that aircraft around. If the aircraft would not change course, the interceptor should use ‘any force necessary’ to keep that aircraft from crashing into a building.” Wherley felt the instructions were “understandable enough.”
When did the Secret Service pass on this purported order from the Vice President? Of the various documents released, one heavily redacted Secret Service memo—dated less than a month after 9/11—is tantalizing. It states that:
After the crash at the Pentagon, Commander [Anthony Barnes of the White House Military Office] in the PEOC advised … that the Vice President had authorized them to engage any other suspect aircraft.… It was at about this time, I began fielding calls from Andrews Air Force Base. I first got a call from [several words redacted]. I verified that they had been requested to do so with the PEOC. When I conveyed this to [words redacted] I told him the Vice President [words redacted] Commander [Barnes] was more than a little incredulous. He had me tell the General to get it from the NMCC [National Military Command Center].
While Barnes cannot today pin down at what time this exchange took place, an Andrews control tower transcript shows that, beginning at about 10:04, a controller began repeatedly transmitting a warning that unauthorized flights entering the closed airspace around Washington would be shot down. Though one cannot be conclusive, the genesis of the warning was likely an instruction passed from the Secret Service.
Cheney would later tell the 9/11 Commission that he had not even been “aware that that fighters had been scrambled out of Andrews at the request of the Secret Service and outside the military chain of command.” The Wall Street Journal, however, has reported conflicting claims. While White House officials said the Secret Service “acted on its own,” the Secret Service issued a statement denying that it did so. To the contrary, the Journal reported, senior agents insisted that “the agents’ actions on September 11 had been ordered by the Vice President.”
Did Cheney give a shoot-down order on his own initiative, before consulting the President? The available evidence suggests he may have. To have done so, moreover, would certainly have been more sensible than sinister. At a moment the capital seemed to be in imminent peril, the two men properly heading the chain of command were out of touch—the secretary of defense away from his post and the President only intermittently in contact because of shaky communications. Many might think that Cheney, on the spot and capable, would have been justified in short-circuiting the system.
If he did so, and had he and the President soon acknowledged as much, it would have been pointless to blame the Vice President. If he did so and then persistently told a false story, however—and if the eventual release of all the records were to prove it—history will be less generous.
WHOEVER REALLY ISSUED the shoot-down order, it came too late to have any effect on events. At Andrews, General Wherley had no immediate way to respond to it—no planes were ready to take off, let alone planes armed and ready. He had, moreover, come away from his exchanges with the Secret Service less than certain about the Vice President’s order. He sent up the first plane available, an unarmed F-16 summoned back from a training exercise, to “check out” the situation over Washington—with no explicit instructions. Four more fighters took off a little later, one pair also without armament, the other—at 11:12 and after a rushed loading process—fully armed with heat-seeking missiles. Their instructions were to fly “weapons free,” which left the decision to fire up to the pilots.
Even then, an hour or more after the shoot-down order came to him via the Secret Service, General Wherley still felt “uncomfortable with the situation.” He did not receive formal, detailed rules of engagement from the Defense Department until long after the real action was over, five hours after the start of the attacks.
The vice presidential authorization to shoot down airliners, meanwhile, had made its way down the designated chain of command from the Pentagon to NEADS, NORAD’s Northeast Air Defense Sector—the nerve center for the two “alert” bases, as distinct from General Wherley’s outfit at Andrews—by 10:31. When the harried men in the NEADS bunker received the order, however, they hesitated:
MAJOR STEVE OVENS: You need to read this … The Region Commander has declared that we can shoot down aircraft that do not respond to our direction … Did you copy that?
MAJOR JAMES FOX, WEAPONS DIRECTOR [A MOMENT LATER]: DO [Director of Operations] is saying “No.”
OVENS: No? … Foxy, you got a conflict on that direction?
FOX: Right now, no, but …
OVENS: OK? OK, you read that from the Vice President, right? … Vice President has cleared us …
FOX [READING]: … to intercept traffic … shoot them down if they do not respond.
NEADS’s Robert Marr, and Major Nasypany commanding the fighters from Otis and Langley, were unsure of the order’s ramifications, did not know quite how to proceed. No new order was sent to the pilots at that point. General Eberhart, moreover, in overall command of NORAD, directed that pilots should not shoot until satisfied that a “hostile act” was being committed.
Not until 10:53 did Nasypany order that his pilots be sent the following tentative message:
Any track of interest that’s headed toward the major cities you will I.D. If you cannot divert them away from the major cities you are to confirm with me first. Most likely you will get clearance to shoot.
THE STORIES TOLD by Cheney, Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz, the FAA, and the military all seemed to fit neatly together after 9/11. Yet they distorted historical truths. The Air Force would not, as Wolfowitz claimed, have been in a position to shoot down United 93, because—had it not crashed—the hijacked airplane would have reached Washington before any fighter pilot in the air received a shoot-down order. The military and FAA versions were similarly misleading or inaccurate—so arousing the Commission’s suspicions that it referred the matter to their respective inspectors general for further investigation.
The FAA’s acting deputy administrator, Monte Belger, told the 9/11 Commission that his officials reacted quickly, “in my opinion professionally,” on September 11. This in spite of the fact that for a full half hour—in a crisis when every moment counted—the agency failed to alert the military to the plight of Flight 93.
“In my opinion,” NORAD’s General Myers was to say in his prepared statement, “lines of authority, communication and command were clear; and the Commander in Chief and Secretary of Defense conveyed clear guidance to the appropriate military commanders.”
That was the message they all wanted the world to hear—that the men who held power in America had been on top of the situation. What is clear, in fact, John Farmer pointed out in 2009, is that “the top officials were talking mainly to themselves. They were an echo chamber. They were of little or no assistance to the people on the ground attempting to manage the crisis.” A thoroughgoing analysis, in Farmer’s view, “would have exposed the reality that national leadership was irrelevant during those critical moments.”
The testimony offered after 9/11, Farmer wrote,
was not simply wrong about facts; it was wrong in a way that misrepresented the c
ompetence and relevance of the chain of command to the response.… It was difficult to decide which was the more disturbing possibility. To believe that the errors in fact were simply inadvertent would be to believe that senior military and civilian officials were willing to testify in great detail and with assurance … without bothering to make sure that what they were saying was accurate. Given the significance of 9/11 in our history, this would amount to an egregious breach of the public trust. If it were true, however, that the story was at some level coordinated and was knowingly false, that would be an egregious deception.
“History,” Farmer wrote later in his book, “should record that, whether through unprecedented administrative incompetence or orchestrated mendacity, the American people were misled about the nation’s response to the 9/11 attacks.”
PART III
AMERICA RESPONDS
FOURTEEN
AMERICANS KNEW, INSTANTLY ASSUMED THEY KNEW, WHO HAD attacked them on 9/11. The Arabs.
As soon as news of the attacks broke, before anything was known of the attackers, a woman phoned the FBI to report an experience she had had the previous evening. She had spotted a diary in a garbage can at Chicago’s Midway Airport, she said, and the final entry had read: “Allah will be served.” That, she thought, seemed sinister.
On an airliner en route to Australia, a flight attendant had kept an eye on a “Middle Eastern male passenger” who was busy on his laptop. Its screen carried a picture of a Boeing 747 and then, suddenly, the words “Mission failed.” The attendant hurried to tell the captain. He in turn alerted the airline and the flight was diverted to the nearest airport—where it emerged that the swarthy passenger was from not the Middle East but Guatemala. The “suspicious” activity had been a video game.
In the turmoil at the Trade Center, even before the second tower fell, a New York fire chief witnessed what was almost certainly the first arrest of the day. As he led his men down to safety, Richard Picciotto remembered, he had come across a cluster of firemen and a police officer engaged in an encounter with “a middle-aged Middle Eastern man.”
The guy was dressed in a nice suit and carrying a nice briefcase, and as I pulled close to the commotion I could see there had been something of a struggle.… One of the firemen on the floor had grown concerned at the man’s sudden appearance; the firefighter had once been a police detective, and he felt there was something fishy about this guy, something about his still being on such a high floor.
All kinds of speculation had been bouncing around on our radios regarding responsibility for these terrorist attacks, and the sight of a transparently Middle Eastern individual was suspicious … plus he had a briefcase, which could have contained a bomb … the “suspect” was in handcuffs and crying uncontrollably. He was claiming innocence of any wrongdoing.… In all likelihood, this guy was guilty of nothing more than foolishness and slowfootedness, but here we were, escorting him down as he cried and as we fought back our own terrors.… It was little over an hour since the first attacks, and already we were running scared.
The Arab with the briefcase would neither be charged with anything nor heard of again. If he was roughly interrogated, though, if he was even held in jail for some time, he was one of many. Some five thousand foreign nationals, most of them of Arab descent, were taken into custody at some point in the two years after the attacks.
According to a Department of Justice inspector general’s report, detainees picked up after 9/11 “remained in custody—many in extremely restrictive conditions of confinement—for weeks and months with no clearance investigations being conducted.… Those conditions included ‘lock down’ for at least 23 hours per day; escorts that included a ‘4-man hold’ with handcuffs, leg irons, and heavy chains any time the detainees were moved … the evidence indicates a pattern of physical and verbal abuse by some correctional officers.” None of those arrested in the United States was to be linked to the attacks, and only one man would be convicted of terrorism offenses. In the words of immigration commissioner James Ziglar, the period after 9/11 was “a moment of national hysteria.”
Some innocent Arabs suffered humiliation or abuse simply on account of their ethnicity. In Brooklyn and Queens, districts where Arabs had long prospered, they suddenly faced open hostility from passersby. Anyone brown and foreign-looking was vulnerable, even at risk of physical violence. Four days after the attacks, a Sikh American was shot dead outside his convenience store by a man shouting that he was a “patriot.” The previous day, the murdered man had made a donation to a charity for 9/11 victims.
Baseless prejudice aside, anything involving Arabs and air travel now triggered suspicion. An Egyptian pilot at a Manhattan hotel, overheard saying, “The sky’s gonna change,” faced a grueling interrogation. When the ban on civilian air travel was lifted, some passengers found themselves ordered off airliners before takeoff because they fit a profile—they were Arabs. On occasion, such incidents were defensible. For there were grounds for believing that, absent the order to ground all planes on 9/11, there would have been at least one more hijacking.
Several sources told of an incident that occurred at New York’s Kennedy Airport that morning. It began as United Flight 23 waited its turn to take off, when an attendant told pilot Tom Mannello that there was something odd about “four young Arab men sitting in First Class.” Mannello, for the moment busy responding to the decision to ground all planes, took the airliner back to the gate and told all his passengers that they had to leave the aircraft.
“The Muslims wouldn’t disembark at first,” a United official said. “The crew talked to the Muslims but by the time the Kennedy Airport police arrived the individuals had deplaned … they left the airport without being questioned.” The Arabs’ checked baggage, which they never reclaimed, reportedly contained “incriminating” material, including terrorist “instruction sheets.”
One of the known 9/11 hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar, had reportedly told a cousin in Saudi Arabia sometime earlier that “five” hijacks were planned for September 11. “We think we had at least another plane that was involved,” NORAD deputy commander Ken Pennie said later. “I don’t know the target or other details. But we were lucky.”
• • •
AROUND 1:00 P.M. on September 11, the President of the United States had a question for his CIA briefer on board Air Force One. “Who,” he asked, “do you think did this?” “There’s no evidence, there’s no data,” briefer Mike Morell replied, “but I would pretty much bet everything I own that the trail will end with al Qaeda and bin Laden.”
In the Middle East as they spoke, some were celebrating. In contrast to most of their governments’ expressions of sympathy, there were Arabs in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Lebanon who were openly jubilant. In Iraq, President Saddam Hussein said he thought Americans “should feel the pain they have inflicted on other peoples of the world.” In Palestinian refugee camps across the region, men fired assault rifles into the air. People handed out candies to passersby, a tradition at times of joy. In the United Arab Emirates, a caller to a TV station claimed responsibility for the attacks in the name of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. A DFLP spokesman swiftly issued a denial, surprising no one. For Arabs, knowledgeable or otherwise, shared the view of Bush’s CIA briefer.
In the Gaza Strip, two men marched through the streets carrying an enormous blowup of Osama bin Laden. Messages circulated on Saudi mobile phones, according to a leading Saudi dissident, reading: “Congratulations.… Our prayers to bin Laden!” “This action,” said Dr. Sayid al-Sharif, an Egyptian surgeon who had once worked with bin Laden in the underground, “is from al Qaeda.”
Osama bin Laden.
Al Qaeda.
The day before the attacks, September 10th, the Congressional Research Service had published its 2001 report on terrorism in the Near East.
“Al Qaeda (Arabic for ‘the base’),” it said, “has evolved from a regional threat to U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf to a global
threat to U.S. citizens and national security interests.” It was “a coalition of disparate radical Islamic groups of varying nationalities to work toward common goals—the expulsion of non-Muslim control or influence from Muslim-inhabited lands.” Cells had been identified or suspected in more than thirty-five countries, including the United States. On an activity scale of Low to High, al Qaeda was the only organization rated “Extremely High.”
Osama bin Laden—“Usama bin Ladin” in officialese—got a page to himself in the report. It noted that he was forty-four years old, the seventeenth of twenty sons of a Saudi construction magnate. He “had gained prominence during the Afghan war against the Soviet Union,” after which his “radical Islamic contacts caused him to run afoul of Saudi authorities.… As a result of bin Ladin’s opposition to the ruling Al Saud family, Saudi Arabia revoked his citizenship in 1994 and his family disavowed him, though some of his brothers reportedly have maintained contact with him.…
“In May, 1996, following strong U.S. and Egyptian pressure … he returned to Afghanistan, under protection of the dominant Taliban movement.… Bin Ladin is estimated to have about $300 million in personal financial assets, with which he funds his network of as many as 3,000 Islamic militants.” The report linked the bin Laden network to attacks on U.S. forces in Somalia in 1993 and to a dozen terrorist operations or plots—including the devastating bombing of the U.S. Navy destroyer the USS Cole the previous year. In 1999, it noted, “bin Ladin was placed on the FBI’s ‘Ten Most Wanted’ list, and a $5 million reward is offered for his capture.”
CBS News fingered bin Laden half an hour after the first strike on the World Trade Center. U.S. intelligence, it said, had “for some time been warning that Osama bin Laden has not been heard from … they believed it was only a matter of time.” Half an hour after that, the National Security Agency—which spies on international communications—picked up the first indication that the intelligence had been accurate. A known bin Laden operative, talking on a phone in Afghanistan, was overheard speaking of having heard “good news.” Also intercepted were the words: “We’ve hit the targets.”