The Eleventh Day - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Anthony Summers (Начало книги) #1

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random

House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

“I don’t believe for a minute that we got everything right.

We wrote a first draft of history.”

—LEE HAMILTON,

vice chairman, 9/11 Commission

AUTHORS’ NOTE

OVER THE YEARS, THE EVENT TO WHICH THE WORLD GAVE THE BRIEF name “9/11” has burgeoned into a universe of facts and factoids. Our approach to the writing of this book was to build a chronology, which eventually ran to well over a thousand pages, to gather information from a multitude of sources, including published material in both paper and electronic form, and to conduct interviews of our own. We read as deeply as possible the many thousands of pages of staff reports, original memoranda, and other 9/11 Commission records that began to be released as of 2009.

Additional information on numerous points can be found in the Notes and Sources section at the back of the book. These are linked to the text by page number.

For ease of reading, we have adopted a single standard for Arabic names that are rendered differently in different texts. The name “bin Laden,” for example, can be found elsewhere as “bin Ladin” or even “ben Ladin,” and the organization associated with him as “al-Qaeda,” or “al Qida”—and more. We have stuck to “bin Laden” and “al Qaeda.”

The full rendering of many Arab persons’ names is lengthy, and we have in many cases shortened them. After a full first mention, for example, “Khalid al Mihdhar” becomes just “Mihdhar.” We render “Ramzi bin al-Shibh,” as have many other texts, simply as “Binalshibh.” Though perhaps not strictly correct, or satisfactory to the purist, this makes for smoother reading.

Our aim has been to make readable sense out of a kaleidoscopic story, to offer rational explanation where there has been confusion or unnecessary controversy, and to serve history as well as possible.

A.S. R.S.

May 2011

PREFACE

TEN YEARS ON, MEMORY AND LOSS. WHERE TWO WONDERS OF THE modern world once soared high over the city, two great cascades feed reflecting pools of shimmering water. The abyss into which it flows is now a hallowed place of remembrance. Pilgrims about to descend to the underworld, the underworld of what once was the World Trade Center, will pass a ribbon of names etched into parapets of bronze.

They identify those killed in New York City on September 11, 2001: the 206 passengers and crew aboard the three planes that were used as missiles that day; the forty who died when a fourth airliner fell from the sky in Pennsylvania; the 2,605 office workers and visitors and would-be rescuers known to have died in and around the Trade Center; and the 125 men and women who died at the Pentagon in Washington. Included, too, are the names of the six people killed eight years earlier, in 1993, in the first attempt to bring down the towers with a truck bomb.

The memorial names 2,982 men, women, and children as of the spring of 2011. The true tally of 9/11 fatalities, however, is incomplete. Some of those who labored in the rubble of the fallen towers have died since, agonizingly slowly, from respiratory disease contracted in the fire and poisoned dust of the place they called Ground Zero. Some nineteen thousand others are reported to be sick and receiving treatment. By one prediction, disease will eventually cripple and kill as many again—more perhaps—as died on the day of the attacks.

We do not know, shall never know, how many have died in the far-off wars that followed the onslaught launched that September day. Fighting men aside, the vast majority of the dead have been civilians: unknown thousands—conservatively, many tens of thousands—of men, women, and children killed in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

Of the three thousand who died on 9/11 itself, fewer than half have graves. Some bodies were consumed by fire, others reduced to minute fragments of mortality, morsels of burned bone, decaying flesh, a single tooth with a silver filling. To this day, forensic pathologists are confronted by a monstrous human jigsaw, one they know they will never complete.

Consider five of the names that are etched, lettered in bronze, above the curtain of water at the 9/11 memorial.

Jimmy Riches, a New York firefighter, died in the lobby of the North Tower. His father, James, himself a Fire Department battalion chief, recovered his son’s mangled body months later.

Donald McIntyre, a Port Authority police officer, also died at the Trade Center. His handcuffs, recovered at the scene, were given by his widow to a colleague assigned to hunt down terrorists in Afghanistan.

No identifiable remains were ever found for Eddie Dillard, an American Airlines passenger who died at the Pentagon. His widow, by odd happenstance, had been American’s base manager in Washington, D.C., when his plane took off that day.

Ronald Breitweiser, a money manager, died in the South Tower of the Trade Center. Only his arms and hands were recovered, identified by fingerprints—and by his wedding ring, which his widow now wears.

Only part of a leg and one foot were found—six years later—to account for Karen Martin, chief flight attendant on the plane that plunged into the North Tower. Attendant Martin was probably the first person harmed by the hijackers on 9/11.

• • •

SOMETHING ELSE WAS LOST that day, something precious that touches on the stories of all the thousands who have died. The Greek tragic dramatist Aeschylus, twenty-five centuries earlier, understood well what it was. “In war,” he wrote, “the first casualty is truth.”

James Riches worked in the rubble for months, motivated in part by the hope of recovering his own son’s dead body. He labored, like thousands of others, buoyed by the assurance of the Environmental Protection Agency, that the air in Lower Manhattan was safe to breathe. Today, no longer a fire chief, Riches Sr.’s health is irreparably damaged, his lung capacity reduced by 30 percent.

Like so many others, meanwhile, Riches wants vengeance against those who killed his son. The Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, said to have ordered the 9/11 attacks, became—in the West—a constant demon, a symbol of the dark forces of terror. President George W. Bush at first promised to get him “dead or alive,” only to backtrack months later and say, “I don’t know where bin Laden is … and really don’t care. It’s not that important.”

In 2009, at the White House, Riches and others met Bush’s successor, Barack Obama. “I pulled out Jimmy’s bracelet and funeral mass card and gave them to him,” the former fire chief said later. “I told him that I’m frustrated that I haven’t seen justice for my son Jimmy.… Please capture Osama bin Laden.” Obama promised “swift and certain justice.”

Police officer McIntyre’s handcuffs, engraved “Mac,” were later snapped on to the wrists of a fugitive named Abu Zubaydah—a native of Saudi Arabia like bin Laden. Imprisoned ever since, Zubaydah remains today the subject of serious controversy. For U.S. interrogators treated him with extreme brutality, using duress that has been defined by the International Committee of the Red Cross, and many others, as torture.

Eddie Dillard’s widow, Rosemary, for all her grief, was one of a number of bereaved family members incensed by the ill treatment of prisoners and by plans to try them before military tribunals. “The secret and unconstitutional nature of these proceedings,” they said, “deprives us of the right to know the full truth about what happened on 9/11.”

Ronald Breitweiser’s widow, Kristen, for her part, has been one of the most articulate of those whose lives were devastated. She testified to a joint House-Senate inquiry and fought for a further, full, independent investigation. When that aspiration was realized—in the shape of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States—Breitweiser excoriated its failings. She believes that much is still hidden, and wants convincing explanations. The CIA, she points out, identified two of the hijackers as terrorists more than eighteen months before 9/11, learned they had visas to enter the United States, yet kept the information from U.S. law enforcement. Why?

Though the final chapter of the congressional report into 9/11 is said to discuss Saudi financial links to the hijackers, all but one page of the chapter was kept secret on the orders of President Bush. Why? At a 2009 meeting with bereaved families, Breitweiser says, President Obama said he was willing to declassify the suppressed material. As of this writing, two years later, the chapter remains classified. Why?

Though less than complete, and though it left some questions open, the Final Report of the National Commission—known as the 9/11 Commission Report—was overwhelmingly well received by an uncritical media. It went to the top of The New York Times best-seller list, and was nominated for a National Book Award. The CIA obstructed the Commission’s work, as its chairmen—former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean and former congressman Lee Hamilton—later acknowledged. Senator Bob Kerrey, who served on the Commission, shared their concerns. Alleging a Bush White House cover-up, Senator Max Cleland had resigned from the Commission early on. It was, he said, a “national scandal.” The final Report was in fact not final, Hamilton said, merely “a first draft of history.”

A 2006 New York Times/CBS poll found that only 16 percent of those responding thought Bush administration members had told the truth about 9/11. Fifty-three percent of responders thought they were “mostly telling the truth but hiding something.” Twenty-eight percent thought Bush’s people were “mostly lying.” A year later, a Scripps Howard poll found that 32 percent thought it “very likely” that the government had chosen to ignore specific warnings of the 9/11 attacks. A further 30 percent thought that “somewhat likely.” A Zogby poll found that 51 percent of Americans wanted a congressional investigation of President Bush’s and Vice President Dick Cheney’s performance in the context of the attacks.

In 2008, a poll conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes—at the University of Maryland—asked questions of sixteen thousand people in seventeen countries. Only 46 percent of those responding thought al Qaeda had been responsible for the attacks. Fifteen percent thought the U.S. government was itself responsible for the attacks, as a ploy to justify an invasion of Iraq. A large number of Americans, meanwhile, have thought Iraq was behind the attacks—a notion encouraged by the Bush administration but unsupported by the evidence. As late as 2010, though, an Angus Reid poll indicated that one in four Americans still thought 9/11 was “a fabrication designed to facilitate the campaign against terrorism.” This all reflects an epidemic of doubt and disbelief. It has been spread in part, to be sure, by conspiracy theorists—the “9/11 truth” movement, as it has become known—preaching to the gullible through the phenomenal influence and reach of the Internet. Less well known is the prevalence of doubt in people one would expect less likely to challenge official orthodoxy.

Those who have expressed grave doubt or called for a new investigation have included five past or present U.S. senators, four members of the U.S. House of Representatives, a former governor, three state deputy or assistant attorneys general, members of state legislatures, numerous public officials and civil servants, diplomats, engineers, and twenty-six former Army, Navy, or Air Force officers. In 2010, two gubernatorial candidates in Texas, a Republican and a Democrat, both said they had questions as to whether the U.S. government had been involved in the 9/11 attacks.

Former CIA officers, FBI agents, and intelligence officials from other agencies have also spoken out. Twenty-five of them expressed their views in a letter to the Congress. Louis Freeh, who was FBI director until the summer of 2001, raised specific issues on television and in a 2005 Wall Street Journal article.

Three sometime presidential contenders have expressed concerns. Former Vice President Walter Mondale said he favored a new investigation. “We’ve never completed the investigation of 9/11,” said General Wesley Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander Europe, “and whether the administration actually misused the intelligence information it had.” Former U.S. senator Bob Graham, who had been cochair of Congress’s Joint Inquiry into 9/11, pointed the finger at Saudi Arabia. The investigation, he said, found grounds for “suspicion that the Saudi government and various representatives of Saudi interests supported some of the hijackers and might have supported all of them.” President Bush, he said, “engaged in a cover-up.”

TEN YEARS ON, there is a lingering sense that the nation and the world have been let down, deprived of the right to know—deceived, even—on a matter of greater universal concern than any event in living memory. It need not have been that way.

The release in the past two years of some 300,000 pages of 9/11 Commission documents, a plethora of other material, and new interviews make it possible to lay some of the perceived mysteries to rest.

With access to the new information, we strive in this book to blow away unnecessary controversy, to make up for omissions in the record, and to throw light into the shadows of deception. In a time of anxiety, to tell the story as honestly as it can be told.

PART I

ATTACK

ONE

DID THE STORY BEGIN TWENTY YEARS AGO DURING THE GULF WAR, when a great American army was installed in Saudi Arabia, a land sacred to Muslims? Did it begin in 1948, when the United States recognized the declaration of a Jewish state to be known as Israel? Or on the day in 1938 when Americans discovered in Saudi Arabia one of the largest reserves of oil on the planet? From then on, certainly, the West began an addictive dance with danger, one that it dances to this day.

This is a story, moreover, rooted in a world and a culture that few Westerners really know or can begin to understand, yet played out in the heart of the United States. Mystery and terror, a frightening mix. Yet there is a simple point of entry, a routine event on an ordinary American morning.

IN THE DAWN of September 11, 2001, in Massachusetts, ninety-two people were getting up, breakfasting, heading for Boston’s Logan Airport. They were the passengers and crew of American Airlines Flight 11, one of some forty thousand planes scheduled to crisscross the country that day.

To glance at some of the names on the passenger manifest, to learn a little about them, is to glimpse the melting pot nature of the country. Philip Rosenzweig, an executive for Sun Microsystems; Thelma Cuccinello, a grandmother on her way to see a sister in California; Peter Gay, a vice president for Raytheon Electronic Systems, traveling with two colleagues; Laura Lee Morabito, U.S. sales manager for the Australian airline Qantas; photographer Berinthia Berenson, widow of the actor Anthony Perkins; David Angell, executive producer of the television series Frasier, accompanied by his wife, Lynn; Jeffrey Mladenik, an ordained minister and acting CEO of a trade publishing company; Lisa Gordenstein, an executive with a discount clothing company; Michael Theodoridis, on his way to a wedding with his wife, Rahma, who was six months pregnant; Walid Iskandar, a business strategy consultant for a British company, setting off to visit his parents; Alexander Filipov, a retired electrical engineer; Daniel Lewin, chief technology officer for Akamai Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Also on their way to the flight were five young men from the Middle East, an Egyptian and four Saudis.

The pilot who was to fly these people to California, John Ogonowski, flew twelve days a month and worked the rest of the time on his 150-acre farm. At fifty, he was a veteran of twenty-three years with American, married to a flight attendant. He had hoped to attend a farming event on the 11th, but the schedule proved unchangeable. At 5:00 that morning Ogonowski awoke, kissed his wife, peeked in at their three sleeping teenage daughters, and climbed into his pickup to drive to the airport. His copilot that day would be Tom McGuinness, a former Navy fighter pilot.

Flight 11, a “turn-around”—an airplane that had flown through the night from San Francisco—was parked at Logan’s Gate 32. Captain Ogonowski arrived to a scene of busy activity. The cleaners were working their way through the plane, the fuelers delivering 76,000 pounds of jet fuel. The nine flight attendants in their blue uniforms were gathering.

Karen Martin, in First Class, was in charge. At forty, she was renowned for her efficiency—“organized … on the stick to a fault.” Her backup, Barbara “Bobbi” Arestegui, was diminutive—small enough, crews joked, to fit on the luggage rack. Several colleagues who had been scheduled to fly were not on board. One had called in sick, another had switched to a different flight—she wanted to accompany her father to a doctor’s appointment. Two others, waiting on standby, were told they were not required.

The check-in process went normally. No one knew until later that, even before they reached the terminal, three of the Arab passengers had been involved in an odd incident. A driver next to them in the parking lot would remember how they had dawdled, leaving the door of their rental car open, “fiddling with their things.” Irritated, he pushed at the offending door, shoved it against one of the Arabs, half expecting a shouting match. Instead, studiously avoiding a scene, the three Middle Easterners said not a word.

In the terminal, though, the check-in attendant found only passenger Filipov, the electrical engineer, to be acting out of the ordinary. He seemed nervous, paced up and down, seemed to know nothing of airport procedure. The attendant found it a little “suspicious.” Otherwise, no one else’s behavior caught her attention.

The copilot of the incoming flight, however, deplaning as the fresh crew took over, would remember a strange encounter. As first officer Lynn Howland left the airplane an Arab man stopped her to ask if she would be piloting the soon to depart Flight 11. When she said she would not, he turned away in an “extremely rude” way. Later, shown a picture of the Egyptian passenger on Flight 11, she at once identified him as the man who had approached her.

At check-in, a computer profiling system had selected three of the five young Arab passengers as potentially suspect. Their checked baggage was screened for explosives, the men themselves given special scrutiny by security. Like the carry-on bags of all passengers, theirs were X-rayed. Nothing was spotted.

All five young Arabs, one reportedly carrying a wooden crutch, then proceeded to the gate. One of them—the Egyptian, the agent thought—arrived “sweating bullets … his forehead was drenched.” With no good reason to stop him, she handed the man his boarding card. He and a companion were the last to board, there to be greeted by senior attendant Karen Martin.

The Egyptian settled down in First Class in aisle Seat 8D, next to passengers David and Lynn Angell. One of the Saudis sat next to him. Two of the others sat further forward, near the cockpit, next to Laura Lee Morabito. Another sat directly behind Daniel Lewin.

The food was on board by now, the in-flight movies loaded. Her final checks completed, Karen Martin prepared to recite the airplane’s safety features. Her colleague Madeline Sweeney, whom everyone knew as “Amy,” had grabbed a few moments to call her husband. She wanted to say she was sorry not to have been able to see her five-year-old daughter off to kindergarten. Now, though, it was time to switch off all cell phones.

Flight 11 pushed back from the gate at 7:40 and by 8:00 it was soaring skyward. September 11 was a glorious morning for flying, with virtually no cloud or wind—“severe clear” in pilots’ parlance.

The Air Traffic Control transcript of air-to-ground exchanges shows that Flight 11 flew routinely for thirteen minutes. “Departure. Good morning. American 11 heavy with you,” Captain Ogonowski told Boston control. “Passing through, ah, 2,000 [feet] for 3,000.” Boston alerted him to a small Cessna nearby, asking him to climb and turn right. Then, with a “So long,” management of Flight 11 passed to other controllers.

The laconic back-and-forth continuing, Ogonowski climbed his plane toward its assigned altitude of 29,000 feet. Then, just after 8:13, Federal Aviation Administration controller Pete Zalewski, at Boston Center—one of the FAA’s twenty-one Air Route Traffic Control Centers—told the pilots to turn twenty degrees to the right. “20 right. American 11,” a pilot acknowledged, and the plane turned.

Sixteen seconds later, when Zalewski told them to climb, Flight 11 did not reply. The controller would try again and again for the next eleven minutes. “American one one … do you hear me? … American eleven, if you hear Boston Center, ident please …” Only static came back across the ether, with one exception—later to be logged as “a brief unknown sound (possibly a scream).”

At 8:18, unbeknownst at the time to the controllers, a telephone rang at an American Airlines office almost a thousand miles away, in the town of Cary, North Carolina. Vanessa Minter, an employee accustomed to dealing with calls about reservations, heard a woman’s voice say, “I think we’re being hijacked.”

Flummoxed, failing to find the emergency button on her phone, Minter transferred the call to a colleague. He did press the button, automatically starting a recording, and brought in a supervisor named Nydia Gonzalez. Soon Gonzalez was passing on what she heard to American’s security office in Texas.

The woman calling was a senior Flight 11 attendant, forty-five-year-old Betty “Bee” Ong. Using a seatback Airfone, Ong had dialed a number that crews knew well—they used it to help passengers with onward travel plans. She sounded “calm, professional, and poised,” and we know exactly what she said for four and a half minutes, the standard duration of the recording system. The rest of the conversation—Ong talked for about twenty-eight minutes—is as remembered by the employees who dealt with the call:

NG:

[I’m] number 3, in the back. The cockpit’s not answering. Somebody’s stabbed in business class and, ah, I think there’s Mace that we can’t breathe. I don’t know. I think we’re getting hijacked.

The seconds ticked by. Time was lost as the staff on the ground asked repetitive questions, mostly to confirm Ong’s identity. Then:

NG:

… Somebody is coming back from business … hold on for one second … Karen and Bobbi got stabbed. [This last sentence, the tape shows, was spoken by a fellow attendant close by.] … Our number 1 got stabbed … our galley flight attendant and our purser has been stabbed. And we can’t get into the cockpit. The door won’t open.

An airline employee on the ground made an unhelpful interjection. “Well, if they were shrewd they would keep the door closed … Would they not maintain a sterile cockpit?”

“Karen” was lead flight attendant Karen Martin, “Bobbi” her backup Barbara Arestegui. Martin, Ong said, lost consciousness, then came around and was being given oxygen. Arestegui appeared not to be seriously injured. The passenger in First Class Seat 9B, however, appeared to be dead.

The man in Seat 9B had perhaps tried to intervene and fight the hijackers. He was Daniel Lewin, an American-Israeli who had served in a crack Israeli commando unit. Lewin spoke Arabic, and may have understood before anyone else what the hijackers intended. Ong said the passenger in Seat 10B, directly to his rear, had stabbed Lewin to death. The man in 10B was one of the five young Arabs who had boarded that morning. The killer and another hijacker, Ong said, had gotten into the cockpit. The sound of “loud arguing” had been heard.

Four minutes into the call, Ong’s colleague Amy Sweeney began trying to phone American Airlines back at the airport in Boston. At 8:32, using a borrowed calling card, she began speaking with duty manager Michael Woodward.

Sweeney, who also reported the stabbings, said the hijackers had “boxes connected with red and yellow wire”—a bomb, she thought. One, she said, spoke good English. So far, passengers in Coach seemed unaware of what was going on.

If the cockpit door had been locked, as required by FAA rules, how had the hijackers gotten in? All American flight attendants held keys, and that was almost certainly why the attendants in First Class—Martin and Arestegui—had been attacked.

There is no knowing exactly what happened when the hijackers erupted into the cockpit. “There was no warning to be more vigilant,” Captain Ogonowski’s wife, Peg, would later say. “These people come in behind him. He’s sitting low, forward, strapped in—the same with his copilot. No warning …”

Ogonowski and copilot Tom McGuinness had been trained not to respond to force with force. FAA policy was still geared to hijackings designed to take over airliners, not destroy them. It called for pilots to “refrain from trying to overpower or negotiate with hijackers, to land the aircraft as soon as possible, to communicate with authorities, and to try delaying tactics.” According to an FAA security report, the agency did know that “suicide was an increasingly common tactic among terrorists in the Middle East.” Its brief to its pilots, however, offered no guidance on how to deal with hijackers bent on suicide.

Attendant Ong had not sounded panicky as she reported from Flight 11. From time to time, though, she asked staff on the ground to “Please pray for us.” There were moments, she said, when the plane was being flown erratically, “sideways.” It was descending. The phone line had started to fade in and out. Her colleague Amy Sweeney said she could see they were now “over New York City.”

Then Ong exclaimed, “Oh, God! … Oh, God! …” and began to cry. Sweeney screamed and said, “Something is wrong. I don’t think the captain is in control. We are in a rapid descent … We are all over the place … I see water! I see buildings! …” Next, a deep breath and, slowly, calmly, “Oh, my God! … We are flying low. We are flying very, very low. We are flying way too low.” Seconds later, again, “Oh, my God, we are way too low …”

American Airlines’ people on the ground could no longer hear either flight attendant. In Boston, duty manager Woodward got only “very, very loud static.” In North Carolina, Gonzalez was saying, “Betty, talk to me. Betty, are you there, Betty? …”

And finally, “I think we may have lost her.”

TWO

IT WAS JUST OVER HALF AN HOUR SINCE THE HIJACKERS HAD STRUCK.

In an office in Lower Manhattan, high in the North Tower of the World Trade Center, a data processor glanced up from his computer. On the horizon to the north, a dot in the sky got his attention. Unusual to see a plane over there, he thought, and turned back to his work.

Moments later, from his perch on a structure on East 77th Street, a steelworker was startled by the sight and the roar of an airliner flying so low that—it seemed to him—it almost hit the antenna atop the Empire State Building. At Madison Avenue and 45th Street, construction workers stared in astonishment. In SoHo, twenty blocks north of the Trade Center, a composer seated in a restaurant window heard a jet thunder overhead. Pigeons, normally blasé, rose in alarm. A window-gazing student at Stuyvesant High—on the banks of the Hudson River—glimpsed the plane for a second and blurted a stunned, “Did you see that?”

A “freakish noise” sent author-photographer Lew Rubenfien rushing onto the roof of his apartment building.

It was the sound jet engines make on a runway when they have been powered all the way up for takeoff—though much more violent, somehow enraged.… The plane was moving far faster than you ever saw one go so low in the sky.… I began to shout telepathically, “Get away from the building, get away from the building.” … The plane made a perfect bull’s-eye, leaving a jagged tear … and then, just as it happens in dreams, everything stretched a long way out.… There could only have been a fraction of a second.… Then, at last, the building exploded. Hot and orange, the great gassy flower blew out.

It was 8:46 A.M.

The impact had been caught on film thanks to the snap reaction of French documentary maker Jules Naudet, filming nearby with a unit of the New York Fire Department. “I look up, and it’s clearly an American Airlines jet,” the Frenchman said later. “I turned the camera toward where it was going to go … I see it go in. I’m filming it.” The image he shot, destined to become iconic, precisely matches Rubenfien’s verbal description—orange burst at the core, great bloom of gray smoke or vapor to the left.

In the North Tower, the man who had seen the plane as a distant dot had not been looking when it came right at him. To Chuck Allen of Lava Trading, busy in his 83rd floor office, the memory instead would be of a “muffled, sucking, unbearably loud noise. Like the sound of two high-speed trains crossing in high proximity to each other.”

Through the windows, still unbroken, he saw debris falling, paper floating. Liquid was running down the windowpanes. There was a grinding and squeaking in the walls and—Allen was vividly conscious of it—the entire building leaned to one side. Then, gradually, it righted itself.

On the 86th floor, the windows had shattered. James Gartenberg, a broker with Julian Studley real estate, reported by phone that the glass had blown “from the inside of the building out.” And that: “The core of the building, the interior core part of the building, collapsed.”

American Flight 11 had sliced into the tower between the 93rd and 99th floors. The liquid Allen saw on the windows was almost certainly jet fuel from the plane’s wing tanks, a dribble of the ten thousand gallons said to have been on board.

Filmmaker Naudet, far below, stayed with the crew of firefighters as it switched from exercise mode to rapid response and rushed to the tower. Minutes later, in the downstairs lobby, he saw what exploding aviation fuel can do. Fireballs had shot down some of the many elevator shafts, detonating on several floors and then in the lobby. “The windows had all been blown out,” Naudet said. “The marble had come off the walls. I saw two bodies burning on the floor. One was screaming, a woman’s scream … I just didn’t want to film that.”

Some fourteen thousand people worked each day in the Trade Center towers. Its Twin Towers—North and South, each 110 stories high—loomed more than a fifth of a mile over Manhattan. They were the tallest buildings in the city of skyscrapers, symbols of America’s financial power, the heart of a great complex that housed offices, a shopping mall, a hotel, and two subway stations. Vast numbers of workers had not yet been at work when Flight 11 hit. They had been milling around on the lower levels, buying newspapers, grabbing a coffee or a snack. It was primary election day in the city, moreover, and many had stopped to vote before going to the office. Some commuters had been delayed, too, by especially heavy traffic through the tunnels in Manhattan. Innumerable lives were saved that morning by being late.

As filmmaker Naudet had seen, some were killed or terribly injured in the North Tower lobby. It was the 91st floor far above, though, just below the impact point, that became the frontier between certain death and possible, even probable, survival. Above, on levels 92 to 105, were the hundreds of international bankers, the bond traders, investment and insurance managers and their staffs, who regularly came in early to get a jump on the markets. Higher still, near the tower’s summit, were the customers and staff of Windows on the World, the celebrated restaurant atop the Trade Center—and engineers who manned television and radio transmitters.

Of the 1,344 souls on those upper floors, none would survive. Some had died instantly, and hundreds had no way of escaping.

On the 92nd floor, which was intact for a while, debris blocked the stairways. At Carr Futures, John San Pio Resta; his wife, Silvia, seven months pregnant; and trader Damian Meehan were trapped. So, too, was Michael Richards, a sculptor who used studio space on the same floor—an anomaly in a building dedicated to commerce—provided by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

Meehan had time to phone one of his brothers, to tell him the elevators were gone and that there was smoke. His last words were “We’ve got to go,” as he headed for one of the blocked stairways. We know nothing of the last moments of the San Pio Restas and Michael Richards. Richards had last been seen at midnight, saying he planned to work till morning. Long preoccupied with the theme of aviation, his final work had been a bronze of himself amidst flames and meteors, pierced by airplanes.

The area immediately above the 92nd floor was a tomb. Fred Alger Management lost thirty-five people, Marsh and McLennan, spread over several floors, 295. For Marsh analyst Patricia Massari, on the phone to her husband when the plane hit, there had been time only for “Oh, my God!” Then the phone went dead. The remains of one of her colleagues would be found five blocks away.

Cantor Fitzgerald, the bond trading company, had occupied floors 100 to 105. Six hundred fifty-eight people had been in their offices at the moment of impact. Michael Wittenstein had hung up in the middle of a call to a customer, then—courteous to a fault—phoned back to apologize. “I believe,” he had time to say, “there was an explosion in the boiler room.”

Andrew Rosenblum broke into a conversation with his wife to say there had been “a really loud bang,” that he would call right back. When he did, on a cell phone, he said he and colleagues needed air. They had used a computer to smash a window, and his wife heard coughing, gasping for breath. Kenneth van Auken tried to call his wife but got the answering machine. “I love you,” he said. Then again, “I love you very much. I hope I’ll see you later.”

All 658 people at Cantor Fitzgerald would soon be dead. One staffer’s body would be found months later, intact, in his suit and tie, seated upright in the rubble.

From Windows on the World, they used to say, you could see for fifty miles on a clear day. That morning, a very clear one, the seventy-nine greeters, waiters, chefs, and kitchen staff had been busy. Regulars had been at breakfast meetings. In the ballroom, a conference sponsored by the British firm Risk Waters had been about to begin. Guests had been greeted, an audiovisual presentation prepared. Manager Howard Kane, on the phone to his wife, had—inexplicably to her—dropped the receiver at exactly 8:46. She wondered for a moment if her husband had had a heart attack. Then she heard a woman scream, “We’re trapped.” Another man picked up the phone to say there was a fire, that they needed the phone to call 911.

Death came slowly at Windows on the World. The story told by the cell phones showed that customers and staff hurried down a floor, to the 106th, to wait for help. Assistant general manager Christine Olender, who phoned downstairs for advice, was told to phone back in a couple of minutes. To help with the smoke, it was suggested, those trapped should hold wet towels to their faces—difficult, for the water supply had been severed. They got some water from the flower vases, a waiter told his wife.

“The situation is rapidly getting worse,” Olender reported. “What are we going to do for air?” Stuart Lee, vice president of a software company, got off an email to his home office. “A debate is going on,” he wrote, “as to whether we should break a window. Consensus is no for the time being.” Then they did break the glass, and people flocked to the window openings.

Every person still alive on those upper floors, some thirteen hundred feet above the ground, was facing either intense heat or dense smoke rising from below. Some pinned their hopes of survival on the one way out they imagined open to them—the roof.

“Get everybody to the roof,” former firefighter Bernie Heeran had told his son Charles, a trader for Cantor Fitzgerald, when he phoned for advice. “Go up. Don’t try to go down.” A colleague, Martin Wortley, told his brother he hoped to escape by helicopter. People had been taken to safety from the roof in the past. On September 11, two police helicopter pilots arrived over the North Tower within minutes—only to realize that any rescue attempt would be jeopardized by the billowing, impenetrable smoke.

Regulations in force at the Trade Center in 2001, moreover, made it impossible even to reach the roof. The way was blocked by three sets of doors, two that could be opened only by authorized personnel with a swipe card, a third operable at normal times only by remote control by security officers far below. The system did not work on 9/11, for vital wires had been cut when the plane hit the tower. Those hoping to escape knew nothing of this.

Early on, one of the helicopter pilots sent a brief message. “Be advised,” he radioed, “that we do have people confirmed falling out of the building at this time.” In the lobby, a firefighter told filmmaker Naudet simply, “We got jumpers.”

VIEWERS AROUND THE WORLD were by now watching events live on television. At the time, however, few in the United States saw the men and women of the Trade Center as they jumped to certain death. Most American editors ruled the pictures too shocking to be shown.

The jumping had begun almost at once. Alan Reiss, of the Port Authority, would remember seeing people falling from high windows within two minutes. Naudet thought “five, ten minutes” passed before he and those around him heard what sounded like explosions—the sound the bodies made as they struck the ground. “They disintegrated. Right in front of us, outside the lobby windows. There was completely nothing left of them. With each loud boom, every firefighter would shudder.”

In the heat of an inferno, driven by unthinkable pain, jumping may for many have been more reflexive action than choice. For those with time to think, the choice between incineration and a leap into thin air may not have been difficult.

Firefighters had never seen anything on this scale, the sheer number of human beings falling, a man clutching a briefcase, another ripping off his burning shirt as he jumped, a woman holding down her skirt in a last attempt at modesty. Some fell in pairs holding hands, others in groups, three or four at a time. Some appeared to line up to jump, like paratroopers.

At least one jump seemed involuntary. Gazing through a long lens, photographer Richard Smiouskas was watching five or six people huddled together in a narrow window when one figure suddenly fell forward and away. It looked as though he had been shoved.

“As the debris got closer to the ground,” firefighter Kevin McCabe said, “you started seeing arms and legs. You couldn’t believe what you were watching … [then] it was like cannon balls hitting the ground. Boom. I remember one person actually hitting a piece of structural steel over a glass canopy … I remember turning my face away … you’d just hear the pounding … tremendously loud, like taking a bag of concrete and throwing it into a closed courtyard. A loud echo … Boom. Boom …”

To Derek Brogan, McCabe’s companion, it “looked like it was raining bodies.” The bodies spelled danger. “We started to get hit,” said Lieutenant Steve Turilli. “You would get hit by an arm or a leg and it felt like a metal pole was hitting you. It was like a war zone.”

Cascading humanity.

JUST FORTY-NINE MINUTES had passed since the hijacking aboard Flight 11 had begun, seventeen since the great airplane roared over Manhattan to bring mayhem and murder to the North Tower. Now, in the sky high above the carnage, a police helicopter pilot spotted something astounding. “Christ!” he shouted into the microphone. “There’s a second plane crashing …”

THREE

“WE HAVE SOME PLANES.”

More than three quarters of an hour earlier, as air traffic controller Pete Zalewski tried to get a response from the hijacked Flight 11, he had suddenly heard an unfamiliar voice on the frequency—a man’s voice, with an Arabic accent. Zalewski had trouble making out the words, but moments later a second, clearer transmission persuaded him and colleagues that a hijack was under way. The hijacker, they would conclude, had been trying to address the passengers and—unfamiliar with the equipment—inadvertently transmitted to ground control instead.

A quality assurance specialist then pulled the tape, listened very carefully, and figured out what the Arabic voice had said on the initial, indistinct transmission. “We have some planes. Just stay quiet and you’ll be okay. We are returning to the airport.”

This was a giveaway that—had the U.S. military been able to intervene in time—could have wrecked the operation. The hijackers had seized not two but four airplanes. What remained unknown, until even later, was that there may have been plans to seize even more.

AS AMERICA’S FLIGHT 11 had been boarding, United Airlines Flight 175—also departing from Boston—had been readying for takeoff. Copilot Michael Horrocks, a former Marine, called his wife about then, joking that he was flying that day with “some guy with a funny Italian name.” Flight 175’s captain was Victor Saracini, a veteran like Flight 11’s Ogonowski. The team of flight attendants included Kathrryn Laborie and Alfred Marchand—a former police officer—in First Class; Robert Fangman in Business; and Amy King and Michael Tarrou—a couple thinking of getting married—in Coach.

Their fifty-six passengers were the usual mix: a computer expert, a scout for the Los Angeles Kings hockey team, a commercials producer, a senior marketer for a software company, a systems consultant for the Defense Department. There were also foreigners: three Germans, an Israeli, a British man, and an Irish woman—and five young Arabs, three Saudis and two Emiratis. All the Arabs had booked seats in First or Business Class.

As they had in the case of Flight 11, ground staff were to recall odd details about the passengers from the Middle East. Two Arabs bungled the boarding process—one of them boarded using his companion’s boarding card, and a new one had to be printed. One man asked twice in poor English if he could purchase a ticket, when he already had one. Two waiting passengers, possibly the same man and a companion, behaved strangely at the gate ticket counter. They stood in line, only to walk away on reaching the counter, line up again, and walk away again. In all, they went through the process three times. They seemed nervous, “looked down at the ground as if they were attempting to avoid eye contact.” Nevertheless, they both eventually boarded successfully.

Captain Saracini took United Flight 175 into the air before 8:15 and climbed steadily to 31,000 feet. Twenty-three minutes into the flight, a controller looking for the missing Flight 11 asked him and his copilot to see if they could spot it. They did, and were told to stay out of its way. Three minutes later, as 175 entered New York airspace, Saracini came on the air to report to controller Dave Bottiglia:

ARACINI

: We figured we’d wait to go to you[r] Center. Ah, we heard a suspicious transmission on our departure out of Boston, ah … sound[ed] like someone keyed the mike and, ah, said, ah, “Everyone, stay in your seats.”

OTTIGLIA:

Oh, okay. I’ll pass that along …

Saracini had probably decided to wait a while before reporting the suspect transmission from Flight 11 because—surmising that it indicated a hijack—he wanted to avoid being overheard. United passengers using headsets could listen in on the cockpit chatter simply by listening to Channel 9—it was a form of entertainment. It is possible that on Saracini’s plane, unbeknownst to him, some of those listening in were the men planning to hijack the aircraft.

Whether or not they overheard the cockpit chatter, hijackers struck Flight 175 within five minutes of the captain’s report about the sinister transmission. At 8:47 the transponder code—the signal that identifies an aircraft—changed twice in the space of a minute. Four minutes later, when ground control asked the pilots to readjust the transponder, there was no response. In the same minute, the airplane deviated from its assigned altitude, climbed, and then—near Allentown, Pennsylvania—began a turn to the southeast. Pilots Saracini and Horrocks were silent now.

Others on board found a way to communicate. Five minutes after the change of course, the phone rang at Starfix, a United facility in California assigned to handle crew calls about minor maintenance problems. The mechanic who took the call, Marc Policastro, found himself talking to a male flight attendant aboard Flight 175, probably Robert Fangman. He said the flight had been hijacked, the pilots killed.

On another phone, a passenger named Peter Hanson got through to his parents’ home in Connecticut. He described the hijack, speaking in low tones as his father made notes. “I think they’ve taken over the cockpit,” Hanson said. “An attendant has been stabbed. Someone else up front may have been killed. The plane is making strange moves.”

On the ground at New York Center, the silence from 175 by now had controller Dave Bottiglia thoroughly alarmed. He alerted an air traffic manager, Mike McCormick. The turn Flight 175 had been making became a U-turn, until the plane was pointed directly at New York City. “We might,” Bottiglia heard McCormick say, “have multiple hijacks.”

At 8:58, another phone began ringing. Passenger Brian Sweeney, the Defense Department consultant on the plane, was trying to reach his wife, Julie, in Massachusetts. She was a teacher, already at school, so he left a voice message. “Hey Jules, it’s Brian. I’m on a plane and it’s hijacked, and it doesn’t look good. I just wanted to let you know that I love you, and I hope to see you again. If I don’t, please have fun in life. Please be happy. Please live your life. That’s an order.”

Sweeney, a former Navy lieutenant who had taught at the Top Gun Fighter Weapons School, did get through to his mother, Louise—with a very different sort of message. He and other passengers, he said, were thinking of storming the cockpit. “I might have to hang up quickly, we’re going to try to do something about this.”

Peter Hanson, meanwhile, managed another call to tell his father, who again made notes: “It’s getting bad, Dad … They seem to have knives and Mace. They said they have a bomb. It’s getting very bad on the plane. Passengers are throwing up … The plane is making jerky movements … I think we are going down … Don’t worry, Dad. If it happens, it’ll be very fast.”

Hanson Sr. had heard a woman’s scream in the background. His son said, “My God! My God! …” Then the call ended.

It was 9:02. Ground controllers north of New York were gradually catching up with the reality. Boston Center told New England Region that the tape of the Flight 11 hijacker showed that he had spoken of “planes, as in plural.” Also: “It sounds like—we’re talking to New York—that there’s another one aimed at the World Trade Center.”

Even as they talked, controllers at New York Center were watching the radar blip that was Flight 175. “He’s not going to land,” one man exclaimed, leaping to his feet. “He’s going in …”

THE BOEING 767 roared in from New Jersey, looking for a moment as though it might collide with the Statue of Liberty. It rocked from side to side, then the nose pointed down. Fire marshal Steven Mosiello, already at the Trade Center, heard rather than saw it as it came ever “closer … louder and louder.” The Irish Times’s America correspondent, Conor O’Clery, watching the scene at the Trade Center through binoculars, saw the plane “skim” across the Hudson River.

On the 81st floor of the South Tower, Fuji Bank official Stanley Praimnath was at his desk, talking on the phone. Praimnath would recall how, in mid-sentence, for no apparent reason, “I just raised my head and looked to the Statue of Liberty. And what I see is a big plane coming towards me … I am looking at an airplane coming, eye level, eye contact, toward me—giant gray airplane … with a red stripe … I am still seeing the letter U on its tail, and the plane is bearing down on me. I dropped the phone and I screamed and I dove under my desk.”

Three floors up, on the 84th, Brian Clark of Euro Brokers had been consoling a woman colleague distraught at the sight of people jumping from the North Tower. He escorted her to the door of the ladies’ room, on the far side of the building, when: “Whomf! It wasn’t a huge explosion. It was something muffled, no flames, no smoke, but the room fell apart … For seven to ten seconds there was this enormous sway in the building … I thought it was over.”

It was 9:03. United Flight 175 had struck the South Tower between the 77th and 85th floors, at an angle. Clark’s chivalrous action in helping a distressed colleague had saved his own life. It had taken him to the side of the building furthest from the point of impact. Praimnath found himself, still under his desk, covered in debris, peering out at what looked like part of the airplane’s wing. He began shouting for help and was soon extricated by Clark, who had headed down a passable stairwell. The two were to make the long descent to the ground and safety.

Many others who had been working in their part of the tower had died instantly. Those who survived the initial impact and headed up, rather than down, would not survive.

Fifty minutes had elapsed since the terror began.

For those fighting for their lives in the towers, those rushing to the rescue, those charged with orchestrating the air traffic still in the sky, and those responsible for the defense of the United States, all was now confusion and chaos—against a drumbeat of breaking news, the biggest, most stunning news in the lifetimes of almost everyone it reached.

FOUR

CNN HAD THE BREAK. ON THE HEELS OF A REPORT ABOUT MATERNITY wear, Carol Lin cut into a commercial within two minutes of the first strike.

“This just in. You are looking at obviously a very disturbing live shot … We have unconfirmed reports this morning that a plane has crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center … Clearly something relatively devastating happening this morning there on the south end of the island of Manhattan.”

On Good Morning America, ABC’s Diane Sawyer and Charles Gibson had been smiling through a serving of breakfast-time fluff. Then, four minutes after CNN, they launched into nonstop blanket coverage. Like all the other networks, ABC was confronting a major national story armed with a minimum of facts.

“Was it in any sense deliberate?” asked Sawyer, now serious-faced. “Was it an accident? … We simply don’t know.” Behind the cameras, assuming pilot error, one ABC staffer made a reference he was to regret —to “stupidity.” On the radio, someone said the pilot must have been drunk.

The early news flashes triggered differing reactions at the highest levels of government. At the National Security Agency outside Washington, where America spies on worldwide phone and email communications, director Michael Hayden glanced at CNN’s live shots of the burning North Tower. He thought, “Big fire for a small plane,” and went back to his meeting.

Breakfasting with a friend at the St. Regis Hotel, CIA director George Tenet responded very differently. His instant reaction, he would recall, was that this was a terrorist attack. “It was obvious that I had to leave immediately.… I climbed back into my car and, with lights flashing, began racing back to headquarters.”

Earlier that morning, at a meeting at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had made a prediction. In the coming months, he said, there would be an event “sufficiently shocking that it would remind people again how important it is to have a strong, healthy Defense Department.” He has not said what he thought when passed a note with news of the crash at the Trade Center, but he left for his office.

Richard Clarke, the long-serving national coordinator for security and counterterrorism, assumed the worst, summoned senior security officials to a videoconference, and headed for the White House.

Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice were already at the White House. Rice merely thought, “What an odd accident!” Cheney, told of the crash while going over speeches with an aide, began watching the TV coverage.

The President, George W. Bush, was absent from the capital and would be all day, a circumstance that was to do his image no good in the hours that followed. When the first plane hit, he was in Sarasota, Florida, on his way to visit an elementary school—part of a drive for child literacy. White House photographer Eric Draper was in a limousine with press secretary Ari Fleischer and Mike Morell, a senior CIA official, when Fleischer’s cell phone rang.

“I heard him say, ‘Oh, my God! I don’t believe it,’ ” Draper recalled. “ ‘A plane just hit the World Trade Center.’ ” Fleischer then turned to Morell to ask if he knew anything about a “small plane” hitting one of the towers. Morell, who phoned CIA Operations, was told that the plane was in fact a large one.

Most likely, the President first learned of the crash as the motorcade arrived at Emma E. Booker Elementary. Navy captain Deborah Loewer, director of the White House Situation Room, ran over with the news as, at about the same moment, chief of staff Andy Card asked Bush to take a call from Condoleezza Rice in Washington. Rice knew less, apparently, than the CIA.

“The first report I heard,” Bush would recall, “was a light airplane, twin-engine airplane.… And my first reaction was, as an old pilot, ‘How could the guy have gotten so off course to hit the towers?’ … I thought it was pilot error … that some foolish soul had gotten lost and made a terrible mistake.” He told school principal Gwendolyn Tose-Rigell, “We’re going to go on and do the reading thing,” and they went off to meet a class of second graders.

A THOUSAND MILES to the north, the first fire chief to reach the North Tower had called in three alarms in quick succession. Even before the second plane hit, a thousand first responders had been deployed. They included men who were off duty, who dropped everything on hearing of the crash and rushed to the scene. One man thought idly that the job would last “twenty-four hours easy—that’s a few hundred dollars, no problem.” In fact, he was joining what was to be the largest rescue operation in the history of New York City—focused principally on saving lives. Senior firemen rapidly concluded that it would not be possible to put out the fire in the North Tower.

Instructions to evacuate the North Tower had been announced over the public address system within a minute of the crash. The system had been knocked out of action, though, so no one heard the announcement. In the South Tower, where the system did still work, the disembodied voice at first advised, “There is no need to evacuate … If you are in the midst of evacuation, return to your office.” The instruction changed at 9:02, when occupants were told they could leave after all. Some four thousand people, two thirds of those reckoned to have been in the South Tower, had by that time chosen to leave anyway.

Then at 9:03, Flight 175 hit the South Tower. For the networks, broadcasting live, the task of reporting became incalculably complex—and totally impromptu. This from the ABC Good Morning America transcript:

AWYER:

Oh, my God! Oh, my God!

IBSON:

That looks like a second plane has just hit …

AWYER:

Terrible! … We will see that scene again, just to make sure we saw what we thought we saw.

IBSON:

We’re going to give you a replay … That looks like a good-sized plane, came in and hit the World Trade Center from the other side … it would seem like there is a concerted attack …

AWYER:

We watch powerless …

On Channel 5’s Good Day New York, the anchorman Jim Ryan took a flyer and got it right. “I think,” he said, “we have a terrorist act of proportions we cannot begin to imagine at this point.”

At the NSA, director Hayden said, “One plane’s an accident. Two planes is an attack,” and ordered that top priority be given to intercepts originating in the Middle East.

At the Defense Department, assistant secretary for public affairs Torie Clarke, accompanied by colleague Larry Di Rita, hurried to Secretary Rumsfeld’s office with the news. He said he would take his daily intelligence briefing, then meet them at the Executive Support Center where military operations are coordinated during emergencies. They left Rumsfeld standing at the lectern in his office—he liked to work standing up—one eye on the television.

Word of the second strike was slow to reach CIA director Tenet, still in his car racing back to headquarters. “With all hell breaking loose,” he remembered, “it was hard to get calls through on the secure phone.… I was in a communications blackout between the St. Regis and Langley, the longest twelve minutes of my life. It wasn’t until I arrived at headquarters that I learned that, as we were tearing up the George Washington Parkway at something like eighty miles an hour, a second plane had hit.”

Counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke learned of the second attack as he drove up to the White House. He was told Condoleezza Rice wanted him “fast,” and found her with the Vice President. “The Secret Service,” Rice said, “wants us to go to the bomb shelter.” Cheney, famous for his imperturbability, was looking a little shaken. He “began to gather up his papers,” Clarke recalled. “In his outer office the normal Secret Service presence was two agents. As I left, I counted eight, ready to move [Cheney] to the PEOC, the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, a bunker in the East Wing.”

Clarke, for his part, headed for the West Wing, to prepare for the videoconference of counterterrorism and other senior officials he would soon chair. He asked, “Where’s POTUS?”—White House shorthand for the President—and learned Bush was at the school in Florida.

“GET READY TO READ all the words on this page without making a mistake. Look at the letter at the end everyone, with the sound it makes. Get ready!”

As the second plane hit the Trade Center, George Bush had been listening intently to teacher Kay Daniels and her class of second graders. The teacher was going into a routine the children knew well, using a phonics-based system designed to promote reading skills. She intoned, “Boys and girls! Sound this word out, get ready!” “Kite!” chorused the children, then “kit!” then “seal” and “steal,” and so on, as Ms. Daniels beat time. Then, “Boys and girls, pick your reader up from under your seat. Open your book up to Lesson 60, on page 153.” The children and the President picked up the readers.

In a nearby room, members of Bush’s staff had been watching the news coverage from New York—the Marine assigned to carry the President’s phone had asked for the television to be turned on. One of those watching as Flight 175 hit was Captain Deborah Loewer, the woman who had run to tell the President about the initial crash. “It took me about thirty seconds,” she recalled, “to realize this was terrorism.”

Loewer spoke rapidly to chief of staff Andy Card, and—we calculate within about ninety seconds—Card was in the classroom and whispering in the President’s ear. By one account he said, “A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.” As likely, given Loewer’s role as Situation Room director, is a version that had Card telling Bush, “Captain Loewer says it’s terrorism.”

IN NEW YORK at about that time, high in the South Tower, Brian Clark of Euro Brokers was pausing to pull Stanley Praimnath out of a wrecked wall, glimpsing fires raging through cracks in walls.

Operators at the Fire Department were logging a stream of emergency calls:

9:04 MC [male caller] CAGGIANO … STS [states] PEOPLE TRAPPED ON THE 104 FLR … IN BACK ROOM … STS 35–40 PEOPLE

9:04 MC—STS 103 FLR—CAN’T GET OUT—FIRE ON FLR—PEOPLE GETTING SICK

IN THE CLASSROOM in Florida, Bush’s expression changed. Told of the second strike, the President pursed his lips, gazing back at his chief of staff as he moved away. ABC’s Ann Compton, watching him, thought “his eyes got wide.” Teacher Daniels thought he seemed distracted. Natalia Jones-Pinkney, one of the pupils, thought he “looked like he was going to cry.” “His face just started to turn red,” said Tyler Radkey, another student. “I thought, personally, he had to go to the bathroom.”

In the adjacent room, the Marine carrying Bush’s phone turned to the local sheriff and said, “Can you get everybody ready? We’re out of here.” Not so—not yet, for the President did not move.

“On the count of three,” teacher Daniels said, “everyone should be on page 153 …” The children obeyed, and so did Bush. “Fingers under the title,” came the order. “Get ready!” The children chorused the title of a story: “The Pet Goat …”

For long and unforgettable minutes, the President of the United States sat dutifully as the second graders read:

The girl had a pet goat. She liked to go running with her pet goat. She played with her goat in her house. She played with her goat in her yard. But the goat did something that made the girl’s dad mad. The goat ate things. He ate cans and he ate cakes. He ate cakes and he ate cats. One day her dad said, “That goat must go. He ate too many things.”

On the other side of the room, press secretary Ari Fleischer had held up a handwritten sign for Bush’s attention. It read, in large black letters, “DON’T SAY ANYTHING YET.”

IN THE NORTH TOWER, realtor James Gartenberg and secretary Patricia Puma had by now realized they were stuck in their office. “A fire door has trapped us,” Gartenberg told a WABC reporter who reached him on the phone. “Debris has fallen around us. I’m with one other person … on the 86th floor, facing the East River … I want to tell anybody that has a family member that may be in the building that the situation is under control at the moment … So please, all family members take it easy.”

It was a brave statement, but neither Gartenberg nor Puma would survive.

The flood of calls to the Fire Department continued:

09:07 CALL FLR 103—ROOM 130—APPROX 30 PEOPLE—LOTS OF SMOKE—FC [female caller] IS PREGNANT

09:08: FC SCREAMING

09:08: FC STS FIRE DEPARTMENT NEEDED TO PUT OUT FIRE

09:09: MC STS 2WTC—PEOPLE ARE JUMPING OUT THE SIDE OF A LARGE HOLE—POSS NO ONE CATCHING THEM

09:09: ON FLR 104—MC STS HIS WIFE IS ON THE 91 FL—STS STAIRS ARE ALL BLOCKED—STS WORRIED ABOUT HIS WIFE

IN FLORIDA, the children chorused on:

The goat stayed … the girl made him stop eating cans and cakes and cats and cakes. But one day a car robber went into the girl’s house. He saw a big red car in the house and said, “I will steal that car.” He ran to the car and started to open the door. The girl and the goat were playing in the back yard. They did not see the car robber. More to come.

The President, seemingly all attention, asked, “What does that mean—‘More to come’?” It meant, a child told him brightly, that there would be “More later on.”

• • •

MORE WAS IN FACT already happening. Since 8:56, well before Bush began listening to the second graders, FAA ground controllers had begun worrying about a third airliner. American Flight 77, bound for Los Angeles out of Washington’s Dulles Airport, had failed to respond to routine messages, and deviated from its assigned course. Its transponder was turned off and it could not be seen on radar. The controller of the moment, in Indianapolis, knew nothing of the events in New York. He thought the plane had experienced serious technical failure and was “gone.”

Soon after 9:00, as the second hijacked airplane crashed into the South Tower, controllers began circulating information that Flight 175 was missing, perhaps crashed. Air Force Search and Rescue and the police were alerted, American Airlines notified. Some at American, meanwhile, thought for a while that it was Flight 77—not United’s 175—that had crashed into the Trade Center’s South Tower. “Whose plane is whose?”: the gist of one conversation between an American manager and his counterpart at United summarizes the general confusion.

United dispatcher Ed Ballinger, responsible for sixteen of the airline’s transcontinental flights, had learned that a Flight 175 attendant had called reporting a hijacking. He composed a cautious message to 175 that read, “How’s the ride? Anything Dispatch can do for you?” It was too late. By the time the message went out, at 9:03, the crew and passengers on board the plane were beyond help. In the same minute, Flight 175 struck the South Tower.

Four minutes after that, Boston area Air Traffic Control advised all commercial airplane pilots in its sector to secure their cockpits. Boston also recommended that the FAA’s Command Center issue a nationwide warning, but the Command Center failed to do so. At 9:19 at United, however, dispatcher Ballinger acted on his own initiative and began sending messages to all “his” flights. They read: “Beware any cockpit intrusion. Two a/c [aircraft] hit World Trade Center.”

By 9:05, aware now of the Flight 11 hijacker’s transmission about having “planes,” FAA’s New York Center issued orders forbidding any aircraft to leave, arrive at, or travel through, their airspace until further notice. “We have several situations going on here,” a New York Center manager told the Command Center. “We have other aircraft that may have a similar situation going on here.” With 4,546 airplanes under their control in the United States that morning, the managers were facing into a situation covered by no training manual.

CONTROLLERS REMAINED totally ignorant of the true status of American 77, the third plane in trouble—though not for want of trying on the part of one of its crew. At 9:12, flight attendant Renee May—assigned to First Class on this latest missing aircraft—got through by phone to her mother in Las Vegas. She spoke just long enough to say six hijackers had taken control, and that passengers and crew were being moved to the back of the plane. She asked her mother to call American Airlines and raise the alarm. Then she got out, “I love you, Mom,” before the call was disconnected.

May’s mother got through to American in Washington, waited while she was put on hold, then relayed her daughter’s message. With staff already distracted by news of events in New York, some wondered whether Flight 77 had hit the World Trade Center. The import of May’s call became lost in the general confusion.

In the West Wing of the White House, the videoconference of senior officials was yet to get under way. After the second strike, meanwhile, Vice President Cheney had picked up a phone and said, “I need to talk to the President … The Cabinet is going to need direction.”

AT THE SCHOOL in Florida, the President’s reading session with the children finally came to an end. “Hoo!” he exclaimed. “These are great readers … Very impressive! Thank you all so very much for showing me your reading skills … Thanks for having us.”

Why had Bush continued to sit in the classroom—for more than five minutes—after being told of the second strike on the Trade Center? Why, many were to wonder, had he not responded instantly—even with a single terse presidential instruction—when Card told him the second crash indicated a terrorist attack?

Two months later, the President would offer a sort of explanation. He had gone on listening to the schoolchildren, he said, because he was “very aware of the cameras. I’m trying to absorb that knowledge. I have nobody to talk to … and I realize I’m the commander-in-chief and the country has just come under attack.”

Once out of the classroom, Bush joined aides watching the TV news, saw the Trade Center burning, and talked on the phone with Cheney and Rice. He decided to make a brief statement, then fly back to Washington.

Unknown to the President, though, as he mulled what to tell the national audience, crisis was spiraling into calamity.

FIVE

SIX TIMES, MAYBE MORE, THE PHONE HAD RUNG THAT MORNING IN THE office at the Justice Department of Theodore Olson, the solicitor general. The caller was his wife, Barbara, and she finally got through some time after 9:15. Mrs. Olson, a prominent attorney who often made television appearances, was no shrinking violet. Now, though, she sounded hysterical.

Olson knew his wife was flying to California that day. He had seen the television coverage of the Trade Center attacks, had thanked God there had not been time for his wife’s flight to get to New York. Now Barbara was on the line—from American 77.

Her flight had been seized, she said, by men “with knives and box cutters.” After an interruption—Mrs. Olson was cut off—she came back on the line and spoke with her husband for about ten minutes.

The pilot, she told him, had announced that the flight had been hijacked. Had Flight 77’s legitimate pilot, Charles Burlingame, remained alive and told his passengers what was happening? Today, there is no way of knowing. Mrs. Olson, who by now sounded calmer, consulted with someone nearby and said she thought the plane was headed northeast. She could see houses below, so the plane must—she realized—have been flying fairly low. She and her husband talked of their feelings for each other, and Olson assured her that things were “going to come out okay.” In his heart, he thought otherwise.

Nothing more would be heard from anyone aboard Flight 77. Ted Olson tried to reach the attorney general, John Ashcroft, only to find that he, too, was out of Washington and in the air. Olson spoke with the Department of Justice Command Center and provided his wife’s flight number, but the effort went nowhere. With the minutes rushing by, the solicitor general of the United States proved no more effective than had flight attendant Renee May’s mother, calling American Airlines to report her daughter’s desperate call.

Flight 77 had been flying on undetected, for ground controllers worked on the assumption that it was still flying not east but west. Then at 9:32, controllers monitoring radar at Dulles Airport, outside Washington, spotted an unidentified airplane speeding toward the capital. Reagan National, the airport situated alongside the Potomac River in Washington itself, was notified. So were Secret Service agents, who were by now fretting both about the safety of the Vice President—still in his White House office—and of the President, still at that school in Florida.

ISOLATED FROM THE ONRUSH of events, but very aware of the catastrophe in New York, the President was launching into his thank-you remarks to the teachers and fifth-grade students—remarks rapidly reshaped to take account of the attacks and suggest that the nation’s leader was at the helm:

Ladies and gentlemen, this is a difficult moment for America. I unfortunately will be going back to Washington.… Today we have had a national tragedy. Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack on our country.… I have ordered the full resources of the federal government to go to help the victims and their families and to conduct a full-scale investigation to hunt down and find those folks who’ve committed this act. Terrorism against our nation will not stand. Now, if you’ll join me in a moment

of silence.… May God bless the victims and their families and America.

Bush was gone from the school moments later. A Secret Service agent emerged at a run to tell local police officers, “We’re under terrorist attack. We have to go now.” The presidential motorcade sped off, heading for the Sarasota airport. Before it got there, however, events would torpedo the plan to return to Washington.

FROM THE TOWER at Reagan Airport in Washington, a supervisor had been talking urgently with the Secret Service’s Operations Center at the White House. “We’ve got an aircraft coming at you,” he said, “and not talking with us.” It is less than four miles from the airport to the White House. Within three minutes, by 9:36, according to the Secret Service record, the agents who had been waiting in Cheney’s outer office—submachine guns in hand—acted. “They came in,” the Vice President remembered, “grabbed me and … you know, your feet touch the floor periodically. But they’re bigger than I am, and they hoisted me up and moved me very rapidly down the hallway, down some stairs, through some doors, and down some more stairs into an underground facility under the White House.” He was on his way to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, a fortified bunker originally built for President Roosevelt in World War II, where he was to remain for many hours.

DULLES CONTROLLERS had reported that the suspect airplane was headed toward the restricted airspace around the White House, known as P-56. It was ten miles out, still pointed that way, when radar at Reagan National picked it up. Then it turned south. A National Guard cargo aircraft pilot, asked if he had it in sight, could see it clearly. It looked “like a 757 with a silver fuselage” descending, Colonel Steve O’Brien would recall.

Then, squinting through the haze, O’Brien saw the plane begin to turn back again toward the city. Suddenly, horrified controllers in the Reagan control tower no longer needed the reports of the National Guard pilot. There the airliner was, in plain sight and less than a mile away.

A fire engine captain and his crew on Interstate 395, en route to a training session, saw the plane in steep descent, banking right. A policeman on a motorcycle on Columbia Pike saw it, flying so low that its fuselage reflected the shapes of the buildings beneath. A Catholic priest, on his way to a graveside service at Arlington Cemetery, saw it—flying no more than twenty feet above the road, he said. Steve Anderson, an executive for USA Today, who saw it from his 19th floor office, couldn’t believe his eyes.

“I heard an airplane, a very loud airplane, come from behind me,” said Richard Benedetto, a reporter for the paper, “an American Airlines airplane. I could see it very clearly.”

“I was close enough—about a hundred feet or so—that I could see the American Airlines logo on the tail,” said Steve Riskus. “It was not completely level but … kind of like it was landing with no gear down … It knocked over a few light poles on its way.”

“I looked out my driver’s side window,” said insurance company employee Penny Elgas, “and realized I was looking at the nose of an airplane … I saw the end of the wing closest to me and the underside closest to me … I remember recognizing it as an American Airlines plane … The plane seemed to be floating as if it were a paper glider.”

AT THE PENTAGON, on the south bank of the Potomac, the news from New York had set some people thinking. “What do we have in place to protect from an airplane?” someone had asked Pentagon police chief John Jester. “Nothing,” he replied. There were measures in place to counter a terrorist attack on the ground, but there was no antiaircraft system. Jester raised the “Protection Condition” to “Alpha,” all he could do in the circumstances.

Controller Sean Boger, in the little tower beside the Pentagon heliport, wondered aloud why it was that no airplane had ever hit the Pentagon—even by accident. The vast complex was, after all, only a mile from Reagan National. Then, out of nowhere, Boger saw “the nose and the wing of an aircraft just like, coming right at us.”

The plane hit just as Jester’s deputy was passing on the “Alpha” alert order. Six hundred feet from the point of impact, Jester heard the noise, felt a shaking, but—so huge and so solidly built is the Pentagon—thought it was caused by “furniture on a pallet rolling over an expansion joint.” Others heard the sound as a muffled “thwoom.”

Flight 77, still with some 5,300 gallons of fuel in its tanks, had hurtled into the military nerve center of the United States at a speed later calculated to have been about 530 miles per hour. The plane struck the west side of the Pentagon just above ground level, going on in diagonally at an angle of about forty-two degrees.

To Penny Elgas, watching petrified in her car, the airliner seemed to “simply melt into the building. I saw a smoke ring surround the fuselage as it made contact with the wall.”

“I saw the plane,” another driver, Rebecca Gordon, said. “It was there … Then it was gone … it just vanished.”

“I expected to see the tail sticking out,” recalled Sheryl Alleger, a naval officer who saw the crash site afterward. “But—nothing. It was like the building swallowed the plane.”

As the airplane pierced the structure, a great mass of flame blossomed above the Pentagon’s roof. There were explosions. The carnage and destruction covered a ragged area of more than an acre of the vast complex.

A total of 189 people, 64 on the airliner and 125 military and civilian staff of the Defense Department, were killed—many instantaneously, more within minutes. Some of the Pentagon’s dead would be found still seated at their desks and conference tables. Forty-nine people suffered injuries sufficient to warrant admission to hospitals.

Christine Morrison, a survivor, described vividly what happened to her. “From the back of the room there was a heatwave-like haze … moving. Before I could register or complete that thought, this force hit the room, instantly turning the office into an inferno hell. Everything was falling, flying, and on fire, and there was no escaping it … I felt the heat and I heard the sizzling of me … Oxygen disappeared; my lungs felt like they were burning or collapsing. My mind was like sludge and thoughts took forever to form and longer to reach the brain, and even longer to make use of them … Everyone lost his or her sense of direction.”

Morrison would emerge into the daylight relatively unharmed. Juan Cruz Santiago was terribly injured. In the words of the official Defense Department history, he was “engulfed by fire. Most of his body was scorched with second, third, and fourth-degree burns.… Hospitalized for three months, Cruz underwent some thirty surgeries, including skin grafts to his face, right arm, hands, and legs. He was left with cruel damage to his face, eyes, and hands.”

Louise Kurtz, who had been standing at a fax machine, was—in her words—“baked, totally … I was like meat when you take it off the grill.” She lost her ears and fingers, underwent multiple skin grafts, and spent three months in the hospital.

Astonishing escapes included Sheila Moody, in the accounts department, who had been seated near the outer wall of the building. Instead of calling out when she heard a rescuer close by—she was stifled by smoke and flames and unable to make a sound—she had been able only to clap her hands. A staff sergeant heard her and got her to safety. Thirty-four others in the department died.

April Gallop, in information management, had brought her two-month-old son to work with her because the babysitter was sick. After the plane hit, and waist-deep in debris, she was horrified to see that the infant’s stroller was on fire—and empty. She found the baby, however, curled up in the wreckage and virtually unscathed, and both were rescued.

The crash site being the Pentagon, trained military men were on hand at once. Marines—doing “what we’re supposed to do,” as one of them put it—went into the wreckage time and again. They and the hundreds of firefighters who arrived would more than once have to retreat—once when it became clear that part of the building was going to collapse, again when it was feared that another hijacked plane was approaching. The firefighting operation lasted thirty-six hours.

WHEN THE PLANE HIT, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was still in his office with his CIA briefer. The room shook, even though his quarters were at the furthest point from the impact—in a building each side of which is longer than three football fields. Told that an airplane had crashed, Rumsfeld set off fast to investigate, bodyguards in his wake. They came eventually, a member of the escort recalled, to a place where “it was dark and there was a lot of smoke. Then we saw daylight through a door that was hanging open.”

The defense secretary would remember emerging to see the building ablaze, “hundreds of pieces of metal all over the lawn,” “people lying on the grass with clothes blown off and burns all over them.” He examined a piece of wreckage, saw writing on it, and muttered: “American Airlines …” He helped push a gurney, was photographed doing so, then headed back inside.

Assistant secretary Torie Clarke, waiting in the Executive Support Center as instructed, remembered seeing Rumsfeld arrive at about 10:15, “suit jacket over his shoulders and his face and clothes smeared with ashes, dirt, and sweat.” He was “quiet, deadly serious, completely cool.”

WHILE DONALD RUMSFELD was on the move around the Pentagon, President Bush had been on the short limousine ride from Booker Elementary to the Sarasota airport. News of the Pentagon attack reached the party as they were en route, leading the President’s Secret Service escort to advise against the planned return to Washington. Chief of staff Card agreed.

From the airport, on board Air Force One, Bush spoke with Cheney at the White House. “Sounds like we have a minor war going on here,” he told the Vice President, according to an aide’s notes. “I heard about the Pentagon. We’re at war … somebody’s going to pay.”

The Secret Service wanted Air Force One off the ground fast. “They were taxiing before the door was closed,” an officer recalled, “and the pilot shot off using only half the runway. There was so much torque that they actually tore the concrete.”

Air Force colonel Mark Tillman, at the controls, took the plane up “like a rocket,” a passenger remembered, “almost straight up.” After flying northeast for a while, it turned west. Those recommending caution had won out. Instead of returning to Washington the President would simply fly on—destination, for the time being, undecided.

In the skies to the north, and even before the Pentagon was hit, the crisis had become yet more serious. Unknown to the President, unknown to anyone at the White House, and once again as predicted in the children’s story at the Sarasota school, there was more to come.

SIX

AT HOME IN NEW JERSEY, A WOMAN NAMED MELODIE HOMER HAD been worried by the television pictures from the World Trade Center. Her concern was for her husband, Leroy, copilot that morning on United 93, a Boeing 757 flying from Newark to San Francisco. Through a contact at the airline, Mrs. Homer sent him a text message asking if all was well.

That message was quickly followed by another. As Flight 93 cruised 35,000 feet over eastern Ohio, it received the warning dispatcher Ballinger was by now sending to all United aircraft: “Beware any cockpit intrusion—two a/c [aircraft] hit World Trade Center.”

Captain Jason Dahl was evidently nonplussed. “Ed,” he messaged back, “confirm latest mssg plz.” It was 9:26, and clarification came swift and savage.

At 9:28, the sound of mayhem crackled over the radio from Flight 93. Cleveland control heard a shout of “Mayday!”; then, “Hey! Get out of here!”; and finally, sounds of physical struggle. Thirty-two seconds later, more fighting. Again, three times: “Get out of here! … Get out of here! … Get out of here!” And screaming.

Melodie Homer never would receive the reassuring reply for which she had hoped. Ballinger’s warning had been in vain, and there would be no more legitimate transmissions from Flight 93.

Instead, at 9:32, came a stranger’s voice, panting as though out of breath. It intoned: “Ladies and gentlemen. Here the captain. Please sit down. Keep remaining sitting. We have a bomb on board. So sit.” Some investigators would surmise that lack of familiarity with the communications system led this hijack pilot—and, earlier, his accomplice on Flight 11—to transmit not to the passengers as intended, but to ground control.

Though the United pilots could no longer transmit, we know a good deal of what went on in the cockpit. Unlike voice recorders on board the three other hijacked flights, all either never found or irreparably damaged, Flight 93’s Cockpit Voice Recorder survived. So did the Flight Data Recorder. Though often difficult to interpret, the voice recorder made for a unique partial record of the final thirty-one minutes aboard the plane.

The cockpit recording began four minutes into the hijack, as the hijacker “captain” tried to tell passengers to remain seated. The microphones picked up a clattering sound, followed by the voice of someone giving orders: “Don’t move … Come on. Come … Shut up! … Don’t move! … Stop!”

Then the sound of an airline seat moving, and more commands: “Sit, sit, sit down! … Sit down!” More of the same, and a voice repeating in Arabic, “That’s it, that’s it …” Then in English, loudly, “SHUT UP!” Someone other than the terrorists was alive in the cockpit, and evidently captive.

Though one cannot know for sure, the person being told to sit down and shut up was almost certainly one of the female flight attendants. Perhaps she was senior attendant Deborah Welsh, who spent much of her time in First Class. Or perhaps she was Wanda Green, who was also assigned to the front of the airplane. Some United attendants carried a key to the cockpit, and one key was usually kept in the forward galley. By arrangement with Captain Dahl, reportedly, his attendants could also gain access to the cockpit by means of a coded knock. Welsh, aged forty-nine, was a veteran with a reputation for being tough. She had once managed to shove a drunken male passenger back into his seat. Green, the same age as Welsh, doubled as a real estate agent and had two grown children. One of these two attendants was likely used to gain access to the cockpit.

The woman in the hijackers’ hands did not keep quiet or sit down. A minute into the series of orders to the captive, a terrorist’s voice is heard to intone in Arabic the Basmala: “In the name of Allah, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate.” This is an invocation used frequently by observant Muslims, often before embarking on some action.

Next on the recording, the man exclaims: “Finish, no more. NO MORE!” and “Stop, stop, stop, STOP!” Repeatedly: “No! No, no, no, NO!” Time and time again, frantically: “Lie down! … DOWN! … Down, down, down … Come on, sit down, sit!”

For two minutes of this, the captive has not spoken. Now, however, a female American voice is heard for the first time. She begs, “Please, please, please …” Then, again ordered to get down, she pleads, “Please, please, don’t hurt me … Oh, God!”

According to Deborah Welsh’s husband, the attendant had spoken of Muslim terrorists with scorn, thought them cowards. If the captive in the cockpit was Welsh, perhaps she now tried an acid response. After another minute of being told to stay down, the female voice on the recording asks, “Are you talking to me?” Her reward, within moments, is violence.

Barely has the hijacker started in again on his mantra of “Down, down!” than the woman is heard pleading, “I don’t want to die.” She says it three times, her cries accompanied by words—or sounds—that are blanked out in the transcript as released. Then, the transcript notes, there is the “sound of a snap … a struggle that lasted for few seconds.” Moments later, a voice in Arabic says, “Everything is fine. I finished.” The woman’s voice is not heard again.

Two minutes after the silencing of the attendant, the terrorist pilot tried again to make an announcement to the passengers. He asked that passengers remain seated, adding this time: “We are going back to the airport … we have our demands. So, please remain quiet.”

About a minute later, at 9:40, a surviving flight attendant on board got through to Starfix, United’s maintenance facility in California. This was Sandra Bradshaw, probably seated toward the rear of the plane in Coach. Those who handled the call thought she sounded “shockingly calm” as she told of hijackers, armed with knives, on the flight deck and in the cabin. Bradshaw said that a fellow flight attendant had been “attacked” and—as relayed to United Airlines Operations by a Starfix operator—that “knives were being held to the crew’s throats.”

It may be that Captain Dahl and copilot Homer were not killed at once. Well into the hijack, the voice recorder transcript shows that a “native English-speaking male” in the cockpit says—or perhaps groans—“Oh, man! …” A few minutes later a hijacker is heard saying in Arabic, “… talk to the pilot. Bring the pilot back.”

A flight attendant—perhaps CeeCee Lyles, who also worked in Coach—at one point passed word that the hijackers had “taken the pilot and the copilot out” of the cockpit. They were “lying on the floor bleeding” in First Class. It was not clear whether the pilots were dead or alive.

Did the hijackers try to get the pilots, already wounded, to help with the controls? Did they then move them to the forward passenger area and leave them lying there? There is no way to know.

FAR BELOW, ALL WAS CHAOS. At the very moment that the attendant in 93’s cockpit had fallen ominously silent—all unknown to those wrestling with the crisis on the ground—Flight 77 had slammed into the Pentagon. On his first day of duty in the post, FAA national operations manager Ben Sliney and his senior colleagues had no way of knowing what new calamity might be imminent.

A Delta flight on its way from Boston to Las Vegas missed a radio call, triggering suspicion. Was this another hijack? Boston had been the point of departure for two of the planes already attacked. Then word reached the FAA Command Center that Flight 93 might have a bomb on board.

At 9:25, Sliney had ordered a nationwide “ground stop,” prohibiting any further takeoffs by civilian aircraft. At 9:42, when the Command Center learned of the crash into the Pentagon, FAA officials together decided to issue a command unprecedented in U.S. aviation history. Sliney reportedly boomed, “Order everyone to land! … Regardless of destination. Let’s get them on the ground.”

There were at that moment some 4,540 commercial and civilian planes in the air or under American control. For the more than two hours that followed, controllers and pilots would work to empty the sky of aircraft. It was the one drastic action that might avert fresh disaster.

By 12:16, the FAA was able to inform government agencies that all commercial flights had landed or been diverted away from U.S. airspace.

BACK IN WASHINGTON, Clarke’s videoconference had finally gotten under way at about 9:37. Extraordinarily, though, it would be an hour before the Defense Department fielded anyone involved in handling the situation. Secretary Rumsfeld himself was out of touch, as noted, having headed outside to view the carnage at the Pentagon.

Absent anyone with a real grasp of what was going on—let alone expertise in how to deal with it—the first matter discussed in the videoconference had been not the crisis itself but the safety of the President and Vice President. In case they were killed or incapacitated, contingency plans were in place for those next in line to the presidency to be taken to a secret underground shelter outside Washington. Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert and Senator Robert Byrd, president pro tempore of the Senate, third and fourth in line, would soon be rushed to the shelter.

All over the capital, people were now pouring out of office buildings. Thousands rushed to get out of the downtown area. The Secret Service ordered an evacuation of nonessential personnel from the White House, and departure—already under way—became headlong flight. Agents yelled at women to take off their high heels and run, and the sidewalks were soon littered with shoes.

Rumor took hold. “CNN says car bomb at the State Department. Fire on the Mall near the Capitol,” read a note passed to Clarke. There was no fire on the Mall. Vietnam veteran Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary representing the Department of State on the videoconference, had a blunt response when asked about the “car bomb.” “Does it fucking look,” he asked, looming large on the monitor, “as if I’ve been bombed?”

TO THE NORTH, in New York City, humor survived in the midst of suffering. A firefighter in the North Tower—on the way up—noticed a fellow coming down toting an odd piece of salvage, a golf club. “Hey!” exclaimed the fireman, “I saw your ball a few flights down.” There were bizarre sights, too. Officers moving from floor to floor found a few people still hard at work at their computers—blind to the peril.

As in Washington, rumors flew. “There’s another plane in the air,” a senior fireman hollered into his radio. “Everybody stay put … We don’t know what’s going on.” A police sergeant told a firefighter, “They hit the White House. And we have another inbound coming at us now.” “Yeah,” a radio dispatcher confirmed, “another one inbound. Watch your back.”

There was no third hijacked airplane heading to New York. Some in the North Tower, meanwhile, were still unaware that even one airplane had hit the building. “What happened?” enquired Keith Meerholz, who had escaped with minor burns. “A plane hit each tower,” a fireman confided, “but don’t tell anyone.” He did not want evacuation to become panic.

For those still alive on the higher floors of the tower, the grim ordeal continued. They were stranded, unable to go down—because of blocked stairways and jammed elevators—or up, with the faint prospect of rescue by helicopter, because of the locked doors.

Down on the 27th floor, from which most workers would escape, a man in a wheelchair named Ed Beyea waited patiently with Abe Zemanowitz, a colleague who had stayed protectively at his side. So far below the point of impact, with emergency services on the scene, real danger perhaps seemed remote. Yet neither man would survive.

Outside, paramedic Carlos Lillo was crying as he worked. His wife, Cecilia, worked on the tower’s 64th floor, and he was frantically worried about her. Cecilia would get safely down and out of the building. Carlos, who lost touch with his comrades, died.

The dying had begun in a horrific way for the firefighters. “The Chief said, ‘You’re going into the lobby command post,’ ” Paul Conlon remembered. “He pointed to the entrance of Two World Trade Center [the South Tower] … It was probably two hundred yards … There were people jumping … Dan Suhr said something like, ‘Let’s make this quick …’ We got about halfway there, and Dan gets hit by a jumper.”

Daniel Suhr, aged thirty-seven, had been with an engine company from Brooklyn. “It was as if he exploded. It wasn’t like you heard something falling and you could jump out of the way … We go to pick him up. He’s a big guy … Someone picked up his helmet … One of the guys says, ‘He still has a pulse.’ … I called the Mayday … The guys were doing CPR. The ambulance came up pretty quickly.”

Suhr, dead on arrival at St. Vincent’s Hospital, was the first firefighter to die, first on a list that, it would soon become clear, was to be numbingly long.

Communications, crucial to any firefighting operation, failed dismally that day. “We didn’t have a lot of information coming in,” Chief Joe Pfeifer recalled of the Command Center in the North Tower lobby. According to the Fire Department’s own investigation, the portable radios in use on 9/11 did not “work reliably in high-rise buildings without having their signals amplified or rebroadcast by a repeater system.”

“We didn’t receive any reports of what was seen from the helicopters,” Pfeifer said. “It was impossible to know what was done on the upper floors, whether the stairwells were intact or not.” “People watching on TV,” Deputy Chief Peter Hayden said, “had more knowledge of what was happening a hundred floors above us than we did in the lobby.”

As their chiefs worked blind, men struggled up the North Tower weighed down by equipment. Company followed company on the strenuous ascent into the unknowable. Of those they had come to rescue, some 1,500 souls had already died or were going to die, those trapped above the impact zone and the injured, handicapped, severely obese, or the elderly, for whom movement was difficult. Of the roughly 7,500 civilians who had been in the North Tower before the attack, however, 6,000 would manage to leave the building by 10:00 A.M.

Of perhaps 7,000 people in the South Tower, some 6,000 are thought to have made their way to safety by 9:30. Of about a thousand who remained, 600 would die.

Brian Clark and Stanley Praimnath, the man Clark had pulled from the wreckage on the 81st floor of the South Tower, had continued to make their painful way down. Slithering at first over ceiling tiles and sheet rock, they sloshed through water, groped through smoke, hurried past fingers of flame. Then the way seemed clear for the long trudge down to safety. “Let’s slow down,” Clark said as they reached the mid-20s. “We’ve come this far. There’s no point in breaking an ankle.” There no longer seemed any need to rush.

High above, hope of escape had withered. Sean Rooney, an Aon insurance executive, had tried to reach the roof and been defeated by the locked doors. From the 105th floor, on the phone to his wife, Beverly, he said, “The smoke is very thick … the windows are getting hot.” Some two hundred other people were trapped in a nearby conference room.

Below, too far below, firefighters were still climbing, climbing. One group, that reached the 70th floor, found numerous victims with serious injuries. Chief Orio Palmer, who got to the 78th floor, reported that there were many “Code Ones”—firefighterspeak for dead. Palmer could see pockets of fire but, speaking as though there would be time to do the job, said he thought it should be possible to put them out.

Emergency operators had continued to log piteous calls:

09:32 105 FLR—

PEOPLE TRAPPED—OPEN ROOF TO GAIN ACCESS

09:36 FC STS THEY ARE STUCK IN THE ELEVATORS … STS THEY ARE DYING

09:40 MC STS PEOPLE PASSING OUT

09:42 PEOPLE STILL JUMPING OFF THE TOWER

09:39 FC MELISSA STS FLOOR VERY HOT NO DOOR STS SHE’S GOING TO DIE … STILL ON PHONE … WANT TO CALL MOTHER

Emergency workers in the South Tower lobby were overwhelmed by the number of injured people who could go no further.

Outside, butchered corpses. “Some of them had no legs,” said Roberto Abril, a paramedic, “some of them had no arms. There was a torso with one leg, with an EMS jacket on top. I guess somebody just wanted to cover it. We kept going back, but at one point it was useless because most of the people that could get out were already walking.”

EARLY THAT MORNING, a handful of high-ranking firemen had pondered the unthinkable. How long would the fires burn on the upper floors, chief of safety Al Turi wondered, before there were partial collapses? Three hours, perhaps? He shared his concern with chief of department Peter Ganci and other colleagues. “The potential and the reality of a collapse,” deputy division chief Peter Hayden said, was discussed early on. “I think we envisioned a gradual burning of the fire for a couple of hours and then a very limited type of collapse—the top fifteen or twenty floors all folding in.”

Rick Rescorla, security chief for Morgan Stanley, saw it coming from the start. “Everything above where that plane hit is going to collapse,” he forecast right after the strike on the North Tower, “and it’s going to take the whole building with it.” He ordered his staff to evacuate at once, even though they were based in the South Tower—at the time still undamaged.

When the top of the South Tower in turn became an inferno, the same thought occurred to firefighter Richard Carletti. “Tommy,” he told a colleague as they stood staring upward, “this building is in danger of collapse.”

Only months earlier, Frank De Martini, construction manager for the New York Port Authority, had dismissed the notion of one of the towers collapsing. “I believe the building probably could sustain multiple impacts of jetliners because this structure is like the mosquito netting on your screen door,” he said in an interview. “And the jet plane is just a pencil puncturing the screen netting. It really does nothing to the screen netting … The building was designed to have a fully loaded 707 crash into it.”

An early design study had indeed suggested that the Trade Center would survive were a Boeing 707, the largest airliner of the day—“low on fuel and at landing speeds”—to strike one of the towers. Now, the buildings had been hit by far larger, far more powerful, 767s heavily laden with fuel. On 9/11, De Martini became concerned early on, and asked that structural inspectors be summoned. He was himself to die that day.

By about 9:50, photographs analyzed much later would show, the South Tower’s 83rd floor gave the appearance of drooping down over the floor below. Video footage showed a stream of molten metal cascading from a window opening near one corner. A minute later, a police helicopter pilot warned that there were “large pieces of debris hanging” from the South Tower. They looked as though they were about to fall.

Even earlier, at 9:37, a man on the 105th floor of the South Tower had called 911 with a frantic message. As regurgitated ten minutes later by a computer, it read in part:

STS FLOOR UNDERNEATH—COLLAPSE

In the welter of calls pouring in, that message went unread—or misread. The 911 caller had in fact been referring to floors beneath him, and he had used the past tense. The floors beneath him, “in the 90-something,” had already collapsed.

That word, from many mouths, and from early on.

Collapse.

SEVEN

FOUR HUNDRED MILES AWAY, OVER OHIO, THREE DOZEN OTHER civilians remained in their airborne purgatory. From about 9:30, for some thirty minutes, fourteen passengers and crew members of United Flight 93 managed to telephone either loved ones or operators on the ground.

The first to do so long enough to have a significant conversation, public relations man Mark Bingham, got through to his aunt’s home in California. “This is Mark,” he began. “I want to let you guys know that I love you, in case I don’t see you again.” Then: “I’m on United Airlines, Flight 93. It’s being hijacked.”

Two other callers from the plane not only provided information but gleaned vital news from those they phoned—news that may have influenced their actions in the minutes that followed. Tom Burnett, chief operating officer for a medical devices firm, made a number of brief calls to his wife, Deena. Speaking quietly, he asked her to contact the authorities, and told her that a male passenger had been stabbed—later that he had died. A woman, perhaps a flight attendant, was being held at knife point, and the hijackers claimed they had a bomb.

Jeremy Glick, a salesman for an Internet services company, also managed to phone. In a long conversation with his wife, Lyz, Glick said the hijackers had “put on these red headbands. They said they had a bomb … they looked Iranian.” The “bomb” was in a red box, he said. The couple told each other how much they loved each other. Glick said, “I don’t want to die,” and his wife assured him that he would not. She urged him to keep a picture of her and their eleven-week-old daughter in his head, to think good thoughts.

Burnett’s wife, who had been watching the breaking news on television, told him that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. “My God,” he responded, “it’s a suicide mission.” By the time he phoned a third time, after news of the crash into the Pentagon, she told him about that, too. Burnett seems to have been seated beside Glick, and apparently relayed all this information to him.

Were they to do nothing, the two men must have agreed, they were sure to die anyway when the hijackers crashed the plane. They resolved to fight for their lives. “A group of us,” Burnett told his wife, “are getting ready to do something.” “I’m going to take a vote,” Glick said on his call. “There’s three other guys as big as me and we’re thinking of attacking the guy with the bomb.”

So began the minutes of brave resistance, the clearly defined act of courage that has lived on in the national memory. Glick and others were equipped in more ways than one to confront the hijackers. He was six foot one and a former college judo champion. Burnett, at six foot two, had played quarterback for his high school football team. He admired strong leaders, had busts of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Churchill in his office, liked Hemingway’s books and Kipling’s poetry. Mark Bingham was a huge man, six foot four and at thirty-one still playing rugby. A few years earlier, he had fended off a mugger who had a gun. His mother got the impression, as he talked from Flight 93, that her son was talking “confidentially” with a fellow passenger. She felt that “maybe someone had organized a plan.”

At 9:42, a GTE-Verizon supervisor based near Chicago began handling a call from yet another powerfully built Flight 93 passenger. Todd Beamer, a star Oracle software salesman, was married with two sons, and his wife was expecting again. He first dialed his home number, but either failed to get through or thought better of it. Instead, explaining that he did not want to upset his pregnant wife, he asked phone supervisor Lisa Jefferson to pass on a loving message.

As they talked, Beamer suddenly exclaimed, “Shit! … Oh, my God, we’re going down … Jesus help us.” From the passengers around Beamer came prolonged shrieks of terror. Then he said, “No, wait. We’re coming back up. I think we’re okay now.”

Today we have an explanation for those moments of panic. The Flight Data Recorder shows that, as Beamer and operator Jefferson talked on, the plane had gone into a rapid descent.

Shaken, Beamer asked Jefferson to say the Lord’s Prayer with him. “Our Father, who art in heaven …” Across the airwaves, they prayed together. Then Beamer began to recite the Twenty-third Psalm. “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want … Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …”

Just before Beamer and the operator had begun talking, Cleveland control lost Flight 93’s transponder, the signal that indicates an airplane’s location and altitude. “We just lost the target on that aircraft,” controller John Werth exclaimed, and began struggling to find it on radar. He was in contact, too, with an executive jet still in flight in the area, which reported sighting 93. At 9:55, the recovered flight recorder shows, the hijacker pilot dialed in a navigational aid relating to the plane’s direction. He was heading, it indicated, for Washington, D.C.

For some six minutes, a female passenger named Marion Britton had been talking to a friend on one of the seatback phones. She said she thought the plane was turning and going to crash. There were sounds of screaming again, and the plane did turn. But there was no crash, not yet.

Jeremy Glick, still on the phone to his wife, Lyz, said, “I know I could take the guy with the bomb.” Then, joking—he had mentioned that the hijackers had knives—“I still have my butter knife from breakfast.”

Todd Beamer, continuing his conversation with GTE supervisor Jefferson, told her that he and a few others were getting together “to jump the guy with the bomb.” Was he sure that was what he wanted to do? “Yes,” came the response. “I’m going to have to go out on faith … I don’t have much of a choice.”

There was, it seems, more to the passengers’ plan than merely overpowering the hijackers. If the legitimate pilots were out of action, that alone would have been pointless. Beamer, however, talked as if there was someone on the plane who could act as pilot if they overpowered the hijackers. He gave Jefferson “the impression their plan would be to try to land it safely.”

There was indeed a pilot among the passengers. Donald Greene, a senior executive of Safe Flight Instrument Corporation, was licensed to fly single-engine four-seaters or copilot a King Air twin-engine turboprop, and flew regularly. To fly and land a Boeing 757 like Flight 93, though, with its complex systems and massive power—40,200 pounds of thrust—would have been another matter. Could Greene have pulled off such a feat? The weather, a key factor for any pilot flying visually rather than on instruments, was perfect, with excellent visibility. It was possible, given time and painstaking instructions radioed from the ground, that a pilot with Greene’s experience could do it. Those hoping to overpower the hijackers well knew, after all, that they had nothing to lose.

The plane was flying erratically again. Operator Jefferson heard the sounds of an “awful commotion”: raised voices, more screams. Then: “Are you guys ready?” and Todd Beamer’s voice saying, “Let’s roll!”—a phrase that, in family life, he liked to use to get his children moving.

“OK,” Jeremy Glick told Lyz, “I’m going to do it.” His wife told him he was strong and brave, that she loved him. “OK,” he said again. “I’m going to put the phone down. I’m going to leave it here and I’m going to come right back to it.” Lyz handed the phone to her father, ran to the bathroom, and gagged.

For some minutes, passenger Elizabeth Wainio, a Discovery Channel store manager, had been on the line to her mother. She had been quiet, her breathing shallow—as if she were already letting go, her mother thought. Her deceased grandmothers were waiting for her, Wainio said. Then: “They’re getting ready to break into the cockpit. I have to go. I love you. Goodbye.”

Sandra Bradshaw, the flight attendant who had earlier phoned to alert the airline, now got through to her husband. She was in the galley, she said, boiling water for the passengers to throw on the hijackers. Then, “Everyone’s running up to first class. I’ve got to go. Bye …”

CeeCee Lyles, Bradshaw’s fellow crew member, also got through to her husband, told him rapidly about the hijacking, that she loved him. Then, “I think they’re going to do it. Babe, they’re forcing their way into the cockpit …”

The Cockpit Voice Recorder registered the moment the hijackers realized what was happening. At just before 9:58, a hijacker asks, “Is there something? … A fight?” There is a knock on the door, followed by sounds of fighting. Then, in Arabic, “Let’s go, guys! Allah is Greatest. Allah is Greatest. Oh guys! Allah is Greatest … Oh Allah! Oh Allah! Oh the most Gracious!” Then, loudly, “Stay back!”

A male voice, a native-English-speaking voice that Tom Burnett’s wife has recognized as that of her husband, is heard saying, “In the cockpit. In the cockpit.”

Followed by a voice exclaiming, in Arabic, “They want to get in there. Hold, hold from the inside … Hold.”

Then, from several English speakers in unison, “Hold the door …” And from a single English speaker, “Stop him,” followed repeatedly by “Sit down! Sit down!” Then, again from an English speaker, “Let’s get them …”

Flight 93, now down to five thousand feet, had begun rolling left and right. The pilot of a light aircraft, on a mapping assignment for the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, saw the airliner at about this moment. “The wings started to rock,” he recalled. “The rocking stopped and started again. A violent rocking back and forth.”

Jeremy Glick’s father-in-law, listening intently on the phone his daughter had handed him, now heard screams in the background. On the Cockpit Voice Recorder, there is the sound of combat continuing. Then, in Arabic:

“There is nothing … Shall we finish it off?”

“No. Not yet.”

“When they all come, we finish it off.”

Then, from Tom Burnett: “I am injured.”

The Flight Data Recorder indicates that the plane pitched up and down, climbed to ten thousand feet, turned. Glick’s father-in-law, phone clapped to his ear, heard more shrieks, muffled now, like those of people “riding on a roller coaster.”

In Arabic, on the voice recorder, “Oh Allah! Oh Allah! Oh Gracious!”

In English, “In the cockpit. If we don’t, we’ll die!”

In Arabic, “Up down. Up down … Up down!”

From a distance, perhaps from Todd Beamer, “Roll it!”

Crashing sounds, then, in Arabic, “Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest! … Is that it? I mean, shall we pull it down?”

“Yes, put it in it, and pull it down.”

“Cut off the oxygen! Cut off the oxygen! Cut off the oxygen! … Up down. Up, down … Up down.”

More violent noises, for as long as a minute, then—apparently by a native English speaker: “Shut them off! … Go! … Go! … Move! … Move! … Turn it up.”

In Arabic, “Down, down … Pull it down! Pull it down! DOWN!”

Apparently from an English speaker, “Down. Push, push, push, push, push … push.”

In Arabic, “Hey! Hey! Give it to me. Give it to me … Give it to me. Give it to me … Give it to me … Give it to me … Give it to me … Give it to me.”

Intermittent loud “air noise” on the cockpit recorder.

Moments later, in Arabic, “Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest!”

Sounds of further struggle, and a loud shout by a native English speaker, “No!!!”

Two seconds later, in Arabic, in a whisper now, “Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest!”

Jeremy Glick’s father-in-law, still listening on the ground, heard high-pitched screams coming over the line Glick had left open when he left to join the rush to the cockpit. Then “wind sounds” followed by banging noises, as though the phone aboard the plane was repeatedly banging on a hard surface.

After that, silence on the phone. Silence on the Cockpit Voice Recorder. Then, in less than a second, the recording ended.

NEAR THE LITTLE TOWN of Shanksville, Pennsylvania, a man working in a scrapyard had seen an airliner, flying low but seemingly trying to climb, just clear a nearby ridge. The assistant chief of Shanksville’s volunteer fire department had been talking on the phone with his sister, who said she could see a large airplane “nosediving, falling like a stone.” A witness who saw it from his porch said it made a “sort of whistling” noise.

Half a mile away, another man saw the final plunge. It was “barely fifty feet above me,” he said, “rocking from side to side. Then the nose suddenly dipped and it just crashed … There was this big fireball and then a huge cloud of smoke.”

United Airlines Flight #93 Cockpit Voice Recorder Transcript

Key:

Bolded text = English translation from Arabic