Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11. MItchell Zuckoff

9:32 A.M., air traffic controllers at Dulles airport saw a green dot on their radar screens that no one expected, traveling eastbound at the surprisingly fast speed of about 500 miles per hour.

      Among those who noticed the unidentified aircraft was Danielle O’Brien, the air traffic controller who for some reason had wished Flight 77’s pilots “good luck” when she handed them off an hour earlier. From its speed and how it turned and slashed across the sky, she and other controllers initially thought the object on their radar was a nimble military jet.

      O’Brien slid to her left and pointed it out to the controller next to her, her fiancé, Tom Howell, who recognized it as a threat. “Oh my God,” Howell said. He yelled to the room: “We’ve got a target headed right for the White House!”

      A Dulles manager called the FAA’s control center and controllers at Reagan airport in Washington to warn them. Still no one from the FAA called NEADS or anyone else in the military’s air defense system. An FAA supervisor at Dulles, John Hendershot, used a dedicated phone line to alert the Secret Service of the incoming danger. He told the men and women who protect the president and the vice president: “We have an unidentified, very fast-moving aircraft inbound toward your vicinity, eight miles west.”

      President Bush wasn’t in Washington, but Vice President Dick Cheney was in his White House office. Secret Service agents rushed in, lifted Cheney from his chair, and hustled him to a tunnel leading to an underground bunker beneath the White House called the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. The agents also told White House staffers to run from the building.

      Simultaneously, Reagan airport officials sought urgent help identifying the mystery jet. They called the closest plane in the sky: a military cargo plane that had just taken off from Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, fifteen miles from the District of Columbia. The FAA’s newly issued ban on takeoffs didn’t apply to military planes, and the cargo plane’s pilots hadn’t heard about it, anyway.

      AS THE FAA tried to identify the plane approaching the White House, little more than ten minutes had passed since Major Kevin Nasypany speculated about using a Sidewinder missile “in the face” to stop terrorists from creating another large-scale disaster.

      The F-16s from Langley were airborne by 9:30 a.m. with orders from NEADS to fly to Washington. But no one briefed them about exactly why they were scrambled. The pilots defaulted to an old Cold War plan and flew out to sea, to a training area known as Whiskey 386. The lead pilot, who’d heard about a plane hitting the World Trade Center but knew nothing about hijackings, thought he and his two wingmen were supposed to defend the capital against Russian planes or cruise missiles.

      As the Langley F-16s took flight, headed the wrong way, a member of Nasypany’s team pressed the issue of how they’d respond if they encountered a hijacked passenger jet being readied for use as a weapon.

      “Have you asked … the question what you’re gonna do if we actually find this guy?” wondered Major James Anderson. “Are we gonna shoot him down if they got passengers on board? Have they talked about that?”

      At that moment, the man on whom shootdown authority rested stood before two hundred students, a handful of teachers, and a clutch of reporters in an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida.

      PRESIDENT BUSH BEGAN his September 11 at 6 a.m. with a four-mile run at a golf course with his Secret Service protectors. Afterwards he showered, dressed, and sat for a routine, fifteen-minute intelligence briefing from CIA official Mike Morell in the president’s suite at Sarasota’s swanky Colony Beach Resort. Many of the president’s summer 2001 briefings had included mentions of a heightened terrorism risk.

      One of those briefings, received by the president on August 6, marked the first time that Bush had been told of a possible plan by al-Qaeda to attack inside the United States. Titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US,” the memo read in part: “Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Laden implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and ‘bring the fighting to America.’”

      But there wasn’t a word about terrorism in Bush’s security briefing on the morning of September 11. Much of it focused instead on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

      By 8:40 a.m., Bush’s motorcade had left the resort for the nine-mile drive to the Emma E. Booker Elementary School. The president intended to use the school as a backdrop to promote his “No Child Left Behind” education policy with a press-friendly event: a reading lesson with a diverse class of second graders.

      On his way into the school, Bush shook hands with teachers and students. Meanwhile, senior White House adviser Karl Rove answered a call from his assistant: a plane had hit the World Trade Center. Rove passed the information to the president but said he didn’t have details and didn’t know what type of plane. Three decades earlier, during the Vietnam era, Bush had served as a fighter pilot in the Texas National Guard. He’d later say that his first thought was pilot error involving a light airplane. Bush also would say he wondered, “How could the guy have gotten so off course [as] to hit the towers?”

      Bush ducked away from the receiving line into a classroom. At 8:55 a.m., less than ten minutes after the first crash, he spoke on a secure phone line with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. A half hour had passed since the FAA first learned about the hijacking of Flight 11, but no one had immediately informed the White House, the nation’s national security agencies, or the Secret Service. Rice didn’t know much more than Bush’s other aides.

      Bush told the school’s principal the situation, then walked to teacher Kay Daniels’s classroom. “Good to meet you all!” he said as he entered. “It’s really exciting for me to be here.” Bush smiled, clapped, and followed along as Daniels led her sixteen students through rapid-fire phonics exercises.

      At about 9:05 a.m., two minutes after United Flight 175 struck the South Tower, White House chief of staff Andy Card hesitated a moment at the door to the classroom. He collected his thoughts, then walked to Bush’s side. Reporters watching from the back of the classroom perked up, knowing that no one would interrupt the president’s event unless something major happened. Card bent at the waist and whispered in Bush’s ear: