 CHAPTER 9.4 Like the national defense effort described in Chapter 1, the emergency response to the attacks on 9-11 was necessarily improvised. In New York, the FDNY, the NYPD, the Port Authority, WTC employees, and the building occupants themselves did their best to cope with the effects of an unimaginable catastrophe, unfolding furiously over a mere 102 minutes, for which they were unprepared in terms of both training and mindset. As a result of the efforts of first responders, assistance from each other, and their own good instincts and goodwill, the vast majority of civilians below the impact zone were able to evacuate the towers. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has provided a preliminary estimation that between 16,400 and 18,800 civilians were in the WTC complex as of 8.46 a.m. on September 11. At most, 2,152 individuals died at the WTC complex, who were not, one, fire or police first responders, two, security or fire safety personnel of the WTC or individual companies, three volunteer civilians who ran to the WTC after the plane's impact to help others or four on the two planes that crashed into the twin towers. Out of this total number of fatalities, we can account for the workplace location of 2,052 individuals or 95.35 percent. Of this number, 1,942 or 94.64 percent either worked or were supposed to attend a meeting at or above the respective impact zones of the twin towers. Only 110 or 5.36 percent of those who died worked below the impact zone. While a given person's office location at the WTC does not definitively indicate where that individual died that morning or whether he or she could have evacuated, these data strongly suggest that the evacuation was a success for civilians below the impact zone. Several actors influenced the evacuation on September 11. It was aided greatly by changes made by the Port Authority in response to the 1993 bombing and by the training of both Port Authority personnel and civilians after that time. Stairwells remained lit near unaffected floors. Some tenants relied on procedures learned in fire drills to help them to safety. Others were guided down the stairs by fire safety officials based in the lobby. Because of damage caused by the impact of the planes, the capability of the sophisticated building systems may have been impaired. Rudimentary improvements, however, such as the addition of glow strips to the handrails and stairs, were credited by some as the reason for their survival. The general evacuation time for the towers dropped from more than four hours in 1993 to under one hour on September 11 for most civilians who were not trapped or physically incapable of enduring a long descent. First responders also played a significant role in the success of the evacuation. Some specific rescues are quantifiable, such as an FDNY company's rescue of civilians trapped on the 22nd floor of the North Tower, or the success of FDNY, PAPD, and NYPD personnel in carrying non-ambulatory civilians out of both the North and South Towers. In other instances, intangibles combined to reduce what could have been a much higher death total. It is impossible to measure how many more civilians who descended to the ground floors would have died but for the NYPD and PAPD personnel directing them via safe exit routes that avoided jumpers and debris to leave the complex urgently but calmly. It is impossible to measure how many more civilians would have died but for the determination of many members of the FDNY, PAPD, and NYPD to continue assisting civilians after the South Tower collapsed. It is impossible to measure the calming influence that ascending firefighters had on descending civilians or whether but for the firefighters presence the poor behavior of a very few civilians could have caused a dangerous and panicked mob flight. But the positive impact of the first responders on the evacuation came at a tremendous cost of first responder lives lost. Civilian and private sector challenges. The first first responders on 9-11, as in most catastrophes, were private sector civilians because 85 percent of our nation's critical infrastructure is controlled not by government but by private sector. Private sector civilians are likely to be the first responders in any future catastrophe. For that reason, we have assessed the state of private sector and civilian preparedness in order to formulate recommendations to address this critical need. More recommendations grow out of the experience of the civilians at the World Trade Center on 9-11. Lack of protocol for rooftop rescues. Civilians at or above the impact zone in the North Tower had the smallest hope of survival. Once the plane struck, they were prevented from descending because of damage to or impassable conditions in the building's three stairwells. The only hope for those on the upper floors of the North Tower would have been a swift and extensive air rescue. Several factors made this impossible. Doors leading to the roof were kept locked for security reasons, and damage to software in the security command station prevented a lock release order from taking effect. Even if the doors had not been locked, structural and radiation hazards made the rooftops unsuitable staging areas for a large number of civilians. And even if conditions permitted general helicopter evacuations, which was not the case, only several people could be lifted at a time. The WTC lacked any plan for evacuation of civilians on upper floors of the WTC in the event that all stairwells were impassable below. Back of comprehensive evacuation of South Tower immediately after the North Tower impact. No decision has been criticized more than the decision of building personnel not to evacuate the South Tower immediately after the North Tower was hit. A firm and prompt evacuation order would likely have led many to safety. Even a strictly advisory announcement would not have dissuaded those who decided for themselves to evacuate. The advice to stay in place was understandable, however, when considered in its context. At that moment no one appears to have thought a second plane could hit the South Tower. The evacuation of thousands of people was seen as inherently dangerous. Additionally, conditions were hazardous in some areas outside the towers. This understandable, in our view, is the instruction given to some civilians who had reached the lobby to return to their offices. They could have been held in the lobby or perhaps directed through the underground concourse. Despite the initial advice given over its public address system, the South Tower was ordered to be evacuated by the FDNY and PAPD within 12 minutes of the North Tower being hit. If not for a second, unanticipated attack, the evacuation presumably would have proceeded. Impact of fire safety plan and fire drills on evacuation. Once the South Tower was hit, civilians on upper floors wasted time ascending the stairs instead of searching for a clear path down when stairwell A was at least initially passable. Although rooftop rescues had not been conclusively ruled out, civilians were not informed in fire drills that roof doors were locked, that rooftop areas were hazardous, and that no helicopter evacuation plan existed. In both towers, civilians who were able to reach the stairs and descend were also stymied by the deviations in the stairways and by smoke doors. This confusion delayed the evacuation of some and may have obstructed that of others. The Port Authority has acknowledged that in the future tenants should be made aware of what conditions they will encounter during descent. Impact of 9-11 calls on evacuation. The NYPD's 9-11 operators and FDNY dispatch were not adequately integrated into the emergency response. In several ways the 9-11 system was not ready to cope with a major disaster. These operators and dispatchers were one of the only sources of information for individuals at and above the impact zone of the towers. The FDNY ordered both towers fully evacuated by 857, but this guidance was not conveyed to 9-11 operators and FDNY dispatchers, who for the next hour often continued to advise civilians not to self-evacuate, regardless of whether they were above or below the impact zone. Nor were 9-11 operators or FDNY dispatchers advised that rooftop rescues had been rolled out. This failure may have been harmful to civilians on the upper floors of the South Tower, who called 9-11 and were not told that their only evacuation hope was to attempt to descend, not to ascend. In planning for future disasters, it is important to integrate those taking 9-11 calls into the emergency response team and to involve them in providing up-to-date information and assistance to the public. Preparedness of individual civilians. One clear lesson of September 11 is that individual civilians need to take responsibility for maximizing the probability that they will survive should disaster strike. Clearly, many building occupants in the World Trade Center did not take preparedness seriously. Individuals should know the exact location of every stairwell in their workplace. In addition, they should have access at all times to flashlights, which were deemed invaluable by some civilians who managed to evacuate the WTC on September 11. Challenges Experienced by First Responders. The Challenge of Incident Command. As noted above, in July 2001, Mayor Giuliani updated a directive titled, Direction and Control of Emergencies in the City of New York. The directive designated for different types of emergencies an appropriate agency as Incident Commander. It would be responsible for the management of the city's response to the emergency. The directive also provided that where incidents are so multifaceted that no one agency immediately stands out as the Incident Commander, OEM will assign the role of Incident Commander to an agency as the situation demands. To some degree, the Mayor's directive for Incident Command was followed on 9-11. It was clear that the lead response agency was the FDNY, and that the other responding local, federal, by-state, and state agencies acted in a supporting role. There was a tacit understanding that FDNY personnel would have primary responsibility for evacuating civilians who were above the ground floors of the Twin Towers, while NYPD and PAPD personnel would be in charge of evacuating civilians from the WTC complex once they reached ground level. The NYPD also greatly assisted responding FDNY units by clearing emergency lanes to the WTC. In addition, coordination occurred at high levels of command. For example, the Mayor and Police Commissioner consulted with the Chief of the Department of the FDNY at approximately 9-20. There were other instances of coordination at operational levels, and information was shared on an ad hoc basis. For example, an NYPD ESU team passed the news of their evacuation order to firefighters in the North Tower. It is also clear, however, that the response operations lacked the kind of integrated communications and unified command contemplated in the directive. These problems existed both within and among individual responding agencies. Command and control within first responder agencies. For a unified incident management system to succeed, each participant must have command and control of its own units and adequate internal communications. This was not always the case at the WTC on 9-11. Understandably lacking experience in responding to events of the magnitude of the World Trade Center attacks, the FDNY as an institution proved incapable of coordinating the numbers of units dispatched to different points within the 16-acre complex. As a result, numerous units were congregating in the undamaged Marriott Hotel and at the overall command post on West Street by 9-30, while Chiefs in charge of the South Tower still were in desperate need of units. With better understanding of the resources already available, additional units might not have been dispatched to the South Tower at 9-37. The task of accounting for and coordinating the units was rendered difficult, if not impossible, by internal communications breakdowns resulting from the limited capabilities of radios in the high-rise environment of the WTC and from confusion over which personnel were assigned to which frequency. Furthermore, when the South Tower collapsed, the overall FDNY command post ceased to operate, which compromised the FDNY's ability to understand the situation. An FDNY Marine unit's immediate radio communication to FDNY dispatch that the South Tower had fully collapsed was not conveyed to Chiefs at the scene. The FDNY's inability to coordinate and account for the different radio channels that would be used in an emergency of this scale contributed to the early lack of units in the South Tower, whose lobby chiefly initially could not communicate with anyone outside that tower. Though almost no one at 9-50 on September 11 was contemplating an imminent total collapse of the Twin Towers, many first responders and civilians were contemplating the possibility of imminent additional terrorist attacks throughout New York City. Had any such attacks occurred, the FDNY's response would have been severely compromised by the concentration of so many of its off-duty personnel, particularly its elite personnel at the WTC. The Port Authority's response was hampered by the lack of both standard operating procedures and radios capable of enabling multiple commands to respond in unified fashion to an incident at the WTC. Many officers reporting from the tunnel and airport commands could not hear instructions being issued over the WTC command frequency. In addition, command and control was complicated by senior Port Authority police officials becoming directly involved in front-line rescue operations. The NYPD experienced comparatively fewer internal command and control and communications issues. Because the department has a history of mobilizing thousands of officers for major events requiring crowd control, its technical radio capability and major incident protocols were more easily adapted to an incident of the magnitude of 9-11. In addition, its mission that day lay largely outside the towers themselves. Although there were ESU teams and a few individual police officers climbing in the towers, the vast majority of NYPD personnel were staged outside, assisting with crowd control and evacuation, and securing other sites in the city. The NYPD ESU division had firm command and control over its units, in part because there were so few of them in comparison to the number of FDNY companies, and all reported to the same ESU command post. It is unclear, however, whether non-ESU and NYPD officers operating on the ground floors and in a few cases on upper floors of the WTC were as well coordinated. Significant shortcomings within the FDNY's command and control capabilities were painfully exposed on September 11. To its great credit, the department has made a substantial effort in the past three years to address these. While significant problems in the command and control of the PAPD also were exposed on September 11, it is less clear that the Port Authority has adopted new training exercises or major incident protocols to address these shortcomings. Lack of coordination among first responder agencies. Any attempt to establish a unified command on 9-11 would have been further frustrated by the lack of communication and coordination among responding agencies. Certainly the FDNY was not responsible for the management of the city's response to the emergency, as the mayor's directive would have required. The command posts were in different locations, and OEM headquarters, which could have served as a focal point for information sharing, did not play an integrating role in ensuring that information was shared among agencies on 9-11, even prior to its evacuation. There was a lack of comprehensive coordination between FDNY, NYPD, and PAPD personnel climbing above the ground floors in the Twin Towers. Information that was critical to informed decision-making was not shared among agencies. FDNY chiefs in leadership roles that morning have told us that their decision-making capability was hampered by a lack of information from NYPD aviation. At 9.51 a.m., a helicopter pilot cautioned that large pieces of the South Tower appeared to be about to fall and could pose a danger to those below. Immediately after the towers collapse, a helicopter pilot radioed that news. This transmission was followed by communications at 10.08, 10.15, and 10.22 that called into question the condition of the North Tower. The FDNY chiefs would have benefited greatly had they been able to communicate with personnel in a helicopter. The consequence of the lack of real-time intelligence from NYPD aviation should not be overstated. Contrary to a widely held misperception, no NYPD helicopter predicted the fall of either tower before the South Tower collapsed, and no NYPD personnel began to evacuate the WTC complex prior to that time. Furthermore, the FDNY as an institution was in possession of the knowledge that the South Tower had collapsed as early as the NYPD as its fall had been immediately reported by an FDNY boat on a dispatch channel. Because of internal breakdowns within the department, however, this information was not disseminated to FDNY personnel on the scene. The FDNY, PAPD, and NYPD did not coordinate their units that were searching the WTC complex for civilians. In many cases, redundant searches of specific floors and areas were conducted. It is unclear whether fewer first responders in the aggregate would have been in the Twin Towers if there had been an integrated response, or what impact, if any, redundant searches had on the total number of first responder fatalities. Whether the lack of coordination between the FDNY and the NYPD on September 11 had a catastrophic effect has been the subject of controversy. We believe that there are too many variables for us to responsibly quantify those consequences. It is clear that the lack of coordination did not affect adversely the evacuation of civilians. It is equally clear, however, that the incident command system did not function to integrate awareness among agencies or to facilitate interagency response. If New York and other major cities are to be prepared for future terrorist attacks, different first responder agencies within each city must be fully coordinated, just as different branches of the U.S. military are. Cooperation entails a unified command that comprehensively deploys all dispatched police, fire, and other first responder resources. In May 2004, New York City adopted an emergency response plan that expressly contemplates two or more agencies jointly being lead agency when responding to a terrorist attack, but does not mandate a comprehensive and unified incident command that can deploy and monitor all first responder resources from one overall command post. In our judgment, this falls short of an optimal response plan which requires clear command and control, common training, and the trust that such training creates. The experience of the military suggests that integrated into such a coordinated response should be a unified field intelligence unit, which should receive and combine information from all first responders, including 911 operators. Such a field intelligence unit could be valuable in large and complex incidents. Also communication challenges, the effectiveness and urgency of evacuation instructions. As discussed above, the location of the NYPD ESU command post was crucial in making possible an urgent evacuation order explaining the South Tower's full collapse. Firefighters most certainly would have benefited from that information. A separate matter is the varied success at conveying evacuation instructions to personnel in the North Tower after the South Tower's collapse. The success of NYPD ESU instruction is attributable to a combination of, one, the strength of the radios, two, the relatively small numbers of individuals using them, and three, use of the correct channel by all. The same three factors worked against successful communication among FDNY personnel. First, the radio's effectiveness was drastically reduced in the high-rise environment. Second, Tactical Channel 1 was simply overwhelmed by the number of units attempting to communicate on it at 10 o'clock. Third, some firefighters were on the wrong channel or simply lacked radios altogether. It is impossible to know what difference it made that units in the North Tower were not using the repeater channel after 10 o'clock. While the repeater channel was at least partially operational before the South Tower collapsed, we do not know whether it continued to be operational after 9.59. Even without the repeater channel, at least 24 of the at-most 32 companies who were dispatched and actually in the North Tower received the evacuation instruction either via radio or directly from other first responders. Nevertheless, many of these firefighters died either because they delayed their evacuation to assist civilians, attempted to regroup their units, lacked urgency, or some combination of these factors. In addition, many other firefighters not dispatched to the North Tower also died in its collapse. Some had their radios on the wrong channel, others were off-duty and lacked radios. In view of these considerations, we conclude that the technical failure of FDNY radios while a contributing factor was not the primary cause of the many firefighter fatalities in the North Tower. The FDNY has worked hard in the past several years to address its radio deficiencies. To improve radio capability in high-rises, the FDNY has internally developed a post-radio that is small enough for a battalion chief to carry to the upper floors and that greatly repeats and enhances radio signal strength. The story with respect to Port Authority police officers in the North Tower is less complicated. Most of them lacked access to the radio channel on which the Port Authority police evacuation order was given. Since September 11, the Port Authority has worked hard to integrate the radio systems of their different commands. The lesson of 9-11 for civilians and first responders can be stated simply. In the new age of terror, they, we, are the primary targets. The losses America suffered that day demonstrated both the gravity of the terrorist threat and the commensurate need to prepare ourselves to meet it. The first responders of today live in a world transformed by the attacks on 9-11. As no one believes that every conceivable form of attack can be prevented, civilians and first responders will again find themselves on the front lines. We must plan for that eventuality. A rededication to preparedness is perhaps the best way to honor the memories of those we lost that day. End of Chapter 9.4 Chapter 10.1 of the 9-11 Commission Report. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings on the public domain. For more information, or to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org reading by Mary Rodey. The 9-11 Commission Report. Section 10. Wartime. After the attacks had occurred, while crisis managers were still sorting out a number of unnerving false alarms, Air Force One flew to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. One of these alarms was of a reported threat against Air Force One itself, a threat eventually run down to a misunderstood communication in the hectic White House situation room that morning. While the plan at the elementary school had been to return to Washington, by the time Air Force One was airborne at 9.55 a.m., the Secret Service, the President's advisors, and Vice President Cheney were strongly advising against it. President Bush reluctantly acceded to this advice, and at about 10.10, Air Force One changed course and began heading due west. The immediate objective was to find a safe location, not too far away, where the President could land and speak to the American people. The Secret Service was also interested in refueling the aircraft and paring down the size of the traveling party. The President's military aide and Air Force officer quickly researched the options and sometime around 10.20 identified Barksdale Air Force Base as an appropriate interim destination. When Air Force One landed at Barksdale at about 11.45, personnel from the local Secret Service office were still en route to the airfield. The motorcade consisted of a military police lead vehicle and a van. The proposed briefing theater had no phones or electrical outlets. Staff scrambled to prepare another room for the President's remarks, while the lead Secret Service agent reviewed the security situation with superiors in Washington. The President completed his statement, which for security reasons was taped and not broadcast live, and the traveling party returned to Air Force One. The next destination was discussed. Once again the Secret Service recommended against returning to Washington, and the Vice President agreed. O-Foot Air Force Base in Nebraska was chosen because of its elaborate command and control facilities, and because it could accommodate overnight lodging for 50 persons. The Secret Service wanted a place where the President could spend several days if necessary. Air Force One arrived at O-Foot at 2.50 pm. At about 3.15, President Bush met with his principal advisors through a secure video teleconference. Rice said President Bush began the meeting with the words, we're at war, and that Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet said the agency was still assessing who was responsible, but the early signs all pointed to Al Qaeda. That evening the deputy's committee returned to the pending presidential directive they had labored over during the summer. The Secretary of Defense directed the nation's armed forces to defense condition 3, an increased state of military readiness. For the first time in history all non-emergency civilian aircraft in the United States were grounded, stranding tens of thousands of passengers across the country. Contingency plans for the continuity of government and the evacuation of leaders had been implemented. The Pentagon had been struck. The White House or the Capitol had narrowly escaped direct attack. Extraordinary security precautions were put in place at the nation's borders and ports. In the late afternoon the President overruled his aides continuing reluctance to have him return to Washington and ordered Air Force One back to Andrews Air Force Base. He was flown by helicopter back to the White House, passing over the still smoldering Pentagon. At 8.30 that evening President Bush addressed the nation from the White House. After emphasizing that the first priority was to help the injured and protect against any further attacks, he said, we will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them. He quoted Psalm 23, though I walked through the valley of the shadow of death. No American, he said, will ever forget this day. Following his speech President Bush met again with his National Security Council, NSC, expanded to include Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta and Joseph Albao, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who had returned from Peru after hearing of the attacks, joined the discussion. They reviewed the day's events. Chapter 10.1. Immediate Responses at Home. As the urgent domestic issues accumulated, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joshua Bolton chaired a temporary domestic consequences group. The agenda in those first days is worth noting, partly as a checklist for future crisis planners. It began with problems of how to help victims and stanch the flowing losses to the American economy, such as organizing federal emergency assistance. One question was what kind of public health advice to give about the air quality in lower Manhattan in the vicinity of the fallen buildings? Compensating Victims. They evaluated legislative options, eventually setting up a federal compensation fund and defining the powers of a special master to rent it. Determining Federal Assistance. On September 13th President Bush promised to provide $20 billion for New York City, in addition to the $20 billion his budget director had already guessed might be needed for the country as a whole. Restoring Civil Aviation. On the morning of September 13, the National Airspace reopened for use by airports that met newly improvised security standards. Reopening the Financial Markets. After extraordinary emergency efforts involving the White House, the Treasury Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission aided by unprecedented cooperation among the usually competitive firms of the financial industry, the markets reopened on Monday, September 17. Deciding when and how to return border and port security to more normal operations. Evaluating legislative proposals to bail out the airline industry and cap its liability. The very process of reviewing these issues underscored the absence of an effective government organization dedicated to assessing vulnerabilities and handling problems of protection and preparedness. Though a number of agencies had some part of the task, none had security as its primary mission. By September 14 Vice President Cheney had decided to recommend, at least as a first step, a new White House entity to coordinate all the relevant agencies rather than tackle the challenge of combining them in a new department. This new White House entity would be a Homeland Security Advisor and Homeland Security Council, paralleling the National Security Council system. Vice President Cheney reviewed the proposal with President Bush and other advisors. President Bush announced the new post and its first occupant, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, in his address to a joint session of Congress on September 20. Beginning on September 11, Immigration and Naturalization Service agents working in cooperation with the FBI began arresting individuals for immigration violations, whom they encountered while following up leads in the FBI's investigation of the 9-11 attacks. Eventually 768 aliens were arrested as special interest detainees. Some, such as Zacharias Musawi, were actually in INS custody before 9-11. Most were arrested after. Attorney General John Ashcroft told us that he saw his job in directing this effort as risk minimization, both to find out who had committed the attacks and to prevent a subsequent attack. Ashcroft ordered all special interest immigration hearings close to the public, family members and press, directed government attorneys to seek denial of bond until such time as they were cleared of terrorist connections by the FBI and other agencies, and ordered the identity of the detainees kept secret. INS attorneys charged with prosecuting the immigration violations had trouble getting information about the detainees and any terrorist connections. In the chaos after the attacks, it was very difficult to reach law enforcement officials who were following up on other leads. The clearance process approved by the Justice Department was time-consuming, lasting an average of about 80 days. We have assessed this effort to detain aliens of special interest. The detainees were lawfully held on immigration charges. Records indicate that 531 were deported, 162 were released on bond, 24 received some kind of immigration benefits, 12 had their proceedings terminated, and eight, one of whom was Musawi, were remanded to the custody of the U.S. Martial Service. The Inspector General of the Justice Department found significant problems in the way the 9-11 detainees were treated. In response to a request about the counterterrorism benefits of the 9-11 detainee program, the Justice Department cited six individuals on the special interest detainee list, noting that two, including Musawi, were linked directly to a terrorist organization and that it had obtained new leads helpful to the investigation of the 9-11 terrorist attacks. A senior al-Qaeda detainee had stated that U.S. government efforts after the 9-11 attacks to monitor the American homeland, including review of Muslims' immigration files and deportation of nonpermanent residents, forced al-Qaeda to operate less freely in the United States. The government's ability to collect intelligence inside the United States and the sharing of such information between the intelligence and law enforcement communities was not a priority before 9-11. Guidelines on this subject issued in August 2001 by Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson essentially recapitulated prior guidance. However, the attacks of 9-11 changed everything. Just one week after September 11, an early version of what was to become the Patriot Act, officially the USA Patriot Act, began to take shape. A central provision of the proposal was the removal of the wall on information sharing between the intelligence and law enforcement communities discussed in Chapter 3. Mashcroft told us he was determined to take every conceivable action within the limits of the Constitution to identify potential terrorists and deter additional attacks. The administration developed a proposal that eventually passed both Houses of Congress by large majorities and was signed into law on October 26. Flights of Saudi Nationals Leaving the United States Three questions have arisen with respect to the departure of Saudi Nationals from the United States in the immediate aftermath of 9-11. 1. Did any flights of Saudi Nationals take place before National Airspace reopened on September 13, 2001? 2. Was there any political intervention to facilitate the departure of Saudi Nationals? 3. Did the FBI screen Saudi Nationals thoroughly before their departure? First, we found no evidence that any flights of Saudi Nationals, domestic or international, took place before the reopening of National Airspace on the morning of September 13, 2001. To the contrary, every flight we have identified occurred after National Airspace reopened. 2. We found no evidence of political intervention. We found no evidence that anyone at the White House, above the level of Richard Clark, participated in a decision on the departure of Saudi Nationals. The issue came up in one of the many video teleconferences of the interagency group Clark chaired, and Clark said he approved of how the FBI was dealing with the matter when it came up for interagency discussion at his level. Clark told us, I asked the FBI, Dale Watson, to handle that, to check to see if that was all right with them, to see if they wanted access to any of these people and to get back to me, and if they had no objections it would be fine with me. Clark added, I have no recollection of clearing it with anybody at the White House. Although White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card remembered someone telling him about the Saudi request shortly after 9-11, he said he had not talked to the Saudis and did not ask anyone to do anything about it. The President and Vice President told us they were not aware of the issue at all until it surfaced much later in the media. One of the officials we interviewed recalled any intervention or direction on this matter from any political appointee. Third, we believe that the FBI conducted a satisfactory screening of Saudi nationals who left the United States on charter flights. The Saudi government was advised of and agreed to the FBI's requirements that passengers be identified and checked against various databases before the flights departed. The Federal Aviation Administration representative working in the FBI Operations Center made sure that the FBI was aware of the flights of Saudi nationals and was able to screen the passengers before they were allowed to depart. The FBI interviewed all persons of interest on these flights prior to their departure. They concluded that none of the passengers was connected to the 9-11 attacks and have since found no evidence to change that conclusion. Our own independent review of the Saudi nationals involved confirms that no one with known links to terrorism departed on these flights. End of Chapter 10.1 Chapter 10.2 of the 9-11 Commission Report This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Reading by Mary Rodey. The 9-11 Commission Report. Chapter 10.2 Planning for War By late in the evening on September 11, the President had addressed the nation on the terrible events of the day. Vice President Cheney described the President's mood as somber. The long day was not yet over, when the large meeting that included his domestic department heads broke up. President Bush chaired a smaller meeting of top advisors, a group he would later call his War Council. This group usually included Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, General Hugh Shelton, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, later to become Chairman, General Myers, DCEI Tenet, Atony General Ashcroft, and FBI Director Robert Mueller. From the White House staff, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Chief of Staff Card were part of the core group, often joined by their deputies, Stephen Hadley and Joshua Bolton. In this restricted National Security Council meeting, the President said it was a time for self-defense. The United States would punish not just the perpetrators of the attacks, but also those who harbored them. Secretary Powell said the United States had to make it clear to Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Arab states that the time to act was now. He said he would need to build a coalition. The President noted that the attacks provided a great opportunity to engage Russia and China. Secretary Rumsfeld urged the President and the Principals to think broadly about who might have harbored the attackers, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Sudan, and Iran. He wondered aloud how much evidence the United States would need in order to deal with these countries, pointing out that major strikes could take up to 60 days to assemble. President Bush chaired two more meetings of the NSC on September 12. In the first meeting, he stressed that the United States was at war with a new and different kind of enemy. The President tasked Principals to go beyond their pre-911 work and develop a strategy to eliminate terrorists and punish those who support them. As they worked on defining the goals and objectives of the upcoming campaign, they considered a paper that went beyond al-Qaeda to propose the elimination of terrorism as a threat to our way of life, an aim that would include pursuing other international terrorist organizations in the Middle East. This chaired a Principals' Committee meeting on September 13 in the Situation Room to refine how the fight against al-Qaeda would be conducted. The Principals agreed that the overall message should be that anyone supporting al-Qaeda would risk harm. The United States would need to integrate diplomacy, financial measures, intelligence, and military actions into an overarching strategy. The Principals also focused on Pakistan and what it could do to turn the Taliban against al-Qaeda. They concluded that if Pakistan decided not to help the United States, it too would be at risk. The same day, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage met with the Pakistani Ambassador to the United States, Malih Al-Odi, and the visiting head of Pakistan's military intelligence service, Mahmoud Ahmed. Armitage said that the United States wanted Pakistan to take seven steps to stop al-Qaeda operatives at its border and end all logistical support for bin Laden, to give the United States blanket overflight and landing rights for all necessary military and intelligence operations, to provide territorial access to U.S. and allied military intelligence and other personnel to conduct operations against al-Qaeda, to provide the United States with intelligence information, to continue to publicly condemn the terrorist acts, to cut off all shipments of fuel to the Taliban and stop recruits from going to Afghanistan, and if the evidence implicated bin Laden and al-Qaeda and the Taliban continued to harbor them to break relations with the Taliban government. Pakistan made its decision swiftly. That afternoon Secretary of State Powell announced at the beginning of an NSC meeting that Pakistani President Musharraf had agreed to every U.S. request for support in the war on terrorism. The next day the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad confirmed that Musharraf and his top military commanders had agreed to all seven demands. Pakistan will need full U.S. support as it proceeds with us, the Embassy noted. Musharraf said the GOP, government of Pakistan, was making substantial concessions in allowing use of its territory and that he would pay a domestic price. His standing in Pakistan was certain to suffer. To counterbalance that, he needed to show that Pakistan was benefiting from his decisions. At the September 13 NSC meeting, when Secretary Powell described Pakistan's reply, President Bush led a discussion of an appropriate ultimatum to the Taliban. He also ordered Secretary Rumsfeld to develop a military plan against the Taliban. The President wanted the United States to strike the Taliban, step back, wait to see if they got the message, and hit them hard if they did not. He made it clear that the military should focus on targets that would influence the Taliban's behavior. President Bush also tasked the State Department, which on the following day delivered to the White House a paper titled, Game Plan for a Political Military Strategy for Pakistan and Afghanistan. The paper took it as a given that bin Laden would continue to act against the United States even while under Taliban control. It therefore detailed specific U.S. demands for the Taliban, surrender bin Laden and his chief lieutenants, including Aiman al-Zawahiri, tell the United States what the Taliban knew about al-Qaeda and its operations, close all terrorist camps, free all-in-present foreigners, and comply with all UN Security Council resolutions. The State Department proposed delivering an ultimatum to the Taliban, produce bin Laden and his deputies, and shut down al-Qaeda camps within 24 to 48 hours, or the United States will use all necessary means to destroy the terrorist infrastructure. The State Department did not expect the Taliban to comply, therefore State and Defense would plan to build an international coalition to go into Afghanistan. Both departments would consult with NATO and other allies and request intelligence, facing and other support from countries according to their capabilities and resources. Finally, the plan detailed a public U.S. stance. America would use all its resources to eliminate terrorism as a threat, punish those responsible for 9-11 attacks, hold states and other actors responsible for providing sanctuary to terrorists, work with a coalition to eliminate terrorist groups and networks, and avoid malice towards any people, religion or culture. President Bush recalled that he quickly realized that the administration would have to invade Afghanistan with ground troops, but the early briefings to the President and Secretary Rumsfeld on military options were disappointing. Tommy Franks, the commanding general of Central Command, CENTCOM, told us that the President was dissatisfied. The U.S. military, Franks said, did not have an off-the-shelf plan to eliminate the al-Qaeda threat in Afghanistan. The existing infinite resolve options did not, in his view, amount to such a plan. All these diplomatic and military plans were reviewed over the weekend of September 15 and 16, as President Bush convened his War Council at Camp David. CENT were Vice President Cheney, Rice Hadley, Powell, Armitage, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Muller, Tenet, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfewich, and Cofer Black, Chief of the DCI's Counter-Terrorist Center. Tenet described a plan for collecting intelligence and mounting covert operations. He proposed inserting CIA teams into Afghanistan to work with Afghan warlords who would join the fight against al-Qaeda. These CIA teams would act jointly with the Military Special Operations Unit. President Bush later praised this proposal, saying it had been a turning point in his thinking. General Shelton briefed the principles on the preliminary plan for Afghanistan that the military had put together. It drew on the infinite resolve-faced campaign plan the Pentagon had begun developing in November 2000, as in addition to the strike options it had been refining since 1998. But Shelton added a new element, the possible significant use of ground forces, and that is where President Bush reportedly focused his attention. After hearing from his senior advisors, President Bush discussed with Rice the contents of the directives he would issue to set all the plans into motion. Rice prepared a paper that President Bush then considered with principles on Monday morning, September 17. The purpose of this meeting, he recalled saying, is to assign tasks for the first wave of the war against terrorism. It starts today. In a written set of instructions, slightly refined during the morning meeting, President Bush charged Ashcroft, Mahler, and Tenet to develop a plan for homeland defense. President Bush directed Secretary of State Powell to deliver an ultimatum to the Taliban along the lines that his department had originally proposed. The State Department was also tasked to develop a plan to stabilize Pakistan and to be prepared to notify Russia and countries near Afghanistan when hostilities were imminent. In addition, Bush and his advisors discussed new legal authorities for covert action in Afghanistan, including the administration's first memorandum of notification on bin Laden. Shortly thereafter, President Bush authorized broad new authorities for the CIA. President Bush instructed Rumsfeld and Shelton to develop further the Camp David military plan to attack the Taliban and al-Qaeda if the Taliban rejected the ultimatum. The president also tasked Rumsfeld to ensure that robust measures to protect American military forces against terrorist attack were implemented worldwide. Finally he directed Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill to craft a plan to target al-Qaeda's funding and seize its assets. NSC staff members had begun leading meetings on terrorist fundraising by September 18. Also by September 18, Powell had contacted 58 of his foreign counterparts, had received offers of general aid, search and rescue equipment, and personnel and medical assistance teams. On the same day Deputy Secretary of State Armitage was called by Mahmoud Ahmed regarding a two-day visit to Afghanistan during which the Pakistani intelligence chief had met with Mullah Omar and conveyed the U.S. demands. Omar's response was not negative on all these points, but the administration knew that the Taliban was unlikely to turn over bin Laden. The pre-911 draft presidential directive on al-Qaeda evolved into a new directive, National Security Presidential Directive 9, now titled Defeating the Terrorist Threat to the United States. The directive would now extend to a global war on terrorism, not just on al-Qaeda. It also incorporated the President's determination not to distinguish between terrorists and those who harbor them. It included a determination to use military force if necessary to end al-Qaeda sanctuary in Afghanistan. The new directive, formally signed on October 25, after the fighting in Afghanistan had already begun, included new material followed by annexes discussing each targeted terrorist group. The old draft directive on al-Qaeda became, in effect, the first annex. The United States would strive to eliminate all terrorist networks, dry up their financial support, and prevent them from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. The goal was the elimination of terrorism as a threat to our way of life. President Bush had wondered immediately after the attack whether Saddam Hussein's regime might have had a hand in it. Iraq had been an enemy of the United States for eleven years, and was the only place in the world where the United States was engaged in ongoing combat operations. As a former pilot, the President was struck by the apparent sophistication of the operation and some of the piloting. He handed Joe's high-speed dive into the Pentagon. He told us he recalled Iraqi support for Palestinian suicide terrorists as well. Speculating about other possible states that could be involved, the President told us he also thought about Iran. Clark has written that on the evening of September 12, President Bush told him and some of his staff to explore possible Iraqi links to 9-11. See if Saddam did this, Clark recalls the President telling them. See if he's linked in any way. Footnote, Richard A. Clark against all enemies inside America's war on terror, free-press 2004. According to Clark, he responded that Al Qaeda did this. When the President pressed Clark to check if Saddam was involved and said that he wanted to learn of any shred of evidence, Clark promised to look at the question again, but added that the NSC and the intelligence community had looked in the past for linkages between Al Qaeda and Iraq and had never found any real linkages. End footnote. While he believed the details of Clark's account to be incorrect, President Bush acknowledged that he might well have spoken to Clark at some point asking him about Iraq. Footnote. President Bush told us that Clark had mischaracterized this exchange. On the evening of September 12, the President was at the Pentagon and then went to the White House residence. He dismissed the idea that he had been wandering around the situation room alone, saying, I don't do that. He said that he did not think that any President would roam around looking for something to do, while Clark said he had found the President's tone very intimidating. President Bush doubted that anyone would have found his manner intimidating. Roger Cressy, Clark's deputy, recalls this exchange with the President and Clark concerning Iraq shortly after 9-11, but did not believe the President's manner was intimidating. End footnote. Responding to a presidential tasking, Clark's office sent a memo to Rice on September 18 titled, Survey of Intelligence Information on Any Iraqi Involvement in the September 11 attacks. Rice's Chief Staffer on Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, concurred in its conclusion that only some anecdotal evidence linked Iraq to al-Qaeda. The memo found no compelling case that Iraq had either planned or perpetrated the attacks. It passed along a few foreign intelligence reports, including the Czech report alleging an April 2001 Prague meeting between Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer, discussed in Chapter 7, and a Polish report that personnel at the headquarters of Iraqi intelligence in Baghdad were told before September 11 to go on the streets to gauge crowd reaction to an unspecified event. Arguing that the case for links between Iraq and al-Qaeda was weak, the memo pointed out that bin Laden resented the secularism of Saddam Hussein's regime. Finally, the memo said, there was no confirmed reporting on Saddam cooperating with bin Laden on unconventional weapons. Footnote. NSC memo, Kurtz to Rice, survey of intelligence information on any Iraqi involvement in the September 11 attacks. On 60 minutes, CBS, March 21, 2004, Clark said that the first draft of this memo was returned by the NSC front office because it did not find a tie between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Rice and Hadley deny that they asked to have the memo redone for this reason. End footnote. On the afternoon of 9-11, according to contemporaneous notes, Secretary Rumsfeld instructed General Myers to obtain quickly as much information as possible. The notes indicate that he also told Myers that he was not simply interested in striking empty training sites. He thought the U.S. response should consider a wide range of options and possibilities. The Secretary said his instinct was to hit Saddam Hussein at the same time, not only bin Laden. Secretary Rumsfeld later explained that at this time he had been considering either one of them or perhaps someone else as the responsible party. According to Rice, the issue of what, if anything, to do about Iraq was really engaged at Camp David. Briefing papers on Iraq, along with many others, were in briefing materials for the participants. Rice told us the administration was concerned that Iraq would take advantage of the 9-11 attacks. She recalled that in the first Camp David session chaired by the President, Rumsfeld asked what the administration should do about Iraq. Deputy Secretary Wolferwitz made the case for striking Iraq during this round of the war on terrorism. Footnote. Rice told us that the Bush at War account of the Camp David discussion on Iraq, accorded with her memory. End footnote. A Defense Department paper for the Camp David briefing book on the strategic concept for the war on terrorism specified three priority targets for initial action, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Iraq. It argued that of the three, al-Qaeda and Iraq posed a strategic threat to the United States. Iraq's long-standing involvement in terrorism was cited, along with its interest in weapons of mass destruction. Secretary Powell recalled that Wolferwitz, not Rumsfeld, argued that Iraq was ultimately the source of the terrorist problem and should therefore be attacked. Footnote. Rumsfeld told Bob Woodward that he had no recollection of Wolferwitz's remarks at Camp David. DoD transcript. Secretary Rumsfeld interview with the Washington Post. January 9th 2002. End footnote. Powell said that Wolferwitz was not able to justify his belief that Iraq was behind 9-11. Quote, Paul was always of the view that Iraq was a problem that had to be dealt with, Powell told us. And he saw this as one way of using this event as a way to deal with the Iraq problem. End quote. Powell said that President Bush did not give Wolferwitz his argument. Quote, much weight, end quote. Though continuing to worry about Iraq in the following week, Powell said, President Bush saw Afghanistan as the priority. Footnote. Powell raised concerns that a focus on Iraq might negate progress made with the international coalition the administration was putting together for Afghanistan. Taking on Iraq at this time could destroy the international coalition. End footnote. President Bush told Bob Woodward that the decision not to invade Iraq was made at the morning session on September the 15th. Iraq was not even on the table during the September the 15th afternoon session, which dealt solely with Afghanistan. Rice said that when President Bush called her on Sunday, September the 16th, he said the focus would be on Afghanistan. Although he still wanted plans for Iraq, should the country take some action or the administration eventually determine that it had been involved in the 9-11 attacks? At the September the 17th NSC meeting there was some further discussion of phase two of the war on terrorism. President Bush ordered the Defense Department to be ready to deal with Iraq if Baghdad acted against US interests, with plans to include possibly occupying Iraqi oil fields. Within the Pentagon, Deputy Secretary Wolferwitz continued to press the case for dealing with Iraq. Writing to Rumsfeld on September the 17th in a memo headlined Preventing More Events, he argued that if there was even a 10% chance that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9-11 attack, maximum priority should be placed on eliminating that threat. Wolferwitz contended that the odds were far more than one in ten, citing Saddam's praise for the attack, his long record of involvement in terrorism, and theories that Ramza Yousef was an Iraqi agent, and Iraq was behind the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Footnote, we review contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda in Chapter 2. We have found no credible evidence to support theories of Iraqi government involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Wolferwitz added in his memo that he had attempted in June to get the CIA to explore these theories. End footnote. The next day, Wolferwitz renewed the argument, writing to Rumsfeld about the interest of Yousef's co-conspirator in the 1995 Manila air plot in crashing an explosive-delayedened plane into CIA headquarters, and about information from a foreign government regarding Iraqi's involvement in the attempted hijacking of a Gulf air flight. Given this background, he wondered why so little thought had been devoted to the danger of suicide pilots, seeing a quote failure of imagination, end quote, and a mindset that dismissed possibilities. On September 19th, Rumsfeld offered several thoughts for his commanders as they worked on their contingency plans. Though he emphasized the worldwide nature of the conflict, the references to specific enemies or regions named only the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and Afghanistan. Footnote. DoD memo. Rumsfeld to Shelton. Some thoughts for the CINCs as they prepare plans. September 19th, 2001. In a memo that appears to be from Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith to Rumsfeld, dated September the 20th, the author expressed disappointment at the limited options immediately available in Afghanistan, and the lack of ground options. The author suggested instead hitting terrorist targets outside the Middle East in the initial offensive, perhaps deliberately selecting a non-Al Qaeda target like Iraq. Since US attacks were expected in Afghanistan, an American attack in South America or Southeast Asia might be a surprise to the terrorists. The memo may have been a draft never sent to Rumsfeld, or may be a draft of points being suggested for Rumsfeld to deliver in a briefing to the president. DoD memo. Feith to Rumsfeld. Briefing draft. September the 20th, 2001. End footnote. Sheldon told us the administration reviewed all the Pentagon's war plans and challenged certain assumptions underlying them as any prudent organization or leader should do. General Tommy Franks, the commanding general of Central Command, recalled receiving Rumsfeld's guidance that each regional commander should assess what these plans meant for his area of responsibility. He knew he would soon be striking the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but he told us he now wondered how that action was connected to what might need to be done in Somalia, Yemen or Iraq. On September the 20th President Bush met with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the two leaders discussed the global conflict ahead. When Blair asked about Iraq the president replied that Iraq was not the immediate problem. Some members of his administration, he commented, had expressed a different view, but he was the one responsible for making the decisions. Franks told us that he was pushing independently to do more robust planning on military responses in Iraq during the summer before 9-11. A request President Bush denied, arguing that the time was not right. SENTCOM also began dusting off plans for a full invasion of Iraq during this period, Franks said. The SENTCOM commander told us he renewed his appeal for further military planning to respond to Iraqi moves shortly after 9-11, both because he personally felt that Iraq and Al Qaeda might be engaged in some form of collusion and because he worried that Saddam might take advantage of the attacks to move against his internal enemies in the northern or southern parts of Iraq where the United States was flying regular missions to enforce Iraqi no-fly zones. Franks said that President Bush again turned down this request. Having issued directives to guide his administration's preparations for war, on Thursday September the 20th President Bush addressed the nation before a joint session of Congress. Quote, Tonight, he said, we are a country awakened to danger, end quote. The President blamed Al Qaeda for 9-11 and the 1998 embassy bombings, and for the first time declared that Al Qaeda was, quote, responsible for bombing the USS Cole, end quote. Footnote. Several NSC officials, including Clark and Cressy, told us that the mention of the Cole in the speech to Congress marked the first public U.S. declaration that Al Qaeda had been behind the October 2000 attack. Clark said he added the language on this point to the speech. End footnote. He reiterated the ultimatum that had already been conveyed privately. Quote, The Taliban must act and act immediately, he said. They will hand over the terrorists, or they will share their fate, end quote. Footnote. President Bush told the Washington Post that he considered having Powell deliver the ultimatum to the Taliban, but determined it would have more impact coming directly from the President. End footnote. The President added that America's quarrel was not with Islam, quote, The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends, it is not our many Arab friends, our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government that supports them, end quote. Other regimes faced hard choices, he pointed out, quote, Every nation in every region now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists, end quote. President Bush argued that the new war went beyond Bin Laden, quote, Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there, he said. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated, end quote. The President had a message for the Pentagon, quote, The hour is coming when America will act, and you will make us proud, end quote. He also had a message for those outside the United States, quote, This is civilisation's fight, he said. We ask every nation to join us, end quote. President Bush approved military plans to attack Afghanistan in meetings with Central Commands General Franks and other advisors on September 21st and October 2nd. Originally titled, Infinite Justice, the operation's code word was changed to avoid the sensibilities of Muslims who associate the power of infinite justice with God alone, to the operational name still used for operations in Afghanistan, enduring freedom. Footnote, Tommy Franks interview, April 9th 2004. Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers and Major General Del Daly, Commander of Joint Special Operations Command, also attended the September 21st meeting. The meeting was in direct response to the President's September 17 instruction to Rumsfeld to develop a military campaign for Afghanistan. The original Infinite Justice name was a continuation of a series of names begun in August 1998 with Operation Infinite Reach, the airstrikes against Bin Laden's facilities in Afghanistan and Sudan after the embassy bombings. The series also included Operation Infinite Resolve, a variety of proposed follow-on strikes on al-Qaeda targets in Afghanistan. End footnote. The plan had four phases. In phase one, the United States and its allies would move forces into the region and would arrange to operate from or over neighboring countries such as Uzbekistan and Pakistan. This occurred in the weeks following 9-11, aided by overwhelming international sympathy for the United States. In phase two, airstrikes and special operations attacks would hit key al-Qaeda and Taliban targets. In an innovative joint effort, CIA and special operations forces would be deployed to work together with each major Afghan faction opposed to the Taliban. The phase two strikes and raids began on October 7. The basing arrangements contemplated for phase one were substantially secured after arduous effort by the end of that month. In phase three, the United States would carry out quote, decisive operations end quote, using all elements of national power, including ground troops, to topple the Taliban regime and eliminate al-Qaeda's sanctuary in Afghanistan. Mazar Isharif in northern Afghanistan fell to a coalition assault by Afghan and US forces on November 9. Four days later, the Taliban had fled from Kabul. By early December, all major cities had fallen to the coalition. On December 22, Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun leader from Kandahar, was installed as the chairman of Afghanistan's interim administration. Afghanistan had been liberated from the rule of the Taliban. In December 2001, Afghan forces with limited US support engaged al-Qaeda elements in a cave complex called Toribora. In March 2002, the largest engagement of the war was fought in the mountainous Shah-e-Kat area south of Gades, against a large force of al-Qaeda jihadists. The three-week battle was substantially successful, and almost all remaining al-Qaeda forces took refuge in Pakistan's equally mountainous and lightly governed frontier provinces. As of July 2004, Bin Laden and Zawahiri are still believed to be at large. In phase four, civilian and military operations turned to the indefinite task of what the armed forces call, quote, security and stability operations, end quote. Within about two months of the start of combat operations, several hundred CIA operatives and special forces soldiers, backed by the striking power of US aircraft and a much larger infrastructure of intelligence and support efforts, had combined with Afghan militias and a small number of other coalition soldiers to destroy the Taliban regime and disrupt al-Qaeda. They had killed or captured about a quarter of the enemy's known leaders. Muhammad Atef, al-Qaeda's military commander and a principal figure in the 9-11 plot, had been killed by a US airstrike. According to a senior CIA officer who helped devise the overall strategy, the CIA provided intelligence, experience, cash, covert action capabilities, and entree to tribal allies. In turn, the US military offered combat expertise, firepower, logistics and communications. With these initial victories won by the middle of 2002, the global conflict against Islamist terrorism became a different kind of struggle. End of chapter 10 of 3. Recording by Corey Samuel. The 9-11 Commission Report. Chapter 11. Foresight and Hindsight. In composing this narrative, we have tried to remember that we write with the benefit and the handicap of Hindsight. Hindsight can sometimes see the past clearly with 2020 vision. But the path of what happened is so brightly lit that it places everything else more deeply into shadow. Commenting on Pearl Harbour, Roberta Wolstetter found it much easier after the event to sort the relevant from the irrelevant signals. After the event, of course, a signal is always crystal clear. We can now see what disaster it was signalling since the disaster has occurred. But before the event it is obscure and pregnant with conflicting meanings. As time passes, more documents become available, and the bare facts of what happened become still clearer. Yet the picture of how those things happened becomes harder to reimagine as that past world, with its preoccupations and uncertainty, recedes, and the remaining memories of it become coloured by what happened and what was written about it later. With that caution in mind we asked ourselves, before we judged others, whether the insights that seem apparent now would really have been meaningful at the time given the limitations of what people then could reasonably have known or done. We believe the 9-11 attacks revealed four kinds of failures, in imagination, policy, capabilities, and management. 11.1. Imagination. Historical Perspective. The 9-11 attack was an event of surpassing disproportion. America had suffered surprise attacks before. Pearl Harbor is one well-known case, the 1950 Chinese attack in Korea another. But these were attacks by major powers. While by no means as threatening as Japan's act of war, the 9-11 attack was in some ways more devastating. It was carried out by a tiny group of people, not enough to man a full platoon. Measured on a governmental scale, the resources behind it were trivial. The group itself was dispatched by an organisation based in one of the poorest, most remote, and least industrialised countries on earth. This organisation recruited a mixture of young fanatics and highly educated zealots, who could not find suitable places in their home societies, or were driven from them. To understand these events, we attempted to reconstruct some of the context of the 1990s. Americans celebrated the end of the Cold War with a mixture of relief and satisfaction. The people of the United States hoped to enjoy a peace dividend, as U.S. spending on national security was cut following the end of the Soviet military threat. The United States emerged into the post-Cold War world as the globe's preeminent military power. But the vacuum created by the sudden demise of the Soviet Union created fresh sources of instability and new challenges for the United States. President George H. W. Bush dealt with the first of these in 1990 and 1991, when he led an international coalition to reverse Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Other examples of U.S. leaders handling new threats included the removal of nuclear weapons from Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, the non-Luga threat reduction program to help contain new nuclear dangers, and international involvement in the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. America stood out as an object for admiration, envy and blame. This created a kind of cultural asymmetry. To us, Afghanistan seemed very far away. To members of al-Qaeda, America seemed very close. In a sense, they were more globalized than we were. Understanding the danger. If the government's leaders understood the gravity of the threat they faced and understood at the same time that their policies to eliminate it were not likely to succeed any time soon, then history's judgment will be harsh. Did they understand the gravity of the threat? The U.S. government responded vigorously when the attack was on our soil. Both Ramsey Yousef, who organized the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Mia Amal Kanzi, who in 1993 killed two CIA employees as they waited to go to work in Langley, Virginia, were the objects of relentless uncompromising and successful efforts to bring them back to the United States to stand trial for their crimes. Before 9-11, al-Qaeda and its affiliates had killed fewer than 50 Americans, including the East Africa Embassy bombings and the coal attack. The U.S. government took the threat seriously, but not in the sense of mustering anything like the kind of effort that would be gathered to confront an enemy of the first, second or even third rank. The modest national efforts exerted to contain Serbia and its depredations in the Balkans between 1995 and 1999, for example, was orders of magnitude larger than that devoted to al-Qaeda. As best we can determine, neither in 2000 nor in the first eight months of 2001, did any polling organization in the United States think the subject of terrorism sufficiently on the minds of the public to warrant asking a question about it in a major national survey. Bin Laden, al-Qaeda, or even terrorism, was not an important topic in the 2000 presidential election. Congress and the media called little attention to it. If a president wanted to rally the American people to a warlike effort, he would need to publicize an assessment of the growing al-Qaeda danger. Our government could spark a full public discussion of who Osama bin Laden was, what kind of organization he led, what bin Laden or al-Qaeda intended, what past attacks they had sponsored or encouraged, and what capabilities they were bringing together for future assaults. We believe American and international public opinion might have been different, and so might the range of options for a president, had they been informed of these details. Recent examples of such debates include calls to arms against such threats as Serbian ethnic cleansing, biological attacks, Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, global climate change, and the HIV AIDS epidemic. While we now know that al-Qaeda was formed in 1988 at the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the intelligence community did not describe this organization, at least in documents we have seen, until 1999. A national intelligence estimate distributed in July 1995 predicted future terrorist attacks against the United States and in the United States. It warned that this danger would increase over the next several years. It specified as particular points of vulnerability the White House, the Capitol, symbols of capitalism such as Wall Street, critical infrastructure such as power grids, areas where people congregate such as sports arenas, and civil aviation generally. It warned that the 1993 World Trade Center bombing had been intended to kill a lot of people, not to achieve any more traditional political goal. This 1995 estimate describes the greatest danger as transient groupings of individuals that lacked strong organization but rather are loose affiliations. They operate outside traditional circles but have access to a worldwide network of training facilities and safe havens. This was an excellent summary of the emerging danger based on what was then known. In 1996 to 1997 the intelligence community received new information, making clear that bin Laden headed his own terrorist group with its own targeting agenda and operational commanders. Also revealed was the previously unknown involvement of bin Laden's organization in the 1992 attack on a Yemeni hotel quartering US military personnel, the 1993 shoot-down of US Army Black Hawk helicopters in Somalia, and quite possibly the 1995 Riyadh bombing of the American Training Mission to the Saudi National Guard. The 1997 update of the 1995 estimate did not discuss the new intelligence. It did state that the terrorist danger depicted in 1995 would persist. In the update's summary of key points, the only reference to bin Laden was this sentence. Iran and its surrogates, as well as terrorist financier Osama bin Laden and his followers, have stepped up his threats and surveillance of US facilities abroad in what also may be a portent of possible additional attacks in the United States. Bin Laden was mentioned in only two other sentences in the Six-Page Report. The Al-Qaeda organization was not mentioned. The 1997 update was the last national estimate on the terrorism danger, completed before 9-11. From 1998 to 2001, a number of very good analytical papers were distributed on specific topics. These included bin Laden's political philosophy, his command of a global network, analysis of information from terrorists captured in Jordan in December 1999, Al-Qaeda's operational style, and the evolving goals of the Islamist extremist movement. Many classified articles for morning briefings were prepared for the highest officials in the government with titles such as, Bin Laden Threatening to Attack US Aircraft, with Anti-Aircraft Missiles, June 1998. Strains surface between Taliban and Bin Laden, January 1999. Terrorists threat to US interests in Caucasus, June 1999. Bin Laden to exploit looser security during holidays, December 1999. Bin Laden evading sanctions, March 2000. Bin Laden's interest in biological radiological weapons, February 2001. Taliban holding firm on Bin Laden for now, March 2001. Terrorist groups said cooperating on US hostage plot, May 2001. And Bin Laden determined a strike in the US, August 2001. Despite such reports and a 1999 paper on Bin Laden's command structure for Al-Qaeda, there were no complete portraits of his strategy, or of the extent of his organization's involvement in past terrorist attacks. Nor had the intelligence community provided an authoritative depiction of his organization's relationships with other governments, or the scale of the threat his organization posed to the United States. Though Deputy DCI John McLaughlin said to us of the cumulative output of the counter-terrorist center, CTC, dramatically eclipsed any analysis that could have appeared in a fresh national intelligence estimate, he conceded that most of the work of the center's 30 to 40 person analytic group dealt with collection issues. In late 2000, DCI George Tenet recognized the deficiency of strategic analysis against Al-Qaeda. To tackle the problem within the CTC, he appointed a senior manager, who briefed him in March 2001, on creating a strategic assessment capability. The CTC established a new strategic assessments branch during July 2001. The decision to add about 10 analysts to this effort was seen as a major bureaucratic victory, but the CTC labored to find them. The new chief of this branch reported for duty on September 10, 2001. Whatever the weaknesses in the CIA's portraiture, both presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush, and their top advisors, told us they got the picture. They understood bin Laden was a danger. But given the character and pace of their policy efforts, we do not believe they fully understood just how many people Al-Qaeda might kill and how soon it might do it. At some level it is hard to define, we believe the threat had not yet become compelling. It is hard now to recapture the conventional wisdom before 9-11. For example, a New York Times article in April 1999 sought to debunk claims that bin Laden was a terrorist leader, with the headline US hard-put defined proof bin Laden directed attacks. The head of analysis at the CTC until 1999 discounted the alarms about a catastrophic threat, as relating only to the danger of chemical, biological or nuclear attack, and he downplayed even that, writing several months before 9-11. It would be a mistake to redefine counter-terrorism as a task of dealing with catastrophic, grand or super-terrorism, when in fact these labels do not represent most of the terrorism that the United States is likely to face, or most of the costs that terrorism imposes on US interests. Beneath the acknowledgment that bin Laden and Al-Qaeda presented serious dangers, there was uncertainty among senior officials about whether this was just a new and especially venomous version of the ordinary terrorist threat America had lived with for decades, or was radically new, posing a threat beyond any yet experienced. Such differences affect calculations about whether or how to go to war. Therefore, those government experts who saw bin Laden as an unprecedented new danger needed a way to win broad support for their views, or at least spotlight the areas of dispute, and perhaps prompt action across the government. The national estimate has often played this role and is sometimes controversial for this very reason. Such assessments, which provoke widespread thought and debate, have a major impact on their recipients, often in a wider circle of decision-makers. The national intelligence estimate is noticed in the Congress, for example. But, as we have said, none was produced on terrorism between 1997 and 9-11. By 2001, the government still needed a decision at the highest level as to whether Al-Qaeda was, or was not, a first-order threat. Richard Clark wrote in his first memo to Condoleezza Rice on January 25, 2001. In his blistering protest about foot-dragging in the Pentagon and at the CIA, sent to Rice just a week before 9-11, he repeated that the real question for the principles was, are we serious about dealing with the Al-Qaeda threat? Is Al-Qaeda a big deal? One school of thought, Clark wrote in this September 4th note, implicitly argued that the terrorist network was a nuisance that killed a score of Americans every 18 to 24 months. If that view was credited, then current policies might be proportionate. Another school saw Al-Qaeda as the point of the spear of radical Islam, but no one forced the argument into the open by calling for a national estimate or a broader discussion of the threat. The issue was never joined as a collective debate by the US government, including the Congress, before 9-11. We return to the issue of proportion and imagination. Even Clark's note challenging Rice to imagine the day after an attack posits a strike that kills hundreds of Americans. He did not write thousands. Institutionalizing imagination, the case of aircraft as weapons. Imagination is not a gift usually associated with bureaucracies. For example, before Pearl Harbor, the US government had excellent intelligence that a Japanese attack was coming, especially after peace talks stalemated at the end of November 1941. These were days, won historian notes, of excruciating uncertainty. The most likely targets were judged to be in Southeast Asia. An attack was coming, but officials were at a loss to know where the blow would fall or what more might be done to prevent it. In retrospect, available intercepts pointed to Japanese examination of Hawaii as a possible target. But another historian observes. In the face of a clear warning, alert measures bowed to routine. It is therefore crucial to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of imagination. Doing so requires more than finding an expert who can imagine that aircraft could be used as weapons. Indeed, since Al Qaeda and other groups had already used suicide vehicles, namely truck bombs, the leap to the use of other vehicles such as boats, the coal attack, or planes is not far-fetched. Yet these scenarios were slow to work their way into the thinking of aviation security experts. In 1996, as a result of the TWA Flight 800 crash, President Clinton created a commission under Vice President Al Gore to report on shortcomings in aviation security in the United States. The Gore Commission's report, having thoroughly canvassed available expertise in and outside of government, did not mention suicide hijackings or the use of aircraft as weapons. It focused mainly on the danger of placing bombs onto aircraft, the approach of the Manila Airplot. The Gore Commission did call attention, however, to lax screening of passengers and what they carried onto planes. In late 1998, reports came in of a possible Al Qaeda plan to hijack a plane. One, a December 4th Presidential Daily Briefing for President Clinton, reprinted in Chapter 4, brought the focus back to more traditional hostage-taking. It reported Bin Laden's involvement in planning a hijack operation to free prisoners such as the Blind Shake, Omar Abdel Rahman. Had the contents of this PDB been brought to the attention of a wider group, including key members of Congress, it might have brought much more attention to the need for permanent changes in domestic airport and airline security procedures. Threat reports also mentioned the possibility of using an aircraft filled with explosives. The most prominent of these mentioned a possible plot to fly an explosives-laden aircraft into a US city. This report, circulated in September 1998, originated from a source who had walked into an American consulate in East Asia. In August of the same year, the intelligence community had received information that a group of Libyans hoped to crash a plane into the World Trade Center. In neither case could the information be corroborated. In addition, an Algerian group hijacked an airliner in 1994, most likely intending to blow it up over Paris, but possibly to crash it into the Eiffel Tower. In 1994, a private airplane had crashed onto the south lawn of the White House. In early 1995, Abdel Hakeem Murad, Ramsey Yosef's accomplice in the Manila Airlines bombing plot, told Philippine authorities that he and Yosef had discussed flying a plane into CIA headquarters. Clark had been concerned about the danger posed by aircraft since at least the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. There, he had tried to create an air defense plan using assets from the Treasury Department after the Defense Department declined to contribute resources. The Secret Service continued to work on the problem of airborne threats to the Washington region. In 1998, Clark chaired an exercise designed to highlight the inadequacy of the solution. This paper exercise involved a scenario in which a group of terrorists commandeered a leojet on the ground in Atlanta, loaded it with explosives, and flew it towards a target in Washington, D.C. Clark asked officials from the Pentagon, Federal Aviation Administration, the FAA, and Secret Service what they could do about the situation. Officials from the Pentagon said they could scramble aircraft from Langley Air Force Base, but they would need to go to the President for rules of engagement, and there was no mechanism to do so. There was no clear resolution of the problem at the exercise. In late 1999 a great deal of discussion took place in the media about the crash off the coast of Massachusetts of Egypt Air Flight 990, a Boeing 767. The most plausible explanation that emerged was that one of the pilots had gone berserk, seized the controls, and flown the aircraft into the sea. After the 1999-2000 Millennium Alerts, when the nation had relaxed, Clark held a meeting of his counter-terrorism security group devoted largely to the possibility of a possible airplane hijacking by al-Qaeda. In his testimony, Clark commented that he thought that warning about the possibility of a suicide hijacking would have been just one more speculative theory among many, hard to spot, since the volume of warnings of al-Qaeda threats and other terrorist threats was in the tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands. Yet the possibility was imaginable and imagined. In early August 1999 the FAA's Civil Aviation Security Intelligence Office summarized the bin Laden hijacking threat. After a solid recitation of all the information available on this topic, the paper identified a few principal scenarios, one of which was a suicide hijacking operation. The FAA analysts judged such an operation unlikely because it does not offer an opportunity for dialogue to achieve the key goal of obtaining Rahman and other key captive extremists. A suicide hijacking is assessed to be an option of last resort. Analysts could have shed some light on what kind of opportunity for dialogue al-Qaeda desired. The CIA did not write any analytical assessments of possible hijacking scenarios. One prescient pre-911 analysis of an aircraft plot was written by a Justice Department trial attorney. The attorney had taken an interest, apparently on his own initiative, in the legal issues that would be involved in shooting down a US aircraft in such a situation. The North American Aerospace Defense Command imagined the possible use of aircraft as weapons, too, and developed exercises to counter such a threat, from planes coming to the United States from overseas, perhaps carrying a weapon of mass destruction. None of this speculation was based on actual intelligence of such a threat. One idea, intended to test command and control plans and NORAD's readiness, postulated a hijacked airliner coming from overseas and crashing into the Pentagon. The idea was put aside in the early planning of the exercise, as too much of a distraction from the main focus—war in Korea—and as too unrealistic. As we pointed out in Chapter 1, the military planners assumed that since such aircraft would be coming from overseas, they would have time to identify the target and scramble interceptors. We can therefore establish that at least some government agencies were concerned about the hijacking danger, and had speculated about various scenarios. The challenge was to flesh out and test those scenarios, then figure out a way to turn a scenario into constructive action. Since the Pearl Harbor attack of 1941, the intelligence community has devoted generations of effort to understanding the problem of forestalling a surprise attack. Rigorous analytic methods were developed, focused in particular on the Soviet Union, and several leading practitioners within the intelligence community discussed them with us. These methods have been articulated in many ways, but almost all seem to have at least four elements in common. 1. Think about how surprise attacks might be launched. 2. Identify telltale indicators connected to the most dangerous possibilities. 3. Where feasible, collect intelligence on these indicators. And 4. Adopt defenses to deflect the most dangerous possibilities, or at least trigger an earlier warning. After the end of the Gulf War, concerns about lack of warning led to a major study conducted of DCI Robert Gates in 1992 that proposed several recommendations, among them strengthening the National Intelligence Officer for Warning. We were told that these measures languished under Gates's successors. Responsibility for Warning related to a terrorist attack passed from the National Intelligence Officer for Warning to the CTC. An intelligence community counterterrorism board had the responsibility to issue threat advisories. With the important exception of analysis of al-Qaeda efforts in chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons, we did not find evidence that the methods to avoid surprise attack that had been so laboriously developed over the years were regularly applied. 3. Considering what was not done suggests possible ways to institutionalize imagination. To return to the four elements of analysis just mentioned. 1. The CTC did not analyse how an aircraft, hijacked, or explosives laden might be used as a weapon. It did not perform this kind of analysis from the enemy's perspective, red team analysis. Even though suicide terrorism had become a principal tactic of Middle Eastern terrorists. If it had done so, we believe such an analysis would soon have spotlighted a critical constraint for the terrorists, finding a suicide operative able to fly large jet aircraft. They had never done so before 9-11. 2. The CTC did not develop a set of tell-tale indicators for this method of attack. For example, one such indicator might be the discovery of possible terrorists pursuing flight training to fly large jet aircraft or seeking to buy advanced flight simulators. 3. The CTC did not propose, and the intelligence community collection management process did not set, requirements to monitor such tell-tale indicators. Therefore the warning system was not looking for information such as the July 2001 FBI report of potential terrorist interest in various kinds of aircraft training in Arizona. Or the August 2001 arrest of Zacharias Musari because of his suspicious behavior in a Minnesota flight school. In late August the Musari arrest was briefed to the DCI and other top CIA officials under the heading, Islamic extremist learns to fly. Because the system was not tuned to comprehend the potential significance of this information, the news had no effect on warning. 4. Neither the intelligence community nor aviation security experts analyzed systemic defenses within an aircraft, or against terrorist-controlled aircraft, suicidal or otherwise. The many threat reports mentioning aircraft were passed to the FAA. While that agency continued to react to specific credible threats, it did not try to perform the broader warning functions we describe here. No one in the government was taking on that role for domestic vulnerabilities. Richard Clark told us that he was concerned about the danger posed by aircraft in the context of protecting the Atlanta Olympics of 1996, the White House complex, and the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa. But he attributed his awareness more to Tom Clancy novels than to warnings from the intelligence community. He did not, or could not, press the government to work on the systemic issues of how to strengthen the layered security defenses to protect aircraft against hijackings, or put the adequacy of air defenses against suicide hijackers on the national policy agenda. The methods for detecting and then warning of surprise attack that the US government had so painstakingly developed in the decades after Pearl Harbor did not fail. Instead they were not really tried. They were not employed to analyze the enemy that, as the 20th century closed, was most likely to launch a surprise attack directly against the United States. End of Chapter 11.1