In My Time (2 page)

IN MY TIME

S
pecial Agent Jimmy Scott burst through the door. “Mr. Vice President, we’ve got to leave now.” Before I could reply he moved behind my desk, put one hand on my belt and another on my shoulder, and propelled me out of my office. He rushed me through narrow West Wing hallways and down a stairway toward the “PEOC,” the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, located underneath the White House.

Being evacuated from my office in the West Wing by Secret Service Agent Jim Scott. September 11, 2001 (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)

We stopped at the bottom of the stairs in a tunnel outside the PEOC. I watched as Secret Service agents positioned themselves at the top, middle, and bottom of the staircase, creating layers of defense in case the White House itself should be invaded. Agent Scott handed out additional firearms, flashlights, and gas masks. He’d evacuated me from my office, he said, because he’d gotten word over his radio that an inbound, unidentified aircraft was headed for “Crown,” code name for the White House.

Within moments another report came in. “Sir,” Scott said, “the plane headed for us just hit the Pentagon.” Now I knew for certain that Washington as well as New York was under attack, and that meant that
President Bush, who had been at an elementary school in Florida, had to stay away. I turned to one of the agents in the tunnel. “Get me the president.” He picked up the handset of a phone on the wall to patch through a call.

This was the second call I had made to President Bush since hijacked airliners flew into the World Trade towers, and he’d been trying to reach me as well. A communications glitch had cut us off earlier, and as I waited to talk to him now, I watched images of the burning towers on an old television set that had been set up in the tunnel. When the president came on the line, I told him that the Pentagon had been hit and urged him to stay away from Washington. The city was under attack, and the White House was a target. I understood that he didn’t want to appear to be on the run, but he shouldn’t be here until we knew more about what was going on.

My wife, Lynne, had been in downtown D.C. when the planes hit, and her Secret Service detail brought her to the White House. She arrived in the tunnel
shortly before 10:00 a.m.
, and when I finished talking to the president, she went with me into the PEOC. I took a seat at the large conference table that occupied most of the wood-paneled room.

Watching the collapse of the World Trade Towers in the presidential emergency operations center at the White House on September 11, 2001, with the deputy chief of staff, Josh Bolten; Transportation Secretary, Norm Mineta; my chief of staff, Scooter Libby; my director of communications, Mary Matalin; and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)

Underneath the table telephones rested in drawers. On the wall across from me were two large television screens and a camera for video-conferencing. A side wall contained another video camera and two more TV screens. The wall behind me was blank except for a large presidential seal.

We hadn’t been in the PEOC long when the television sets showed the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapsing. Both Lynne and I knew we had just watched hundreds, maybe thousands, of innocent people die.

Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta, who’d been one of the first in the PEOC, was making lists of airline flight numbers, trying to figure out which planes were confirmed hijacked and crashed, and which might still be threatening us in the air. Norm was working two telephones, with the FAA on one and his chief of staff on the other, trying to get the skies cleared until we knew just what we were dealing
with. A commercial airline pilot usually has wide discretion to handle his aircraft in an emergency, and apparently someone said something to Norm about pilots deciding when and if to bring their planes down. I heard him say in no uncertain terms that pilot discretion would not be the rule today. “Get those planes down now,” he ordered.

In those first hours we were living in the fog of war. We had reports of six domestic flights that were possibly hijacked, a number that later resolved to four. We had conflicting reports about whether the Pentagon had been hit by a plane, a helicopter, or a car bomb. We started getting reports of explosions across Washington, at the Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol, and the State Department. We heard there was an unidentified, nonresponsive plane headed for Camp David and another headed for Crawford, Texas; we also received word of a threat against Air Force One.

At about 10:15, a uniformed military aide came into the room to tell me that a plane, believed hijacked, was eighty miles out and headed for D.C. He asked me whether our combat air patrol had authority to engage the aircraft. Did our fighter pilots have authority, in other words, to shoot down an American commercial airliner believed to have been hijacked? “Yes,” I said without hesitation. A moment later he was back. “Mr. Vice President, it’s sixty miles out. Do they have authorization to engage?” Again, yes.

There could have been no other answer. As the last hour and a half had made brutally clear, once a plane was hijacked it was a weapon in the hands of the enemy. In one of our earlier calls, the president and I had discussed the fact that our combat air patrol—the American fighter jets now airborne to defend the country—would need rules of engagement. He had approved my recommendation that they be authorized to fire on a civilian airliner if it had been hijacked and would not divert. Thousands of Americans had already been killed, and there was no question about taking action to save thousands more. Still, the enormity of the order I had just conveyed struck all of us in the PEOC, and a silence fell over the room. Then Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Bolten leaned forward in his chair and suggested we get in touch with the
president to let him know what had just happened. At 10:18, I picked up the secure phone in the drawer beside me and called Air Force One, which had left Florida and was heading west as the president’s aides looked for a secure location from which he could address the American people. When the president came on the line, I told him about the shootdown order.

There soon followed some tense moments when we got word that an aircraft was down, south of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Had it been forced down? Had it been shot down by one of our pilots following the authorization I’d conveyed? Eventually we learned that an act of heroism had brought United Airlines Flight 93 down in the fields near Shanksville. Aware of the fates of the other planes hijacked that morning, the passengers on Flight 93 stormed the cockpit. By sacrificing their own lives, those brave men and women saved the lives of many others, possibly including those of us in the White House that morning.

Eric Edelman, my deputy national security advisor and a veteran foreign service officer, entered the PEOC with a message for me from Steve Hadley, the president’s deputy national security advisor. “Mr. Vice President,” he said, “Steve believes you should evacuate.” I told Eric I wasn’t going anywhere. I knew the president was safe. And I knew I had to maintain my ability to communicate, as frustrating as our communications challenges were that day. “Eric, if we leave here and get on a helicopter to evacuate, it will be at least forty-five minutes before I can be back in touch with anyone. That’s valuable time we can’t afford to lose. Tell Hadley we’re staying put.”

Lynne, who’d been sitting at the end of the conference table, brought me news of our family. She had heard from the Secret Service that they were getting our kids and grandkids to secure locations. At 10:28, the second tower came down, and there was a collective gasp in the room. Mothers and fathers were in that building, and wives and husbands, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters. They weren’t combatants in a war, but people going about their lives. They had been killed, and their families would be plunged into grief by terrorists who had no regard for innocent lives.

Within minutes of the tower collapsing, I was told that another plane headed in the direction of Washington had hit the ground on the border of Ohio and Kentucky. Then came word of another hijacked plane, this one just five miles out from the White House. “Take it out,” I said. “If it looks threatening, take it out.”

At 10:39 I had a chance to update Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld, who was in the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon. A transcript exists of our conversation:

VP:
There’s been at least three instances here where we’ve had reports of aircraft approaching Washington—a couple were confirmed hijacked. And, pursuant to the president’s instructions, I gave authorization for them to be taken out. Hello?

SecDef:
Yes, I understand. Who did you give that direction to?

VP:
It was passed from here through the operations center at the White House, from the shelter.

SecDef:
Okay, let me ask the question here. Has that directive been transmitted to the aircraft?

VP:
Yes, it has.

SecDef:
So, we’ve got a couple of aircraft up there that have those instructions at this present time?

VP:
That is correct. And it’s my understanding they’ve already taken a couple aircraft out.

SecDef:
We can’t confirm that. We’re told that one aircraft is down but we do not have a pilot report that did it.

As the 9/11 Commission would later find, the Northeast Air Defense Sector of NORAD had not passed the shootdown order to the fighter pilots as they scrambled out of Langley Air Force Base, although pilots out of Andrews Air Force Base did have permission to shoot. And only one aircraft had crashed into the ground—Flight 93, near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The plane we had thought was down on the Ohio-Kentucky line was actually American Flight 77—the plane that had been headed in the direction of the White House. It had circled away
from us, then back toward the White House, prompting my evacuation. Then it set on its deadly course for the Pentagon.

TWO THOUGHTS WERE UPPERMOST in my mind that morning: preventing further attacks by getting planes out of the skies and guaranteeing the continuity of a functioning United States government. We began immediately taking precautions to ensure that any attack on Washington would not decapitate the leadership of our nation. The president stayed away from the city until things clarified. We evacuated key leaders in the House and Senate to a secure location away from D.C. I had trouble getting hold of House Speaker Dennis Hastert, but finally reached him at Andrews Air Force Base, where his security team had taken him. I brought him up to date and urged him to move to a secure location, which he did. I called him at least once more that day. It was crucial that he know what was happening since he was second in line to succeed to the presidency.

The president pro tempore of the Senate, Robert Byrd, who was next in the presidential line of succession after the Speaker, refused to move to a secure location. He went home instead. Others who did evacuate were anxious to return to Washington as soon as possible. At one point my friend Senator Don Nickles of Oklahoma asked why the executive branch had the right to decide when members of Congress, a coequal branch of government, could come back to Washington. “Because we’ve got the helicopters, Don,” I told him.