Senior aids to President George W. Bush, reporters, and pilots and airline staff of Air Force One spoke with Politico journalist Garrett Graff about the moment they received word that terrorists had hijacked aircraft and had flown them into the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001. The safest place they thought the president could be, they say, was in the sky—so the team spent eight hours aboard Air Force One that day.
In the interview, published Friday, the team recalls how beautifully the morning started, and how quickly that deteriorated.
Sonya Ross, a reporter from the Associated Press, noted that there was a "garden variety trip" scheduled for "low-ranking staff" that morning, when the president would make an appearance at a Sarasota, Fla. school to promote his No Child Left Behind bill. "A lot of the top journalists didn’t come. It was a scrub trip," she said. Mike Morrell, the president's briefer from the CIA, says the briefing that morning was standard—Bush's biggest concern was about Israel's second intifada.
"There was nothing in the briefing about terrorism. It was very routine," he said.
Among the more chilling quotes: Andy Card, then Bush's chief of staff, remembers "literally telling him, 'It should be an easy day.' Those were the words. 'It should be an easy day.'"
Because cell phones weren't popularly used then and staff communicated through pagers, which primarily sent pre-programmed messages, White House press assistant Brian Bravo could only notify Bush's staff of the attack by saying "a plane has hit the World Trade Center.”
"At that point, no one knew what it meant," Bravo said.
The staff describes informing Bush of the attack while he was reading a book at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, and of the Secret Service rushing to get Bush aboard Air Force One once his appearance there was over.
"We were climbing so high and so fast [in the plane] I started to wonder if we’d need oxygen masks," White House stenographer Ellen Eckert said.
Aboard Air Force One, Card remembers that Bush was "visibly angry" that the Secret Service would not return to Washington, D.C. Communication on the aircraft was also compromised, according to officials onboard that day, preventing Bush from reliably speaking with the Situation Room staff. Master Sargeant Dana Lark said that both commercial and terrestrial systems were "all jammed."
"I started to have tunnel vision.. What the hell is going on? Did someone sabotage our comms? It wasn’t until later I realized all the commercial systems were all just saturated. It was all the same systems the airplane pilots were using at the same time, talking to their dispatchers. We as Air Force One didn’t have any higher priority than American This or United That," Lark said.
They then had to use the military satellites, "which we would only use in time of war," Colonel Mark Tillman told Politico.
All commercial aircraft were ordered to ground their flights; there were six unresponsive aircraft in the sky, and Bush officials were worried that those planes had also been compromised. Tillman added that they had received reports that "Angel was next."
Angel was the Secret Service's code name for Air Force One.
"No one really knows now where the comment came from—it got mistranslated or garbled amid the White House, the Situation Room, the radio operators," Tillman said. “The fact that they knew about 'angel,' well, you had to be in the inner circle. That was a big deal to me. It was time to hunker down and get some good weaponry."
And then, from his office on Air Force One, Bush watched as the towers began to collapse.
Eric Draper: We were in the president’s office when the Towers fell. You knew that there’d be a loss of life in a catastrophic way. The room was really silent. Andy Card, Ari, and Dan Bartlett were there. There’s an image of the president, with his hands on his hips, just watching. Dan had a friend who worked in the Towers. He was very emotional. Everyone peeled off one by one and the president just stood there, alone, watching the cloud expand.
Air Force One landed at the Barksdale, La., air force base, where Bush would go on to address the nation.
You can read the entire interview here.
