MItchell Zuckoff - Fall and Rise - The Story of 9/11

Unknown to Biggio, during the previous ten minutes strange and suddenly familiar events had begun aboard a third transcontinental passenger jet.

CHAPTER 6

“THE START OF WORLD WAR III”

American Airlines Flight 77

AFTER A CELEBRATORY DINNER THE NIGHT BEFORE, BARBARA OLSON woke beside her husband, Ted, on his birthday, just as she’d planned. The lawyer, author, and conservative activist got ready for an early flight to Los Angeles, where she was to appear on that night’s edition of Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher .

Before leaving her Virginia home for Dulles International Airport, before Flight 11 or Flight 175 met their fiery ends, Barbara placed a note on Ted’s pillow: “I love you. When you read this, I will be thinking of you and I will be back on Friday.”

AS THE MORNING progressed, the defenders of American airspace were forced to rely almost as much at times on television news updates as on their radar scopes and official reports. From their limited vantage point inside the NEADS bunker in upstate New York, Major Kevin Nasypany, Colonel Robert Marr, and their team struggled to make sense of confusing, conflicting, inaccurate, and occasionally devastating information about events in New York and whether more threats loomed.

When a NEADS technician saw the burning North Tower on television shortly before nine, those images marked the first notice anyone there received about what had happened. The technician gasped, “Oh God!” Her colleague answered, “God save New York.”

A report soon reached them that the plane was a Boeing 737, perhaps as a result of the CNN broadcast that mentioned that model. Otherwise, the plane that struck the North Tower appeared to match the Boeing 767 passenger jet they’d been trying without luck to find: American Flight 11. The NEADS team still hadn’t heard about United Flight 175 or any other hijacked planes. When they confirmed that the North Tower crash involved Flight 11, that presumably would mean the end of NEADS mission. NEADS staffers asked Nasypany what he wanted to do with the two F-15s they’d scrambled from the Otis base on Cape Cod.

Unsure whether the CNN report and other information they’d received was accurate, concerned that the plane they sought was a Boeing 767, not a 737, and lacking official confirmation, Nasypany continued to play defense. “Send ’em to New York City still,” he ordered. “Continue! Go!”

A NEADS identification technician, Senior Airman Stacia Rountree, sought more information about the crashed plane from the FAA Boston Center’s military liaison, Colin Scoggins. The call initially seemed to confirm the loss of Flight 11, but soon it did the opposite, increasing confusion about which plane had struck the tower.

Scoggins: “Yeah, he crashed into the World Trade Center.”

Rountree: “That is the aircraft that crashed into the World Trade Center?”

Scoggins: “Yup. Disregard the tail number [for American Flight 11].”

Rountree: “Disregard the tail number? He did crash into the World Trade Center?”

Scoggins: “That, that’s what we believe, yes.”

Another NEADS technician interrupted, saying that the military hadn’t received official confirmation that the North Tower crash involved American Flight 11. Media reports still mentioned a small Cessna that had supposedly gotten lost over Manhattan. To top it off, American Airlines officials had yet to confirm to anyone that Flight 11 had even been hijacked, much less that it had crashed. Rountree’s supervisor, a no-nonsense master sergeant named Maureen “Mo” Dooley, took over the call.

Dooley: “We need to have—are you giving confirmation that American 11 was the one?”

Scoggins: “No, we’re not gonna confirm that at this time. We just know an aircraft crashed in and—”

On the other hand, Scoggins acknowledged, that didn’t mean they had any idea where to find American Flight 11. Dooley asked him: “[I]s anyone up there tracking primary [radar] on this guy still?”

Scoggins replied: “No. The last [radar sighting] we have was about fifteen miles east of JFK [Airport], or eight miles east of JFK was our last primary hit. He did slow down in speed. The primary that we had, it slowed down below, around to three hundred knots.”

Dooley: “And then you lost ’em?”

Scoggins: “Yeah, and then we lost ’em.”

With incomplete information, Nasypany couldn’t rule out the possibility that American Flight 11, with a hijacker at the controls, remained airborne and hiding from radar with its transponder off, somewhere over one of the most heavily populated areas of the United States. Meanwhile, Nasypany and the NEADS team didn’t learn about United Flight 175 until 9:03 a.m.

Rountree cried out: “They have a second possible hijack!”

But again, just as with Flight 11, the notification came far too late. At almost that exact moment, Flight 175 smashed into the South Tower. Colonel Marr and others at NEADS watched it live on CNN. The two F-15 fighter jets from Otis still hadn’t reached New York.

America’s air defense system couldn’t stop those crashes, but Nasypany still wanted the F-15s in the sky over New York. The United States had just experienced its first simultaneous multiple hijackings, and no one could say whether the terrorists had more planned. As he prowled the room at NEADS, bottling his frustration while he pressured, calmed, and cajoled his team, Nasypany hadn’t yet heard Mohamed Atta’s ominous statement, “We have some planes.” But he didn’t need to.

“We’ve already had two,” Nasypany thought. “Why not more?”

EARLIER THAT MORNING at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C., before either Flight 11 or Flight 175 was hijacked, passengers walked calmly onto the sparsely filled American Airlines Flight 77. The plane was a Boeing 757, a single-aisle passenger jet smaller and slimmer than the wide-bodied 767, but nonetheless a large plane suited to transcontinental flights. Bound nonstop for Los Angeles, Flight 77’s fuel weighed just under 50,000 pounds, more than a fully loaded city bus.

Two Flight 77 passengers, one in first class, the other in coach, represented the two distinct worlds of Washington, D.C. One, Barbara Olson, enjoyed great celebrity and clout as a member of the capital’s ruling elite. The other embodied great possibility.

Bernard C. Brown II stepped aboard Flight 77 with a complete set of useful tools: looks, brains, charisma, an eye for sharp clothes, and a fair shot at fulfilling his dream of becoming either a professional basketball player or a scientist. But Bernard was still only eleven, which meant that his nimble mind sometimes wandered to subjects other than school.

Fifth grade had gone well, and Bernard’s parents and teachers wanted him to remain on a high-achieving trajectory at the Leckie Elementary School in the southwest corner of Washington, D.C., near what was known as Bolling Air Force Base. Some students at Leckie lived in a homeless shelter, but Bernard was among the fortunate ones: he lived in military housing with his younger sister, his mother, Sinita, and his father, Bernard Brown Sr., a chief petty officer in the Navy who worked at the Pentagon. The two men of the family were known as Big Bernard and Little Bernard.

As the new school year began, Little Bernard’s fifth-grade teacher successfully urged her best friend at Leckie, sixth-grade teacher Hilda Taylor, to pick Bernard to join her for a special treat: a four-day trip to study marine biology at a sanctuary off the California coast. A native of Sierra Leone, Hilda Taylor believed that American children needed to look beyond their borders to gain a deeper understanding of the wider world. With that goal in mind she’d become involved with the National Geographic Society, which sponsored the trip.