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

As the summer of 2001 flew past, CeeCee poured out her heart in a letter to the woman who had raised her, Carrie Ross, who was both CeeCee’s adoptive mother and her biological aunt. CeeCee mentioned rough patches of her past, then wrote that she was as happy as she’d ever been. She loved her new job as a flight attendant, and she credited Ross’s love and support for leading her to this high point in life.

Before flying to Newark on September 10, CeeCee squared away piles of laundry and filled the refrigerator with home-cooked meals. She hated to be away from her family, but she and Lorne didn’t want to uproot from Florida to her airport base in New Jersey. So CeeCee joined a group of her fellow flight attendants, each paying $150 in monthly rent for the Newark crash pad, and bided her time until she’d earn enough seniority to gain greater control over her schedule.

The morning of Monday, September 10, Lorne drove CeeCee to the Fort Myers airport, walked her to her gate, kissed her goodbye, and began a new day of serial phone calls. CeeCee didn’t reach the Newark apartment until eleven that night, and she wouldn’t get much rest. She’d been assigned an early flight out of Newark, an 8:00 a.m. departure to San Francisco. Even as her energy flagged, she didn’t want to stop talking with Lorne.

Two hours into their last call of September 10, which blended into their first call of September 11, CeeCee fell asleep clutching her cellphone and her teddy bear Lorne. The real Lorne hung up, certain that they’d speak again soon.

MAJOR KEVIN NASYPANY

Northeast Air Defense Sector, Rome, N.Y.

At forty-three, solidly built and colorfully profane, Kevin Nasypany had a name that rhymed with the New Jersey town of Parsippany, a military pilot’s unflappable confidence, and a caterpillar mustache on a Saint Bernard’s face.

On September 10, Nasypany woke with a full plate. He and his wife, Dana, had five children, three girls and two boys aged five to nineteen, and Dana was seven months pregnant. They also had a sweet new chocolate lab puppy that Nasypany had judged to be dumber than dirt. Their rambling Victorian house in upstate Waterville, New York, needed paint, the oversized yard needed care, and a half-finished bathroom needed remodeling. Plus, someone needed to close their aboveground pool for the season, a chore that Nasypany loudly proclaimed to be a royal pain in the ass.

To top it off, he had to protect the lives of roughly one hundred million Americans.

Nasypany was a major in the Air National Guard, working as a mission control commander at the Northeast Air Defense Sector, or NEADS (pronounced knee- ads). NEADS was part of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, the military organization with the daunting task of safeguarding the skies over the United States and Canada.

Protection work suited Nasypany, who’d been a leading defenseman on his college hockey team. At NEADS, he and his team stood sentry against long-range enemy bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles sneaking past U.S. air borders, along with a catalog of other airborne dangers such as hijackings. Nasypany had joined NEADS seven years earlier, after an active duty Air Force career during which he earned the radio call sign “Nasty” and spent months aloft in a radar plane over Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia during the First Gulf War.

On workdays, Nasypany drove his Nissan Stanza twenty-five miles to NEADS headquarters, a squat aluminum bunker that resembled a UFO from a 1950s sci-fi movie. It was the last operating facility in a military ghost town, on the property of the decommissioned Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, New York. The obscure location was fitting: in the grand scheme of U.S. military priorities, defending domestic skies had become something of a backwater, staffed largely by part-time pilots and officers in the Air National Guard.

Working eight-hour shifts around the clock, three hundred sixty-five days a year, Nasypany and several hundred military officers, surveillance technicians, communications specialists, and weapons controllers huddled in the green glow of outdated radar and computer screens. Bulky tape recorders preserved their spoken words as they kept a lookout for potential national security threats over Washington, D.C., and twenty-seven states in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest.

One of the many challenges for Nasypany was to keep his crews sharp amid the daily tedium of a peacetime vigil. Entire shifts would pass with no hint of trouble, which was good for the country but potentially numbing to NEADS crews. Then, perhaps a dozen times a month, an “unknown” would appear on a radar scope, and everyone needed to react smartly and immediately, knowing that a mistake or a delay of even a few minutes theoretically could mean the obliteration of an American city.

In most of those cases, the NEADS crew would quickly identify the mystery radar dots. But three or four times a month, when initial efforts failed, NEADS staffers would carry out the most exciting part of their job: ordering the launch of supersonic military fighter jets to determine who or what had entered American airspace.

Nationally, NORAD and its divisions could immediately call upon fourteen fighter jets, two each at seven bases around the country. Those fighters remained perpetually “on alert,” armed and fueled, pilots ready. The military had many more fighter jets spread among U.S. bases, but time would be needed to round up pilots and load fuel and weapons, and time would be an unaffordable luxury if America came under attack.

During the decade since the fall of the Soviet Union, America’s leaders had behaved as though the airborne threat had nearly disappeared. At fourteen, the number of on-alert fighters nationwide marked a sharp drop since the height of the Cold War, when twenty-two military sites, with scores of fighter jets, were always ready to defend against a ballistic missile attack or any other threat to North America. In fact, by the summer of 2001, the number of on-alert fighter jet sites throughout the United States had been ordered to be cut from fourteen to only four, to save money, though that order had yet to be carried out.

NEADS directly controlled four of the on-alert fighter jets: two F-15s at Otis Air National Guard Base in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, and two F-16s at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Virginia.

When the fighters launched, time and again the unknown aircraft or mystery radar dot would turn out to be benign: a fish-spotting plane from Canada with faulty electronics, or a passenger jet from Europe whose pilots failed to use proper codes on their cockpit transponder, a device that sends ground radar a wealth of identifying information plus speed and altitude. In NEADS parlance, the end result would be a “friendly” plane that didn’t “squawk,” or properly identify itself by transponder, as a result of human or mechanical error. When the potential threat passed, the NEADS sentinels resumed their watch.

To stay ready for surprise inspections and, above all, a genuine threat by an unknown with nefarious intent, Nasypany and other NEADS officers regularly put their crews through elaborate exercises. They had one planned for September 11, with the impressive name Vigilant Guardian. The drill focused on a simulated attack by Russian bombers, with elaborate secondary scenarios including a mock hijacking by militants determined to force a passenger jet to land on a Caribbean island. Nasypany and some colleagues wanted the exercise to include a plot by terrorists to fly a cargo plane into the United Nations building in New York City, but a military intelligence officer had nixed that idea as too far-fetched to be useful.

Nasypany spent his September 10 shift preparing for the next day’s exercise, but he also had to carry out a more mundane family responsibility. NEADS allowed tours by civilians, so Boy Scout troops, local politicians, and civic groups regularly clomped around the Operations Room, looking at the radar scopes after classified systems were switched off. In this case, his wife’s sister Becky was visiting the Nasypanys from Kansas, and she’d always been curious about Kevin’s work. He got approval for Becky to witness what she had long imagined to be the exciting world of national security surveillance in action.