Anthony Summers - The Eleventh Day

At 10:14, a lieutenant colonel at the White House passed word to the Pentagon that the Vice President had “confirmed” fighters were “cleared to engage the inbound aircraft if they could verify that the aircraft was hijacked.” It was, another officer said, a “pin-drop moment.”

A Libby note, timed as “10:15–18,” read:

Aircraft 60 miles out, confirmed as hijack—engage? VP: Yes. JB: Get President and confirm engage order

The initials “JB” referred to Joshua Bolten, the White House deputy chief of staff—who was also with the Vice President in the bunker. He suggested that Cheney call Bush, he told the Commission, because he “wanted to make sure the President was told that the Vice President had executed the order. He said he had not heard any prior discussion on the subject with the President.”

Nor had press secretary Ari Fleischer, who was at Bush’s side aboard Air Force One and keeping a record of everything that was said—at the President’s request. His notes up to that point—like those of Scooter Libby and Lynne Cheney at the White House—contain no reference to any conversation with Cheney about shoot-down authorization. They do show, however, that at 10:20—two minutes after a formally logged call from the Vice President—Bush told Fleischer that “he had authorized a shoot-down if necessary.”

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OTHER INFORMATION, reportable in detail now thanks to recent document releases, further suggests that the Vice President may have authorized the shooting down of suspect airliners without the President’s say-so. It involves exchanges between Secret Service agents at the White House and Air National Guard officers at Andrews Air Force Base, just ten miles southeast of Washington. Though not an “alert” base, its units proudly styled themselves the “Capital Guardians.”

Unlike the President—in his role as commander-in-chief—and those in the military chain of command, the Secret Service was not primarily concerned with countering the terrorist attacks. Its priority was the protection of the President and Vice President and those in the line of succession. On September 11, that meant trying to protect Air Force One and the White House itself from attack. On 9/11, according to Commission staff member Miles Kara, the missions of the military leadership—from the President as commander-in-chief on down—and the Secret Service were at times “mutually exclusive.”

A Secret Service agent and his FAA liaison had, early on, after the two attacks on New York, discussed the need to get fighters over Washington. Once the Pentagon had been hit, the phones began ringing at Andrews. Brigadier General David Wherley, the National Guard commander at the base, arrived at a run to learn that Secret Service agent Ken Beauchamp had rung with the message, “Get anything you can airborne.”

When he got back to Beauchamp, Wherley was helpful but cautious. He asked to speak with “someone a little higher up the food chain,” and was passed first to another agent, Nelson Garabito. Garabito told him, “It’s coming direct from the Vice President.” Still not satisfied, the general then spoke with the agent in charge of the Presidential Protective Division, Rebecca Ediger. Ediger repeated the request—Wherley told the 9/11 Commission—“speaking for the Vice President.”

The general asked to speak direct to Cheney, but Ediger said the Vice President was on another line. Wherley “wasn’t going to get to talk to anyone he felt comfortable getting the order from,” he realized. So he made do with Agent Ediger—and an “unidentified male voice who took the phone from Ediger” and asked him to “put aircraft over DC with orders to intercept any aircraft that approached within twenty miles and turn that aircraft around. If the aircraft would not change course, the interceptor should use ‘any force necessary’ to keep that aircraft from crashing into a building.” Wherley felt the instructions were “understandable enough.”

When did the Secret Service pass on this purported order from the Vice President? Of the various documents released, one heavily redacted Secret Service memo—dated less than a month after 9/11—is tantalizing. It states that:

After the crash at the Pentagon, Commander [Anthony Barnes of the White House Military Office] in the PEOC advised … that the Vice President had authorized them to engage any other

suspect aircraft.… It was at about this time, I began fielding calls from Andrews Air Force Base. I first got a call from [several words redacted]. I verified that they had been requested to do so with the PEOC. When I conveyed this to [words redacted] I told him the Vice President [words redacted] Commander [Barnes] was more than a little incredulous. He had me tell the General to get it from the NMCC [National Military Command Center].

While Barnes cannot today pin down at what time this exchange took place, an Andrews control tower transcript shows that, beginning at about 10:04, a controller began repeatedly transmitting a warning that unauthorized flights entering the closed airspace around Washington would be shot down. Though one cannot be conclusive, the genesis of the warning was likely an instruction passed from the Secret Service.

Cheney would later tell the 9/11 Commission that he had not even been “aware that that fighters had been scrambled out of Andrews at the request of the Secret Service and outside the military chain of command.” The Wall Street Journal , however, has reported conflicting claims. While White House officials said the Secret Service “acted on its own,” the Secret Service issued a statement denying that it did so. To the contrary, the Journal reported, senior agents insisted that “the agents’ actions on September 11 had been ordered by the Vice President.”

Did Cheney give a shoot-down order on his own initiative, before consulting the President? The available evidence suggests he may have. To have done so, moreover, would certainly have been more sensible than sinister. At a moment the capital seemed to be in imminent peril, the two men properly heading the chain of command were out of touch—the secretary of defense away from his post and the President only intermittently in contact because of shaky communications. Many might think that Cheney, on the spot and capable, would have been justified in short-circuiting the system.

If he did so, and had he and the President soon acknowledged as much, it would have been pointless to blame the Vice President. If he did so and then persistently told a false story, however—and if the eventual release of all the records were to prove it—history will be less generous.

WHOEVER REALLY ISSUED the shoot-down order, it came too late to have any effect on events. At Andrews, General Wherley had no immediate way to respond to it—no planes were ready to take off, let alone planes armed and ready. He had, moreover, come away from his exchanges with the Secret Service less than certain about the Vice President’s order. He sent up the first plane available, an unarmed F-16 summoned back from a training exercise, to “check out” the situation over Washington—with no explicit instructions. Four more fighters took off a little later, one pair also without armament, the other—at 11:12 and after a rushed loading process—fully armed with heat-seeking missiles. Their instructions were to fly “weapons free,” which left the decision to fire up to the pilots.

Even then, an hour or more after the shoot-down order came to him via the Secret Service, General Wherley still felt “uncomfortable with the situation.” He did not receive formal, detailed rules of engagement from the Defense Department until long after the real action was over, five hours after the start of the attacks.