How 9/11 Forced America to Rebuild Its National Security From the Ground Up, as Told by the Insiders Who Lived It

Twenty-five years after al-Qaida hijackers crashed four commercial airplanes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Shanksville, Pa., the people who worked the front lines of government and intelligence that day still carry the details.

At an NPR event in Washington, D.C., host Mary Louise Kelly gathered four of them: Stephen Hadley, deputy national security adviser in the Bush White House; Jane Harman, then a Democratic congresswoman from California; John McLaughlin, deputy director of the CIA; and Michael Morell, also at the CIA and President Bush’s briefer that morning. Their conversation, lightly edited for clarity, covered how the attacks changed intelligence agencies and the government’s view of threat.

Morning of September 11, 2001

McLaughlin was running a staff meeting when the first plane hit. The agenda was routine: the counterterrorism budget, the Balkans, other problems. His first thought was cautious. “Could be terrorism. But let’s see what is going on here.”

The second plane ended all doubt. “We are under attack,” he thought, and he believed everyone in the room thought the same. The surprise was not total. That summer, intelligence reporting on terrorism had spiked sharply — something the CIA director later described as “the lights were blinking red all summer.” What they did not know was time, target, or method. McLaughlin later typed a line on his computer: “Nothing will ever be the same.”

Hadley was in the Situation Room. Richard Clarke, the White House counterterrorism chief, ran a group in the back room trying to determine whether the attacks were the first of many. When the White House evacuated, staff ran down West Executive Avenue. Hadley asked his group whether they wanted to leave or stay. “Everybody said: ‘We’ve got to stay and help the president manage this crisis,’ so we did.”

One memory stuck with him: Norm Mineta, the transportation secretary, working to bring thousands of planes out of the sky. “We did not know how many might have been taken over by terrorists and become a weapon against this country.”

Harman’s story starts a day earlier. On September 10, she had lunch with Ambassador Paul Bremer, who had chaired the National Commission on Terrorism. Harman was a member of that commission, one of three bodies that had predicted a major terror attack on U.S. soil. Over lunch near the Capitol, they complained that no one was paying attention to them. Twenty hours later, the prediction came true.

That morning, Harman was heading to her office, then to the intelligence rooms in the Capitol dome. Her office called to say the buildings were evacuated. Hundreds of members of Congress milled outside the Capitol. She believed the plane that went down in Pennsylvania was targeting the U.S. Capitol. “We would have had a continuity of government crisis if that plane had hit the Capitol,” she said.

She had heard — though she was not sure it was true — that United flight 93 left late. Had it not, it might have been in flight before the news of the Trade Towers broke, and “it might have hit when the rest of us were around.”

The President’s Briefing That Morning

Morell was with President Bush, traveling with the president on his plane as his CIA briefer. Kelly asked him directly: did the president’s daily brief that morning mention al-Qaida or terrorism?

“Contrary to what you read on the internet. It did not,” Morell said. The PDB focused on the second intifada, then raging in the West Bank, which the president was closely following. There was no mention of terrorism or al-Qaida outside the intifada.

One item in the brief caught the president’s attention, and he called Condoleezza Rice to ask her to follow up. The briefing lasted about 20 to 25 minutes, starting at eight. Then they left for Booker T. elementary school.

The president gave Morell a specific instruction: call Director Tenet and tell him that if he got any information about the perpetrator, the president wanted to be the first to know. Morell also remembered the head of the Secret Service telling the president he needed to stay away from Washington. The president’s answer was firm: “The American people want to know where their president is. I’m coming home now.”

A New Architecture for a New Threat

Sept. 11, 2001 represented a new kind of national security threat, and a new national security architecture was created to confront it. The panel’s discussion moved to how the government viewed the terrorist threat in the wake of the attacks.

Hadley said the actions taken afterward are hard to understand without grasping the mood at the time. “We had been attacked. We were surprised,” he said. The source of the next threat was not known.

“Nothing will ever be the same.”

That line, written by McLaughlin as the day unfolded, captured the scale of what had happened. The panel did not lay out a full policy timeline, but the new architecture that emerged from that morning marked a permanent shift in how the government weighed threats at home.

Warnings on Record

Harman’s story about the National Commission on Terrorism underscored a painful irony: the warnings were on record, and no one was paying attention to them. The commission had predicted a major attack on U.S. soil.

For the people on the panel, the day never fully receded. McLaughlin’s computer note captured the permanent break. Hadley’s memory of Mineta grounding thousands of planes captured the immediate, unscripted response. Harman’s near-miss with the Capitol captured how close the government came to losing its continuity.

Morell’s memory of the president’s demand — to be the first to know the perpetrator — captured something else: the personal weight of the day at the top of the government.

The planes, the field, the evacuated buildings, the briefing that did not mention al-Qaida — all of it shaped what came next. The people who lived through the morning described what it took to get there.

Source: npr.org

9/11 anniversary · Bush White House · CIA · intelligence community · national security · terrorism