Bush: 'We're At War'

Such a polite, neat young man. He brought his landlord coffee and cookies. He remembered to use his frequent-flier number when he bought his ticket from Boston to Los Angeles--business class. And a good student, too, reported his flight instructor, though he seemed more interested in turning the plane than landing it. A little standoffish, maybe, but he could knock back a vodka with his buddies. So it was uncharacteristic for Mohamed Atta to be running a little behind when he boarded American Airlines Flight 11 on Tuesday shortly before 8 a.m. One of his bags never made it aboard, but maybe that was intentional, too, for inside was a suicide note. The FBI believes that Atta was in control when Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, but maybe not. The hijackers had an abundance of piloting talent--four of the five terrorists aboard had some flight training. Indeed, there were enough hijackers with piloting skills to fly four airliners--two for New York, and two for Washington.

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At the White House on that beautiful, clear morning, the occupants were running for their lives. Vice President Dick Cheney had already been hustled into a bunker designed to withstand the shock of a nuclear blast when, at about 9:30 a.m., Secret Service men told staffers leaving the West Wing to run, not walk, as far away as possible. "There's a plane overhead, don't look back!" shouted a policeman. Agents were yelling at women to shed their high-heeled shoes so they could run faster. Several staffers saw a civilian airliner, reflecting white in the bright sunlight, appearing to circle nearby. Perhaps unable to spot the White House, the hijackers at the control of American Airlines Flight 77 dive-bombed the Pentagon instead.

How could a small band of religious zealots knock down the World Trade Center, the most visible symbol of capitalism, killing thousands in lower Manhattan, and come so close to destroying the executive mansion of the most powerful nation on earth? Part of the answer is that few U.S. government officials really believed they could. Consider the dazed reaction of top officials of the Federal Aviation Administration, the agency charged with safely controlling the nation's airways. Although a couple of aircraft had been behaving erratically on the radar screens of flight controllers for at least 15 minutes, officials at FAA headquarters did not suspect that a hijacking had occurred until the second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, rammed the South Tower of the World Trade Center at 9:05. A half hour later, when the third plane, American Flight 77, hit the Pentagon, the FAA officials responded in classic bureaucratic fashion. "Get out your security manuals," ordered one top official. The officials dutifully began reading their manuals to determine who among them were deemed "essential" and should stay and work, and who should go home for the day.

U.S. Air Force fighter planes did not arrive to protect the nation's capital for another 15 minutes. Pentagon officials had watched helplessly as the suicide airliner bore in on the nation's military command center. In the chaotic aftermath, the plane at the greatest risk of getting shot down was the one flying the attorney general of the United States. At least that's the way it seemed to the pilot, David Clemmer, a Vietnam combat veteran who received a warning as he flew the nation's chief law- enforcement officer, John Ashcroft, back to Washington from an aborted speaking engagement in the Midwest. Land your plane immediately, Clemmer was instructed by an air-traffic controller, or risk getting shot down by the U.S. Air Force. Clemmer turned to an FBI agent assigned to guard Ashcroft and said, "Well, Larry, we're in deep kimchi here, and basically, all the rules you and I know are out the window." The pilot notified air-traffic controllers that he was carrying the attorney general--but was worried that the message wouldn't get through to military commanders controlling the airspace around Washington. "Thinking out of the box," as Clemmer put it, he asked for--and got--a fighter escort into Washington. His plane, guarded by an F-16, was one of the last to land on the East Coast that day.

Within a day or two, the haplessness, the confusion, the mentality of "it can't happen here" had been wiped away, perhaps forever. An aircraft carrier patrolled off New York Harbor, past the skyline so horrifically sundered by the destruction of the World Trade Center. Washington was an armed camp on hair-trigger alert. "We're at war," declared President George W. Bush. "We will not only deal with those who dare attack America, we will deal with those who harbor them and feed them and house them." The FBI had launched the largest manhunt in history, code-named PENTTBOM (for Pentagon and Twin Towers), tracking the suspected 19 suicide bombers and their backers around the nation and abroad. Intelligence officials told NEWSWEEK that they feared that between 30 and 50 teams of terrorists were still on the loose. It was hard to tell if the threat was real, or if America was gripped with the sort of frenzy that seized the nation after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor--and many citizens assumed that Japanese troops would soon be marching on Chicago. Northwest Airlines confirmed that flight attendants were staying away from work in droves. And bomb scares became routine. By Saturday, FBI agents had detained 25 people wanted for questioning on immigration violations and issued arrest warrants for two other "material witnesses."

Congress will no doubt hold hearings to assign the fault for a massive failure of intelligence. At the CIA, NEWSWEEK has learned, officials looked at the Justice Department's list of dead hijackers aboard American Flight 77, the plane that hit the Pentagon, and recognized three of them as terrorism suspects. ("Oh s--t," exclaimed one official.) In late August, the agency had asked the FBI to find two of the men, one of whom was believed to be connected to a suspect in the October 2000 bombing of the destroyer the USS Cole. But the FBI was still looking when the hijackers struck.