A Shadow of Itself

Morning, September 11, 2001.  In my car on the Gowanus Expressway along the Brooklyn waterfront.  Just before nine, sirens.  Traffic slowing.  Fire trucks wailing toward Manhattan.   Over the radio, word that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Towers.

I’d flown small planes up the Hudson River myself past the World Trade Center. I guessed that something like a Skyhawk or a Cherokee had drifted into the Towers.  A wind gust or turbulence from the helicopters or the jets might have thrown it out of control.

The news stations were talking about nothing but the crash.  Eyewitnesses were insisting that the Tower had been hit by a large aircraft, not a private plane.  One witness – who sounded like he knew what he was talking about – said he thought it had been a twin prop military transport.

An announcer broke in that another plane had hit the second World Trade Tower.  From the Verrazano Narrows Bridge I could see both Towers pouring out black plumes like giant smokestacks.  At my office on Staten Island I heard that American Airlines Flight 77 had hit the Pentagon and on an office television I saw the South Tower collapse at 10:05, the North Tower twenty-three minutes later.  Wanting to see for myself, I went down to the ferry landing to meet the survivors arriving from Manhattan.   By then United Airlines Flight 93 had crashed in Pennsylvania, and there were rumors that other hijacked planes were heading for the White House, the Capitol . . . whatever seemed a likely target. There were even supposed to be terrorists on Staten Island.

* * *

When the planes hit the World Trade Towers, I was already working on this history of the Bureau.

I knew that on 9/11 the FBI was, by law and Presidential Directive, America’s lead agency in the war against terrorism.  The FBI had just passed through a decade of signal successes in “rendering” suspects from overseas back to the United States to stand trial for terrorist attacks within the United States and against Americans abroad.  Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Clinton had sent FBI agents around the globe to respond to attacks on American interests abroad – embassy bombings, barracks explosions, attacks on navy warships – where once they would have sent the marines.  “The successful prosecutions of individuals involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the plot to attack New York City landmarks, and the 1998 bombings of two U.S. Embassies in East Africa,” a government study reported, “added to the emphasis on law enforcement as a counterterrorism measure.”  The architects of this doctrine never meant the FBI to replace military action or diplomatic negotiations as a weapon against terrorism, but to complement them.  But for most of the nineties, FBI law enforcement overseas had replaced military action and diplomatic negotiations in the war against terrorism.

I had interviewed the FBI officials in charge of counter terrorism, though that was hardly on my mind as I watched the Trade Towers collapse.  But when President Bush announced that the country was undergoing “an apparent terrorist attack,” I thought of my conversations with Neil Gallagher, Assistant Director in charge of the National Security Division.  When I asked him what the Bureau was doing about terrorism, he took me to the Bureau’s high tech Strategic Intelligence and Operations Center where government leaders watching banks of computers and monitors could stay in touch with a terrorist attack site.  He had briefed me on Bureau doctrine of Joint Operations Commands and Joint Information Centers to coordinate the efforts of first responders to an attack.  The FBI’s planning for a terrorist attack focused on establishing order at the “crime scene,” to preserve evidence and organize it for the eventual trial.  The Bureau’s famed Hostage Rescue Team – the guys who slithered down ropes from black helicopters – had been embedded in “Critical Incident Response Group” whose mission was to collect evidence at violent crime scenes.  The HRT rehearsed “close quarters combat” against the “Tangos” (aviation lingo for the letter “T,” meaning terrorists) in maze-like shooting ranges at Quantico, preparing themselves to take out barricaded terrorists.   In field drills and “table top” exercises the Bureau had practiced restoring order as the panicked population of an urban center – one scenario was a biological attack on Wall Street – tried to flee while emergency personnel – police, fire department, military personnel, government leaders – made their way through the crowds.  The Bureau had spent the better part of a decade readying itself for what it believed would be its principal challenge when the inevitable terrorist attack finally came – taking control of crime scene chaos to permit the orderly collection of evidence.

The 9/11 attack would make that planning seem irrelevant, almost bizarrely misguided.  Minutes after the attack Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was in charge.  He and his staff coordinated the work of the first responders.  Any FBI SAC who suggested to Giuliani that the Bureau was taking over would have had his head handed to him.  As for preserving evidence, getting ready for a trial — everyone in the world had seen the crime, and the terrorists were all dead along with their victims.  There would be no trial.  There was no evidence in any real sense, only the respectful recovery of the victims’ remains for burial.  Although the FBI quickly managed to identify the nineteen hijackers, that was cold comfort.

The question about 9/11 was not who had done it or whether they could be convicted; it was why hadn’t the FBI (and the CIA) kept this from happening.  I remembered what the FBI’s National Security Division had told me when I asked them what they were doing to stop terrorist attacks.  They had kept repeating like a memorized mantra, “We aren’t violating anybody’s civil liberties.”

When I pressed them on what they were doing, they essentially expanded on that same idea.   They explained that they could not — and would not — launch an investigation of any individual or group until the suspects had gotten beyond talking about an attack to actually acquiring the weapons they were going to use.

That hadn’t impressed me then.  I was sure it was going to impress any one now.  But the Bureau hadn’t really been responding to my questions – it was talking past me to another audience, one so distrustful of the FBI that it would far prefer the Bureau to do nothing than do anything that might even theoretically “violate anybody’s civil liberties.” Clearly, the pre-9/11 FBI had been determined to err on the side of tolerating potentially dangerous groups right up to the verge of violence rather than risk being accused of harassing folks who might only appear to be dangerous.

Pearl Harbor had been followed by years of blame mongering, Democrats and Republicans each trying to assign guilt for the intelligence failure to the other.  Half a century later conspiracy buffs are still trying to sell the notion that only colossal incompetence or treason could explain how FDR, the Navy and the FBI had ignored clues to the Japanese intentions.

But all responsible examinations of the Pearl Harbor disaster have concluded that those few meaningful “signals” were drowned out before December 7 by the meaningless “noise” of conflicting messages.  I had no doubt that after 9/11, too, all manner of “signals” would surface that should have tipped off the FBI and other agencies, supposedly, about the impending attack, had those signals been interpreted correctly.  I expected that this time, too, careful investigation and sober reflection would reveal that once again those meaningful signals were distinguishable only in hindsight from the static of meaningless noise.  There would be no smoking guns.  There would be no really damning answer to the question, what did the Bureau know and when did it know it?

I was wrong.