It's been 25 years since al-Qaida terrorists attacked the United States by hijacking four commercial airplanes and crashing them into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon.
A fourth plane crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pa..
Sept. 11, 2001 represented a new kind of national security threat, and a new national security architecture was created to confront it.
Before a live audience at NPR's headquarters in Washington, D.C., Sources and Methods host Mary Louise Kelly discussed how that day changed the country and its spy agencies, with people who worked on the frontlines of government and intelligence.
That panel included Stephen Hadley, Jane Harman, John Mclaughlin and Michael Morell. At the time of the attacks, Hadley was serving as deputy national security adviser in the Bush White House. Jane Harman was a Democratic member of Congress representing California. John McLaughlin was deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Michael Morell was also at the CIA and was President Bush's CIA briefer that very day.
The following highlights from their conversation have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
On their memories of the day:
John McLaughlin: I was running a staff meeting. We were talking about the budget, including the budget for counterterrorism. We were talking about the Balkans and some other problems we were struggling with at that moment. And the first plane hit. And like everyone else, my thought was, 'Could be terrorism. But let's see what is going on here.'
And of course, the second plane left no doubt in our minds. I thought, and I think everyone there thought, 'We are under attack.' The other thought was in my mind and the mind of many people would say, 'OK, that's it,' because we had been anticipating a major attack. We did not know time, target or method. But we had been receiving that summer, a giant spike in reporting about terrorism, something that the director subsequently characterized as the lights were blinking red all summer. But at the end of the day, I did write on my computer, 'Nothing will ever be the same.'
Stephen Hadley: I was in the Situation Room. Dick [Richard] Clarke, the White House counterterrorism chief at the time, had a group in the back room, trying to figure out what we knew, what happened, whether this might be the first of successive attacks, more coming.And then the White House evacuated, and we saw these people running down West Executive Avenue. So I asked the group in the Situation Room, 'Do you want to leave? Or do you want to stay?' Everybody said: 'We've got to stay and help the president manage this crisis,' so we did.I think one of the things I remember most was Norm [Norman] Mineta, then secretary of transportation, getting thousands of airplanes in the air over this country down onto the ground, because we did not know how many might have been taken over by terrorists and become a weapon against this country.
Jane Harman: If I could back it up just one day, on September 10th, I had lunch with Ambassador Paul Bremer.At the time, he had chaired something called the National Commission on Terrorism. I was a member of that commission, which was one of three commissions predicting, based on studies we had made, that there could be a major terror attack on U.S. soil. And Jerry [Paul Bremer] and I were having lunch near the Capitol, bemoaning the fact that no one was paying attention to us. So, 20 hours later, guess what?
[That morning] I was going to my office, and then I was going to the intel rooms, which were in the dome of the Capitol at the time. And later, most of us thought that the target of that plane that went down in Pennsylvania was the U.S. Capitol. So my office called and said the office buildings are evacuated, a plane has hit the World Trade Tower and we're not sure what it is, but the office buildings are closed. The Capitol just closed. And so a lot of us I mean, I would say hundreds of members were milling around outside the Capitol. We would have had a continuity of government crisis if that plane had hit the Capitol. And what I heard, I'm not sure this is true, is that it left late, that United plane 93, and had it not left late, it would have been in flight before we got real news of what happened to the Trade Towers, and it might have hit when the rest of us were around.
Mary Louise Kelly: Michael, I've saved you for last because you were traveling with President Bush on his plane that day as his CIA briefer. Did the briefing that morning, the president's daily brief, that you delivered to President Bush mention al-Qaida, mention terrorism?
Michael Morell: Contrary to what you read on the internet. It did not. I remember distinctly that it focused on the second intifada, which was then raging in the West Bank, which the president was very much focused on. No mention of terrorism, no mention of al-Qaida outside the intifada.There was a piece in the PDB (president's daily briefing) that caught the president's attention, and he called Condi Rice [Condoleezza Rice] to ask her to follow up on something. I think the briefing lasted about 20 to 25 minutes, started at eight. And then we left the briefing and got in the motorcade to go to Booker T. elementary school.
The president did say to me that he wanted me to call Director Tenet [George Tenet] and tell him that if he got any information as to the perpetrator, that he, the president, wanted to be the first to know.
I remember distinctly the head of the Secret Service telling the president that he needed to stay away from Washington. And I remember the president saying, 'The American people want to know where their president is. I'm coming home now.'
How the government viewed the terrorist threat in the wake of the attacks:
Hadley: I think it's hard to understand the actions that were taken without a sense of the mood at the time we had been attacked. We were surprised. We did not really know from whence it came. We did not know as much about al-Qaida as we needed to. And the intelligence community was saying at the time, that they thought it was likely or at least highly probable that this was a first of a wave of mass casualty attacks, some of which might involve weapons of mass destruction from this enemy that we felt we did not know well enough. So it was an all- hands-on-deck moment to get the country in a position so that that reality would not happen. And all the steps we were taking to change missions, organizations and the like, you can criticize individual pieces of them but the country pulled together and that prophecy did not come true. And that's a great tribute to what this country did in that moment of crisis.
Morell: It is really hard to overstate how worried we all were in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that we were going to be hit again. There were many days when George Tenet and I walked from the old executive office building across the West Executive Avenue to the West Wing, where we said to each other, 'I wonder if we're going to get hit today.' And these weapons of mass destruction that Steve talked about, we learned an awful lot about al-Qaida's efforts in that arena in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. We knew they were talking to Pakistani nuclear scientists, trying to get their hands on a nuclear weapon. We had reporting that maybe they were going to sneak one into New York City. It is really hard to overstate the threat that we all felt. So I think it's easy to criticize sometime, that we may have overreached here or overreached there. But that context is everything.
Kelly: I just want to quote you, John, because you and I have talked about this over the years in various interviews. I was pushing you on some of the actions that the CIA took after 9/11, (like waterboarding). You told me in 2018, 'If you were a CIA officer back in 2002, you were torn. On the one hand by the sense you might be doing something in conflict with basic values that you hold dear. On the other hand, failure to get that information might put the blood of Americans on your hands.'
McLaughlin: Listen, difficult decisions were taken in those days, and we often say we hope that no one has to make those decisions again. And what I can tell you is they weren't perfectly executed. But on the other hand, the United States was not attacked by al-Qaida again. The gloves did come off.
Hadley: [There were measures] kept secret because if they disclosed to the enemy, their purpose and usefulness would be lost. We knew at the time that we were going to authorize and do things and establish programs that when the crisis of the moment and the concern of the moment had died down, The American people might be at the safe space, after we'd gotten after al-Qaida, after we reduced the threat. The American people may be uncomfortable with them. We knew that was a possibility, but we thought these were measures we had to do to get on top of the threat to prevent the country from being attacked again. And I think that was the right trade-off.
Harman: I certainly respect the fact that the CIA and our whole intelligence community was worried about a second wave of attacks. But I would say as someone who was in the chairs in Congress, I became the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee during that time and who struggled to get information, that the information was not adequate at the time.
I remember asking someone, 'Why did we open Guantanamo Bay prison in a piece of Cuba that is U.S. soil?'
Answer: To be beyond the reach of U.S. law. Now, I'm a trained lawyer and I knew that made no sense. But I thought maybe there's something I don't understand. Well, guess what? The Supreme Court agreed with me. And now Guantanamo Bay has to employ the protections under our Constitution. So my bottom line is, there were others who were trying to get on top of this story who really cared, as everyone did, about doing this the right way. And I'm not sure we got there fast enough.
On the legacy of the post-9/11 tactics :
Kelly: Should we still risk privacy for the sake of security? I understand that hindsight is 2020, but the trade-offs that America made – I take the point. We didn't know what was coming next. And we didn't know where bin Laden was. The enhanced interrogation techniques, the torture, whatever intelligence they produced of value, how do you weigh that against the damage to America's reputation as a country that believes in the rule of law?
Morell: Steve mentioned earlier our concern about how the American public would react at the end of the day. You know what? They supported everything that we did, the American public in every poll that's ever been taken. It was the elite who grabbed this as an issue. The American people thought that we did the right thing to protect the country.
I think we're talking about a whole bunch of issues here that result in us losing the big picture. The big picture is that despite intentions, plans, plots to attack America again after 9/11, it didn't happen. We're talking to the people in the room here. We're talking to your audience. Your government and your intelligence community protected you after 9/11 and deserve a tremendous amount of credit for that.
Kelly: I appreciate that point and I appreciate you making it. And I'm raising questions in the interest of asking what are the trade-offs that were made in terms of America's moral standing?
Laughlin: I would go back to something I said at the very beginning, which is in one sentence, difficult decisions were made. They were not perfectly executed. America has not been attacked again.
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