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Terror chief tells of 9/11 West Wing terror on ninth anniversary
The terrorism chief who was running the White House situation room on September 11, 2001, has told for the first time how his staff tried to phone home after being told as many as 11 hijacked aircraft could be heading for the West Wing.
By Duncan Gardham,, Security Correspondent
Published: 9:00PM BST 10 Sep 2010
The passengers on board United Flight 93 fought back against the hijackers and the plane crashed in Pennsylvania, 10 to 20 minutes before it would have hit the White House Photo: AP
Richard Clarke, who was President Bush's Counter-Terrorism Coordinator, said he and around a dozen colleagues left in the White House thought they were going to die as unaccounted for aircraft – including one that was hijacked – flew towards the capital. "We reduced the staff down to a very small number out of the thousands that work in the White House. We were all very clear we might not make it out," he told The Daily Telegraph.
"We decided that Flight 93 was heading towards us and we had reports that there were others – possibly up to 11 hijacked aircraft – and we assumed their target was either the White House or Capitol Hill. "I didn't think we were going to get out. Most of us didn't. I told several people who had children to leave but they wouldn't. Most couldn't get through to their families because the phones were jammed or they were not at home."
One member of staff, Roger Cressey, Mr Clarke's deputy, did get through and was told his father-in-law was on one of the hijacked flights. "There was no panic in the West Wing," Mr Clarke said. "It was extraordinarily calm, serious and businesslike. We were a group of people who had done this before, who had trained on a lot of simulations. "A regular feed indicated that one plane was still an issue and we thought it was probably coming for the White House."
George Bush had to be told he could not come back to Washington from a school visit in Florida and instead flew to air force bases in Louisiana and then Nebraska. Dick Cheney, the Vice-President and Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, were both in a secure bunker in the East Wing of the White House, communicating by telephone with Mr Clarke, who was running the emergency response.
One of the staff, Frank Miller, got the others in the West Wing to sign a list and then emailed it out of the building so that rescuers would know how many bodies they were looking for if the aircraft struck the White House. Mr Clarke said a US Army engineering unit was based outside Washington with plans of the building and GPS coordinates ready to dig through the rubble. "If that aircraft had hit the White House, the building would have been demolished and that would have been very symbolic but Dick Cheney was in a bomb shelter and he would probably have survived and been dug out."
Mr Clarke said the rest of the White House staff had been told to take off their shoes and "run, to get out quick." "It didn't take too much to get rid of most of them," he added. There were no fighter aircraft over Washington and there was no chance of shooting down United Airlines Flight 93 but the passengers on board fought back against the hijackers and the flight crashed in Pennsylvania, 10 to 20 minutes before it would have hit the White House.
It later emerged that Mr Cressey's father-in-law had missed his flight. Asked whether the threat to his own life affected his views of the day, nine years on, Mr Clarke said: "It has always coloured my view that they were trying to kill us as Americans and it has always been personal. "The anniversary is a good time to remember what we could have done differently." Mr Clarke, who now runs a consulting firm, has been critical of the Bush administration's refusal to take the threat from al-Qaeda seriously before September 11.
But he said he believed that eventually Osama bin Laden will be caught. "We have really not had a fix on him since he walked into Pakistan in November 2001. We don't really know where he has been, we just assume it is Pakistan because that's the last place we know where he was, nine years ago. "But I believe we will find him eventually and I am quite sure he is still alive. It could happen tomorrow, or it could happen ten years from now."
