43* (7 page)

“Get me a directive from the president or the attorney general and I’ll be happy to
give permission,” the deputy director said sternly. But Gore was spending Labor Day
in Tennessee, one of his regular visits “back home, where I’ve got some fences to
mend.” Once Gore got Clarke’s plea, he talked with Attorney General Jamie Gorelick,
who talked to acting director Kelly, who convened a legal team that promised an answer
within seventy-two hours. The search of Moussaoui’s computer would not begin until
8 a.m. Central Daylight Time on the morning of Tuesday, September 11.

And because it was Labor Day weekend, there was no one with real authority at the
FAA, no one to respond to Clarke’s new concern; his bulletin about the Moussaoui memo
had triggered a note from the Phoenix FBI field office:
Nothing about a Moussaoui, but were you made aware of our concern over all those Middle
Easterners who seemed to be enrolling in U.S. flight schools?
No, he hadn’t been. But the two disparate pieces of information—Moussaoui in Minnesota,
other Middle Easterners at flight schools nationwide—seemed to fit. Moreover, the
whole intelligence system had been blinking bright red over Fourth of July weekend.
Maybe they had focused on the wrong holiday, and maybe the airlines were the target.

But Labor Day passed peacefully. And on Tuesday, September 4, when the top FAA officials
learned of Clarke’s concern, there was a giant collective eye-rolling.

First, they said, we haven’t had a U.S. hijacking in eighteen years; second, counterterrorism
has received threatening intelligence every holiday, and nothing ever happens. But
beyond all of that—what does this guy want us to
do
? Pull the airlines out of service so we can arm the damn cockpit doors? Hire a few
thousand air marshals in the next week? Double down on airport screenings?

“For God’s sake, Dick,” the top FAA security official said in a phone call, “do you
happen to know where the President of the United States is going next Tuesday? He’s
going to Miami International Airport, to celebrate a historic victory over airline
delays. How happy would he be if the day of his speech, we’ve got lines of very unhappy
passengers all over CNN? I don’t think so, Dick.”

As
Air Force One
flew south this late-summer day, President Gore was looking forward to an increasingly
rare event: a full day of good news in the state that had given him the presidency,
and that remained the key focus of his team’s political energies.

In Orlando, there would be a speech at Disney World, before a convention of communications-software
developers, where Gore would promise continued federal support for the rapid outbuilding
of a national broadband network.
Maybe the political world was stuck in a world of post offices and touch-tone phones,
he thought,
but that’s not where we’re heading, and I want the next generation of entrepreneurs
to know that I know
. In Miami this evening, he would speak at a massive dinner in honor of Jorge Mas
Canosa, the late king of the Cuban American community. And then tomorrow, Tuesday,
he would be at Miami International Airport, to commemorate the one unalloyed piece
of good news he had had in these past troubled months.

The bad news had come in waves. There was the collapse of the dot-com bubble, and
then the telecom crash, both beginning months before he had even taken office, the
result of events as disparate as a court ruling against Microsoft and a disastrously
wrongheaded merger between AOL and Time Warner. Once-mighty companies like WorldCom
and Global Crossing disappeared from the face of the earth, while other celebrated
companies, like Pets.com, imploded. The giddy sense of effortless enrichment among
investors collapsed just as thoroughly.

Worse, the seemingly unending series of interest-rate increases by the Fed had managed
to send the broader American economy into recession in March; by June the unemployment
rate had jumped to 6.4 percent—the highest in nine years—and late-night comedians
were beginning to joke that Al Gore had accomplished in six months what Clinton hadn’t
managed in eight years.

“Maybe,” David Letterman cracked, “it’s time to bring back to the White House someone
who know how to get things rising again. Anyone have Monica Lewinsky’s phone number?”

Nor was Gore finding any satisfaction in the fight for his legislative programs. The
Republican majority in the House was adamantly insisting on applying the entire surplus—still
estimated at more than $200 billion—toward a tax cut substantially skewed toward the
more affluent taxpayers; Gore’s plan to shore up the Social Security and Medicare
trust funds, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay insisted, was “just more proof that the
president marches to the beat of socialist drums.” From his own side of the spectrum
came more complaints that Gore was abandoning the core concerns of the Democratic
Party. Where were the large-scale investments in roads and bridges? Where was the
legislation making it easier for workers to unionize their factories and offices?
Where was universal health care? For heaven’s sake, there were even rumors that Gore
was considering the idea of an individual health mandate, the idea pushed by the right-wing
Heritage Foundation.

“I refuse to believe such rumors,” said Senator Hillary Clinton, who had famously
drafted a health-care plan as first lady that had gone down in ignominious defeat.
“No one who calls himself a Democrat could seriously entertain such a notion.”

The struggling economy and the legislative gridlock had combined to put a serious
dent in Gore’s approval ratings. Indeed, a poll release just that morning had shown
that if the 2000 election were rerun, Gore and Bush would once again finish in a dead
heat. And now there was a new annoyance—right there in the pages of the
New Yorker
magazine the president held in his lap.

It was a piece by Seymour Hersh, one of the most indefatigable investigative journalists,
the man who had exposed the My Lai massacre in South Vietnam back in 1969 and who
took special delight in ferreting out discontent in the defense and intelligence arenas.
Hersh’s ten-thousand-word article took a skeptical look at the killing of Osama bin
Laden, building a brief from dissident Defense Department and CIA officials. Hersh
questioned everything, from the president’s constitutional power to order extraterritorial
killing to the danger that bin Laden’s death could spark retaliation inside the United
States—“blowback,” as they called it in the intelligence community. There was no doubt
Hersh’s article would get heavy play on the network newscasts and the next day’s front
pages.

And that story would play at a time when fears of a terrorist strike were at a peak.
Back in July, Clarke had told Gore flatly that “something really, really spectacular
is going to happen here, and it’s going to happen soon.” CIA director Tenet was circulating
warnings from the Middle East that “something very, very, very, very big is about
to happen.” He had followed Clarke’s urgings, convened two principals meetings in
the past three weeks, he was on the phone daily with Tenet and the FBI—Bernie Kerik,
the new director, from New York, had been there for a few days now—and he hoped that
his insistence would work its way down that sclerotic bureaucracy. Well, Labor Day
had come and gone without incident, so maybe there was some breathing room. But that
Hersh piece was only likely to feed the classic Washington “cover your ass” mentality.

Which was why the event at the Miami airport the next day was such a welcome relief
for the president: a chance to share clearly good news with the country.

It was Gore’s attempt to answer one of the most nettlesome annoyances of middle-class
life in the America of 2001: air travel. For millions of middle-class and professional
men and women, the simple matter of taking to the skies had become hell on earth.
An antiquated air-traffic-control system, overscheduling of flights, and the rush
of travelers to enjoy cheap airfares had combined to strangle the system. Some ninety
million passengers had suffered delays or cancellations in just the first seven months
of 2000.

“I know airline delays may not rank with poverty and pollution and nuclear proliferation,”
he told his senior advisors, “but it’s one of those nuisances that can ruin a week.
If we could do something to make it better, it would be a huge political plus.”

So on April 15, 2001—a date chosen so he could offer “a small piece of good news from
the government to whom you have just sent your taxes”—President Gore had signed off
on a simple, highly consequential step. For years, military “air corridors” across
the United States had been reserved for use by the Armed Forces. With the Cold War
over, with the prospect of combat with any hostile power so remote, the president
went to Newark airport on Tax Day to announce that he was opening the two East Coast
corridors to commercial travel.

The results were impressive and, by the standards of government actions, swift. By
June, when the summer travel season began in earnest, flight delays out of the three
major New York airports had been cut nearly in half. When thunderstorms erupted, as
they sometimes did during summer months, no one could do much about the delays that
followed. But on a bright, clear day, it was almost commonplace for flights to depart
more or less on schedule. And it was on just such a day that President Gore traveled
to Miami to celebrate the achievement. It was a perfect trifecta for the beleaguered
president: the use of executive power to achieve a goal that would be directly felt
by a critical voting bloc even as the gridlocked legislative process had stalled his
agenda; a chance for an appearance in the state that had given him the White House,
and would likely be critical again; and an appearance on as perfect a late-summer
day as anyone could want, just as the regiments of business travelers would be returning
to the skies after the summer vacations. Tuesday, September 11.

There was no way it should have led to the worst day in American history.

“I can’t believe it!” First Officer LeRoy Homer said to Jason Dahl, the pilot of the
Boeing 757. “Wheels up at 8:10? At Newark? When was the last time we didn’t sit on
the tarmac for an hour?”

“Weather’s perfect, for a change,” Captain Dahl said, noting the bright-blue sky,
no storms anywhere, and a lot more room for commercial jets to fly, thanks to President
Gore’s opening of those military air corridors. Moreover, the FAA was paying special
attention to the travels of the president this day; extra air-traffic controllers
had been quietly assigned to the nation’s busiest airports, to lessen the risk of
embarrassing delays on the morning the president was to celebrate easing the pain
of air travelers.

So United Flight 93, bound for San Francisco out of Newark International Airport,
took off just when it was supposed to; as did American Flight 11 out of Boston’s Logan
Airport, headed for Los Angeles; United 175, also headed from Boston to L.A.; and
American Flight 77, leaving Washington’s Dulles International for Los Angeles. With
only thirty-seven passengers on board United 93, it promised to be an easy day’s work
for the seven-person flight crew. For flight attendant CeeCee Lyles, it was a particular
contrast to her previous work; for six years she had worked as a police office and
detective in Fort Pierce, Florida, before leaving in 2000 to take up the work she
had wanted since childhood. Lyles would often recall how some in her family thought
a flight attendant’s work was more dangerous than police work.
Sure, if you’re threatened by a passenger who wants one more drink.

It was just after the plane had reached cruising altitude—8:40 a.m.—when three men
suddenly stood up, wrapped red bandanas around their heads, and forced their way into
the cockpit. A moment later, a voice came over the loudspeaker system:

“Ladies and gentlemen: Here the captain. Please sit down and keep remaining sitting.
We have a bomb on board. So, sit.”

Within minutes, several of the passengers had gotten on their cell phones or the onboard
Airfones to call home and report what was happening. But as far as the plane’s passengers
and those at home knew, this was a hijacking no different from the ones that had plagued
the world decades earlier; presumably, the hijackers would fly the plane to Cuba or
some other foreign destination, release their demands, and eventually, the passengers
would be set free. Indeed, a moment later, the plane made a sharp turn and began heading
southeast, destination unknown.

It was not until CeeCee Lyles reached her sister at 9 a.m. that anyone on board had
a sense of what was happening.

“I’m watching the TV,” her sister said, “and they’re saying that a small plane just
crashed into the World Trade Center. An accident, they’re saying.”

“I’ve got to go,” Lyles said. She ran to the back of the plane, where most of the
passengers and crew had been herded, and told them what had just happened at the World
Trade Center. “I think we’ve got to take this plane back,” she said. “This can’t possibly
be a coincidence.”

Three minutes later, as the passengers and crew were trying to determine what to do
next, Lyles’s phone rang again.

“Another plane just hit the other tower!” her sister screamed.

“All right, let’s roll!” passenger Todd Beamer said to the group.

And if the passengers had had a little more time, if United 93 had been delayed even
by fifteen or twenty minutes, perhaps they could have seized control of the plane,
or at least taken it down before it reached its destination.

But time had run out. Because President Gore was determined to broaden his appeal
to the American middle class with a simple change in air-traffic rules, United 93
took off on time that day; which meant there was no gap between the hijacking of the
flight and the three other jets—which meant that at 9:04 a.m. on the morning of September
11, 2001, United 93 was two minutes away from a direct hit on the United States Capitol.