Most anybody who was sentient on Sept.11, 2001 has clear memories of the exact moment when they heard about or saw images of the attacks, first on the North tower of the World Trade Center, then the South, then the plane that plowed into the Pentagon, and finally, United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania after a passenger revolt. CIA officers, of course, had special reasons to react in shock and anger, but also dismay, because many had been warning for weeks that Osama Bin Laden was “determined” to strike in the U.S.. Some also worried about the fate of their colleagues on the 25th floor of Tower 7, which housed the agency’s New York office, now afire from the airliner crashes and collapses of the north and south towers. (All got out alive.)
At headquarters, and at far flung overseas posts, CIA officers cast off their shock and dismay and swung into action, knowing they were in the first minutes of a new and probably very long war.
Here are their stories, arranged by name in alphabetical order. You can click on their names for their bios.
I remember 9/11 as if it were yesterday. Many of us do.
I was Director of NROC [the National Resettlement Operations Center, which handles defectors] that morning, hosting an in-house breakfast in our conference room for a departing NROC officer. Like many of us, we saw on tv the strike on the first tower, and we all (about 30 of us), froze in place wondering what that was all about. Then watching the second plane hit the second tower, we dispersed quickly in absolute shocking silence to our individual offices, including me to mine with my NROC lawyer to watch in horror the unfolding events and trying to figure out what we in our NROC outbuilding [in Tyson’s Corner, Va. could do]. We reviewed quickly whether any of our recent defectors might have any intelligence or clue about what was going on, and then got a call from the White House asking if NROC had any suitable and available safe houses in the area for possible use by the First Family in case of evacuation. I immediately dispersed two officers to “get one ready,” although there turned out to be no need. This was the same day I was scheduled to take a plane South to visit with a few resettlement cases which, needless to say, was cancelled. We waited and watched in horror the rest of that day, many of us wanting to return to HQs to lend any assistance we could…which happened in the days following.
I was on Capitol Hill and could see smoke from Pentagon. And of course I couldn’t miss the F-16’s buzzing Washington. Me being me, I jumped to the totally wrong conclusion that with four planes commandeered someone with battlefield experience had to be behind it—I don’t know, maybe Imad Mughniyah. But what wasn’t on my bingo card was a Saudi contractor living in San Diego who’d be arrested in Birmingham [England] with calculations for a plane to hit a target on the horizon and hanging out with Anwar Al-Awlaki playing jihad. It does makes me wonder what I got out of Arabic and spending the bulk of my working life trying to figure out the Middle East.
I was working in the main CTC vault where Alec Station was situated at headquarters on 9/11 and remember the feeling of knowing immediately when the FAA officer circulated the information about the first plane. We had been warning for months, and I think we all just knew. But the one memory that stands out the most to me was seeing colleagues, who earlier that morning had still believed we were over-warning about al-Qa’ida, be the first to volunteer to help after being instructed to evacuate the building for safety. It meant a lot to us.