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Even if words might fail, they’re the best hope to delay the descent of 9/11 into the well of history. That is the purpose of this book. The approach is to recount the chaotic day as a narrative in three parts: events in the air, on the ground, and in the aftermath, focusing on individuals whose actions and experiences range from heroic to heartbreaking to homicidal. For every account included here, a thousand others are equally important. I’ve tried to choose stories that reveal the depth and breadth of the day without turning this into an encyclopedia. The goal is to provide a fresh perspective among readers for whom the attacks remain “news,” and to create something like memories for everyone else.
Another hope is more intimate: to attach names to some of the people directly affected by these events. Of the nearly three thousand men, women, and children killed on 9/11, arguably none can be considered a household name. The best “known” victim might be the so-called Falling Man, photographed plummeting from the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Yet even he remains nameless to most people, an anonymous icon.
THIS BOOK HAS its roots in the day itself. On September 11, 2001, as a reporter for the Boston Globe, I wrote the lead news story about the attacks, with contributions from several dozen colleagues. The work was at once historic and local: both hijacked planes that struck the Twin Towers took flight from Boston’s Logan International Airport. Five days later, with help from four reporters, I published a narrative called “Six Lives” that became the scale model for this book. It wove the stories of six people affected by, responsible for, or otherwise connected to the hijacking of American Airlines Flight 11 and the North Tower calamity. As we explained at the time, the story was designed to reveal “a nation’s shared experience, as told through their memories and the memories of their loved ones. It also creates a memorial to all those who were killed, and provides a record for all who lived.”
Several years ago, I discussed “Six Lives” at Boston University, where I teach journalism and where at least twenty-eight 9/11 victims earned degrees. Talking afterward with my friend and agent Richard Abate, we feared that many of my students, as well as several of our own children, felt little or no personal connection to 9/11. To some it seemed as distant as World War I. That realization triggered an idea: I could expand “Six Lives” to cover not only the first flight and the first tower, but all four flights and their unscheduled destinations, along with the ripples of physical and emotional effects. Time would serve not as an eraser but as an ally, yielding information and perspective collected in the years since 9/11 to deepen the account while keeping it accessible and truthful.
Speaking of truth, this book follows strict rules of narrative nonfiction. It takes no license with facts, quotes, characters, or chronologies. Descriptions of events and individuals rely on firsthand or authoritative accounts, checked for accuracy and cited in the endnotes where appropriate. All references to thoughts and emotions come from the individual in whose mind they arose, either from interviews, first-person reports, or other primary sources.
The attacks of 9/11 are among the most heavily covered events in history. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that some individuals featured in this book have had their stories told elsewhere. Several are subjects of entire books, among them Rick Rescorla, Welles Crowther, Father Mychal Judge, former FBI counterterrorism chief John O’Neill, and several heroes of United Flight 93. Some accounts included here rely on testimony from the 2006 trial of al-Qaeda member Zacarias Moussaoui, who pleaded guilty to being involved in the 9/11 plot. Overall, I mined information from government documents, law enforcement reports, trial transcripts, books, periodicals, documentaries, and broadcast and online works from reputable sources, credited where appropriate. Mainly, I relied on my own interviews with survivors, family and friends of the lost, witnesses, emergency responders, government officials, scholars, and military men and women.
Despite my efforts, and despite years of investigations, unanswered questions remain. Certain details and timeline elements are vague or in dispute. I have pointed out some of those gaps and disagreements in the text or in the notes. I have not included unfounded allegations or pseudoscience from the cottage industry of 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Facts are stubborn and powerful: this is a true story.
THE ESSENTIAL JOB of journalism, from daily reporting to narrative history, is to answer six fundamental questions: who, what, where, when, why, and how. Motivation being the great mystery of human existence, the most elusive is usually “why.” As in: “Why did terrorists who claimed to be acting on behalf of Islam hijack commercial airliners to crash them into U.S. civilian and government targets on 9/11?”
By focusing primarily on the day itself, I’ve left deep exploration of that question to others. Readers inclined toward further pursuit of “why” should seek out additional works. Three worth reading are Steve Coll’s excellent Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001; Terry McDermott’s Perfect Soldiers: The 9/11 Hijackers: Who They Were, Why They Did It; and Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.
Wright traced the forces, philosophers, and practitioners of the 9/11 brand of jihad, an Arabic word that translates as “struggle.” His accomplishment cannot be reduced to a few lines, but he masterfully examined the mindset of those responsible for the attacks:
Christianity—especially the evangelizing American variety—and Islam were obviously competitive faiths. Viewed through the eyes of men who were spiritually anchored in the seventh century, Christianity was not just a rival, it was the archenemy. To them the Crusades were a continual historical process that would never be resolved until the final victory of Islam.
Wright also provided insight into the men who carried out the hijackings:
Radicalism usually prospers in the gap between rising expectations and declining opportunities… . Anger, resentment, and humiliation spurred young Arabs to search for dramatic remedies. Martyrdom promised such young men an ideal alternative to a life that was so sparing in its rewards. A glorious death beckoned to the sinner, who would be forgiven, it is said, with the first spurt of blood, and he would behold his place in Paradise even before his death.
Of the other exceptional books about 9/11, including those cited in the Select Bibliography, several deserve acknowledgment: The Ground Truth: The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11 by John Farmer, senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, distills how government and military officials served (and misled) the public; The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11, by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, is an impressive synthesis of information about these events; and 102 Minutes, by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn of the New York Times, lives up to its subtitle: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive inside the Twin Towers. The 9/11 Commission’s final report is an essential resource, as are the commission’s voluminous staff statements, hearing transcripts, and monographs. I benefited greatly from the work of former 9/11 Commission investigator Miles Kara, who maintains the insightful website “9-11 Revisited,” at www.oredigger61.org.
In the pages ahead, my goal is to fulfill the promise I made in 2001 with “Six Lives”: to create a memorial to all those who were killed and to provide a record for all who survived. Plus one more: to build understanding among those who follow.
—Mitchell Zuckoff, Boston
PROLOGUE (#ulink_b5ea8e70-04e1-5eae-8108-509689972baa)
“A Clear Declaration of War” (#ulink_b5ea8e70-04e1-5eae-8108-509689972baa)
THIS BOOK COULD BEGIN NEARLY FOUR DECADES BEFORE 9/11, IN 1966, with Egypt’s execution of a fanatically anti-Western author named Sayyid Qutb, whose writings inspired two generations of Islamist terror groups. Or further back in time, to 1918, with the defeat of the last great Muslim empire, the Ottoman sultanate. Or even further, to 1798, the year Napoleon Bonaparte occupied Egypt. Or seven hundred years before that, with the start of the Crusades. Or five hundred years before that, when Muslims believe the first verses of the Quran were revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. Or more than two thousand years earlier, with the birth of Abraham.
When it comes to historical storytelling, it’s impossible for one volume to capture everything that came before. Yet a story must start somewhere. In this case, consider a relatively recent date: February 23, 1998. On that day, a shadowy forty-year-old Islamic militant named Osama bin Laden issued a fatwa, a furious religious decree. His edict declared war on the United States and all its citizens, wherever they or their interests could be found.
Faxed to an Arabic newspaper in London, the fatwa was signed by bin Laden, a Saudi heir to a construction fortune who was living in Afghanistan, and three other belligerent Islamic leaders, from Egypt, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Their declaration invoked a militant interpretation of jihad that they said obligated every Muslim to violently defend holy lands against enemies. Two years earlier, bin Laden had issued a narrower fatwa, aimed at military targets, that called for the removal of American troops from Saudi Arabia: “[E]xpel the enemy, humiliated and defeated, out of the sanctities of Islam.” The new fatwa went much further.
In florid language, the February 1998 fatwa asserted that three primary offenses justified a declaration of global war: (1) the presence of American military forces on the holiest lands of Islam, the Arabian Peninsula; (2) the U.S.-led war in Iraq; and (3) the United States’ support of Israel, in particular its control of Jerusalem. “All of these crimes and sins committed by the Americans,” the statement said, “are a clear declaration of war on Allah, his messenger, and Muslims.” In response, bin Laden and his cohort issued a command: “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it… . We—with Allah’s help—call on every Muslim who believes in Allah and wishes to be rewarded to comply with Allah’s order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it.”
By the time he released his more strident fatwa, the bearded, lanky bin Laden was no stranger to American intelligence agencies. Between 1996 and 1997, U.S. officials learned that he headed his own terrorist group and was involved in a 1992 attack on a hotel in Yemen that housed U.S. military personnel. They also discovered that bin Laden had played a role in the “Black Hawk Down” shootdown of U.S. Army helicopters in Somalia in 1993 and had possibly orchestrated a 1995 car bombing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that killed five Americans working with the Saudi National Guard. After the fatwa, bin Laden’s threat profile rose dramatically among U.S. officials, especially when, six months later, sources blamed him for the nearly simultaneous bombings of American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, in neighboring Tanzania, which killed more than two hundred people. In response to those bombings, President Bill Clinton authorized an attack using Tomahawk missiles aimed at six sites in Afghanistan. American officials believed that bin Laden would be at one of the target locations, but he had left hours earlier, apparently tipped off by Pakistani officials.
Bin Laden remained a focus of kill or capture discussions, even as a federal grand jury in New York indicted him in absentia in 1998 for conspiracy to attack U.S. defense installations. The U.S. intelligence community formally described his terror group, called al-Qaeda, or “the Base,” in 1999, fully eleven years after its formation. The attention only emboldened him. Bin Laden struck again in October 2000, when a small boat loaded with explosives tore a hole in a U.S. Navy destroyer, the USS Cole, as it refueled off the coast of Yemen. The blast killed seventeen crew members and injured dozens more.
Yet even as they tried to keep tabs on bin Laden, even as warning signals became sirens, American political and intelligence leaders never fully grasped how determined he was to execute his fatwa with mass murder inside the United States. Despite solid clues—which intensified during the summer of 2001—and sincere investigative efforts by a small number of individuals, overall the U.S. government response to bin Laden was characterized by missed connections, squandered opportunities, and overlooked signs of impending disaster. An intelligence-gathering structure built to monitor Russian men with bad suits and nuclear warheads didn’t know what to make of a fanatical Saudi in flowing robes issuing fatwas by fax machine.
Even discounting for hindsight, overwhelming evidence shows that the U.S. government’s failure to anticipate the attacks of 9/11 was as widespread as it was ultimately devastating. Scores of examples prove that point, but consider one. Several months before 9/11, the head of analysis for the U.S. government’s Counterterrorism Center wrote: “It would be a mistake to redefine counterterrorism as a task of dealing with ‘catastrophic,’ ‘grand,’ or ‘super’ terrorism, when in fact most of these labels do not represent most of the terrorism that the United States is likely to face or most of the costs that terrorism imposes on U.S. interests.” Those very labels—“catastrophic,” “grand,” “super-terrorism”—were in fact the perfect descriptions of what was about to happen.
WHILE GOVERNMENT AND intelligence officials tried to get a handle on bin Laden before and after his February 1998 fatwa, average Americans remained largely ignorant of him and his followers. For one thing, there was bin Laden’s country of residence. Among journalists, Afghanistan had long been shorthand for any subject too far away for many Americans to care about.
When bin Laden’s name did appear in the American media, journalists focused mainly on his wealth. Usually he’d be described something like this: “[A] multimillionaire Saudi dissident whom the State Department has labeled ‘one of the most significant financial sponsors of Islamic extremist activities in the world today.’” Rarely did news accounts suggest that he might pose a direct threat to the United States as a terrorist leader, although a 1997 article in the New York Times tiptoed in that direction, noting that “recent reports” indicated that bin Laden had paid for a house in Pakistan that sheltered the mastermind of a 1993 World Trade Center truck bombing that killed six people and injured more than a thousand. But in general, at the time of the fatwa it would have been easy for a well-read American to claim little knowledge and less concern about bin Laden. Before he issued his declaration of war, his name had appeared in a grand total of fifteen articles in the New YorkTimes, sometimes only in passing. Most other American news organizations mentioned him less, if at all.
Even bin Laden’s February 1998 fatwa against Americans passed unnoticed by most U.S. news organizations. The first clear reference in the Times came nearly six months later, as an offhand line in a story about a search for suspects in the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania: “Earlier this year, Mr. bin Laden and a group of extremist Muslim clerics called on their followers to kill Americans.” The story quickly moved on, mentioning only that bin Laden was the prime suspect in the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers, an apartment complex in Saudi Arabia, that killed nineteen American airmen. However, a New York Times article in 1999 about the embassy bombings reversed course, sharply downplaying the apparent threat he posed. The story read, in part:
In their war against Mr. bin Laden, American officials portray him as the world’s most dangerous terrorist. But reporters for The New York Times and the PBS program “Frontline,” working in cooperation, have found him to be less a commander of terrorists than an inspiration for them. Enemies and supporters, from members of the Saudi opposition to present and former American intelligence officials, say he may not be as globally powerful as some American officials have asserted.
Yet in the years before 9/11, a few journalists offered darker perspectives about bin Laden’s potential ability to violently carry out his fatwa. The Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus wrote a pointed story two days after bin Laden’s 1998 declaration of war that cited a CIA memo that said U.S. intelligence officials took the threat seriously. Another prescient outlier was ABC’s John Miller, who interviewed bin Laden in May 1998 at a training camp in Afghanistan. In the interview, bin Laden repeated his fatwa and said he would not distinguish between civilian and military targets. Writing about it later, Miller ruefully acknowledged that his interview barely registered with the public: “[W]e had our little story, and a few weeks later, in a few minutes of footage, Osama bin Laden would say ‘hi’ to America. Not many people would pay attention. Just another Arab terrorist.”
One scholar who took serious note of the fatwa was Bernard Lewis, an eminent if controversial intellectual who studied relations between Islam and the West and coined the phrase “clash of civilizations.” Writing in 1998 in Foreign Affairs magazine, Lewis concluded:
To most Americans, the declaration [by bin Laden] is a travesty, a gross distortion of the nature and purpose of the American presence in Arabia. They should also know that for many—perhaps most—Muslims, the declaration is an equally grotesque travesty of the nature of Islam and even of its doctrine of jihad… . At no point do the basic texts of Islam enjoin terrorism and murder. At no point do they even consider the random slaughter of uninvolved bystanders. Nevertheless, some Muslims are ready to approve, and a few of them to apply, the declaration’s extreme interpretation of their religion. Terrorism requires only a few.
Lewis’s warning went largely unheeded.
In the summer of 2001, not everyone in the United States felt confident in the state of the nation, but many relished, or took for granted, the privileges of life in the last superpower at the dawn of the twenty-first century. They had enjoyed the longest uninterrupted economic boom in the nation’s history, and the spread of American culture, political ideas, and business interests to the world’s farthest reaches seemed destined to continue indefinitely. Almost none lost sleep over threats emanating from a cave in Afghanistan. A Gallup poll taken on September 10, 2001, found that fewer than 1 percent of Americans considered terrorism to be the nation’s No. 1 concern.
But they didn’t know that a countdown had already begun. Nineteen bin Laden devotees, radicalized young Arab men living in the United States, awoke on September 11, 2001, determined to fulfill the fatwa. In twenty-four hours, the poll results would change, along with everything else.
(#ulink_ea740524-a918-59b4-822f-7ea02c843fa6)
CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_e50393b4-b489-58b8-bc6b-164d8d9690bd)
“QUIET’S A GOOD THING” (#ulink_e50393b4-b489-58b8-bc6b-164d8d9690bd)
September 10, 2001
CAPTAIN JOHN OGONOWSKI
American Airlines Flight 11
“Dad, I need help with my math!”
John Ogonowski’s eldest daughter, Laura, called out to her father the second he stepped inside his family’s farmhouse in rural Dracut, Massachusetts.
“Laura!” yelled her mother, Margaret “Peg” Ogonowski, in response. “Let him walk in the door!”
Fifty years old, six feet tall and country-boy handsome, John gazed at his wife and sixteen-year-old daughter. His smile etched deep crinkles in the ruddy skin around his blue eyes. Dinner hour was near, and Peg suspected that John felt equal parts tired and happy to be home. As darkness fell on September 10, 2001, he’d just driven from Boston’s Logan International Airport after piloting an American Airlines flight from Los Angeles. A day earlier, he’d flown west on American Flight 11, a daily nonstop from Boston to Los Angeles.
After twenty-three years as a commercial pilot, John’s normal routine upon returning home was to go directly to the master bedroom and strip out of his navy-blue captain’s uniform with the silver stripes on the sleeves. He’d pull on grease-stained jeans and a work shirt, then head to the enormous barn on the family’s 130-acre farm, located thirty miles north of Boston, near the New Hampshire border. Quiet by nature, content working with his calloused hands, John inhaled the perfume of fresh hay bales and unwound by tackling one of the endless jobs that came with being a farmer who also flew jets.
But on this day, to Peg’s surprise, John broke his routine. Changing clothes and doing chores would wait. Still in uniform, he sat at the kitchen counter with Laura and her geometry problems. “Let’s remember,” he often told his girls, “math is fun.” They’d roll their eyes, but they liked to hear him say it.
Homework finished, the family enjoyed a dinner of chicken cutlets, capped by John’s favorite dessert, ice cream. Also at dinner that night were Peg’s parents, visiting from New York; his father’s brother Al, who lived nearby; and their younger daughters Caroline, fourteen, and Mary, eleven.
At one point, Peg noticed something missing from John’s uniform shirt. “Did you go to work without your epaulets?” she asked. “I had to stop for gas,” John said. He’d removed the shoulder decorations so he wouldn’t look showy, like one of those pilots who seemed to expect the world to salute them.
John’s modesty and quiet confidence had attracted Peg nineteen years earlier, when she was a junior flight attendant for American. John had joined the airline as a flight engineer after serving in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, when he flew C-141 transport planes back and forth across the Pacific. Some of his return flights bore flag-draped coffins. In his early years at American, John was a rare bird: an unmarried pilot, easy on the eyes, respectful to all. On a flight out of Phoenix, a savvy senior flight attendant urged Peg to speak with him. When they landed in Boston he got her number.
They were married in less than a year. By the end of the decade John had been promoted to captain, Peg had risen in seniority, and they had three daughters. All that, plus their White Gate Farm, growing hay and picking fruit from three hundred blueberry bushes and an orchard of a hundred fifty peach trees John planted himself. Every spring, they put in pumpkins and corn to sell at John’s parents’ farm a couple of miles down the road, where he’d learned to drive a tractor at the age of eight. Peg often joked that the classic John Deere in their barn was her pilot husband’s other jet.
John and Peg continued to work for American Airlines throughout their marriage, with John flying a dozen days a month and Peg working about the same. They alternated flight schedules so one or the other could be with the girls. When that failed, their families pitched in. John had spent a chunk of his career flying international routes, but the overnight flights wore him down, and he’d recently been recertified on the Boeing 767, the wide-bodied pride of American’s domestic fleet. Lately he’d been flying regularly on the Boston–Los Angeles route, often on Flight 11, which Peg had flown hundreds of times as well.
John was scheduled to fly again the next morning, another six-hour trip to California, but he decided he didn’t want to leave home so soon after returning from the West Coast. Also, federal agriculture officials and a team from Tufts University were coming to the farm in the morning to discuss a program John felt passionate about. He and Peg had set aside a dozen acres to allow Cambodian immigrant farmers to grow bok choy, water spinach, pigweed, and other traditional Asian vegetables, to sell at markets and to feed their families. John plowed for the immigrants and rarely collected the two-hundred-dollar monthly rent. He built greenhouses for early spring planting, provided water from the farm’s pond, and taught the new Americans about New England’s unforgiving soil, crop-killing pests, and short planting season. Soon the Ogonowskis’ White Gate Farm was designated the first “mentor farm” for immigrants. When a reporter stopped by, John heaped credit on the Cambodians: “These guys are putting more care and attention into their one acre than most Yankee farmers put into their entire hundred acres.”
After dinner, John went to the desktop computer in the TV room. He logged in to the American Airlines scheduling system, hoping that another pilot wanted to pick up an extra trip. A match would turn John’s onscreen schedule green, allowing him to stay on the farm on September 11. He tried several times, with the same result each time.
“I’m just getting red lights,” he told Peg.
The farm tour would go on without him, while once again John would serve as captain of American Airlines Flight 11, nonstop from Boston to Los Angeles.
PETER, SUE KIM, AND CHRISTINE HANSON
United Airlines Flight 175
In 1989, a vibrant young woman slalomed through a house party, weaving through the crowd to avoid a determined young man with red dreadlocks, freckles, and a closet stuffed with tie-dyed T-shirts. Peter Hanson was cute, but Sue Kim wasn’t interested in a latter-day hippie desperate to convince her that the music of the Grateful Dead was comparable to the work of Mozart.
This sort of thing happened often to Sue, a first-generation Korean American. It made sense that a curious, intense man like Peter would meet her at a party and be smitten by her intelligence and effervescence. Sue’s easy laugh made people imagine that she’d lived a charmed life. But she hadn’t.
When Sue was two, her overworked parents sent her from their Los Angeles home to live with her grandmother in Korea. She returned to the United States four years later and learned that she had two younger brothers, who hadn’t been sent away from their parents. Her mother died when Sue was fifteen, and she helped to raise her brothers. Later her father committed suicide after being diagnosed with cancer. Beneath her placid surface, Sue craved the bonds of a secure family.
After the house party, Peter engineered ways to see Sue again while he pursued a master’s degree in business administration. When Peter thought that he’d gained romantic traction, he cut off his dreadlocks, stuffed them in a bag, and gave them to his mother, Eunice. She understood: Peter wanted to show Sue he’d be good marriage material. It marked a sharp turn toward responsibility for the free-spirited twenty-three-year-old. His parents worried that perhaps he wasn’t quite ready for marriage, but he couldn’t wait.
“If I don’t nab her now, she won’t be there,” Peter told his mother. Eunice accompanied him on a shopping trip for an engagement ring. Sue said yes, accepting not only Peter but also his devotion to the Grateful Dead. Their wedding bands were antiques, handed down from the parents of Peter’s father, Lee.
Peter earned an MBA from Boston University and became vice president of sales for a Massachusetts computer software company. He stayed close with his parents, with whom he’d traveled the world as a boy and occasionally enjoyed his favorite band’s contact-high concerts. Even as he accepted adult responsibilities, Peter remained a prankster. One day while answering phones at the local Conservation Commission office where she worked, Eunice heard a stern male voice demanding permission to build a structure next to a pond on his property. Eunice calmly explained the review process and the permits needed, but the caller raged about his rights as a landowner. As the rant wore on, Eunice realized it was Peter.
Meanwhile, Sue developed into an impressive academic scientist. She’d worked her way through a biology degree at the University of California, Berkeley, then moved to Boston for a master’s degree in medical sciences. With Peter’s encouragement, Sue pursued a PhD in immunology, working with specially bred mice to explore the role of certain molecules in asthma and AIDS. Sue was scheduled to defend her dissertation that fall, but approval was a foregone conclusion. Her doctoral adviser envisioned Sue joining the faculty at Boston University.
Peter and Sue juggled their professional lives with taking care of their daughter, Christine, who was born in February 1999. She looked like Sue in miniature, a hug magnet with Peter’s love of music. Christine’s middle name was Lee, for her paternal grandfather. Quietly, Sue stocked up on pregnancy tests, hoping to give Christine a little brother and Peter’s parents a grandson.
Lee and Eunice visited often from their Connecticut home. When Eunice arrived one day with a broken foot, Christine yelled, “I help you, Namma! Wait here!” She ran upstairs and returned with a colorful Band-Aid she applied to Eunice’s cast. Lee found joy in watching Christine work with Peter in the yard. The little girl promised the young trees that she and her daddy would help them grow big and strong. When they said grace before meals, Christine insisted on a song from a television show about Barney the purple dinosaur: “I love you, you love me, we’re a happy family. With a great big hug, and a kiss from me to you, won’t you say you love me too?” If her grandparents missed a word, Christine made them start over.
Early in September, Peter needed to fly to California on business, so they decided to turn the trip into a family vacation and a visit with Sue’s grandmother and brothers. The weekend before the September 11 flight, Christine told Eunice of her excitement about the upcoming trip, which included plans for an outing to Disneyland. During one phone call, Christine reported to her grandmother that she was going to California to see Mickey Mouse and Pluto. Then Christine expressed an even stronger desire: “I want to go to your house, Namma!”
On the night of September 10, Christine slept in her new big-girl bed with her favorite stuffed animal, Peter Rabbit holding a carrot. Before she left home the next morning, she’d tuck Peter under the covers, to keep him safe until she returned.
BARBARA OLSON
American Airlines Flight 77
Under the hot lights of the C-SPAN television show Washington Journal, host Peter Slen flipped open a copy of Washingtonian magazine for September 2001. The camera zoomed in to a headline, THE 100 MOST POWERFUL WOMEN IN WASHINGTON. Then it swung across the set to find conservative firebrand Barbara Olson, her telegenic smile dialed to full blast, her gleaming blond hair draped down the back of her red blazer. Slen asked Barbara: “Why are you listed as an influential political insider?”
Barbara knew perfectly well, but she answered modestly: “I don’t know. That’s where they put me.” She changed the subject to a recent lunch where the magazine’s honorees discussed who might be the first female president. Overwhelmingly, the capital’s most powerful women named Hillary Clinton. Virtually alone in dissent was Barbara, who had just completed her second book lacerating the U.S. senator from New York and former First Lady.
“What does it mean to have influence in this town?” Slen asked. “How do you get it? Is it power, is it position, is it money, is it marriage?”
The question carried a sexist dagger, missed by audience members who didn’t know that Barbara’s husband was among the most powerful lawyers in the country: U.S. Solicitor General Ted Olson, the top legal strategist for the White House. President George W. Bush had given him the job after Olson had argued successfully before the U.S. Supreme Court to end the recount of votes in Florida from the 2000 election, a decision that led to Bush becoming president.
Barbara ignored the jab, replying with a laugh that long work paved the road to influence. She’d grown used to questions about whether a glamorous woman who drove a Jaguar and had a weakness for stiletto heels deserved her place at the center of the political world. But at forty-five, having earned a partnership in a prominent law firm, Barbara drew confidence from the knowledge that before marrying Ted, she’d been a professional ballet dancer, worked her way through law school, and prosecuted drug cases in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington. She’d also served as chief investigative counsel for the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
During her five-year marriage to Ted, his third and her second, Barbara had seen her stock rise further as half of a Washington power couple. They hosted enormous parties for the conservative intelligentsia at their home in Virginia. They shared a love for Shakespeare, poetry, the opera, modern art, and their Australian sheepdogs: Reagan, for the president, and Maggie, for British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
When the C-SPAN show took calls from viewers, Barbara’s partisan nature was on full display. After lavish praise from one caller who loved her bestselling book about Hillary Clinton, Hell to Pay, another caller laced into Barbara for criticizing the Clintons. Weeks earlier, Barbara had apologized in the Washington Post for describing the former president’s late mother as a “barfly who gets used by men.”
The caller scolded her: “Miss Olson, you have to learn how to be more human. You’re a very evil person… . You’re not going to survive too long. You got too much hate and the devil in you.”
Barbara smiled through the attack, though not as widely as before. Her blue eyes dimmed momentarily as she blinked away the criticism and the ominous prediction. “Well, we do have a First Amendment,” Olson replied. “Everybody has a right to their own opinion. I don’t have hate in me.”
After the show ended, Barbara rushed on with her life. She needed to pack for a flight to Los Angeles, for her next performance as a face of conservatism: she was booked to appear on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher. Her flight was set for Monday, September 10.
Barbara decided the schedule didn’t work for her. Though it would require a dash from the airport to Maher’s studio, she decided to push back her flight until the next day. Ted Olson would turn sixty-one years old on Tuesday, September 11. Before flying to California, Barbara wanted to wake up beside him, to wish him a happy birthday.
CEECEE LYLES
United Airlines Flight 93
As midnight approached on Monday, September 10, CeeCee Lyles lay on a futon bed in a tiny apartment she shared with four other United Airlines flight attendants near Newark International Airport in New Jersey. She clutched a teddy bear she’d named Lorne and talked on her cellphone to the bear’s namesake, her husband, Lorne Lyles, back home in Florida.
At thirty-three, five foot seven, CeeCee had flashing brown eyes and a love of fine clothes that complemented her athletic figure. Years earlier, Lorne noticed her when each of them was taking a son to baseball practice. He nearly fell out of his car when she walked past. “Man! She is beautiful,” he thought.
CeeCee had traveled a winding road to happiness with Lorne, and the cellphone was a lifeline when her work took her away from him. They’d talk for hours, often five or six times a day, sometimes as many as ten to fifteen. The comfort of the other’s voice mattered as much as the subjects: their sons, two each from previous relationships; her work in airports and airplanes; his, as a police officer on the overnight shift in Fort Myers, Florida. Beyond work and kids, they’d talk about bills and chores and missing each other. As Lorne would say, they’d talk and talk, about “everything and nothing.”
CeeCee had become a United flight attendant less than a year earlier, at Lorne’s urging, after he recognized the emotional toll of her previous jobs, as a corrections officer in Miami and then as a police detective on the streets of Fort Pierce, Florida. When they began dating, Lorne was a police dispatcher in Fort Pierce, so to some extent they’d fallen in love over the airwaves, enchanted by the sound of each other’s voice.
During her six years on the police force, CeeCee had put her good looks to use when she went undercover to portray a prostitute, but she got more satisfaction from helping women and children victimized by crime and drugs. She’d often stop by the Bible Way Soul Saving Station, where her uncle was the pastor, and she became a role model at a Christian women’s shelter founded by two of her aunts. Her kindness had limits, though, replaced by toughness when dealing with criminals. CeeCee excelled in an Advanced Officer Survival course that included hand-to-hand fighting and takedown moves. Before marrying Lorne in May 2000, CeeCee picked up extra shifts and worked second and third jobs to support her sons, Jerome and Jevon, around whom her life revolved. She kept them focused on school, taught them to play baseball, and expected them to fight for loose balls on the basketball court.
Becoming a flight attendant allowed CeeCee to fulfill her dreams of traveling, meeting new people, and trading hardened criminals for the occasional drunken businessman. As a perk of the job, she and her family took sightseeing trips on days off and filled available seats on flights to Indianapolis, where Lorne’s two sons, Justin and Jordan, lived with their mother. They’d done just that the previous weekend, then returned home so CeeCee’s sons could be in school on Monday.
As the summer of 2001 flew past, CeeCee poured out her heart in a letter to the woman who had raised her, Carrie Ross, who was both CeeCee’s adoptive mother and her biological aunt. CeeCee mentioned rough patches of her past, then wrote that she was as happy as she’d ever been. She loved her new job as a flight attendant, and she credited Ross’s love and support for leading her to this high point in life.
Before flying to Newark on September 10, CeeCee squared away piles of laundry and filled the refrigerator with home-cooked meals. She hated to be away from her family, but she and Lorne didn’t want to uproot from Florida to her airport base in New Jersey. So CeeCee joined a group of her fellow flight attendants, each paying $150 in monthly rent for the Newark crash pad, and bided her time until she’d earn enough seniority to gain greater control over her schedule.
The morning of Monday, September 10, Lorne drove CeeCee to the Fort Myers airport, walked her to her gate, kissed her goodbye, and began a new day of serial phone calls. CeeCee didn’t reach the Newark apartment until eleven that night, and she wouldn’t get much rest. She’d been assigned an early flight out of Newark, an 8:00 a.m. departure to San Francisco. Even as her energy flagged, she didn’t want to stop talking with Lorne.
Two hours into their last call of September 10, which blended into their first call of September 11, CeeCee fell asleep clutching her cellphone and her teddy bear Lorne. The real Lorne hung up, certain that they’d speak again soon.
MAJOR KEVIN NASYPANY
Northeast Air Defense Sector, Rome, N.Y.
At forty-three, solidly built and colorfully profane, Kevin Nasypany had a name that rhymed with the New Jersey town of Parsippany, a military pilot’s unflappable confidence, and a caterpillar mustache on a Saint Bernard’s face.
On September 10, Nasypany woke with a full plate. He and his wife, Dana, had five children, three girls and two boys aged five to nineteen, and Dana was seven months pregnant. They also had a sweet new chocolate lab puppy that Nasypany had judged to be dumber than dirt. Their rambling Victorian house in upstate Waterville, New York, needed paint, the oversized yard needed care, and a half-finished bathroom needed remodeling. Plus, someone needed to close their aboveground pool for the season, a chore that Nasypany loudly proclaimed to be a royal pain in the ass.
To top it off, he had to protect the lives of roughly one hundred million Americans.
