Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [181]
Before long, the smoke in my office became heavy, so along with several staff members I headed to the National Military Command Center in the basement.* A complex of rooms outfitted with televisions, computer terminals, and screens tracking military activities around the world, the NMCC is a well-equipped communications hub. Despite the fires still raging in the Pentagon and sprinklers dousing wires and cables with water, our links to the outside world were functioning, although sporadically.13 The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Hugh Shelton, was in South America. The vice chairman, General Dick Myers, the man the President had recently nominated to be Shelton’s successor, had been on Capitol Hill making courtesy calls with members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Upon learning of the attack, he rushed back to the Pentagon and joined me in the command center.
There were two sides of Dick Myers, and I came to know both well. He looked like the grown-up version of a humble high school football hero from a Norman Rockwell cover of the old Saturday Evening Post. But the other side of Dick Myers was one that the public did not see. He had the self-confidence, fire, independent spirit, and tenacity of a fighter pilot tested repeatedly in combat. In his early years he had been frightened of planes because he had witnessed a crash as a child. Yet he came up through the ranks of the Air Force to the highest position in our armed forces. In our private meetings, the determined, persistent man who had logged over six hundred combat flight hours in Vietnam would often emerge.
Myers and I discussed raising America’s threat level to Defcon (Defense Condition) 3, an increased state of alert for the nation’s armed forces, two levels short of full-scale war.*
“It’s a huge move,” Myers said, “but it’s appropriate.”14
General Myers reported that combat air patrols were now in the skies over Washington, D.C.—the first time in history this step had been taken. We also launched two fighters to protect Air Force One and were scrambling more.15
I was told that Vice President Cheney was at the White House in the underground communications facility. Colin Powell was traveling in Peru and would be returning to Washington. George Tenet was hurrying back to CIA headquarters after a breakfast meeting. President Bush was en route to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. The Secret Service, with the support of Vice President Cheney, advised Bush not to return to Washington until the situation was clarified. We were receiving unverified reports of hijacked airliners heading toward U.S. cities. Targeting the White House remained a possibility.
I looked at screens displaying the dozens of aircraft still in the air while the Federal Aviation Administration and NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command) tried to determine which, if any, were hijacked planes and where they might be heading. At some point we received word that an aircraft believed to have been hijacked was down somewhere in Pennsylvania.16
Defense Department officials executed our continuity-of-government plans, according to long-established procedures, to ensure that at least some of America’s leadership in all branches of the federal government would survive an enemy attack. I had been involved in planning and exercises for continuity-of-government operations during the 1980s, at the request of the Reagan administration. In those days, the plans postulated a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. Now it was terrorist