The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [58]
On September 11, faced with swift-moving, complex information about multiple hijackings, the FAA was overwhelmed. The internal communications mix—multiple Air Traffic Control Centers, Eastern Region Administration, a command center in Herndon, Virginia, an operations center and FAA headquarters in Washington—proved too muddled to be effective.
There was some confusion over operational language. At the FAA, a “primary target” denoted a radar return. At NORAD, it meant a search target. In FAA parlance, to speak of a plane’s “coast mode” was to project its direction based on its last known appearance on radar. On 9/11, one NEADS staff technician interpreted the word “coast” as meaning that one of the hijacked flights was following the coastline, the eastern seaboard. One senior FAA controller admitted having not even known, on September 11, what NORAD was.
NORAD, for its part, ran into problems when units not designated for defense were called in. Such units had different training, different regulations and equipment, used a different communications net. In one area, NORAD fighter pilots found themselves unable to communicate with airmen from other units. Of three relevant radio frequencies, none worked.
Transcripts of FAA and NEADS conversations, when finally obtained by the Commission, were found to feature exchanges like this:
NEADS VOICE: In that book … we used to have a book with numbers [Dial tone]
NEADS IDENTIFICATION TECHNICIAN: Wrong one [Beeps] I can’t get ahold of Cleveland. [Sigh] [Dial tone, dialing, busy signal] … still busy. Boston’s the only one that passed this information. Washington [Center] doesn’t know shit …
FAA BOSTON CENTER: … We have an F-15 holding … He’s in the air … he’s waiting to get directions …
NEADS IDENTIFICATION TECHNICIAN: Stand by—stand by one. Weapons? I need somebody up here that …
And so on. One NEADS technician would keep saying of Washington air traffic control, “Washington [Center] has no clue … no friggin’ … they didn’t know what the hell was going on … What the fuck is this about?” A staffer at the FAA’s Command Center, speaking on the tactical net, summed up the situation in four words: “It’s chaos out there.”
“The challenge in relating the history of one of the most chaotic days in our history,” a Commission analyst wrote at one point in an internal document, “is to avoid replicating that chaos in writing about it.” So copious is the material, so labyrinthine the twists and turns it reflects, that a lengthy treatise would barely do it justice. Miles Kara, a member of the team that analyzed the military’s failures—himself a former Army intelligence officer—was still producing learned essays on the subject as late as 2011. The Commission’s basic findings, however, were in essence straightforward, and—based on the incontrovertible evidence of the tapes and logs—revelatory.
THE NERVE CENTER for the military on September 11 was an unprepossessing aluminum bunker, the last functional building on an otherwise abandoned Air Force base in upstate New York. From the outside, only antennas betrayed its possible importance. Inside, technicians manned rows of antiquated computers and radar screens. They did not, though, expect to have a quiet day on September 11. Their commander, Colonel Robert Marr, moreover, expected to have to respond to a hijacking.
A simulated hijacking. For the Northeast Air Defense Sector’s headquarters was gearing up for its part in the latest phase of Vigilant Guardian, one of several large-scale annual exercises. This one, old-fashioned in that it tested military preparedness for an attack by Russian bombers, included a scenario in which an enemy would seize an airliner and fly it to an unnamed Caribbean island.
At 8:30 that morning, the exercise proper had not yet got under way. The colonel was munching apple fritters.