American Caliph by Shahan Mufti

Author:Shahan Mufti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

31.

JURISDICTION

On a typical day, the Mayor’s Command Center on the fifth floor of the Municipal Center in Washington would be staffed by two city bureaucrats who would make sure all the lights were on and the equipment working, and beyond that, not much else. The command center, which was organized under the District’s civil defense unit, occupied a part of the fifth floor of the building, where Cullinane and the rest of the top brass of the police had their offices as well. The command center was created on the fly in 1968 when President Johnson declared martial law in the District during the riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. After that, it was quickly formalized and used routinely during massive anti-war and other demonstrations in the early 1970s.

The seven-room honeycomb structure was custom built for the District’s Office of Civil Defense. Cullinane had an additional office in there, and there were others for the mayor and his staff and still more reserved for the military. The media had their own space in the command center, with phone lines and amenities like coffee and cigarettes. The command center was a nerve center filled with special telephones with dozens of red, white, gray, blue, and green buttons. Some had direct lines to the military and the White House. The command center had other technology that gave it the ability to pull information from various sources—commercial radio and TV, the police and fire frequencies, National Parks Police, highway and traffic departments, newswire services—creating a centralized databank of information like no other civilian operation in the capital.

At around 2:00 p.m. on March 9, the command center began coming to life. Cullinane and Rabe knew that the only way to keep track of the takeover of Washington was from there. Along with them, in one of the rooms at the center with restricted access, a negotiating team had been slowly assembling all day. O’Brien dropped in periodically, and Earl Silbert, the U.S. attorney who had overseen the prosecutions of the Black Mafia hitmen, was there too. At three o’clock, minutes after the news of the District Building seizure broke, officers from various other DC law-enforcement agencies began pouring in. The Capitol Police, the U.S. Park Police, the Metro Police for the bus and subway systems, and the Executive Protection Services all sent their officers to the command post to operate under the orders of Maurice Cullinane.

The newsroom at the command center, which typically sat empty, was now buzzing with journalists from newspapers, wire services, and local and national TV and radio stations, jostling for space, walking into each other’s camera shots. Three large sheets of paper hung from the walls in the pressroom, titled “Mosque,” “Dist. Building,” and “B’nai B’rith.” A running list of numbers of casualties, fatalities, hostages released, etc., was continually updated by the command center staff to keep the press sated.

Shortly after 4:00 p.m., the negotiating team was joined by Special Agent Patrick Mullany of the FBI.

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