The Spymasters by Chris Whipple

Author:Chris Whipple
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2020-08-19T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT “It’s a slam dunk.”

George Tenet and George W. Bush

At 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001, George Tenet was having breakfast at Washington’s St. Regis Hotel with former Oklahoma senator David Boren. “The head of my security detail came over to me and said a plane had hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center,” he recalled. “My instinctual reaction was, ‘This is Al Qaeda. I’ve gotta go.’ ”

The drive to Langley took twelve minutes, an eternity to Tenet, who had no secure phone reception. Upon his arrival at CIA headquarters, the director went to the seventh floor and huddled with Cofer Black, head of the Counterterrorism Center, and his senior staff. Both of the World Trade towers were ablaze; Tenet, remembering an Al Qaeda plot to crash a plane into Langley headquarters, ordered nonessential CIA personnel to go home, and the rest to move to another building. But Black was having none of it; he refused to evacuate his staff. “People could die,” Tenet told his notoriously gruff lieutenant. Black replied: “Well, sir, then they’re just going to have to die.” The Counterterrorism Center was staying put.

George W. Bush had been speaking to an elementary school class in Florida that morning. Later, aboard Air Force One, he summoned his CIA briefer, Michael Morell, to his cabin. “Michael, who did this?” the president demanded. Morell replied that he’d bet his children’s future that it was Al Qaeda. For hours, Tenet tried to reach Bush but couldn’t get a clear connection. Finally, a little after 3 p.m., in a video conference with Tenet from Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, the president learned the truth: On the passenger manifests of the hijacked planes were the names of known Al Qaeda terrorists Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi.

The 9/11 Commission would famously call the nation’s inability to prevent the attacks a “failure of imagination.” But that wasn’t really true: Not only had the CIA been warning all summer about an imminent attack but it had previously warned of an Al Qaeda attempt to hijack commercial airliners. In 1995, in the so-called Bojinka plot, Al Qaeda operatives had planned to commandeer as many as ten commercial flights out of Manila in the Philippines and blow up the planes over the Pacific; the plot was foiled when the terrorists’ safe house caught fire. The CIA had warned that its failure wouldn’t deter Al Qaeda from deploying airliners as weapons again. “So dismissing something because it didn’t occur,” said Tenet, “turns out to be a terrible, terrible mistake.”

In retrospect, Tenet thought the real failure was the administration’s refusal, in the face of the CIA’s warnings, to take defensive precautions on a national scale. Only an effort involving the CIA, FBI, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and other agencies could have thwarted the attacks. “An entire government failed to recognize all the things that needed to be done,” he said. “When you don’t have a system of protection and defense built in place, when you don’t

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.