Was Air Force One a Target on 9/11? The Initial Press Reports from the White House Said Yes.
Reality Check (October 2, 2001)
I do not normally violate copyright law. As both an author and a publisher, I support copyright laws. But in this case I will make two exceptions. The reason is, I cannot trace who wrote the second piece or where it was first published. It is very, very important. As for the first article, it has almost completely disappeared from the Web. I could find only one copy still on-line. It deserves to be preserved.
Both documents report that just after the Pentagon was attacked, the Secret Service received an anonymous phone call: "Air Force One is next." Air Force One is whichever one of several Air Force planes the President is using at the time.
The articles went on to say that the caller had been able to identify AF One in terms of the White House's code for that day. The second article then discussed the possibility that moles -- infiltrators -- are working inside the government.
I wanted confirmation of the second story. I went to http://www.google.com, as I usually do, and searched for "Air Force One is next," "code words," and "bunker," all of which appeared in the original article. You can do the same. Five links popped up. Four were either dead or went to a page that no longer contained the story. Only one, from FOSTER'S DAILY DEMOCRAT (http://www.fosters.com), a newspaper in S.E. New Hampshire, still carried an AP story, dated September 13.
It was not the same story. It did have the information about the phone call and the broken code. Here is the AP story. I reprint it here for confirmation purposes, and also because it seems to have disappeared from the Web. It deserves to be preserved.
[Make an e-mail folder for REALITY CHECK, and put this issue into the folder.]
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Hopscotching across half the country while America was under attack, President Bush vented his frustration with Secret Service officials telling him Air Force One was at risk of a terrorist assault.
"I'm not going to let some tin horn terrorist keep the president of the United States away from the nation's capital," he said during the six-hour flight that took him from Florida to Louisiana and Nebraska before returning to the White House. "The American people want to see their president and they want to see him now."
White House counselor Karl Rove read the quote from several pages of notes he took on a legal pad while Bush dealt with attacks in Washington and New York.
Rove and other White House officials have slowly revealed details of the journey to counter critics who have questioned whether Bush overreacted by touching down at two Air Force bases before returning to Washington.
Bush's top political strategist said some people raised questions with him, but their doubts were dispelled "when they were told there was specific and credible evidence of a threat" against the White House, Air Force One and the president himself.
Bush was in Florida, visiting a second-grade class, when White House chief of staff Andrew Card told him two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. Bush stepped outside the classroom to get briefed on the events, then spoke publicly to condemn the terrorist strike.
Soon after, a plane slammed into the Pentagon. Bush and his entourage were rushed aboard Air Force One.
The hijacked plane "was on a flight path directly for the White House and it hit the Pentagon instead," White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said. National security officials monitoring intercepted communications speculated that the hijackers had trouble controlling the plane and spotting the White House for all the trees on the South Lawn, and so headed for the wide-open Pentagon instead, according to a Secret Service official briefed on the situation.
Within that same hour on Tuesday, the Secret Service received an anonymous call: "Air Force One is next." According to a senior government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, the caller knew the agency's code words relating to Air Force One procedures and whereabouts.
"We want to get the plane up and we want to get it up very high," the head of the Secret Service detail told Bush, according to Rove's notes. They wanted to head toward the Florida panhandle to pick up fighter jets scrambling to give Air Force One air cover.
Bush told Card, "I want to move on to Washington."
Vice President Dick Cheney, holed up in a secure bunker beneath the White House, told Bush the threat should be taken seriously and he should not return to Washington just yet.
Bush was told there were six planes unaccounted for, all potential missiles. "The situation is not stable," the head of Bush's detail told the president. Cheney's lead Secret Service agent, meanwhile, told the vice president he had no choice but to remain inside the complex because there was no time to bring a helicopter in and taking him out by car through gridlocked streets was too risky.
After landing at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, Bush scheduled a national security meeting at 4 p.m. -- several hours away.
"I want to go back home as soon as possible," Bush said, according to Rove, who was with the president all day Tuesday.
Replied the agent: "Our people are saying it's unstable still."
The president was told he could get to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska more quickly than to Washington, thus allowing him to conduct the national security meeting at a secure location and address the public for a second time.
Off he went.
This story provides a good reason justifying the President's refusal to return to Washington immediately. But the press never picked up the broken code aspect of this story.
The President was briefly criticized in print for his failure to return to Washington immediately. It was just about the only criticism that he has received so far.
This brings me to the second report. I was e-mailed a copy. It appeared as part of a 70-page collage of stuff, none with Web links, most of which cannot be verified, and some of which is nuts. But this report is not nuts. It is really grim in its implications.
I could not verify its accuracy. The following information is not supported by any citation of evidence, although I personally can believe it.
The discovery shocked everyone in the president's emergency operations center -- Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta. Their first question was: How did the terrorists access top-secret White House codes and procedures? Is there a mole, or more than one enemy spy in the White House, the Secret Service, the FBI, the CIA or the Federal Aviation Administration?
This, however, is unsubstantiated speculation:
In the week after the attacks in New York and Washington, more hair-raising facts emerged. The terrorists had also obtained the code groups of the National Security Agency and were able to penetrate the NSA's state-of-the-art electronic surveillance systems. Indeed, they seemed to have at their disposal an electronic capability that was more sophisticated than that of the NSA.
What is well worth considering is the rest of the story, which deals with a technologically sophisticated follower of bin Laden, and his ability to assume so many disguises and passports. We are dealing with the international terror underground. It will not be easy for the CIA or FBI to penetrate these groups. (My father was an FBI agent in charge of penetrating an earlier, far less violent network of subversives. He tells me that he is not optimistic about the FBI's ability to get inside one of these groups.) There is no evidence that they have done so yet.
But the key issue in this story is the original phone call, which was based on the White House's daily code. The fact that no news media followed up on this is suspicious. I don't think the White House wanted it pursued.
Digital moles in White House:
Terrorists Had Top-Secret Presidential Codes -
A Gift From The CIA
"Air Force One is next," read the message received by the U.S. Secret Service at 9 a.m. Sept. 11, after two hijacked planes struck the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York.
Three minutes later, Secret Service agents grabbed Vice President Dick Cheney from his seat opposite a television set in the White House and hustled him down to the president's emergency operations center, a bunker built to withstand a nuclear blast.
The terrorists' message threatening Air Force One was transmitted in that day's top-secret White House code words. As the clock ticked away, the Secret Service reached a frightening conclusion: The terrorists had obtained the White House code and a whole set of top-secret signals.
This made it possible for a hostile force to pinpoint the exact position of Air Force One, its destination and its classified procedures. In fact, the hijackers were picking up and deciphering the presidential plane's incoming and outgoing transmissions.
The discovery shocked everyone in the president's emergency operations center -- Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta. Their first question was: How did the terrorists access top-secret White House codes and procedures? Is there a mole, or more than one enemy spy in the White House, the Secret Service, the FBI, the CIA or the Federal Aviation Administration?
In the week after the attacks in New York and Washington, more hair-raising facts emerged. The terrorists had also obtained the code groups of the National Security Agency and were able to penetrate the NSA's state-of-the-art electronic surveillance systems. Indeed, they seemed to have at their disposal an electronic capability that was more sophisticated than that of the NSA.
This startling observation came as no surprise to those tracking the globe-spanning investments of Saudi Arabia's bin Laden family and those of its exiled son, Osama, in some of the world's biggest and most advanced satellite and telecommunications companies. World Space Communication is one of the known bin Laden assets. U.S. counter-terrorism agencies, including the NSA, have been tracking World Space Communication's activities for the past five years. Some of the company's satellites are far more advanced than the NSA's own eyes in the sky.
Bin Laden also has the NSA beat on the employment front, hiring the best computer experts on the market. One such is Nabil Khan Kani, a Syrian who lived in Barcelona with his Spanish wife, Jenna Florine, in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
No one ever suspected what the amiable Syrian was really up to until January 2000, when FBI agents found two apartments he used thousands of miles from Barcelona, in the Bab el-Shabaa district of Saana, Yemen. The apartments served as transit points for Egyptians suspected of operational links with the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Algerians connected with the Armed Islamic Group, or GIA. There, investigators turned up nine fake identity cards in different names, all with Kani's photo, Spanish, Italian, French and Sudanese passports, likewise with the same photo but in different names, and two pistols fitted with silencers.
Kani must have used yet another alias for his getaway. His whereabouts are unknown to this day. Computer and terrorism experts suggest that the missing Syrian computer whiz was the author of the technology known as steganography, as first described in the Washington Post yesterday. This technology enables users to bypass electronic monitoring by hiding messages randomly in seemingly innocent digital files, such as music files, those of the popular online marketplace eBay, pornographic files or even e-mail headers. Scrambled with the help of basic encryption tools, they can only be read by those with a "key." These messages leave no trace of their presence.
U.S. intelligence has been unable to trace their authors and recipients in the three years since first detecting evidence of their existence in the files of the bin Laden organization. U.S. agencies now believe that the attacks in New York and Washington were coordinated through those encrypted electronic messages, which were opened by "key" holders.
They also believe that terrorists are in possession of all or part of the codes used by the Drug Enforcement Administration, the National Reconnaissance Office, Air Force Intelligence, Army Intelligence, Naval Intelligence, Marine Corps Intelligence and the intelligence offices of the State Department and Department of Energy.
Intelligence and counter-terror sources report that, while rescuers in New York and Washington were sifting through rubble inch by inch, US government experts were changing codes one-by-one -- and even more difficult, replacing procedures and methods of encryption. The nagging question of a mole in the highest reaches of the U.S. government and intelligence community -- with direct or indirect links with bin Laden -- remains. Since no single individual has access to every top-level code at any given time -- a single mole would not answer the case; it would have to be a large, widely spread number. U.S. experts do not believe bin Laden was capable of infiltrating double agents into the heart of the U.S. administration on a large scale. They are looking elsewhere, instead, at a country with a very well-oiled intelligence apparatus -- Iraq.
This theory was argued by an authoritative voice, former CIA Director James Woolsey, in a New Republic article reprinted by London's Daily Telegraph on Sept. 17. He refers to a book called "Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America," by Laurie Mylroie, which quotes a senior FBI investigator on the problematical identity of Ramzi Yousef, perpetrator of the first attempt to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993.
For that deed, a U.S. federal court in New York sentenced Yousef Jan. 8, 1998, to 240 years in solitary confinement. He was also indicted for conspiring to hijack 12 U.S. and Asian commercial aircraft on their way to the United States and blow them up over New York. It was claimed that the name Ramzi Yousef was an alias for his real identity, which was a Pakistani called Abdul Basit Karim.
However, the FBI investigator cited in the book said that Basit was not his real identity either; Yousef was actually an Iraqi army agent who stole Basit's identity. Basit and family were resident in Kuwait when Iraq overran the oil emirate in 1990. The Iraqis moved the family to Baghdad with other hostages. Some returned home, but the Basits were never heard of again, probably murdered for the sake of disguising Ramzi Yousef.
The former CIA director's advice is this: Iraq was involved in the first attack on the World Trade Center. Baghdad is therefore the place to look for the conspirators behind the second.
Intelligence sources can disclose that Woolsey's conclusion does not rest exclusively on the Mylroie book. While pointing the finger at Iraqi intelligence, he assigns Baghdad with no more than a partial role both in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and also in last week's suicide attack on its twin towers. His conclusions are based on a CIA investigation opened during his tenure as CIA director from 1993-1995.
Evidence kept in a personal dossier codenamed KG-84-HJ established Iraqi complicity in the 1993 attack. It also contains the first serious evaluations and theories regarding the identity of the high-placed penetration agents in the White House and at the heart of U.S. intelligence.
They appear to be the very moles who made those vital coded signals available to the kamikaze terrorists Sept. 11.
Finally, I discovered in my search that privacy really is gone on the Web. One of the links from my google search took me to USA JEWISH WEB TODAY: http://www.usajewish.com The Air Force One story was gone from the page. But at the bottom of the page was this discomforting note:
I clicked through and found myself on the Amazon.com site. Read it for yourself:
My decision is clear: I will not send money or buy anything that will generate income for a Web site that is using this technology to identify me.