9/11 Tapes
Reveal Ground Personnel Muffled Attacks
by Gail Sheehy
URL: http://www.observer.com/pages/frontpage2.asp
Despite having boarded her train at 5 a.m. that morning in Washington, D.C.,
Rosemary Dillard’s linen jacket was still creaseless, her carriage professional
and crisp, as she walked down the train platform at Princeton Junction on the
morning of June 4.
Ms. Dillard dared to hope that the F.B.I. would clarify the timeline in the
mystifying story of
The briefing in New Jersey two weeks ago, attended by about 130 family members
of victims, had been arranged by the F.B.I. Previously unavailable calls from
passengers and crew were to be played for families of victims of the four
infamous flights that were turned into missiles by terrorists.
Who knew what, and when? And what did the airlines and federal officials do
about it? These were the burning questions on the minds of many family members
who have begged the commission to help connect the dots. This week, when the
9/11 commission wraps up its public hearings, families had been promised that
the final report would be titled "9-11: The Timeline." But at the
last minute the commission switched the subject to "9-11: The Plot," focusing
on the hijackers’ success in foiling every layer of the nation’s defenses, up
to and including the airlines’.
For Ms. Dillard, the tapes scheduled to be played in
Her husband was a passenger on that flight.
The cab on the way to the hearing at the Radisson Hotel was quiet. Asked if she
was part of a lawsuit being filed by the roughly 115 families against American
and United Airlines and an alphabet soup of government agencies, she demurred.
"That’s a very sore subject," she said. She hoped, in hearing tapes
of conversations between flight crews and authorities on the ground, to find
out why, when flight controllers in Boston suspected a hijacking of American
Airlines Flight 11 as early as 8:13 a.m., neither her company nor the Federal
Aviation Administration notified her to warn the crew of American Airlines
Flight 77 of the terrorist threat in the skies when the plane took off at 8:20
a.m. By
But neither the tapes and cell-phone recordings Ms.
Dillard heard that afternoon, nor the PowerPoint presentation that took the
families systematically through all four flights with neat timelines and bland
conclusions, helped her to connect the dots. She fled the hearing early, deeply
upset.
Those present were told that the material they were hearing is evidence in the
government’s case against Zacarias Moussaoui, the once-alleged 20th hijacker, and in order not
to compromise the case, it mustn’t be disclosed. They signed nondisclosure
agreements and were not permitted to take notes. Civil attorneys and the media
were barred. F.B.I. agents filled the halls of the hotel and took any camera or
recording equipment before people were admitted to the ballroom. Those who left
the three-and-a-half-hour session to relieve themselves were accompanied into
rest rooms by agents.
The families heard a tape that has just now surfaced. Recorded by American
Airlines at its headquarters in Fort Worth, Tex., even as the first hijacked
airliner, Flight 11, was being taken over, the tape shows the airline’s top
management was made aware beginning at about 8:21 a.m.– 25 minutes before the
impact of the first plane into the World Trade Center’s north tower that a
group of men described as Middle Eastern had stabbed two flight attendants,
clouded the forward cabin with pepper spray or Mace, menaced crew and
passengers with what looked like a bomb, and stormed the cockpit in a violent
takeover of the gigantic bird.
Despite all the high secrecy surrounding the briefing, a half-dozen different
family members were so horrified by voice evidence of the airlines’ disregard
for the fate of their pilots, crew and passengers that they found ways to
reveal some of what they heard on those tapes, and also what they felt. To
them, the tapes appeared to show that the first instinct of American and United
Airlines, as management learned of the gathering horror aboard their passenger
planes on Sept. 11, was to cover up.
The response of American’s management on duty, as revealed on the tape produced
at the meeting, was recalled by persons in attendance:
"Don’t spread this around. Keep it close."
"Keep it quiet."
"Let’s keep this among ourselves. What else can we find out from our own
sources about what’s going on?"
"It was disgusting," said the parent of one of the victims, herself a
veteran flight attendant for United Airlines. "The very first response was
cover-up, when they should have been broadcasting this information all over the
place."
That instinct to hold back information, some of the families believe, may have
helped to allow the third hijacked plane to crash into the Pentagon and contributed
to the doom of a fourth flight, United Flight 93. The United dispatcher was
told by his superiors: Don’t tell pilots why we want them to land. The F.B.I.
and the F.A.A. have also held back or, in one case, destroyed evidence in the
government’s possession that would tell a very different story of how the
nation’s guardians failed to prepare or protect Americans from the most
devastating of terrorist attacks on the homeland.
"Flight 77 should never have taken off," Ms. Dillard said through
clenched teeth.
Voices of the dead on cell
phones aroused gut-wrenching feelings. Passengers who called from both American
Flight 11 and United Flight 175 talked about believing the hijackers were
piloting the aircraft, and reported wildly erratic flying patterns.
Voices of crew members, calmly disseminating specifics to airline managers on
the ground, pointed out how much was known minutes and even an hour and a half
before the last of the jumbo jets had met its diabolic finish.
American Airlines officials had to know there was nothing traditional about
this hijacking, because two of their flight attendants, Madeline (Amy) Sweeney
and Betty Ong, were calmly and bravely transmitting
the most illuminating details anyone has yet heard. Ms. Ong’s
tape was played in a public commission hearing in January, prompting family
members to demand that the F.B.I. honor their rights under the Victims
Assistance Act to hear any and all calls made from the stricken planes that
day. Ms. Sweeney’s name was cited only in passing at that earlier hearing. And
when the president and chief executive of American Airlines, Gerard Arpey, testified, he never mentioned Ms. Sweeney or the
cache of information she had provided American Airlines officials so early in
the unfolding disaster.
Since then, Mike Sweeney, her widowed husband, has been troubled by the disconnect between the airline’s ignoring of his wife’s
efforts, and the fact that the F.B.I. awarded her its highest civilian honor.
He was first informed about the new tape two weeks previously by the
"I was shocked that I’m finding out, almost three years later, there was a
tape with information given by my wife that was very crucial to the happenings
of 9/11," Mr. Sweeney told me. "Suddenly it miraculously appears and
falls into the hands of F.B.I.? Why and how and for what reason was it
suppressed? Why did it surface now? Is there information on that tape that is
of concern to other law-enforcement agencies?"
The gut-churning question that has kept the widowed father of two young
children on edge for so long is this: "When and how was this information
about the hijackers used? Were Amy’s last moments put to the best use to
protect and save others?"
Now he believes the answer is no.
From the beginning, the commission has been plagued with questions of where
evidence exists about what happened with the flights on Sept. 11. This tape is
a case in point.
"We, the prosecution team and the F.B.I. agents that have been assigned to
assist us, were not aware of that tape," Mr. Novak told me. He says he
only learned of it two weeks ago while he was briefing 9/11 commissioners on
what he knows about the two hijacked American flights. He believes the
commission got the tape from the airline.
"Now, does Mike have a reason to have heartburn about this?" he asks
rhetorically. "Absolutely as any other victim would, if they learned of
something after two and a half years. We’re trying to figure out why we didn’t
know about this before. Is it American Airlines’ fault? I don’t know. Is it the
way they produced it? I don’t know. Is it an F.B.I. fault? I don’t know."
Mr. Novak suggested a possible explanation for the airline’s personnel to hold
the horrific information tightly: "I think they were trying not to get
other people unduly alarmed so they could deal with the situation at
hand." But he says he is not going to defend or attack airline personnel.
"That’s not my job. Our job is to try to convict Moussaoui.
We view this as a giant murder case."
He confirmed that the Justice Department only revealed to the families what in
its judgment were the "relevant" tapes. The F.B.I. is holding back
other recordings from some of the flights as evidence in prosecuting its
criminal trial. It is the way the F.B.I. has always done business: zealously
guarding information to make its case retrospectively, rather than sharing
information with other law-enforcement agencies to improve the country’s
defensive posture proactively. For example, tapes considered
"relevant" to the families didn’t include the cockpit voice recorder
or the flight-data recorder from Flight 93, the final casualty.
On the American Airlines tape played at the meeting, a voice is heard relaying
to the airline’s headquarters the blow-by-blow account by Ms. Sweeney of mayhem
aboard Flight 11. The flight attendant had gone face to face with the
hijackers, and reported they had shown her what appeared to be a bomb, with red
and yellow wires. The young blond mother of two had secreted herself in the
next-to-last passenger row and used an AirFone card,
given to her by another flight attendant, Sara Low, to call the airline’s
flight-services office at
"This is Amy Sweeney," she reported. "I’m on Flight 11 this
plane has been hijacked." She was disconnected. She called back:
"Listen to me, and listen to me very carefully." Within seconds, her
befuddled respondent was replaced by a voice she knew.
"Amy, this is Michael Woodward."
The American Airlines flight-service manager had been friends with Ms. Sweeney
for a decade and didn’t have to waste time verifying that this wasn’t a hoax.
Ms. Sweeney repeated, "Michael, this plane has been hijacked."
Since there was no tape machine in his office, Woodward began repeating the
flight attendant’s alarming account to a colleague, Nancy Wyatt, the supervisor
of pursers at
"In
The two managers’ names were given in testimony to the 9/11 commission by Mr. Arpey, then executive vice president of operations, who
described himself as "directly involved in American’s emergency-response
efforts and other operational decisions made as the terrible events of Sept. 11
unfolded." Joe Burdepelly, one of the S.O.C.
managers, told Mr. Arpey at
Mr. Arpey testified that by
Mr. Arpey’s account revealed that the American
Airlines executives had attempted to monitor the progress of Flight 11 via
communications with the F.A.A. and their traffic-control officials. "As
far as we knew, the rest of our airline was operating normally at this point,"
he said.
But Flight 11 had missed its first mark at
At
Apparently, none of this crucial information was transmitted to other American
pilots already airborne notably Flight 77 out of Dulles, which took off at 8:20
a.m. only to be redirected to its target, the Pentagon or to other airlines
with planes in harm’s way: United’s Flight 173, which
took off at 8:14 a.m. from Boston, or United’s Flight
93, whose "wheels-up" was recorded at 8:42 a.m.
"You would have thought American’s S.O.C. would have grounded everything,"
says Ms. Dillard. "They were in the lead spot, they’re in
Ms. Dillard had to learn about the two planes crashing into the
"There’s a plane that hit the Pentagon. Our crew was on it."
"Was that 77?" Ms. Dillard asked.
"I think so," her assistant said.
"Are you sure it was 77?" Ms. Dillard pressed. "‘Cause I just took Eddie over to Dulles," Ms. Dillard
said numbly, referring to her husband. "Eddie’s on that plane."
She looked at the crew list. Her heart sank. "I knew one of the ladies
very well," she later remembered, "and she had kids, and the other
two who were married, and another one was pregnant. It was horrible."
One of American’s top corporate executives directly in the line of authority
that day was Jane Allen, then vice president of in-flight services, in charge
of the company’s 24,000 flight attendants and management and operations at 22
bases. She was Ms. Dillard’s top boss. But Ms. Dillard never heard from her
until after Flight 77 had plowed into the Pentagon. Reached at United Airlines
corporate headquarters in
"I really don’t know what I could possibly add to all the hurt," she
said.
But was it too much information, or too little, that was hurtful?
"I really am not interested in helping or participating," Ms. Allen said,
putting down the phone.
"This has been the attitude all the way along," Ms. Dillard observed.
"Everybody was keeping it hush-hush."
The failure to trumpet vital news
from calls placed from the first hijacked flight throughout the system and into
the highest circles of government leaves families wondering whether military
jets could have intercepted American Airlines Flight 77 in time to keep it from
diving into the Pentagon and killing 184 more people. That suicide mission
ended in triumph for the terrorists more than 50 minutes after the first
American jetliner hit the
The information hold-back may have arisen from lack of experience, or from the
inability to register the enormity of the terrorists’ destructive plans, or it
may have been a visceral desire to protect the airlines from liability. The
airlines make much of the fact that the "common strategy" for civil
aircraft crews before 9/11 was to react passively to hijackings "to
refrain from trying to overpower or negotiate with hijackers, to land the
aircraft as soon as possible, to communicate with authorities, and to try
delaying tactics."
This strategy was based on the assumption that the hijackers would want to be
flown safely to an airport of their choice to make their demands.
But that defense of the airlines’ actions is belied by the fact that the
F.A.A., which was in contact with American Airlines and other traffic-control
centers, heard the tip-off from terrorists in Flight 11’s cockpit "We have
planes, more planes" and thus knew before the first crash of a possible
multiple hijacking and the use of planes as weapons.
To this writer’s knowledge, there has been no public mention of the Flight 11
pilot’s narrative since the news report on
Mike Low had been quite upbeat
going into the meeting. He had just learned that his 28-year-old daughter Sara,
another crew member on Flight 11, had not been incapacitated by the Mace the
terrorists sprayed in the front cabin. The F.B.I. had notified him that Sara
had given Ms. Sweeney her father’s calling card, which allowed the 32-year-old
mother of two to pretend to be a passenger and use an AirFone
to call Logan Airport and relay the vital information.
"I’m a very old-fashioned and simple small-town person," Mr. Low had
told me beforehand. He owns and operates a concrete and asphalt business in
Coming out of the hearing, he was a different man.
"I find it alarming that the airline and the F.A.A. would want to hold
something as horrific as a hijacking among a few people," he said,
"when bells and whistles should have been going off in all categories of
responsibility."
Agents had allowed families to talk informally with them after the meeting, and
Mr. Low had some very frank questions for an F.A.A. representative.
"The warning from F.A.A. in the summer of 2001 was supposedly given to all
the airlines on CD-ROM’s," he said. "Where did those warnings go? To
flight crews? I have never had any indication that any pilot or flight
attendant heard those warnings."
He added that the F.A.A. man had nothing to tell him.
"I’d been with American for 29 years," Ms. Dillard said with
embittered pride. "My job was supervision over all the flight attendants
who flew out of National, Baltimore or Dulles. In the summer of 2001, we had
absolutely no warnings about any threats of hijackings or terrorism, from the
airline or from the F.A.A."
Alice Hoglan’s face was ashen when she emerged from
the meeting. The mother of one of the brave, doomed passengers on United
Airlines Flight 93, Mark Bingham, a gay rugby player, Ms. Hoglan
now knew even more vividly what her son had kept from her when he had called.
Along with Todd Beamer and other brave passengers, he had helped lead a
passenger revolt aboard Flight 93, which was heading toward Washington and
either Congress or the White House.
"It was excruciating," she said, her lips biting off the few upbeat
words she could muster. "I’m just very grateful that the people on Flight
93, the heroes who were able to act, died on their feet and doing the very best
they could to preserve lives on the ground."
Ms. Hoglan, who worked 29 years as a flight attendant
for United, the airline on which her son was killed, was still flying for
United in the summer of 2001. She had come to the hearing neatly dressed in a
gray suit, her eyes bright in anticipation of deeper understanding. Afterwards,
her wispy silver hair looked like it had been raked through in frustration. Her
eyes blazed with reignited anguish and sank back into a mother’s face that
could only be described as ravaged. She is among the 115 families who rejected
the financial buyout by the federal Victims’ Compensation Fund in order to preserve
her right to sue the airlines and government agencies who failed to warn or
protect Americans from the third terrorist bombing on our homeland.
"I’ve been learning a lot," said Ms. Hoglan.
"During the summer of 2001, there were 12 directives sent by the F.A.A.
which are now supposedly classified notifying the airlines of specific threats that terrorists were planning to hijack their aircrafts. The
airlines apparently buried that information and didn’t tell us."
A Freedom of Information Act request has confirmed that the F.A.A. sent a dozen
warnings to the airlines between May and September of 2001. Those 35 pages of
alerts are being exempted from public disclosure by a federal statute that
covers "information that would be detrimental to the security of
transportation if disclosed." Most rational people would say that the
non-disclosure of the alerts was what was detrimental to the security of
transportation on Sept. 11.
"The F.B.I. gathered the evidence, gave it to the F.A.A., the F.A.A. gave
it to the airlines, and the airlines didn’t tell us," Ms. Hoglan said. "I was a working flight attendant with
United that summer, in 2001, and I never heard a thing. I’m suing United
Airlines, and I’m very keen on the role of the flight attendants in Sept.
11."
The same lament was sounded by Ms. Ogonowski, who was
also a senior working flight attendant in the summer of 2001, for American
Airlines. She had crewed many times on the 767 that her husband piloted on the
morning of Sept. 11. "I’m an insider. There was no warning to be more
vigilant. We were sitting ducks. My husband was such a big, commanding man, six
feet tall. He didn’t have a shot in hell. These people come in behind him, he’s sitting low, forward, strapped in the same with
his co-pilot. No warning. If they’d been alerted to possibilities Ö but people
were complacent."
Ms. Ogonowski was legally required to exempt American
Airlines from her lawsuit in order to accept workmen’s compensation from the
company for her husband’s death on the job. "But I never felt American was
at fault," she said. "Our own C.I.A. and F.B.I. failed us. They
should have been able to be more prepared, and warned us."
Some of the families of victims aboard Flight 93 were painfully reminded of the
cockpit tape the F.B.I. allowed them to hear one year ago. That was the
"Let’s roll" flight, for which Beamer and the other passengers have
been celebrated for their quick thinking and courageous confrontation with the
terrorists.
"There was a lot of yelling by passengers, like you’d hear in a
huddle," one family member told me, requesting anonymity for fear of being
thrown out of the suit against the airlines. "It sounded like, ëIn the cockpit, in the cockpit if we don’t get in there,
we’ll die!’ Then we heard crashing dishes. Then screaming among the terrorists,
frightened screams, as if to say, ëYou got me! You’re
killing me!’"
Some of the relatives are keen to find out why, at the peak of this struggle,
the tape suddenly stops recording voices and all that is heard in the last 60
seconds or so is engine noise. Had the tape been tampered with? When I put
their question to Mr. Novak, the lead prosecutor on Flight 93, he said curtly,
"I’m not going to comment on that, and neither should have they. They
violated that nondisclosure agreement by telling you the contents of that
cockpit voice recorder."
Why didn’t United at least warn the pilots of Flight 93 to bar the cockpit
door, some of the families wanted to know?
Ed Ballinger, the flight dispatcher for United Airlines that morning, was the
last human being to talk to the cockpit of Flight 93. He had 16 flights taking
off early that morning from the East Cost to the West Coast. When United’s Flight 175 began acting erratically and failed to
respond to his warnings, he began banging out the same enigmatic message to all
his planes: "Beware of cockpit intrusion."
Flight 93, the last of the hijacked planes, called him back and said "Hi,
Ed. Confirmed."
Mr. Ballinger said he didn’t wait for his superiors or for Transportation
Secretary Norman Mineta’s decision to ground all
flights. He sent out a Stop-Fly alert to all crews. But United
dispatchers were instructed by their superiors not to tell the pilots why they
were being instructed to land, he claims.
"One of the things that upset me was that they knew, 45 minutes before
[Flight 93 crashed], that American Airlines had a problem. I put the story
together myself [from news accounts]," Mr. Ballinger said. "Perhaps
if I had the information sooner, I might have gotten the message to [Flight] 93
to bar the door."
This week, when the 9/11 com-
mission holds its 12th and final hearings on Wednesday and Thursday, it will
drill down on the excuses offered by the nation’s air defense network, NORAD,
to explain why it failed utterly to order a protective cap of fighter jets over
the nation’s capitol as soon as the world knew that the nation was under
attack. Families will be listening carefully when the commission questions the
head of NORAD’s Northeast Air Defense Sector, General
Ralph E. Eberhart. NORAD had as long as 50 minutes to
order fighter jets to intercept Flight 93 in its path toward
So many unconnected dots, contradictions and implausible
coincidences. Like the fact that NORAD was running an imaginary
terrorist-attack drill called "Vigilant Guardian" on the same morning
as the real-world attacks. At 8:40 a.m., when a sergeant at NORAD’s
center in Rome, N.Y., notified his northeastern commander, Col. Robert Marr, of
a possible hijacked airliner American Flight 11 the colonel wondered aloud if
it was part of the exercise. This same confusion was played out at the lower
levels of the NORAD network.
What’s more, the decades-old procedure for a quick response by the nation’s air
defense had been changed in June of 2001. Now, instead of NORAD’s
military commanders being able to issue the command to launch fighter jets,
approval had to be sought from the civilian Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. This change is extremely significant, because Mr.
Rumsfeld claims to have been "out of the
loop" nearly the entire morning of 9/11. He isn’t on the record as having
given any orders that morning. In fact, he didn’t even go to the White House
situation room; he had to walk to the window of his office in the Pentagon to
see that the country’s military headquarters was in flames.
Mr. Rumsfeld claimed at a previous commission hearing
that protection against attack inside the homeland was not his responsibility.
It was, he said, "a law-enforcement issue."
Why, in that case, did he take onto himself the responsibility of approving NORAD’s deployment of fighter planes?
The families of the vanished bodies and unsettled souls of 9/11 are still
waiting to have the dots connected. Until that happens, many continue to feel
perforations in their hearts that even time will not heal.
You may reach Gail Sheehy via email at:
gsheehy@observer.com.
Because of its importance to the events of
