191. 9/11: The Twin Towers Fall (Ep 5)

What happened on 9/11? This is the day itself, as seen through the eyes of those who lived and died… Listen as David and Gordon take us through the day that changed America, forever. ------------------- THE REST IS CLASSIFIED LIVE 2026 at The Rest Is Fest: Buy your tickets ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠to see David, Gordon and special guest Anthony Scaramucci live on stage at London’s Southbank Centre on 5 September: https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/scaramucci-vs-the-rest-is-classified-team-america/ ------------------- Sign-up for our free newsletter where producer Becki takes you behind the scenes of the show: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://mailchi.mp/goalhanger.com/tric-free-newsletter-sign⁠-up⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Join the Declassified Club to go deeper into the world of espionage with exclusive Q&As, interviews with top intelligence insiders, regular livestreams, ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, and weekly deep dives into original spy stories. Members also get curated reading lists, special book discounts, prize draws, and access to our private chat community. Just go to ⁠⁠therestisclassified.com⁠ or join on Apple Podcasts. ------------------- Get a 10% discount on business PCs, printers and accessories using the code TRIC10. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://HP.com/CLASSIFIED⁠⁠⁠⁠ for more information. T&C's apply. ------------------- EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restisclassified Upgrade your online protection with an all-in-one security app! It’s risk free with NordVPN’s 30-day money-back guarantee 🌍 ------------------- Email: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@restisclassified⁠ Video Editor: Joe Pettit Social Producer: Emma Jackson Assistant Producer: Alfie Rowe Producer: Becki Hills Head of History: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03David McCloskey?

  For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter and discounted books, join the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com.

• 0:25Gordon Corera?

  The day is September 11, 2001. A group of Al Qaeda hijackers are preparing to commit one of the deadliest terror attacks in history. But what happened on the day itself? Welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm Gordon Carrera.

• 0:42David McCloskey?

  And I'm David McCloskey.

• 0:43Gordon Corera?

  For four episodes, we followed the plot. It was assembled, how the hijackers were trained, how they came into the United States. We've looked at what the FBI and CIA knew about them, at the fact the lights were blinking red in the summer of 2001, but with no specific details about what was coming. And we left last time on the night of September 10 itself, with the soon to be hijackers preparing themselves for the next morning. This time, we're looking at the day itself, September 11, 2001. Our hijacking teams awake early and make their way to the airport. And this is the moment of no return. First, a word from our sponsors, HP.

• 1:28Gordon Corera?

  This episode is brought to you by HP.

• 1:31David McCloskey?

  In intelligence, you quickly learn that you are only as strong as the network around you. It's rarely a single major event that undermines an operation. It's the gaps between systems. That's where information leaks.

• 1:42Gordon Corera?

  It's the same in business. Leaders face a constant battle against strict timelines, mismatched tools, and the worry their security isn't as tight as they think it is.

• 1:53David McCloskey?

  Which is why HP approaches technology not as a collection of gadgets, but as an integrated system.

• 1:59Gordon Corera?

  And crucially, that protection is built in at hardware level. It runs quietly in the background, blocking threats without requiring constant specialist oversight.

• 2:09David McCloskey?

  With a team of business advisors, HP helps businesses of all sizes find technology that fits their needs and budget.

• 2:17Gordon Corera?

  To see how HP helps businesses work securely and productively, visit hp.com/classified. Trick listeners also benefit from 10% off HP Business Technology with the code TRICK10.

• 2:35Gordon Corera?

  This episode is brought to you by Wise. It's only when you start moving money between currencies that you really think about the exchange rate, the fee, and what might be hidden away in the small print. Whether you're living abroad, paying someone overseas, or just trying to manage your money across borders, you want a fair exchange rate, an easy transfer, and no surprises along the way. Wise keeps things simple. Wise is a smart way to move the currencies you need around the globe. It works in more than 160 countries and with over 40 currencies. Most transfers arrive instantly. Wise uses the mid-market exchange rate, like the one you see on Google, with no markups or hidden fees. So when money needs to move, you can see the rate, know the fee, and get

• 3:20Gordon Corera?

  on with it. Join millions saving billions on hidden fees by downloading the Wise app today. Be smart, get wise. Ts and Cs apply.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  Want to be the one who's always in the know about the game, the scores, the plays? Here's a tip, the Apple Sports app. Just pick your favorite teams and get automatic live updates without even knowing their schedules. And when your team scores, it shows up right on your iPhone lock screen, making it easy to check in anytime. So rule the group chat and download Apple Sports for free on the App Store or find it on your new iPhone.

• 3:54Gordon Corera?

  So David, it was a brilliantly clear blue sky that September morning. I think everyone can remember it from the pictures. And yet, a day in which some of the darkest things are going to happen in American history. Let's focus on the hijackers, shall we? And what they were up to as they head towards the airports to get their flights.

• 4:16David McCloskey?

  And we should say in this episode, we're gonna just cover September 11, 2001. And there are two books in particular that we're indebted to as we piece this history back together. One of them is Garrett Graff's The Only Plane in the Sky, which is an oral history of 9/11. And the other is a book by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn called 102 Minutes, which focuses on events inside the World Trade Center itself. But hijackers to start. Atta, Mohammed Atta, as we said last episode, had driven bizarrely north

• 4:48Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, that strange journey.

• 4:48David McCloskey?

  Portland, Maine, the evening before, for reasons we still don't understand. And they had left their hotel at 5:30 in the morning, and they cut things really close. They dropped their rental car in the lot and they clear security at the Portland Airport around 5:45, just seven minutes before their commuter flight to Boston. And it's crazy to think about because had that flight been delayed, it's possible the whole thing would have unraveled or would have had to have been rescheduled. But it's not. They land at Boston Logan, 6:45. And seven minutes later, Atta takes a short call from Shaheen, one of the other pilots, who was in another terminal at Logan, preparing to board the second plane.

• 5:32David McCloskey?

  Shaheen and his team had checked out of a budget hotel the night before, drove their rental car to Logan, where apparently they argue with someone in the garage over a parking spot.

• 5:42Gordon Corera?

  Weird, isn't it?

• 5:43David McCloskey?

  Weird. The others are making their own way to the airport. So near Newark, very early, Zia Jara, who's written, sent that letter that we spoke about last time to his girlfriend, calls his girlfriend and says he loves her three times.

• 5:59David McCloskey?

  Outside Washington, the Pentagon team has checked out of their hotel in the Virginia suburbs. They drive to Dulles in a rental car. They park in an hourly lot. The interior of this car, which investigators will later turn over, is littered with flight manuals, cockpit diagrams, and maps.

• 6:16Gordon Corera?

  And what's interesting is across these three airports, the men go through the security checkpoints, but nothing is found, which is suspicious.

• 6:24David McCloskey?

  By 8:00 AM, the four planes are loading. We have American 11 and United 175 out of Boston, American 77 out of Washington Dulles, and United 93, which is out of Newark. These are ordinary flights, full crews, business travelers, you have families heading home, honeymooning couples. Right, it's just a typical mix of kind of business and leisure passengers on any transcontinental flight taking off that morning.

• 6:52Gordon Corera?

  So let's look at the first plane, American 11. It lifts off from Boston at 7:59. It's a Boeing 767, carrying 81 passengers, nine flight attendants, as well as the captain and first officer. And for the first 14 minutes, it's all normal, isn't it, on the flight?

• 7:08David McCloskey?

  But then just before 8:14, it makes its last routine acknowledgement to air traffic control. And 16 seconds later, there's a further instruction which goes unanswered. And that's because the hijacking is underway. And it's really swift. It's really brutal. This is the plane carrying those two Saudi brothers we talked about,

• 7:30Gordon Corera?

  that we talked about, yeah.

• 7:31David McCloskey?

  The Sherry brothers. They're seated in the second row of first class. They stab two flight attendants preparing for cabin service. And then Atta, who is going to take over the controls, moves toward the cockpit. Behind him, a passenger who is a former Israeli Special Forces officer, is stabbed by one of the other muscle who was seated behind him, probably because this guy is getting up to try to stop what he's seeing happening in the in the front rows. And he's not realizing that there's yet another hijacker who's sitting behind him. The hijackers spray pepper spray to drive passengers to the rear of the plane, try to get them away from the cockpit.

• 8:13Gordon Corera?

  They claim they've got a bomb.

• 8:14David McCloskey?

  They claim they have a bomb. How, in this case, they get into the cockpit, it's unknown. But whatever they did, within minutes, they have control of the plane. And it's very likely that the pilot and the copilot are dead or dying. Now, what happened next on Flight 11 is known chiefly because two flight attendants made phone calls. One of them is a woman named Betty Ong. She's 45. She's in her 14th year with the airline. And she's aboard that morning only because she had switched onto the flight to meet her sister and plan a trip to Hawaii.

• 8:49Gordon Corera?

  One of those tiny details, so many of those from that day, which are so painful.

• 8:54David McCloskey?

  The passengers have been herded into the back with the pepper spray. And what Betty does is she calls, she gets on one of the phones in the back and calls American Airlines reservations line and stays on it for about 25 minutes. At 8:19, and she gives this very grim, stark report. She says, "The cockpit isn't answering. Somebody has been stabbed in business class." She talks about how there's mace, there's pepper spray in the air. People are having a hard time breathing. When she's trying to give the person on the other end of the line seat numbers as she sort of pieces together what's happening. The other flight attendant on this flight, Madeline Amy Sweeney, is filling in that day for a sick colleague. And she reaches a manager who also happens to be a friend back at Logan

• 9:39David McCloskey?

  Airport and reports that a passenger had had his throat cut. Two of the other flight attendants had been stabbed. And again, mentioned there's a bomb that the hijackers have threatened they have in the cockpit, which of course they don't. And then she starts talking about how the plane is descending rapidly. Plane's flying very low, it's flying over the buildings of New York. And then she says, oh, my God, we are way too low. And the call ends. At eight twenty-four, air traffic controllers hear a transmission from American Airlines Flight 11 that the hijacker at the controls believed he's making to the cabin. And so in kind of broken words, they get a phrase that, you know, they don't understand

• 10:23David McCloskey?

  the full meaning until later. He says, we have some planes.

• 10:28Gordon Corera?

  He's trying to communicate to the passengers, he thinks.

• 10:30David McCloskey?

  Right.

• 10:31Gordon Corera?

  And to try and, I don't know, calm them, stop them fighting back.

• 10:35David McCloskey?

  Well, again, I think, I think they're obviously trying to, they're trying to control people and saying like, we have planes, we have bombs.

• 10:42Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 10:42David McCloskey?

  We will detonate them unless you listen to what we say, which in some respects makes it feel more like.

• 10:49Gordon Corera?

  A traditional hijacking, which is what people are probably thinking at this point.

• 10:54David McCloskey?

  At this point.

• 10:55Gordon Corera?

  And then, I mean, astonishingly, that's eight twenty-four, there's another 22 more minutes of that flight.

• 11:04David McCloskey?

  Yeah.

• 11:04Gordon Corera?

  I mean, it's just impossible to think what is going through people's minds for 22 minutes as it's flying, knowing that a hijacker is controlled of the plane. But people are still probably hoping they're going to land somewhere.

• 11:19David McCloskey?

  But at eight forty-six and forty seconds, American Airlines Flight 11 strikes the North Tower of the World Trade Center. It hits roughly between the 93rd and 99th floors. It's flying just about 440 miles an hour when it hits the building. Everyone aboard and hundreds in the building above and around the impact are killed instantly. And the force is absolutely staggering. So the plane is carrying about 10,000 gallons of jet fuel, which ignite into fireballs. The largest of them is around 200 feet across, right? So it's wider than the tower itself. Much of the fuel burns off within minutes, but some of it is, you know, kind of outside the building, running down the building, getting into elevator shafts.

• 12:04David McCloskey?

  The impact itself shakes the ground, literally, in New York. There are seismographs at Columbia University's observatory, which are 20-plus miles away. And they register the jolt for 12 seconds, the impact of this plane hitting the building. Now, smoke is pouring out of the North Tower after this. And this is the point where news cameras begin to pick it up. So you have local coverage first at eight forty-eight, where the CBS affiliate in New York crosses over to its traffic helicopter, whose reporter is describing seeing smoke coming out of the tower. And then just minutes later, national coverage starts.

• 12:46Gordon Corera?

  And international coverage as well. I mean, I can remember this because I was at the BBC and the, working at the Today program and immediately our coverage switched to, to these shots of the, the World Trade Center.

• 13:00David McCloskey?

  The first one.

• 13:01Gordon Corera?

  The first impact. And people still don't know what's going on at that point. And people are thinking, people are thinking it's a light plane which has hit the tower rather than a big plane at that moment, in those first few moments. So something's happening, but absolutely no idea at that point that it's a terrorist attack.

• 13:17David McCloskey?

  Did you think it was a terrorist attack at that point?

• 13:19Gordon Corera?

  Not at that point, yeah.

• 13:21David McCloskey?

  Yeah.

• 13:21Gordon Corera?

  Thought it was an accident of some kind.

• 13:23David McCloskey?

  And I think on the ground in New York, it also looks like an accident because it's one plane. Let's go to Bin Laden for a second. He's known the date for probably five days, so he's been waiting. And the morning of September 11th in Afghanistan, he wakes up early and prays, as was his custom. As the first plane hits the North Tower, Al Qaeda guys at his guesthouse are basically trying to get a radio signal. And finally, someone actually tunes into the BBC's Arabic service. And they get the breaking news that a plane has struck the World Trade Center in New York.

• 14:04David McCloskey?

  And the members of Al Qaeda who, who know that something was going on and understand that this is Al Qaeda are elated.

• 14:12Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 14:13David McCloskey?

  But because the operation had been so compartmentalized, nobody else knows what else is coming. And Bin Laden kind of says, look, wait, wait, there's more. And according to Lawrence Wright's account in the looming tower, Bin Laden, who at this point is weeping, holds up three fingers for the three remaining planes that are still in the air and still headed to their targets.

• 14:36Gordon Corera?

  So let's go back to New York then. So in the South Tower of the World Trade Center, people are beginning to evacuate. Others are told over the public address system that their building was secure and they could return to their desks. I mean, that's, I mean, it's a terrible moment because, because what they don't realize is that there's a second plane coming for them in the tower.

• 14:58David McCloskey?

  In the, in the Dwyer book, 102 Minutes, they have this very fascinating explanation for at least some of the disaster of that day, which is, at least part of the scale of the tragedy is, is due to, of all things, the building codes in New York. Because the World Trade Center is constructed in the late 60s and early 70s, both towers. And had it been erected according to the building code that had been in effect in New York since, I think, the 30s, it probably would have been a very different building. But there was a new code that had come into effect and that the real estate industry,

• 15:40David McCloskey?

  for understandable reasons, had promoted, which made it much more lucrative to construct these kind of very, you know, very tall skyscrapers because it increased essentially the density of the space that you could rent or lease. And what that did was it cut back on potential escape routes.

• 16:00Gordon Corera?

  Evacuation routes.

• 16:01David McCloskey?

  Evacuation routes. It cut back on the floor space available for evacuation and exit. And the result is that in both towers, it's just going to be that much harder to actually get people out. And it, it probably means that, you know, some thousand or more people inside the North Tower, who would initially survive the impact, couldn't reach an open staircase at the time. So as this, as this doomed evacuation of the North Tower and this sort of halted evacuation of the South Tower are underway, United Flight 175 had left Boston at eight fourteen AM. And that's just minutes after American Airlines Flight 11 had been seized by ATA and his

• 16:46David McCloskey?

  crew. Now, somewhere between eight forty-two and eight forty-six, the five hijackers on United 175, they strike. Again, similar playbook, they have knives, box cutters, they use pepper spray to herd people back, they say we have a bomb, they kill both pilots. And then, as on the first plane, the passengers who have been herded into the back, they start making calls.

• 17:10Gordon Corera?

  Hmm.

• 17:11David McCloskey?

  Peter Hanson, one of the passengers on this plane, he's 32, he's flying with his wife, Sue Kim, and their two and a half year old daughter, Christine, who is going to wind up being the youngest of all the day's victims. At eight fifty-two, Peter gets in touch with his father in Connecticut and says, the cockpit's been taken, there's a flight attendant who's been stabbed, hangs up. Minutes later, he calls again, and in the transcript of the call, you can hear his voice get really tight as he seems to understand what's, what's happening. Hijackers have knives and pepper spray, he says, you know, the plane's kind of making jerky movements. He thought that they meant to fly into a building and he tells his dad, he says, don't

• 17:55David McCloskey?

  worry, dad, if it happens, it'll be very fast. And there's a scream, woman screaming, the call cut off. His father then turns on the television and he's watching at nine oh three AM as United 175 banks hard into the South Tower. And this time, the cameras are live because everyone's been watching the burning North Tower. So millions of people are watching as a fully loaded passenger jet just soars into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

• 18:30Gordon Corera?

  I mean, I remember actually watching that live. So I was watching the live coverage, saw that second plane in. But what's, what I remember thinking was, even though it said it was live, in my head, I thought this is a replay of the first impact. And I thought, because I, I couldn't quite compute that a second plane could hit. And so in my head, I was like, oh, they've just gone back and found some footage from 15 minutes ago or 20 minutes ago of the first plane hitting. And then it took a few moments for it to become clear. No, no, no, this was a second plane hitting. And of course, at that moment, at that moment, you realize this isn't, the first one wasn't an accident.

• 19:13Gordon Corera?

  You don't get two accidents like that. This is an attack.

• 19:17David McCloskey?

  So at that point, you knew.

• 19:19Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 19:20David McCloskey?

  And I think everybody else knew too. This is absolutely not an accident. So let's go inside the, the two towers. Because there, there's roughly 100 minutes before they fall. And there's a bunch of ordinary people who were in absolutely desperate situations. So on the 88th floor of the North Tower, there's a Port Authority engineer named Frank DiMartini and a bunch of other colleagues of his who could have fled immediately. But instead, they get a crowbar, flashlights, and they start working their way through the floors, which are filling with smoke. In many cases, they're prying open jammed doors and trying to pull trap people free, probably end up saving dozens of people, and they all die, these rescuers.

• 20:03David McCloskey?

  Elsewhere in the North Tower, there's six people who are trapped in an express elevator, just stuck in this kind of sealed shaft and there's smoke seeping in. Among them is a window washer named Jan Demshur. And he actually, he's got a squeegee and he uses kind of the, the flat steel blade on there, take turns kind of hacking at the wall of the shaft, punching through drywall until they can break into a bathroom on the far side and then climb out to safety. There's Brian Clark, who's an executive with a brokerage on the 84th floor of the South Tower, and he's leading a small group kind of down the smoke choked stairwell.

• 20:44David McCloskey?

  Here's a banging and some noise and a cry for help behind a collapsed wall. On the other side is a banker from the 81st floor who had kind of crawled as far as he could and hit a dead end. Clark shines his flashlight in. This other banker waves a hand through the gap and then Clark pulls him out over this broken wall and they get out of the tower together before it will come down. Firefighters are beginning to arrive at the scene and they're going up into the towers. Now, above the impact zones, where the stairwells and elevators were severed, escape is absolutely not an option. And some people go to the broken windows and some of them fall, or in some cases, jump.

• 21:28Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, and I mean, these were some of the most, I think in the days after, some of the most, I don't know, striking awful images. I mean, there was one of these people who was captured by an Associated Press photographer. Richard drew of, of just a figure, you know, the falling man, as it was known, you know, who jumped headfirst from the tower. And I mean, I think newspapers sometimes ran it once for impact, but then it was so horrific. I just don't think you never saw it again. And I don't know if, if that person's ever been identified as who it was, but I mean, you just put yourself in the mind of someone who knows they're going to die and it's a choice of dying in the, in the flames in that burning building or jumping. I mean, it's just, you know, truly awful.

• 22:13Gordon Corera?

  I think so many individual stories from those days, you know, I think the firefighters as well, rushing to the scene to try and save people who are all going to die themselves.

• 22:21David McCloskey?

  There's Melissa Doi, who's a 32-year-old financial manager who's up on the 83rd floor of the South Tower. She reaches a 911 operator and stays on the line for nearly a half hour as the heat's kind of climbing toward her and the oxygen's running out and the operator is not able to send anyone who can help her. And she keeps telling Melissa to stay calm, you know, say her prayers. And near the end, Doi asks, she says, "I'm going to die, aren't I?" I mean, some who could have, have fled did choose to stay. And there's a case of a young equities trader named Willis Crowther, who was a volunteer firefighter. In his spare time, he's last seen in the South Tower, leading survivors down through the smoke. He's got a, you know, red bandana over his face.

• 23:06David McCloskey?

  He's going back up again and again to try to rescue people and his, his body's later recovered alongside those of several New York firefighters. It will end up being the deadliest day in the history of American Fire Service. So for 100 minutes, nobody below though, really grasps that the towers might fall. So you have people climbing the stairs, you have the rescuers arriving, going up. The crews in the lobby, they, they all assume that despite all of the carnage and chaos so far, that the buildings will stand.

• 23:41Gordon Corera?

  Let's take a break there.

• 23:44Speaker 03

  Did you know that psoriatic arthritis may progress over time and could cause permanent joint damage if left untreated? Listen to what it sounds like to be a million miles away. Trifaya Guselkumab, taken by injection, is a prescription medicine for adults with active psoriatic arthritis. Serious allergic reactions, increased risk of infections or lower ability to fight them and liver problems may occur. Before treatment, get checked for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms, or need a vaccine.

• 24:28Speaker 03

  Imagine being a million miles away. Explore the possibilities. Ask your doctor about Trifaya. Tap this ad to see new joint data and learn more about Trifaya, including important safety information.

• 24:44Speaker 04

  Ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease symptoms? Don't pause for the moments that matter. That's why understanding your treatment options matters. Discover what's possible with Trifaya. Guselkumab. Trifaya is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis. Serious allergic reactions, increased risk of infections or lower ability to fight them and liver problems may occur. Before treatment, get checked for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms, or need a vaccine. Talk to your doctor and explore what's possible, or call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more about Trifaya and visit trifayarradio.com.

• 25:29Speaker 05

  Are you looking for support in your weight management journey? Zepbound Terzepatide may be able to help. Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity, or some adults with overweight who also have weight-related medical problems, to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off. Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15-milligram injection. Zepbound contains Terzepatide and should not be used with other Terzepatide-containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Zepbound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens or reuse needles.

• 26:11Speaker 05

  Don't take if allergic to it, or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer, or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop Zepbound and call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain or a serious allergic reaction. Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia. If you're nursing, pregnant, plan to be, or taking birth control pills. Taking Zepbound with a sulphonal urea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems. Talk to your doctor.

• 26:51Speaker 05

  Call 1-800-545-5979, or visit zepbound.lilly.com.

• 26:57Gordon Corera?

  Welcome back. The twin towers of the World Trade Center have been hit. And at that moment, it is clear that this is an attack on the United States. So let's maybe go to, to Langley, just outside Washington DC, CIA headquarters, where these warnings they've had that something might be coming have now played out in the most terrible way.

• 27:26David McCloskey?

  Well, that morning, the CIA Director George Tenet, he's actually at a breakfast in Washington. The President, President Bush, is traveling in Florida and he's, Michael Morell, his PDB briefer is with him, doing the briefing that morning.

• 27:41Gordon Corera?

  And we should say, we've spoken to Mike Morell and there's a bonus episode there, which is, it's astonishing really to hear what it was like to be with the President of the United States on that day. So the President's out of town, but George Tenet is in DC and he's going to get told about the attack himself, isn't he?

• 27:58David McCloskey?

  So George Tenet is at breakfast that morning in DC. His security chief comes up to him, very urgent look on his face and says, "A plane's at the World Trade Center." And I think Tenet, who's been steeped in this threat reporting all summer, instantly suspects that something terrible has happened. So he leaves breakfast, gets into his car, and he, he writes, you know, in his memoir that all the random dots we'd been looking at started to fit into a pattern. My head was exploding of connections. And he's probably thinking, as no other Americans would, he's thinking of, you know, that old KSM plot.

• 28:32Gordon Corera?

  Multiple airliners.

• 28:33David McCloskey?

  To blow up airliners over the Pacific. You know, or even there was, there was a related scheme to fly a plane into CIA headquarters. So Tenet's mind is starting to go to, to dark places. On the drive, he can't get calls through to Langley on his secure phone. He's having trouble with it. And he describes the drive as the longest 12 minutes of his life. By the time he gets to Langley, the second plane is hit. The South Tower has been hit. At 10:00 AM, Tenet gives the order to evacuate CIA headquarters, which is not a normal thing to do.

• 29:05Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 29:05David McCloskey?

  The only time it was evacuated when I was there was, there was actually an earthquake in Washington DC and we evacuated headquarters. So this is, this is insane.

• 29:15Gordon Corera?

  But it's interesting, it's the counterterrorism center. They don't want to go. They're exempted from this and they're saying, you know, "Well, we could all die," but they're like, "We've got to stay and work," because they know what it is and what's coming.

• 29:29David McCloskey?

  And keep in mind at this point, it is a very real possibility in the minds of everyone there, that there will be a plane.

• 29:36Gordon Corera?

  Heading for Langley.

• 29:37David McCloskey?

  Comes to Langley and kills everybody there.

• 29:39Gordon Corera?

  Yeah.

• 29:40David McCloskey?

  The chief of the counterterrorism center had, had told Tenet, "Look, no, people have to stay." And Tenet recalls telling him, he's like, "Well, they could die." And the chief of CTC says, "Well, sir, then they're just going to have to die." And Tenet says, "You're right." And so there is a crew inside CTC that will remain there throughout the entire day.

• 29:59Gordon Corera?

  So back to the hijackers then. We've had the two planes hitting the World Trade Center, but there is a third plane now, an American 77, a Boeing 757 out of Washington Dulles, which had taken off at 8:20, bound for Los Angeles, and that's the one that's heading for the Washington area.

• 30:19David McCloskey?

  This plane flies normally until about 8:51. Between 8:51 and 8:54, the hijacker sees it. Again, it's the same playbook. Knives, box cutters, probably kill the pilots, use pepper spray to herd people into the back, tell everyone you have a bomb.

• 30:37David McCloskey?

  At 8:54, the plane turns south, which is off course. And then two minutes later, its transponder goes dark, and even radar contact is lost with the plane. It just vanishes from the controller's screens. It's doubling back toward Washington, but no one can see it. And then, as on the other flights, from the back of the cabin, the calls start. At 9:12, a flight attendant named Renee May gets in touch with her mother in Las Vegas and said the plane had been hijacked, the passengers had been moved to the back. She says, "Call American Airlines." And her parents do. Around the same time, a passenger named Barbara Olson reaches out to her husband, who's actually the US Solicitor General, a guy named Ted Olson.

• 31:21David McCloskey?

  Tells him the plane's been hijacked by men with knives and box cutters. She called a second time. The pilot has announced the hijacking, she says, and she asked her husband, you know, what should she tell the captain to do? Because the captain's still alive. He tells her, her husband tells her, about the two planes that had already hit the World Trade Center.

• 31:40Gordon Corera?

  So then she's got to realize what's coming.

• 31:42David McCloskey?

  And then she tells him, "The plane is flying very low. It's flying over houses." And then the line goes dead. At 9:34 a.m., the plane is five miles southwest of the Pentagon. It swings through this hard 330-degree descending turn and drops toward the ground. And this is the plane that is piloted by Honey Hanjor, who is arguably

• 32:08Gordon Corera?

  The worst pilot.

• 32:09David McCloskey?

  The worst pilot among the crew. He's pushing the throttles to full power. At 9:37 and 46 seconds, American 77 strikes the Pentagon. It is going roughly 530 miles an hour. Kills everybody aboard and 125 people inside the building. And the recollections inside the Pentagon are of absolute chaos. There's a woman named Sheila Moody, who's an accountant. It's her very first day of work at the Pentagon. She spent the morning setting up her new office. And when the plane hits, she gets this burst of hot air hitting her eyes. And when she opens him up, everything around her is on fire. She's trapped in the smoke. She actually survives by tapping on a surface

• 32:54David McCloskey?

  so a firefighter can hear where she is. Near her in the Pentagon, there's an Army security manager named John Yates, who's actually blown across the room and burned over much of his body. And when he comes to, the office is totally black. It's thick with smoke. There's furniture everywhere. And he's trying to grope and find a way out.

• 33:12Gordon Corera?

  I headed out to the US. It took a few days to get there because airspace was closed, as we'll get to. But I got to the Pentagon on, I think, the Friday, a couple of days after 11:00, and saw. And I still remember this sight because there was this blackened scar in the Pentagon building where the plane had hit, which was still smoking when I got there. But what was astonishing is the Pentagon building is so big that actually, the scar, the hole, the blackened scar, didn't almost, you couldn't believe that a plane had hit it. It didn't look big enough. And it's partly the size of the building. And yet, to suddenly look at that and think a passenger jet airliner had hit at that point. I mean, anyway, it was astonishing. But it is at that moment that actually airspace is going to be closed.

• 33:57Gordon Corera?

  I mean, something really unprecedented happens because they are now realizing in the Federal Aviation Administration that something bad is going on with multiple airliners. And so, I mean, it's the, their national operations manager's first day in the job, but he's going to have to order every aircraft in American skies to land at the nearest airport at once. And international flights will be stopped from arriving.

• 34:25David McCloskey?

  4,000 planes land. It's more than 100 transatlantic flights that are turned back or diverted to Canada. And the US clears its own skies, essentially.

• 34:35Gordon Corera?

  So that's three of the planes. Then there is this fourth flight. This is different from the others. This is United 93. It's a really powerful film, made by Paul Greengrass, actually, which recounts what happens there and will become very famous. And United 93 was running late, wasn't it?

• 34:52David McCloskey?

  And that is a absolutely crucial detail is ATA, we talked about in the prior episodes, had worked to coordinate the timetables so there wouldn't be delay between these strikes or you could minimize it. And in this case, United 93 is delayed. It doesn't leave the ground until 8:42. It's more than 25 minutes behind schedule. It's a Boeing 757. It's got 37 people on it. It's also got the smallest hijacking team. It's only four. There were five on the other planes. One of the muscle, the Saudi guys meant to round out the team, had actually been turned away at the Orlando Airport back in August. So they're down a guy.

• 35:37David McCloskey?

  The hijackers on this flight also waited longer than the others. They struck at 9:28 a.m., which is 46 minutes into the flight. And when this happens, the plane suddenly drops a few hundred feet. Air traffic control is catching a couple transmissions amid the struggle, though. There's a mayday. And then moments later, they hear a voice shouting, "Get out of here," probably one of the pilots yelling.

• 36:00Gordon Corera?

  To someone trying to get in the cockpit.

• 36:02David McCloskey?

  Yeah, to get out. That's when Jara, the train pilot, takes the controls. He turns the plane back eastward toward Washington, tells the passengers over the intercom to sit down. There's a bomb aboard. Then, as on the other flights, the calls start. But because it's late, the passengers are calling home. They're learning from friends, family, loved ones.

• 36:26Gordon Corera?

  That the other planes have crashed.

• 36:27David McCloskey?

  The other planes have hit the World Trade Center. They've hit the Pentagon. So they understand immediately that it's not a normal hijacking. There's a flight attendant on this plane, Cece Lyles. She leaves her husband a voicemail in really a breaking voice. She says, "Please tell my children that I love them." Sandra Bradshaw, also on the flight, calls her husband from the galley, says everyone's rushing to first class and had to go. There's a passenger also on this flight named Todd Beamer. He's 32. He's an account manager for a software company. He's a husband, a father. His wife Lisa is pregnant with their third child. He's also an alum of my university and the Student Center at my college. It was named after him in the aftermath of this.

• 37:11David McCloskey?

  Unable, he can't reach his family. So he speaks at length with the phone operator named Lisa Jefferson. He asks her to pray with him. He recites the Lord's Prayer. And he makes her promise that she'll call his wife. Then she hears him turn from the phone to the others. The other passengers ask if they're ready, and he says, "Okay, let's roll."

• 37:34Gordon Corera?

  Famous words, yeah.

• 37:36David McCloskey?

  So at 9:57, the passengers on United 93 charge. And the cockpit voice recorder catches this kind of melee, which is muffled through the door. There's shouts, there's thuds, there's the sound of, like, breaking dishes, presumably from the meal that may have been served on the plane. Jara, who's piloting it, rolls the plane hard left and then right. He pitches the nose up and down. He's actually trying to throw the attackers off there. If you get the sense at this point, they've probably subdued or are in the process of subduing some of the muscle.

• 38:09Gordon Corera?

  And he's trying to stop them getting into the cockpit and stopping him.

• 38:11David McCloskey?

  Yeah. One of the muscles, originally him to hold the door, a passenger crying out that if they don't get into the cockpit, they're all going to die. And the hijackers are about to be overwhelmed. And rather than surrender the plane, Jara rolls it onto its back and drives it into the ground. So at 10:03 and 11 seconds, United 93 slams into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. It is going 580 miles an hour. It's 125 miles short of Washington and its target, whether it was the Capitol or the White House, is never reached.

• 38:46Gordon Corera?

  So those people on board die, but their bravery of those passengers stops how many other deaths in Washington? I mean, it's just amazing to think of, you know, them having the bravery to do that and realizing.

• 38:59David McCloskey?

  Yeah, when they could have sat there and hoped for the best. You know, they stood up and did something about it.

• 39:03Gordon Corera?

  So shall we go back to New York? Because during this time, when we talked about the towers being hit, but no one thinking that they could collapse. I mean, it was inconceivable that they would collapse to anyone. But that is what's going to happen after this delay as we head towards 10 o'clock.

• 39:26David McCloskey?

  So when we hit 9:59 a.m., the South Tower, which is actually the second to be hit, it collapses and it kind of folds down floor by floor like dominoes. Many of the eyewitnesses describe the feel of the collapse in terms of like an earthquake or artillery fire. And the tower falls. And we now, we have these iconic videos and images.

• 39:54Gordon Corera?

  Of this cloud of dust, I mean, sweeping through Manhattan. I mean, it's like something.

• 40:01David McCloskey?

  Like a wave.

• 40:01Gordon Corera?

  It's like a wave. I mean, and it goes dark. I think that's what's astonishing. It goes from this really bright blue September day that it's been to just darkness and ash covering everything. It's like a volcanic eruption.

• 40:15David McCloskey?

  Frank Rosano, a guest who was trapped at the Marriott that's positioned between the towers, said, "What had been a bright sunny day suddenly turned pitch black. It was as if a curtain of concrete and steel had come falling down, like the curtain at a play. I could literally see it coming down past the window almost in slow motion, turning everything pitch black." So the streets become, as many of the eyewitness and survivor accounts say, it's like nighttime.

• 40:42Gordon Corera?

  Yeah, and people are just covered in this ash and dust. I mean, you can see them kind of walking dazed around the streets in the footage from the time, can't you? Just covered.

• 40:51David McCloskey?

  And a lot of the faces look like they're literally painted white, almost with the dust and the ash. And the soot is so thick that it actually blocks sound waves. So many of the people who are on the streets of Lower Manhattan and who are enveloped in this cloud describe what had been this terrible, violent noise of the tower collapsing, turning into a world of silence.

• 41:19Gordon Corera?

  It's worth a moment, isn't it, to understand why the towers do fall? Because the conspiracy theorists, you know, will have a field day with this and it's nonsense. You know, the idea that they were kind of wired with explosives and that explains it. It's nonsense, but it, but the science of why they fell is, is important to understand something, why something happened, which no one expected to happen.

• 41:40David McCloskey?

  So the steel didn't melt and there's a later federal engineering investigation that found that the buildings actually survive the impacts themselves. And the design, as it was intended, just like redistributed the loads around the damage. But what happened is the impact and the nature of the airliners essentially is gigantic fuel bombs. What it meant was that it had actually burned off the sprayed on fireproofing of the steel. And it started fires across multiple floors, which are first fed by the jet fuel, but then as the fires get hotter and hotter and stronger and stronger, the contents of the offices

• 42:23David McCloskey?

  themselves, the paper, the furniture, all of that starts to turn into the fuel itself.

• 42:30Gordon Corera?

  And so the steel doesn't actually so much melt, it just loses its strength as it heats effectively and becomes more soft thanks to the heat. And then that allows the whole kind of effect of it kind of concertining and it's sagging and eventually collapsing.

• 42:48David McCloskey?

  Yeah, because it essentially is, it's, yeah, it's not melting into liquid, but it's losing its strength. The fireproofing has been burned off. It's getting hotter and, and it's becoming less rigid. And so in the minutes that follow that, that kind of steel becomes soft and pliable, the, the floor trusses begin to sag and as they sag, they pull the tower's exterior columns inward. And so it kind of is, it's bowed, it's weakened and those columns can't hold the enormous load above them.

• 43:18Gordon Corera?

  And then it just buckles.

• 43:19David McCloskey?

  And then it buckles. And then what happens is as the top of the building begins to drop, the weight, the force of that.

• 43:25Gordon Corera?

  Momentum of it drives it further and further down and, and takes the whole thing.

• 43:29David McCloskey?

  That's right. And then it becomes, and as you can see, kind of the, the velocity of the collapse picking up in the videos, it just becomes unstoppable. So floor drives through floor all the way to the ground and it, it takes 10 seconds. That's it. And the whole thing is down. And then at 10:28, the North Tower falls similarly. And in its final minutes, you know, there's hundreds who are still inside, they're in the stairs, in the lobby, there are firefighters and policemen going in to rescue people. They all go down with the building. It's been just about two hours since the first plane was hijacked.

• 44:11David McCloskey?

  And by mid morning, even though nobody knows it yet, it's all over.

• 44:18Gordon Corera?

  I mean, we didn't know it on the day. And I mean, people thought, what else is coming? Are there more planes that they're going to hit? I mean, the panic, the confusion, the chaos was just so intense. And I, but by, I guess by nightfall, it felt like things were over, you know, the, the immediate chaos. But Manhattan that night, I mean, I, I just think those scenes are just seared into my mind of what it looks like and anyone who remembers it, just the kind of jagged bits of the buildings, which were still there and the dust and the, the chaos. No one had any idea as well, how many people had died. And the estimates were all over the place for how many people had died. I mean, some people thought 10,000.

• 45:01David McCloskey?

  I remember seeing estimates even higher than that on the day of, that it could have meant as many as 20 or 30,000.

• 45:05Gordon Corera?

  And it's going to take a long time to know what's going on. I mean, the ash is still falling and it's, you know, the paper from the offices drifting around. I mean, really, really something else. And then, as I said, at the Pentagon, this, this kind of scar in the building where the, where the plane had, had struck. I mean, just chaos and confusion really, and despair, I think despair.

• 45:27David McCloskey?

  Yeah, tremendous amount of despair. I, I can, you know, remember feeling that. I mean, I was in faraway Minnesota at the time and you can remember just feeling the sense of, you know, everyone's parents came home from work and people came home from school. There's a sense of just disbelief at what we were seeing on the screen. The, the World Trade Center will become, it's, it's the longest burning structural fire in American history. There's, the collapse creates this kind of deep oxygen fed pile that the firefighter's hoses, the water actually could not penetrate. And so the fire only dies as they excavate the debris. And that takes nearly a hundred days.

• 46:11David McCloskey?

  It's not until the week before Christmas that the fire is out at the World Trade Center. Out in the field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, there's almost nothing left. The United Flight 93 had hit the ground at such speed that it had essentially disintegrated. And there's a smoking crater, there's a field of scattered debris and the plane has essentially been obliterated. And there's just a few pieces of, you know, like a flight attendants, you know, book nearby. But I mean, there's just so little left because of the speed at which that plane had hit the ground.

• 46:45Gordon Corera?

  In Afghanistan, Bin Laden and his followers, I guess, you know, they, they know it's them, there's gunfire in the streets as, you know, their, their plan, the plane's operation has succeeded. President Bush, we talk about this more in the bonus episode, don't we? You know, has been in Florida in this classroom, this kind of bizarre scene where he's reading a kid's book in Sarasota, Florida, reading with the schoolchildren when he's told famously by his chief of staff that the second plane is hit and America's under attack. And, you know, with Mike Morell from the CIA, we talk a lot more about what happens that day, you know, being on Air Force One with President Bush as they fly around, still

• 47:25Gordon Corera?

  worried about further attacks, before they eventually returned to Washington that evening. With President Bush then addressing the nation from the Oval Office, looking, I think, pretty shaken as they worry about, about further attacks.

• 47:40David McCloskey?

  And he has a very memorable line from that speech, which I think characterizes so much of, you know, what's to come and, and a lot of the aftermath that we'll talk about in, in the next episode where Bush says, we will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them. And, you know, it, it does start at the first priorities, the wounded and guarding against further attacks, but it's very clear from that moment that the nation is, is going to go on a war footing. And George Tenet, CIA Director, arrives at the White House shortly after the speech because there's going to be a big meeting of Bush's national security team at around 9:00 PM that night. And again, you know, in retrospect, we know that the attack was done on the day of. That is very much an open question.

• 48:24David McCloskey?

  There's been threat reporting coming into the CIA that afternoon. In, in one case from the French, it said another group of terrorists was inside the US preparing a second wave. There's a rumor that Air Force One itself was a target, the president was a target. So Tenet arrives on the night of September 11th to find the White House basically in armed fortress. He's taken not to the Situation Room, which is where you'd normally have national security meetings, but to an underground emergency operations center where the national security team is convening. And Tenet says it was his first time in that room and last time in that room. He never, ever went there again. George Tenet was the CIA Director from 1997 to 2004.

• 49:06David McCloskey?

  He's in this room once on 9/11. Now, by this point in the evening, we talked about this a little bit with, with Michael Morell in, in the bonus episode. I think while Michael's on the plane with the president, he, he, he doesn't deliver an analytical conclusion, but he basically says.

• 49:26Gordon Corera?

  It feels like.

• 49:27David McCloskey?

  It feels like Al Qaeda, right? And by this point, Tenet will tell Bush that this, you know, sort of looks, smells and tastes like Bin Laden. And in fact, when CIA Counterterrorism Center analysts and targeters had been looking through the flight manifests that day, they see that they've got those two Al Qaeda linked Saudi operatives who were on the flight. And so they can know, maybe not with total certainty, but with something approaching it, that this is, that this is Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

• 50:01Gordon Corera?

  What a moment that must be for them.

• 50:03David McCloskey?

  Tenet wrote also, I think this is maybe a place to leave kind of the day is, is Tenet wrote that that room held more raw emotion in one place than I think I've ever experienced in my life. Anger that this could have happened, shock that it had, overwhelming sorrow for the dead, a compelling sense of urgency that we had to respond and do so quickly, and a continuing feeling of dread about what might lie ahead.

• 50:30Gordon Corera?

  And so that morning, which began with clear blue skies, ends with smoke and ash and dread and close to 3,000 people killed. Let's leave it there and next time we'll look at the aftermath and some of the questions which still remain and are still debated about whether these terrible terror attacks could have been prevented. We'll see you next time.

• 50:57David McCloskey?

  We'll see you next time.

• 51:02Speaker 05

  Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. While others follow the noise, we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com.

• 51:17Speaker 06

  Marketers have used AI to create more marketing than ever. But generic AI tools produce generic results. That's why Profound built your AI marketer, a marketing agent that has real-time context on your brand, audience, competitors, and positioning, and knows what performed best in the past. The result is AI-powered marketing that you're actually proud to publish, and a new teammate that you trust to run at scale. To see why a third of the Fortune 100 choose Profound's AI marketer, go to Profound.com.

• 51:48Speaker 05

  The real cost of a break-in isn't your valuables. It's the feeling that your home stopped being safe. SimpliSafe keeps danger away from your family with three layers of protection. One, smart AI cameras and live US-based agents help stop intruders before they break in. Two, we sound the alarm at points of entry. Three, our agents request emergency response. Plans starting around $1 a day. Right now, get 60% off your new system with professional monitoring at simplisafe.com/spotify.

• 52:12Speaker 07

  Outdoor deterrence plans start at $49.99 a month. Visit simplisafe.com/licenses for alarm license information.