Laden was killed eight years later. I thought of what had happened in those eight years. Even if KSM had provided a nugget of intelligence (which was later largely discounted) is that what Goss and others called “effective”?
The problem with the national security beat is that the more you know, the more you wonder. All I have been certain about is that “the war on terror” was a ridiculous name for a war in the first place.
This is not a memoir or an exhaustive analysis, but a ten-year trip through the national security grey zone, which ends where it began—at Ground Zero. It is a glimpse at a decade of terror inflicted by both individuals and the state. It is an introduction to the people I met who instilled that terror, and to the victims they left in their wake.
“Some of the saddest aspects of the 9/11 story are the outstanding efforts of so many individual officials straining, often without success, against the boundaries of the possible.”
THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT
IT WAS MIDNIGHT on September 14, 2001, and Times Square was eerily quiet. The few people milling about had their chins dipped, eyes downcast, and if the knock-off Gucci handbag vendors had been out earlier, there was no sign of them now. Broadway was dark. No inebriated late-night diners. No tourists. Times Square was like a wrinkly and weary prostitute, resigned to her fate, and longing for a client just to escape the tedium. Only the Lipton Cup-a-Soup high above, spewing its curly stream of smoke into the warm night, seemed oblivious to what had happened three days earlier.
Standing alone at Broadway and 46th, I was trying to decide if a doughy pretzel passed for dinner and wishing there was somewhere I could buy a new T-shirt that didn’t say I Love New York—even if I did. I had worn the same pants and shirt since the morning of September 11, washing the Ground Zero dust off them at night, using the hair dryer on them in the morning. High above me was a gargantuan billboard for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s next action Hollywood blockbuster, Collateral Damage.
The news of the day had been U.S. President George W. Bush’s trip to Ground Zero. Finally. Bush had been in Sarasota, Florida, at Emma E. Booker Elementary School the morning of 9/11. Five minutes before he walked into a classroom, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice called him from the White House to say a commercial aircraft had struck the World Trade Center, adding, “That’s all we know right now, Mr. President.” Ten minutes later Bush was reading “The Pet Goat” to the class of eager youngsters when White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card whispered in Bush’s ear, “A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.”
Bush later wrote in his memoir that his instinct was to stay calm, so he remained in the classroom reading for another seven minutes. “The nation would be in shock; the president could not be,” he wrote. “If I stormed out hastily, it would scare the children and send ripples of panic throughout the country.” But in a video clip that aired endlessly, Bush looked less like the sanguine commander-in-chief he imagined himself to be and more like a deer in headlights. Osama bin Laden recalled this moment before Bush’s 2004 re-election. “Because it seemed to him that occupying himself by talking to the little girl about the goat and its butting was more important than occupying himself with the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers, we were given three times the period required to execute the operations. All praise is due to Allah,” al Qaeda’s leader said in a video.
While Bush was criticized for maintaining that stunned demeanour in the days that followed, he was reborn amid the debris of the towers on that Friday as exhausted firefighters and cops started cheering “U-S-A, U-S-A!” The image of Bush with raised bullhorn, standing among New York’s finest, was beamed around the world. The swaggering Texan told the crowd that the world was listening. “And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon,” he thundered.
I didn’t see Bush that day, but instead was writing a profile on the man emerging as New York’s real hero, Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani was at the World Trade Center ten minutes before the first building collapsed and remained at the epicentre of the tragedy during the week that followed. He became New York’s trauma counsellor, public information minister and cheerleader. “He seems both concerned and calm, and appears to be in control of an uncontrollable situation. Usually I cringe when I hear politicians speaking. But this hasn’t been the case with the mayor,” New Yorker Molly Hammerberg told me as we walked along Canal Street in the pounding rain.
Just a week earlier, New Yorkers had not particularly liked Giuliani, lamenting the scandals in the city’s police department and the mayor’s well-publicized affair, but 9/11 had transformed the thin-skinned Giuliani into the fifty-seven-year-old big-hearted Teflon Rudy. He had even spontaneously hugged the largely unhuggable New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton at a press conference. Friday, September 14, may have been Bush’s day to shine, but New Yorkers were praising Giuliani. He would later become Time magazine’s Person of the Year and Queen Elizabeth ii herself would knight him.
As I searched for dinner after writing about Saint Rudy, my cell-phone rang. “Hi, doll.” It was Lorrie Logan.
AT THE TORONTO STAR there was once a secret we called “switchboard.” All Star journalists who worked in the pre-Internet, pre-cellphone, pre-BlackBerry, -Twitter, -Facebook and -24-hour-news-coverage days, have a switchboard story or favourite operator who saved their career. I loved Lorrie because aside from being a workaholic she had this way of talking that made you feel like a cherished niece. Whenever I was somewhere feeling homesick, my eyes would well up when I heard her say, “Oh, dolly, what can I do for you?”
The CIA really should have employed Star operators. Switchboard could track anyone. For years, they worked manically, hidden in a third-floor room that looked as if it belonged to an autistic mathematician. Every inch of wall space was carefully covered in numbers. Shelves were lined with phone books from around the world or obscure tomes on cooking, or wildlife, or Tajikistan. These incredible women—because except for the rare male interloper the staff were predominantly women—had found hostages and gunmen, presidents and criminals and more than one Star reporter who didn’t want to be found. They weren’t just operators even though they also connected calls. They were relentless and charming investigators, bloodhounds, who could go toe-to-toe with the most dogged investigative journalist.
One famous story goes back to November 23, 1963, when the Star’s managing editor desperately needed our Washington correspondent, Martin Goodman. It was less than twenty-four hours after U.S. President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated and Lyndon Johnson inaugurated. Goodman had covered Johnson’s swearing in, but still hadn’t filed his story and editors were panicking. Switchboard was dispatched to track the wayward scribe. Within minutes, they had a map of Johnson’s post-inauguration parade route and the names of all the shops along the motorcade’s path. They called a drugstore and persuaded a pharmacist to go outside and shout Goodman’s name from the sidewalk as the press cars passed. Goodman heard, was told by the helpful druggist to call his Star boss, and he did.
Linda Diebel, our former Latin America correspondent, recalls one time when in a panic she dialled switchboard on a Thursday night, trying to track a Canadian government official for a weekend story. The man was on vacation. Somehow, within the next twelve hours, switchboard not only discovered that the official was in London, England, but had uncovered what he was going to do, where he was travelling, how he would get there and what he looked like. When the bureaucrat got off the Tube at a south end station that Friday morning, some guy held out a pay phone asking if he was from Ottawa, Canada, because he had a call. True story. There were hundreds.
Journalists were fiercely protective of our switchboard and mourned their “downsizing” in 2010. But in the weeks
