Read Online A Pretext for War by James Bamford - Free Book Online Page A

frequency. We’ll split up the area as we have to. Just defend as required. We’ll talk about the rest in the air.” The four rushed to the prep area and zipped up their g-suits and checked their parachute harnesses.
    As the pilots were grabbing for their helmets, another urgent call came in from the Secret Service. “Get in the air now!” someone screamed. At almost the same instant, another White House official telephoned on a different line and said the entire Washington area had been declared “a free-fire zone.” Sasseville told his three fellow pilots, “That meant we were given authority to use force, if the situation required it, in defense of the nation’s capital, its property and people.”
    But these aircraft were part of the 121st Fighter Squadron of the D.C. National Guard—not NORAD. Thus they were not on alert. As a result, they had little or no weapons. Sasseville raced to the flight line with his wingman and jumped into the waiting F-16s armed only with five seconds’ worth of nonexplosive 20mm training rounds—metal slugs. AIM-9 missiles were being installed on two other fighters, but Sasseville felt he had no time to waste. “I was still turning things on after I got airborne. By that time, the [NORAD] F-16s from Langley were overhead—but I didn’t know they were there,” he recalled. “We all realized we were looking for an airliner—a big airplane . . . the track looked like it was headed toward D.C. at that time.”
    Another F-16 pilot, Maj. Billy Hutchison, just landed after being recalled from a training operation in North Carolina. He also had no active weapons but was told to get airborne immediately. Like Sasseville and his wingman, if it came to preventing another airborne terrorist attack, Hutchison knew he had few options. All, however, were prepared to likely sacrifice their lives by using their aircraft to ram the hijacked plane.
    Sasseville at least had a five-second burst of dummy rounds. His first option was to shoot from behind the passenger jet and “try to saw off one wing. I needed to disable it as soon as possible—immediately interrupt its aerodynamics and bring it down.” But if that didn’t work, the only shot he had left was “to hit it—cut the wing off with my wing. If I played it right, I’d be able to bail out. One hand on the stick and one hand on the ejection handle, trying to ram my airplane into the aft side of the [airliner’s] wing,” he said. “And do it skillfully enough to save the pink body . . . but understanding that it might not go as planned. It was a tough nut; we had no other ordnance.”
     
     
    News of American Flight 77’s crash into the Pentagon removed any doubt from Ben Sliney’s mind. At the FAA’s control center, about fifteen miles south of the Pentagon, he boomed, “Order everyone to land! Regardless of destination! Let’s get them on the ground!’’ It was a breathtaking decision. For the first time in history, every commercial and private plane over the United States was immediately ordered out of the sky. At that moment, there were 3,949 planes over the country. A few minutes later, Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta agreed. But when told that even with the order it could still be overridden by pilot discretion, Mineta snarled, “Fuck pilot discretion, bring down all the planes.”
     
     
    L. Kemp Ensor, the National Security Agency’s associate director for security, walked into the director’s office with his assistants just as Lieutenant General Hayden heard some early reports about the explosion at the Pentagon. “As they were walking through the door, I knew exactly what we needed to do and I said all nonessential personnel out of here. Out of the complex,” said Hayden. “A couple of reasons for it—one was just pure safety. Second was . . . the strength of the agency is our intellectual capital. The agency goes down in the elevators at night. Computers are nice, but what makes it run is the