James Bamford builds his case against America's intelligence agencies from the ground up, which makes for devastating reading not only for his subjects, but for anyone concerned with the nation's security or simply smart use of taxpayer dollars. Indeed, one can't help but cringe as the veteran journalist records the alarming post-Cold War floundering of the C.I.A., N.S.A., Defense Department, and succeeding administrations in the face of burgeoning terrorist threats that culminate with the attack on 9-11. Seemingly caught flatfooted by the demise of the Soviet Union, the U.S. intelligence community stumbles through the 1990s as it becomes institutionally hidebound and sluggish. During relatively peaceful times, its shortcomings, while not unnoticed, remain largely unaddressed. As Bamford sees it, with the arrival of George W. Bush, the situation goes from bad to worse. With the neocons in power, intelligence gathering is corrupted and politicized to create the grounds for going to war with Iraq. While much of what appears here has appeared earlier in works by Joseph Wilson, Richard Clarke, and others, Bamford pulls the loose ends together and adds new reporting to create a wide-ranging yet taut and absorbing expose of an American security apparatus that combines vast power with stunning ineptitude. --Steven Stolder


From Publishers Weekly
In this hard-hitting expose, investigative journalist Bamford (The Puzzle Palace; Body of Secrets) paints a damning portrait of an incompetent and politicized intelligence community. Before 9/11, he contends, the inadequacy of the CIA’s clandestine service hobbled its fight against Osama bin Laden, forcing it to rely on mercenary Afghan proxies and cruise missile drive-bys. Meanwhile, bread-and-butter undercover operations to infiltrate and monitor al-Qaeda were eschewed, and leads on the upcoming attacks bungled. After 9/11, he asserts, the Bush administration used the attacks as a pretext for a long-planned invasion of Iraq; a Defense Department intelligence unit was set up to tout trumped-up evidence against Saddam, which, Bamford says, CIA analysts were pressured into endorsing. Much of the book rehashes a now familiar critique of both the pre-9/11 lapses and the Bush administration’s selling of the war, but the author enriches it with a wealth of insider interviews that illuminate structural problems in the nation’s intelligence effort. Bamford lards his account with pointless mise-en-scene ("in the onyx darkness, George W. Bush switched on the brass sidelight next to his bed") and a gratuitous, if gripping, narrative of the carnage of 9/11. But when he gets down to analysis, his broad understanding of America’s intelligence institutions and procedures make this a must-read for anyone concerned about the current state of affairs.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
As debate continues to rage about the flaws in the American occupation of Iraq, James Bamford takes a fresh look at the run-up to the 2003 conflict, to examine how pre-war intelligence spurred the onset of war. Bamford, author of two earlier investigative studies of the National Security Agency, The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets, sets out in A Pretext for War to show that key figures in the Bush administration -- national security adviser Richard Perle, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith -- locked in a plan to wage war in Iraq well before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He charges that these four leading hawks manipulated the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency in a desperate attempt to justify a regime change in Iraq that they had been strategizing to bring about for years. He suggests further that the administration's rush to war grew out of a key and chronic blind spot in American policy circles: the failure to recognize the central role of the Palestinian cause in igniting Arab rage against the United States. Bamford makes this case largely in the last third of his book. He uses the first two-thirds to meticulously lay out how the Sept. 11 aircraft were hijacked, the numerous intelligence and logistical failures that led to al Qaeda's successful strike and the reaction to the attacks in official Washington. Highly readable and well-researched, this account offers new insights into how the Sept. 11 hijackings occurred, while also showing how terribly ill-equipped and unprepared our defense systems were to deal with these kinds of attacks. Other writers have also chronicled the overall failures and some of the panic, but Bamford found much new information that underscores just how chaotic and dangerous things really were in Sept. 11's immediate aftermath. For example, Bamford notes that two Air National Guard jets were scramble-ready and perhaps could have intercepted at least one of the suicide airliners, yet were assigned that day to unarmed bomb practice. Even if they had scrambled earlier, however, the fighter jets had no weapons to shoot down the hijacked jets. In fact, Bamford says, "on September 11, 2001, the entire United States mainland was protected by just fourteen planes spread out over seven bases." Bamford goes on to track the reactions to the attack inside the NSA and CIA and supplies a chronology detailing when various senior administration officials were notified. For example, CIA director George Tenet received no word until well after the second aircraft had crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center. The top military commanders were just as out of touch. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Henry Shelton, was en route to Europe, and his deputy, Gen. Richard Myers, was on Capitol Hill. "Through it all, the general in charge of the country's military was completely ignorant of the fact that the United States was under its worst attack in nearly two centuries," Bamford writes. "Nor did he know that about forty minutes earlier, the President had decided to declare war." Bamford dislikes President Bush intensely and makes little effort to hide it. He re-examines the president's actions on Sept. 11, from when he heard of the attacks to his flight across the country before finally returning to Washington, and concludes that "disturbingly, the story George W. Bush often tells of his learning of the attacks cannot possibly be true." He reaches this conclusion by chronicling the appearance of the first video snippets of the crashes on television and determining that the president could not have seen the footage at the time he claimed he did. He also strongly implies Bush was a coward for not returning immediately to Washington, D.C., contrasting his actions to those of Lyndon Johnson after the Kennedy assassination. (While Bush's decision not to return to Washington is debatable, to assume that it arose out of cowardice -- without any confirming testimony from people who would know -- seems overly harsh. The early moments of the attacks were chaotic -- and Washington itself was a target.) Bamford treads less familiar and more interesting ground when he describes the secret sites to which Bush, senior cabinet members and congressional leaders were taken, and the atmosphere inside. Again, others (notably Sen. Tom Daschle) have provided similar accounts, but by skillfully integrating these scenes with his own interviews, Bamford paints a vivid picture of the leadership of the free world bracing for an apocalypse. In reviewing America's intelligence breakdowns, Bamford focuses mainly on material familiar to most readers from the Sept. 11 hearings: the lack of coordination among intelligence agencies, the lack of human intelligence on al Qaeda and a casual inattention to the al Qaeda threat despite CIA Director George Tenet's 1999 declaration of war on Osama bin Laden. But here, too, Bamford uncovers fresh material, in his scathing report on the workings of the Alec Station, the secret CIA unit dedicated solely to tracking bin Laden and al Qaeda. Bamford effectively makes the case that the group, constantly underfunded and understaffed, made little difference: "After four years and hundreds of millions of dollars, Alec Station had yet to recruit a single source within bin Laden's growing Afghanistan operation. It was more than embarrassing -- it was a scandal."For Bamford, though, the crowning scandal was the long-incubating plan to force Saddam Hussein out of power by military force. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith and other key members of this war faction -- nicknamed the Vulcans -- had long been laying the groundwork for an invasion of Iraq. Administration insiders such as Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill have already made influential versions of this case in their recently published books, and Bamford relies on Clarke's own account of the immediate post-Sept. 11 security meetings to underline the depth of the administration's Iraq fixation.Bamford traces the personal relations among the key players spanning several decades. Again he adds some interesting bits to the existing record: e.g., the Pentagon's distrust of the CIA's intelligence; internal turf wars among the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department and the office of Vice President Dick Cheney over what kind of intelligence was used in planning for Iraq; and the Pentagon's establishment of separate intelligence shops to counter the CIA and DIA. Bamford also notes that it was the Vulcans Perle and Feith, together with senior State Department adviser David Wormser, who drafted the basic outlines of Bush's plan to oust Saddam, including the doctrine of preemption, back in the mid-1990s, when they were advising Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu rejected the plan, which gathered dust until Bush's election, when the group returned to the corridors of power. Bamford says that the new fortunes of Perle, Feith and Wormser, together with Bush's personal determination to repay Saddam for his attempt to kill Bush's father, were instrumental in America's decision to go to war. A Pretext for War suffers from some factual slips -- at one point, for instance, identifying Abram N. Shulsky as head of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans rather than William Luti. There are several repeated paragraphs and a frustratingly incomplete index -- all indications of a too hasty rush to publish. However, Bamford does add to the public record in significant ways. His deconstruction of the role played by Ahmed Chalabi in feeding false information on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to U.S. intelligence agencies and reporters, especially Judith Miller at the New York Times, is especially timely. Chalabi has recently fallen from grace, and the New York Times is reviewing its reporting on WMD, publicly admitting it should have been more skeptical of some of its sources. The story of "Curveball," an Iraqi defector who provided information that was given great credence by both Pentagon intelligence and the national news media only to be debunked, is also instructive.On balance, Bamford does a superb job of laying out and tying together threads of the Sept. 11 intelligence failures and their ongoing aftermath, using original research, the public record and a light, fast-paced writing touch. We have of course heard the brunt of Bamford's polemic indictment of Bush and the Vulcans before: that the United States invaded Iraq as the result of a "massive disinformation campaign, abetted by a lazy and timid press." Readers may find such claims a bit sweeping, but A Pretext for War nonetheless provides a useful, new and sobering stream of information -- especially as the fallout from the Vulcans' crusade looms as a potentially decisive issue in a crucial election year. Reviewed by Douglas Farah Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.


Review
“Probably the best one-volume companion to the harrowing events in the war on terrorism since 1996.” –Time


“Highly readable and well-researched. . . . Bamford does a superb job of laying out and tying together threads of the Sept. 11 intelligence failures and their ongoing aftermath, using original research, the public record and a light, fast-paced writing touch.” –The Washington Post Book World

“A damning portrait of the country’s intelligence agencies. . . . Bamford unearths new details . . . to create a vivid, unsettling narrative. . . . Highly persuasive.” –The New York Times

"Not only contains significant new information, but also combines that information with previously known material to make . . . sense of Sept. 11 and its aftermath. . . . A vital book." –Milwaukee Journal Sentinel


From the Trade Paperback edition.


Book Description
In The Puzzle Palace, James Bamford revealed the inner workings of the NSA, the largest, most secretive, and best-financed intelligence organization in the world. In Body of Secrets, he took readers inside the ultrasecret agency, charting its deeds and misdeeds from its founding in 1952 to the end of the twentieth century. Now Bamford applies his relentless investigative drive and unparalleled access to intelligence sources to produce another history-making volume. A bold, incisive response to the Bush administration’s version of recent events, A PRETEXT FOR WAR explains why American intelligence agencies failed to predict and prevent the disaster of 9/11 and lays bare the Bush administration's role in formulating specious justifications for the pre-emptive war on Iraq.

Bamford homes in on the systematic weaknesses that led the intelligence community to ignore or misinterpret evidence of the impending terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Using impeccable sources in the intelligence communities, he shows that the Bush administration was, from its inception, more interested in pursuing a dubious agenda in Iraq than hunting terrorists like Osama bin Laden. From the mishandling of 9/11 to the still-unproven claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, to recent allegations about the threat Iran poses to the world, Bamford argues that the Bush administration has co-opted the intelligence community for its own political ends.

A PRETEXT FOR WAR is the full, unvarnished story of a national scandal packed with detailed proof of incompetence, deception, and misinformation on the part of the government officials charged with safeguarding our security. An unprecedented, utterly convincing exposé of the most secretive administration in history, it is bound to make headlines throughout the world.


From the Inside Flap

The bestselling author of Body of Secrets and The Puzzle Palace presents his most hard-hitting book to date—a sweeping, authoritative, and fearless account of the failures of America’s intelligence agencies and the Bush administration’s calculated efforts to sell a war to the American people.\

In The Puzzle Palace, James Bamford revealed the existence of the NSA, the largest, most secretive, and best-financed intelligence organization in the world. In Body of Secrets, he took readers inside the ultrasecret agency, charting its deeds and misdeeds from its founding in 1952 to the end of the twentieth century. Now Bamford applies his relentless investigative drive and unparalleled access to intelligence sources to produce a headline-making book about the most pressing issues of the present day.

From the mishandling of the pre-9/11 threat to the unproven claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, Bamford argues that the Bush administration has co-opted the intelligence community for its own political ends, and at the expense of American security.  Bamford makes the case that the Bush administration’s Middle East policy decisions, from overthrowing Saddam to ignoring the situation of the Palestinians, are driven by long-held beliefs and goals of an elite group of conservatives inside and outside of government.

A Pretext for War homes in on the systematic weakness that led the intelligence community to ignore or misinterpret evidence of the impending terrorist attacks of 9/11—a failure rooted in the refusal to acknowledge the central role of the Palestinian cause in igniting Arab rage against the United States.  Compounding the errors, the Bush administration’s immediate response to 9/11 was to call for an attack on Iraq, and it subsequently invented justifications for the preemptive war that has ultimately left the United States more vulnerable to terrorism.  

A Pretext for War is an unprecedented, utterly convincing exposé of the most secretive administration in history.  


About the Author

JAMES BAMFORD, the author of the bestsellers Body of Secrets and The Puzzle Palace, has written extensively on national security issues, including investigative cover stories for the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times Magazine. Formerly the Washington investigative producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, and a distinguished visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, he lives in Washington, D.C.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER 1

ROME

Tech. Sgt. Jeremy Powell's heart started pounding and he quickly raised his hand and started waving it vigorously to get attention. He sat in a quiet pool of emerald light, staring at a matrix of slowly moving white dots, cryptic flashing letter-number combinations, lines going in all directions, and green circles that would form at the center and then expand outward, like a ripple from a stone tossed in a morning pond. Represented by every dot was a small cross-section of humanity, packed in an aluminum tube and traveling in the air near the speed of sound. Jeremy Powell was sitting in front of a glowing radar screen, scanning the skies over America's East Coast for any indication of attack, invasion, or airborne drug dealers.

This green room, like a leprechaun's lair, was the Operations Command Center of "Huntress Control"--the Air National Guard's Northeast Air Defense Sector. Located in the sleepy town of Rome in central New York, it was part of the North American Aerospace Defense Command--NORAD--a relic from the days of bomb shelters, air raid warnings, and fears of invading Russians. Besides being centrally located and free from major urban electromagnetic interference, Rome was an appropriate venue for America's twenty-first-century lookouts. It was the place where the American flag first flew in the face of battle, during the American Revolution at Fort Stanwix, located in what is now the center of the city of Rome. And it was the home, and final resting place, of Francis Bellamy, author of the Pledge of Allegiance.

Lt. Col. Dawne Deskins, her eyes now adjusted to the eerie light that greeted the start of her dozen-hour shift, saw Jeremy Powell's hand waving. As the airborne control and warning officer at the center, she was expecting more activity than usual this morning because of the drill. September 11, 2001, was the fourth day of a weeklong exercise code-named "Vigilant Guardian." It was designed to create a fictional crisis affecting the United States and test the network of radar watch stations around the country. Like a rerun of an old movie, the scenario involved Russian bombers flying over the North Pole in attack formation. The Rome command center was responsible for monitoring more than half a million square miles of airspace, from the Montana-North Dakota border to the coast of Maine down through South Carolina. Included were the skies over New York City and Washington, D.C. Should a crisis develop, the radar specialists could pick up the phone and alert fighter pilots at National Guard units at Burlington, Vermont; Atlantic City, New Jersey; Cape Cod, Massachusetts; and Duluth, Minnesota.

A moment earlier, Powell had taken a call from Boston Center. "Watch supervisor, I have a possible hijack of American 11 heavy," a Boston military liaison with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) told him. "Recommend notifying NORAD." Powell passed the information on to Deskins. Part of the exercise, Deskins thought to herself, until the direct phone line to the FAA began flashing. It was 8:40 a.m.


Forty-one minutes earlier, at 7:59 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 had lifted off from Boston's Logan International Airport with eighty-one passengers and eleven crewmembers, and knifed into the crystal-blue sky. "Good morning," said the captain to the air traffic controllers disappearing quickly below. "American 11 heavy with you passing through, ah, two thousand for three thousand." As the flight climbed steeply from two to three thousand feet, window-seat passengers could clearly see the glint of sunlight reflecting off the gold dome of the State House high atop Beacon Hill. "Good morning," replied a controller at Boston departure radar. "Traffic ten o'clock, two miles, maneuvering."

Early September and a good time to be traveling. The weather had broken and it was clear and cool in the Northeast. The thunderstorms of summer were past, as was the hectic Labor Day holiday. And September 11 was a Tuesday, statistically one of the least busy travel days of the week. For the passengers aboard Flight 11, less than half full, it meant empty middle seats in which to stretch out for the long trip to Los Angeles. Normally capable of carrying up to 269 passengers, the twin-engine Boeing 767--a mechanized marvel made up of 3.1 million parts--was one of the long-haul workhorses for American Airlines. Sloshing around in the wings and other cavities was up to 10,000 gallons of highly explosive fuel.

"We have him in sight," replied the pilot. At fifty, John Ogonowski had been flying for half of his life, first in the Air Force at the end of the Vietnam War, and, beginning in 1979, with American. Earlier that morning, he had left the bucolic tranquility of his 150-acre farm in the northern Massachusetts town of Dracut. A sweeping expanse of fields and fruit trees, dotted with farm machinery and stonewalls, it was where the round-faced Ogonowski, a fourth-generation farmer, found peace. Down from the clouds, he spent his time laboriously plowing, cleaving, and harrowing the soil. "When his hands were dirty and his pants were filthy, he was always pretty happy,'' said his brother, James.

As the plane passed over the small Massachusetts town of Gardner, about forty-five miles west of Boston, the smell of coffee was starting to drift through the cabin. Flight attendants were just beginning to prepare the hot breakfasts of omelets, sausages, and fruit cups. Seated in business class, in seat 8D, was thirty-three-year-old Mohamed Atta, clean-shaven and in casual clothes. Instead of lowering his food tray, he pulled his small black shoulder bag from under the seat in from of him, withdrew a hardened plastic knife and a box cutter, and stepped into the aisle. At that same moment, as if choreographed, four other men assigned to Row 8 also rose and headed toward the front of the plane.

Sitting in front of a twenty-seven-inch, high-resolution Sony TV console, the controller could see Flight 11's key information--its altitude, direction, and identifying number. John Ogonowski heard again the crackle of a traffic controller in his earphones. "AAL11, your traffic is at, uh, two o'clock, twenty miles southwest-bound, MD-80," the controller said, alerting Ogonowski to a McDonnell Douglas MD-80 nearby.

"AAL11, roger," said the captain, adding, "twenty right, AAL11."

At that very moment, 8:13 a.m., the move was on. Atta and his men began their assault. First they used their knives to stab the two first-class flight attendants, Barbara Arestegui and Karen Martin. Then they slashed the throat of a business-class passenger who had apparently attempted to come to their rescue. As he lay on the floor of the plane, bleeding severely, the hijackers began spraying something in the first-class section to keep people away from the front of the plane. Then they made their way into the cockpit carrying a device with yellow wires hanging from it, which they said was a bomb. "Don't do anything foolish," one of the men yelled in English to the pilot and copilot. "You're not going to get hurt."

But likely within minutes, the door to the cockpit was locked, the two pilots were killed, and Atta took over the left seat. Suddenly one wing dipped severely while the other rose high, nearly tipping the plane on its side, before the aircraft stabilized. As the plane turned south toward New York, the flight attendants provided oxygen to the injured people and used the public address system to request the assistance of any doctor or nurse on board. In the coach section, passengers remained calm, thinking there was just some medical emergency.

Sixteen seconds later, unaware of the horror then taking place in the blood-splattered cockpit, the Boston controller again radioed Flight 11. "AAL11. Now climb maintain FL350," he said, giving the pilot permission to climb from 29,000 to 35,000 feet. Hearing nothing, he repeated the message ten seconds later, and again eleven seconds later, and once more fifteen seconds later at 8:14:23--but still no reply. By 8:15, the air traffic controller in Boston was becoming greatly concerned. Despite his numerous calls, there was only a deathly silence from American Flight 11. He switched to the emergency frequency, 121.5. "AAL11, if you hear Boston Center, ident please or acknowledge," repeated the controller, his voice rising.

At 8:24, frightening words poured from his earphones. "We have some planes," said a voice. "Just stay quiet, and you'll be okay. We are returning to the airport." It was a message, likely from Mohamed Atta, intended for his passengers. But it was relayed to the Boston Center possibly as a result of Captain Ogonowski secretly activating the "push to talk" button on the plane's wheel before being killed, or accidentally by Atta as he took his place. The depressed button allowed the controller to hear what was going on at that moment in the cockpit. "We have more planes. We have other planes," the hijackers said. "And, uh, who's trying to call me here?" asked the controller, wondering if it was his missing Boeing 767. "AAL11, are you trying to call?"

Then another troubling message. "Okay. If you try to make any moves, you'll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet." And finally, at a second before 8:34, came one more. "Nobody move, please," said the voice. "We are going back to the airport. Don't try to make any stupid moves."

Six minutes later, at 8:40, the military liaison at Boston's FAA notified NORAD's Northeast Air Defense Sector Operations Center at Rome, New York. "We have a hijacked aircraft and I need you to get some sort of fighters out here to help us out," he told Dawne Deskins. The transponder on Flight 11 was no longer working, he said. Also, the Los Angeles-bound plane had suddenly made an unexpected left turn toward New York City. And then there were the frightening transmissions. Get "some F-16s or something" airborne, he pleaded. Deskins asked for Flight 11's latest position, but when the operator looked for it, it had disappeared. "American 11 heavy, Boston Center. Your transponder appears to be inoperative. Please recycle," said one of the controllers, repeating it several times. "American 11 heavy, how do you read Boston Center? Over."

As the plane was crossing from Massachusetts into New York, Atta turned off the plane's transponder, the device that transmits the plane's identification, speed, altitude, and location to the FAA's radar systems. Without the transponder information, Boston could still track it on its primary radar using faint "skin paint" returns, but for the technicians in Rome, like Jeremy Powell, finding the dot in the maze of moving and blinking images on his screen would be very difficult. At that moment, there were approximately 2,500 planes in the air over the Northeast alone. "We were going by the old-fashioned method of 'what was his last known speed, his last known heading, his altitude?'" said Powell. "And we were trying to kind of map it out on the scope."

"We'll direct the intercept," said the Boston liaison officer. "Just get something up there." Deskins rushed up a short flight of stairs to the weapons desk in the "Battle Cab," a glassed-in balcony that overhung the Ops Room like a corporate suite at a football stadium. Her commanding officer, Air Force Colonel Robert Marr, was in the room working on the drill. "I have FAA on the phone, the shout line, Boston Center. They said they have a hijacked aircraft," she told him. "He says it's going to New York." Suddenly, she wondered why a large jet would be commandeered to go such a short distance.

As American Flight 11 continued tearing toward New York City, two courageous flight attendants, huddling out of sight, managed to telephone fellow colleagues with key details of what was taking place. "Listen, and listen to me very carefully. I'm on Flight 11. The airplane has been hijacked," said Amy Sweeney, a thirteen-year veteran of the airline. She was talking to American Airlines ground manager Michael Woodward at Boston's Logan Airport. Nearby, another flight attendant, Betty Ong, who had been with the airline a year longer than Sweeney, was also able to call an airline official on the ground. She reached Vanessa Minter, an agent at the airline's reservation center in Raleigh, North Carolina.

For twenty-five minutes, both flight attendants were able to communicate over crew telephones in the coach section of the plane. They relayed key details of the hijacking in real time, including the bloody way in which the men took over the cockpit. From the seat numbers Sweeney was able to pass on, airline officials were able to pull up such vital details as the hijackers' names, addresses, phone numbers, and credit-card information--including that of Mohamed Atta. She said they were all males and appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent. While calm, Sweeney and Ong were also very concerned. "Pray for us," Ong said repeatedly. "Pray for us."

Up in the Battle Cab, Colonel Marr called the man in charge of NORAD for the continental United States, Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida. Thin, with short brown hair, Arnold was a command pilot with more than 4,000 hours flying nine different aircraft, including the F-16 and F-15. As he was walking out of a teleconference, someone came up and told him Rome was on the phone. "Boss, I need to scramble Otis," Marr said, referring to Otis Air National Guard Base on Cape Cod. Normally, the Secretary of Defense is the one who must give the approval to intercept a hijacked plane, but Arnold decided to make the decision on the spot. "Go ahead and scramble them, and we'll get the authorities later," he said.

As with most of the East Coast that Tuesday morning, the sky over Cape Cod was cloud-free and royal blue. Tucked away in the seaside resort community of Falmouth, Massachusetts, Otis Air National Guard Base was home of the 102nd Fighter Wing. Out on the tarmac, two F-15s sat "cocked and loaded" with weapons and extra gas on board. The two pilots on alert that morning, Maj. Daniel Nash and Lt. Col. Timothy Duffy, were in the control room scanning the charts and schedules that lined the walls, when the traffic control tower at Otis told them of a possible hijacking of an American Airlines flight out of Boston.

Although no scramble alarm had yet been received, the two quickly put on their flight suits and began walking to the waiting fighters. Duffy was a part-time Guardsman who just happened to be on duty that day. The thirty-five-year-old Nash, a beefy pilot with neatly trimmed brown hair, had joined the 102nd about a year and a half earlier. He had been on a number of alerts, but they usually turned out to be false alarms, such as an unknown aircraft approaching the coast that turned out to be a military plane. But he had a different feeling about this one.

On board Flight 11, it was obvious that the plane's movements were becoming more erratic; the aircraft was descending rapidly, almost in a dive, as it neared New York City. Nevertheless, the passengers, perhaps out of fear, remained relatively calm, with no hysteria or screaming. Over the crew phone, Woodward asked flight attendant Sweeney to see if she could spot anything familiar. "I see the water. I see the buildings. I see buildings," she said, adding that the plane was flying very low.


In Manhattan, forty-eight-year-old Steve McIntyre left his Upper West Side home a good half hour earlier than usual and was just arriving at the World Trade Center. The Director of Regulatory Affairs for the American Bureau of Shipping, his office was on the ninety-first floor of Tower One. For nearly a quarter of a century, since graduating from the University of Michigan's Naval Architecture School, he had worked for the company, which sets standards for maritime safety.

By 8:46 a.m. on September 11, between five and seven thousand other people were at work in each of the two towers. Few tourists had arrived, and the observation deck wasn't scheduled to open until 9:30.

From McIntyre's north-facing office, the entire city was laid out below him. Silver towers and glass walls radiated in the sun, and flat, tar-covered rooftops with stubby chimneys stretched to the arched horizon. The glare was so great that he had to close the blinds before sitting down at his computer to begin plowing through his e-mail. Suddenly, he heard what he thought was the roar of jet engines followed by a shadow crossing the blinds.

Another employee of the American Bureau of Shipping, George Sleigh, a British-born naval architect, was talking on the phone when he, too, heard the roar of jet engines. He glanced out his window and a thought instantly crossed his mind: The wheels are up, the underbelly is white, and man, that guy is low.

Nearby in the office, Claire McIntyre, no relation to Steve McIntyre, was checking her e-mail when she heard the same sound--the blast of a jet engine. Impossible, she thought. Then, to her horror, she looked up to see the wing and tail of a colossal plane coming right at her at nearly the speed of sound. Oh my God, all my people, she thought. Screaming, she bolted from her office and raced into the hall to alert the rest of the staff. "Everyone, get out now," McIntyre yelled at the top of her voice. At the same moment, Steve McIntyre also realized it was a plane but had no idea of its size. Oh, shit, he thought to himself. Someone's lost control of a private Learjet.

Nearly one hundred floors below, French filmmakers Jules and Gedeon Naudet were shooting scenes for their documentary about a typical day in the life of a rookie New York fireman. As they were zooming in on men closing a sewer grate, they heard the sound of a low-flying plane. Curious, they pointed the camera almost straight up as American Flight 11 streaked across the lens headed directly for the building.

At Boston's Logan Airport, ground manager Michael Woodward was still holding the telephone to his ear, listening to flight attendant Amy Sweeney describe the approaching buildings before she took a very slow, deep breath. "Oh, my God!" she said quietly, calmly. And then there was just very, very loud static.

For a fraction of a second, the event seemed almost graceful. At 8:46:26, the building simply swallowed up the plane. But in the blink of an eye, when the jet's tanks containing 10,000 gallons of fuel suddenly compressed like crushed Coke cans, a massive fireball exploded with a force equal to 480,000 pounds of TNT. So powerful was the explosion that it registered a .09 on the Richter scale, used to measure earthquakes.

Flight 11 entered between floors 93 and 98, just two floors above the heads of Steve McIntyre, Claire McIntyre, and George Sleigh, shaking and oscillating the entire building as if an earthquake had struck. In the American Bureau of Shipping, an interior wall and ceiling crumbled. One employee, encased in debris, had to be extricated from his cubicle. People began grabbing fire extinguishers while another person had the presence of mind to soak a fat roll of paper towels. Sleigh crawled out from the rubble while Steve McIntyre left to check the fire exits.

The three had no idea how lucky they were. The concrete slab above their heads would become the dividing line between survival and tragedy--a ceiling of life for those below it, a floor of death for those on top of it. None of the 1,344 people then struggling on the floors above them would make it out alive.


Seconds after the blast, the cockpit crew aboard U.S. Airways Flight 583 heard Flight 11's eerie final gasp. "I just picked up an ELT on 121.5," the pilot told New York air traffic control, referring to an emergency locator transmitter and its frequency. "It was brief, but it went off." The sound probably came from the black box aboard the doomed American flight in the second before it vaporized. "We picked up that ELT, too," reported a pilot on Delta Airlines Flight 2433. "But it's very faint."

Slowly, it was beginning to dawn on New York Control just what had taken place. "Anybody know what that smoke is in lower Manhattan?" asked another pilot flying over the area. "A lot of smoke in lower Manhattan coming out of the top of the World Trade Center--a major fire."

At the Rome Ops Center, somebody ran into the room and said they had just heard about a plane hitting the World Trade Center. A few minutes later, Boston Center was called with the news that the plane was American Flight 11. Dawne Deskins picked up the telephone and called Maj. Don Arias, the public affairs officer for NORAD. "We think the aircraft that just hit the World Trade Center was American Airlines Flight 11," she said. In response, Arias gasped. "Oh, God. My brother works in the World Trade Center," he said.

Arias, a former New York City firefighter, called his brother immediately. What his brother related was bedlam in hell. "He says, 'You're not gonna believe what I'm looking at here.' I said, 'What?' He says, 'People are at the windows.' He says, 'There's a guy falling out of the building next door.' He says, 'There are people jumping.' And I said, 'You know, I--I think, I just got a call from the Northeast Air Defense Sector. There's a hijacked plane. I think that's the plane.'"

At about the same moment that Flight 11 slammed into Tower One, a Klaxon at Otis Air National Guard Base let out a series of deafening blasts and red lights began flashing in the corner of the alert barns, sending a flock of seagulls flapping into the air. "This is an official military scramble," said the public address system. "Alert pilots report to your battle stations." Already halfway to their jets, Nash and Duffy began racing as crew chiefs quickly pulled protective covers from the two vintage F-15 Eagles, built in 1977. Chocks were yanked from beneath the wheels and the heat-seeking and radar-guided missiles were armed. At 8:52 a.m., a red light turned green and the F-15s screamed down the tarmac.

Ten minutes earlier, at 8:42 a.m., concern had deepened when a flight controller at Boston Center suddenly became concerned about another plane, United Airlines Flight 175. Like American Flight 11, it was a Boeing 767 destined for Los Angeles. "Looks like he's heading southbound, but there's no transponder, no nothing, and no one's talking to him," he told his supervisor. A minute later, Deskins at the Rome command center received the new alert on the "shout line" from Boston Center.

Sitting in the pilot's seat was Victor Saracini, a fifty-one-year-old Navy veteran from Pennsylvania who often took his guitar along with him on flights. Saracini had also heard the troubling messages from Flight 11 and notified New York Air Route Traffic Control Center in Ronkonkoma, New York. "We heard a suspicious transmission on our departure from Boston," said Saracini. "Sounds like someone keyed the mike and said everyone stay in your seats." What Saracini did not know was that he had his own set of hijackers on board.

By the time Duffy and Nash were airborne, they were already too late for Flight 11. Nevertheless, the fighter pilots still had a chance of catching up to United Flight 175. But distance and time were critical factors. Cape Cod was nearly two hundred miles from downtown Manhattan. Duffy pushed his throttle to Mach 1.2, nearly 900 miles per hour. Going at such a supersonic speed was normally something for which they needed permission. Nash called Duffy on the radio. "Duff, you're super," he said. "Yeah, I know," said Duffy. "You know, don't worry about it." Duffy then called for a location of the target. "Your contact's over Kennedy," came the response. "Okay, I know where that is," said Duffy and they turned toward New York's Long Island. At that moment, they were 153 miles from the World Trade Center.

Another Air National Guard base with F-16s was located at Atlantic City, New Jersey--and Flight 175 would pass within just four minutes of the base before turning north to New York City. At the time, two Air Force F-16 jet fighters were simply practicing bombing runs above a scruffy patch of Pine Barrens near Atlantic City, just eight minutes away from Manhattan. But they were not armed for air-to-air combat, and to land, rearm, and get airborne again would take too long.

The two aircraft were based at the Air National Guard's 177th Fighter Wing at Atlantic City International Airport in Pomona, New Jersey. Throughout the Cold War, two scramble-ready jets had always been on alert in Atlantic City. But because of budget cutbacks beginning in 1998, the wing's mission had been changed. Instead of the jets being ready to take off on a moment's notice, they were both assigned to unarmed bomb practice. On September 11, 2001, the entire United States mainland was protected by just fourteen planes spread out over seven bases.


By 8:48, there was no question that a major crisis was unfolding, possibly that the United States was under attack by terrorists. It was known that at least two commercial airliners had been hijacked. Worse, nearly half an hour earlier, at 8:24, a Boston controller had heard one of the hijackers threatening the pilots and saying, "We have more planes. We have other planes." It was then that NORAD and the command's top general in charge of the continental United States had been notified. He authorized a "battle stations" alert and scrambled heavily armed F-15 jet fighters into the air. Should the fighters catch up with the passenger planes, the only defense would be to shoot them down, though only the President of the United States could give such an order. Then a large plane crashed into Tower One of the World Trade Center.

At 8:47, the CNN program Live at Daybreak was carrying a fluffy report on a maternity-wear fashion show in New York. Then, at 8:48, anchor Carol Lin broke into a commercial about debt relief. "This just in," she said. "You are looking at… obviously a very disturbing live shot there--that is the World Trade Center, and we have unconfirmed reports this morning that a plane has crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center." CNN then switched to Sean Murtagh, the network's vice president of finance, who had observed the crash from the twenty-first floor of 5 Penn Plaza. "I just witnessed a plane that appeared to be cruising at a slightly lower than normal altitude over New York City. And it appears to have crashed into--I don't know which tower it is--but it hit directly in the middle of one of the World Trade Center towers," he said during the live telephone interview. "It was a jet, maybe a two-engine jet, maybe a 737 . . . a large passenger commercial jet… It was teetering back and forth, wing-tip to wing-tip, and it looks like it has crashed into-probably, twenty stories from the top of the World Trade Center--maybe the eightieth to eighty-fifth floor. There is smoke billowing out of the World Trade Center."


At that moment, George W. Bush was sitting in the back of his limousine in Sarasota, Florida. His motorcade was about six blocks from the Emma E. Booker Elementary School, where the President was to meet a class of second-graders, when presidential press secretary Ari Fleischer, traveling in a separate car, received a phone call. "Oh, my God, I don't believe it," he said to the caller. "A plane just hit the World Trade Center," he announced to others in the car.

When Bush arrived at the elementary school, Fleischer, along with aides Karl Rove and Dan Bartlett, were standing on the sidewalk waiting to brief the President on the crash. "The President was surprised," said Fleischer. "He thought it had to be an accident." Yet despite having a secure STU-III phone next to him in the presidential limousine and an entire national security staff at the White House, it appears that the President of the United States knew less than tens of millions of other people in every part of the country who were watching the attack as it unfolded. Once in the school, the President ducked into an empty classroom and spoke on the phone with his national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, and asked her to keep him informed. Yet even then, at almost 9:00, neither Rice nor Bush was aware that the United States had gone to "battle stations" alert and had scrambled fighter jets into the air to intercept and possibly take hostile action against multiple hijacked airliners, something that was then known by hundreds of others within NORAD, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Pentagon.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"From the mishandling of the pre-9/11 threat to the unproven claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, Bamford argues that the Bush administration has co-opted the intelligence community for its own political ends, and at the expense of American security. Bamford makes the case that the Bush administration's Middle East policy decisions, from overthrowing Saddam to ignoring the situation of the Palestinians, are driven by long-held beliefs and goals of an elite group of conservatives inside and outside of government." A Pretext for War homes in on the systematic weakness that led the intelligence community to ignore or misinterpret evidence of the impending terrorist attacks of 9/11 - a failure rooted in the refusal to acknowledge the central role of the Palestinian cause in igniting Arab rage against the United States. Compounding the errors, the Bush administration's immediate response to 9/11 was to call for an attack on Iraq, and it subsequently invented justifications for the preemptive war that has ultimately left the United States more vulnerable to terrorism.

FROM THE CRITICS

Michiko Kakutani - The New York Times