The Day That Shook America

A Concise History of 9/11

J. Samuel Walker

• Editorial: University Press of Kansas
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780700632626
• Categoría: Geschichte
• Categoría: Nordamerikanische Geschichte

On September 11, 2001, author J. Samuel Walker was far from home when he learned of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Stricken by incredulity and anxiety, he found the phone lines jammed when he tried to call his wife, who worked in downtown Washington, DC. At the time and ever since, Walker, like many of his fellow Americans, was and remains troubled by questions about the disaster that occurred on 9/11. What were the purposes of the attacks? Why did US intelligence agencies and the Defense Department, with annual budgets in the hundreds of billions of dollars, fail to protect the country from a small band of terrorists who managed to hijack four airliners and take the lives of nearly three thousand American citizens? What did responsible government agencies and officials know about Al-Qaeda and why did they not do more to head off the threat it posed? What were American policies toward terrorism, especially under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and why did they fall so far short of defending against a series of attacks? Finally, was the tragedy of 9/11 preventable? These are the most important questions that The Day That Shook America: A Concise History of 9/11 tries to answer. The Day That Shook America offers a long perspective and draws on recently opened records to provide an in-depth analysis of the approaches taken by the Clinton and Bush administrations toward terrorism in general and Al-Qaeda in particular. It also delivers arresting new details on the four hijackings and the collapse of the Twin Towers. J. Samuel Walker covers both the human drama and the public policy dimensions of one of the most important events in all of US history, and he does so in a way that is both comprehensive and concise.

1

“A Complex,
Dangerous Threat”

America’s Approach to Terrorism

In the post-World War II era, terrorism gradually emerged as a troubling and prominent public issue in the United States. At first, the government dismissed it as largely inconsequential. But as the threat grew during the 1960s, presidential administrations and federal agencies became more concerned. They found that dealing with terrorist activities and demands raised a series of perplexing questions about whether to negotiate with groups that took hostages or to refuse to make concessions. Government officials had to decide whether to respond to terrorist attacks by pulling out of vulnerable areas or by using military force. Decisions on those matters imposed serious risks and difficult judgments. US policies toward terrorism between the 1960s to 1993 under the authority of seven presidents were strong in rhetoric but mostly ineffective, or counterproductive, in practice. The struggle against an elusive enemy was hampered by limited resources, bureaucratic rivalries, and inadequate interagency cooperation. Former ambassador and diplomatic troubleshooter Richard Holbrook later commented that in dealing with terrorism, the US government was “the machine that fails” because “we do not have a single government; we have a collection of fiefdoms.”¹

Responses to Terrorism before 1993

US diplomats and military personnel had occasionally been targets of politically motivated bombings or had been taken as hostages during the 1950s, but terrorist acts against the United States became much more frequent after the early 1960s. The most common form of terrorist attacks was hijacking commercial airliners and forcing them to fly to Cuba. This first took place in 1961, and it was repeated more than twenty times by the end of 1968. Domestic hijackings did not cause any deaths, and the government did not treat them as a problem that demanded a prompt or firm response.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which had statutory responsibility for both promoting the aviation industry and regulating its safety and security, took few steps to discourage hijackings. Although it trained air marshals and placed them on a limited number of flights, it resisted taking other actions that might have impeded the plans of potential hijackers. The idea of imposing checks on passengers seemed beyond reason. “It’s an impossible problem,” an FAA official declared in 1968, “short of searching every passenger.” The FAA refrained from requiring security measures such as installing metal detectors, screening passengers, or scanning luggage.²

Addressing the problem of terrorism became more complicated when it expanded from a largely domestic matter to the international arena. The focus of terrorist activity and of US concern by the late 1960s was the Middle East, where hatred and violence between Israelis and Palestinians had raged since the 1940s. This region became an even greater hotbed of turmoil after Palestinian terrorist groups channeled their wrath toward Israel by hijacking airplanes and taking hostages, including some Americans. In July 1968, for example, Palestinian terrorists hijacked a flight from Rome to Tel Aviv on EL AL, the Israeli national airline, and forced it to land in Algeria. The hijackers released the passengers who were not Israelis, including two Americans. But they held Israeli nationals, the crew among them, as hostages for more than a month. The crisis eventually ended after Algeria gave in to quiet US diplomatic pressure and threats from airline pilots to quit flying to the country. But it was an ominous harbinger.

After Richard Nixon took over as president in 1969, terrorism became an increasingly persistent and confounding issue for the United States. A particularly prominent ordeal occurred in September 1970, when Palestinian terrorists pulled off a daring move by attempting to simultaneously hijack four planes en route from Europe to New York City. Two of the attacks succeeded, and the planes wound up on the blistering hot site of a former British air base in the Jordanian desert. The terrorists took 306 hostages, and they issued a series of demands to Israel, the United States, and western European nations. Although they gradually released most of the hostages, they continued to hold fifty individuals, forty of whom were US citizens. After about three weeks, the remaining hostages were freed only after Switzerland, West Germany, Great Britain, and Israel, under US pressure, agreed to make concessions by releasing Palestinian prisoners.

Meeting the demands of hijackers to free hostages was a defensible but not a desirable approach, and Nixon directed that the US government seek better ways to deal with the growing terrorist threat on a priority basis. Within a short time, he ordered that sky marshals be assigned to international flights leaving from American airports. This would require a force of about four thousand, and since only about one hundred and twenty-five trained marshals were available from the FAA, CIA, and other agencies, it was a long-term project. The administration weighed the more critical issue of using military intervention rather than making concessions to free hostages without coming up with satisfactory answers.

The problem of international terrorism reached unprecedented levels of worldwide attention and revulsion during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. Agents of the Palestinian organization called Black September broke into the living quarters of the Olympic village and killed two Israeli team members. They took nine other athletes and coaches hostage, whom they beat and tortured. A German government effort to rescue the hostages turned into a disaster that resulted in the death of the nine Israelis and five of the terrorists. Partly in response, Nixon created the Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism, which had an impressive-sounding name and spawned the first interagency working group that met regularly to consider methods of countering terrorism. But the committee had little influence. Alexander Haig, the deputy national security adviser, later called it a “charade.”

Another terrorist incident that occurred within the United States soon led to more important steps to fight terrorism. In November 1972, three criminal fugitives boarded a Southern Airways flight in Birmingham, Alabama. A cursory screening failed to detect the guns and grenades they carried onto the plane. Shortly after takeoff, they took control of the cockpit and demanded a ransom of ten million dollars to allow the plane to land safely. Eventually, after the FBI delivered more than two million dollars in small bills, the hijackers ordered the plane to go to Cuba. After arrival, the Cuban government arrested them. This hijacking created a great deal of concern in the United States. “This incident was the closest to the total loss of a plane and its passengers we’ve had from hijacking,” pointed out John J. O’Donnell, president of the Airline Pilots Association. After years of resistance, Congress mandated and the FAA carried out a policy of screening all passengers and their carry-on luggage before boarding. The result was that thousands of weapons were detected among prospective passengers within a short time, and, presumably as a related benefit, the number of domestic hijackings decreased dramatically.

Nevertheless, the Nixon administration still lacked a clear approach to dealing with the demands of terrorists. It agreed informally on a policy of “no concessions,” but its position was neither applied consistently nor revealed to the public. The dangers of announcing that the United States would refuse to make concessions were highlighted when a band of Palestinian terrorists took five hostages attending a diplomatic reception at the Saudi embassy in Khartoum, Sudan, in March 1973. Among them were the US ambassador, Cleo Noel, and the outgoing chargé d’affaires at the US embassy, George Curtis Moore. The terrorists declared that they would free the hostages only if hundreds of Palestinians were released from prisons in Western countries. The State Department attempted to negotiate, but Nixon undermined its efforts. The president, apparently without consulting with his staff or State Department officials, declared at a press conference, “We will do everything we can to get [the diplomats] released, but we will not pay blackmail.” A short time later, the terrorists shot Noel, Moore, and a Belgian diplomat to death in the basement of the Saudi embassy. The murders demonstrated beyond a doubt the risks of talking tough about terrorism when lives were at stake.³

Nixon left office in 1974 with an ambiguous legacy in combating terrorism. Although he took some important actions to address the threat, he did not come close to resolving it. The dilemmas surrounding the response to terrorism remained as troublesome as ever, and the problem appeared to be worsening. Newsweek labeled 1975 the “Year of Terror” after a dismaying worldwide wave of assassinations, hijackings, hostage takings, letter bombings, and armed incursions. “The spate of terrorist activity raised serious questions about the ability of many governments—particularly the Western democracies—to protect their citizens and their systems,” the story observed. “Whatever their motives, terrorist raids present policemen and government leaders with an agonizing dilemma: to give in or to hang tough.”⁴

The growing occurrence of politically motivated and often cold-blooded violence fed especially acute fears that terrorists could acquire nuclear weapons. The primary concern among nuclear professionals was that terrorists would be able to build a crude but still enormously destructive nuclear bomb. Theodore Taylor, an experienced and highly regarded nuclear scientist, argued in the early 1970s that making an atomic bomb was not a terribly difficult task if the enriched uranium or plutonium needed to fuel it were stolen or purchased by terrorists. He suggested that a terrorist group did not have to duplicate the Manhattan Project to construct a bomb with enough explosive power to, for example, destroy the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River or topple the World Trade Center. The misgivings he expressed soon were reported in scientific journals and popular publications.

Partly in response to “heightened press interest” and partly because of their recognition of the need to improve existing security arrangements, the US Atomic Energy Commission and its successor, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, adopted a series of new regulations between 1973 and 1979. They strengthened measures to guard against the theft of nuclear materials in transit and to defend against sabotage of or attacks on nuclear power plants and fuel reprocessing facilities. The more stringent requirements eased but did not eliminate concerns about the dire consequences of terrorist acquisition of an atomic weapon.⁵

After the “Year of Terror,” the terrorist threat seemed to diminish, or at least come to a lull. Although terrorist strikes continued to occur both at home and abroad during the presidential administrations of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, they did not rank as a top priority at the highest levels of the federal government. Admiral Stansfield Turner, who served as Carter’s director of central intelligence, later commented that there “was not a great deal of concern” about terrorism. Working groups in the State Department, the National Security Council, and other agencies remained active in following, evaluating, and deliberating over the problem, but there was no pressing need to reach a consensus on how to respond to a serious attack on US citizens. Nevertheless, the US Army, with the strong encouragement of the Carter administration, took a significant step to fight terrorism by creating special forces that were trained to rescue hostages and to conduct tactical counterterrorist operations, the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment–Delta, commonly referred to as Delta Force, Combat Applications Group. They provided the United States for the first time with a military capability for quick-strike, targeted assaults.

After his inauguration as president in January 1981, Ronald Reagan soon made clear that he planned to take a much more aggressive stance on terrorism. “Let terrorists beware,” he declared, “that when the rules of international behavior are violated, our policy will be one of swift and effective retribution.” But he discovered that rhetoric was not a productive means of dealing with a problem that was so resistant to satisfactory solutions.

The emptiness of Reagan’s promise for retaliation against terrorist atrocities became apparent in the caldron of Middle Eastern conflict. In June 1982, tensions erupted into warfare when Israel decided to “clean out” Palestinian militants on its northern border by invading Lebanon. In an effort to end the bloodshed that killed thousands of civilians, the Reagan administration sent US Marines into Lebanon as part of an international peacekeeping force. It was a worthy objective that turned into an exceptionally painful experience. In April 1983, suicidal terrorists set off a bomb outside the US embassy in Beirut, causing the deaths of sixty-three people, including seventeen Americans. Reagan called the strike a “cowardly . . . act,” but the government could not determine exactly who was responsible. Therefore, there was no obvious target for “swift and effective retribution.”

The situation worsened immeasurably a few months later. On October 23, 1983, suicide bombers exploded two truckloads of dynamite at US Marine barracks located at the Beirut airport. The death toll was 241, the costliest terrorist assault ever carried out against US forces. Reagan pledged retaliation, but it soon became apparent that military options were limited and their benefits were doubtful. Some advisers worried that military actions could increase the dangers for US forces in the area. Eventually, in February 1984, after much debate and indecision, Reagan decided that US troops would be “redeployed” by leaving Beirut. The difficulties of the struggle against terrorism and the gap between words and deeds were made unmistakably clear.

Terrorist attacks continued, including the hijacking of a Trans World Airlines (TWA) flight in June 1985 in which the plane was diverted to Beirut and the passengers held as hostages at the airport. The terrorists demanded the release of more than seven hundred Palestinians from Israeli prisons. When a response was slow in coming, they murdered a US Navy diver, Robert Stethem, by brutally beating him, shooting him in the head, and throwing his body out of the plane. The Reagan administration considered using the army’s Delta Force to try to rescue the remaining hostages but finally managed to end the crisis, after more than two weeks of extraordinarily tense multilateral negotiations, by pressuring Israel to release three hundred Palestinian prisoners. The hijackers, after committing barbarous murder, also went free.⁶

Reagan was greatly frustrated by the burdens and frequently lamentable outcomes of dealing with terrorism. In July 1985, he established a cabinet-level task force, under the direction of Vice President George H. W. Bush, to review US policies for dealing with terrorism. The group’s report, completed in January 1986 and published in an unclassified form the following month, affirmed that “international terrorism poses a complex, dangerous threat for which there is no quick or easy solution.” It noted that twenty-three Americans had been killed and one hundred and sixty injured by international terrorists in 1985 alone. Nevertheless, the report asserted that existing programs to fight terrorism were not only “tough and resolute” but also “well-conceived and working.” The task force reiterated that the policy of the US government was to “make no concessions to terrorists” while also applying “every available resource to gain the safe return” of Americans taken hostage. It did not discuss the contradictions in applying that policy or point out that Reagan and his predecessors had on several occasions made concessions to terrorists in order to secure the release of hostages. The task force also declared that foreign countries that “practice terrorism or actively support it will not do so without consequences.”

Shortly after receiving the Bush task force’s report, Reagan issued National Security Decision Directive Number 207. It called for “coordinated action before, during, and after terrorist incidents” and assigned responsibilities for carrying out this task to various cabinet departments and executive agencies. The presidential directive underscored the commitment to following a “no-concessions policy” to rescuing hostages and to taking action against nations that practiced or sponsored terrorist activities that threatened US lives, property, or interests. Reagan’s directive and the task force report on which it was based did not rise far above the level of platitudes, but they were still the most comprehensive statements of America’s approach to counterterrorism yet produced.⁷

The Reagan administration left no doubt that the United States intended to punish state sponsors of terrorism. By that time, the most prominent and notorious supporter of international terrorism was Muammar Gaddafi, Libya’s head of state. For years, Gaddafi had undertaken many actions that incensed US policy makers. His offenses included harboring terrorists, financing their activities, and sending agents to attack US installations in Western Europe. In 1986, Libyan operatives bombed a discotheque in Germany that was popular with members of the US armed services. The blast killed two American soldiers and wounded many others. The Reagan administration had been planning an attack on Libya for some time and had tried to goad Gaddafi into giving it a pretext. The disco bombing served that purpose, and in April 1986, Reagan ordered an air strike on Libya with targets that included Gaddafi’s personal residence.

The bombing of Libya fulfilled Reagan’s promise to retaliate against terrorist attacks and won wide approval in the United States. It did not, however, intimidate Gaddafi, who took his revenge in a devastating way. On December 21, 1988, Pan American (Pan Am) Airlines Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 243 passengers, sixteen crew members, and eleven town residents. Most of those who lost thei...