Weather 
In 2001, Richard Clarke was perhaps the most experienced person working in the White House. A member of the National Security Council, Clarke had spent 23 years in the executive branch and repeatedly warned about the risk of an attack on US soil by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.
In June of that year, Clarke sent a memo to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on the subject. He warned her of the very strong possibility of an imminent major terrorist attack and of serious gaps in the nation’s emergency protocols.
In July, they met in person to discuss the threat further. That day, he expressed his worry about the continuity of government in the wake of such an attack and presidential succession.
In August, his warnings made their way into a presidential brief. It was titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.”
At some point in these conversations Clarke even presciently predicted that such an attack could include an unthinkable horror: the hijacking and weaponization of passenger-filled commercial airliners.
But as the investigative journalist Jeffrey Robinson describes in his revelatory “Ash and Honor: The Untold 368 Minutes of 9/11 (St. Martin’s Press), Rice expressed skepticism and “accused the CIA and Clarke of sensationalizing Osama bin Laden, just trying to scare everybody.”
Little more than a month later, Rice used a secure phone to tell the president that the World Trade Center had just been hit by the first of four hijacked airliners on a kamikaze mission, the worst attack on America since Pearl Harbor.
In “Ash and Honor,” Robinson skillfully weaves together underreported stories of that day from around the world. He reviewed scores of documents (and some reports he believes are still classified) and interviewed over 65 eyewitnesses to the day’s events. Pilots, soldiers, civilians, spies — all their recollections come together to create a new portrait of the chaos and the brave souls who weathered it.
When the nation came under attack, the president was in Sarasota, Fla., visiting the Emma E. Booker Elementary School for what the author calls “a media stunt before sixteen second graders, designed to highlight a new education initiative.”
By the time Rice’s ominous call came through, Eddie Marinzel and Dave Wilkinson, the two men leading Bush’s Presidential Protective Division that day, had already decided to get Bush on Air Force One and off the ground. Where to was unknown.
Bush demanded to be taken back to Washington, DC, eager to reassure the nation that he was in control. But returning to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. was not an option. The White House was still a potential target.
Then things got worse: Word arrived that the plane carrying the commander in chief was itself a bull’s-eye on the terrorists’ list of targets, writes Robinson.
That became clear at 10:22 a.m. A phone rang in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC), a concrete bunker located five stories beneath the East Wing of the White House.
Marine Corps Maj. Bob Darling answered. On the other end of the line was a Secret Service agent calling from the Situation Room. The agent “said that a reliable source had called the White House with a warning.”
“Angel is next.”
Shocked, Darling looked across the table to Rice and repeated what he just heard.
“Angel is next.”
“Who the hell is Angel?” Rice asked.
“Air Force One,” Darling responded.
The president’s plane was then high over the Gulf of Mexico. News of the threat “freaked out everyone.”
That someone had made a threat against the president was not surprising. But this one was different, because whoever made it knew about the codename Angel — “the classified code for Air Force One.”
“This time the threat was next-level ominous. The unthinkable was suddenly a real possibility. The threat could be coming from someone either inside the security bubble that surrounded the president or close enough to that bubble to know how to get inside.”
Marinzel and Wilkinson “assumed the worst”: that the threat might have come from someone aboard Angel itself. They considered whether it could be a “rogue Secret Service agent,” a steward, a guest, or a member of the press corps.
“No one could be trusted,” writes Robinson.
Col. Mark Tillman, the pilot, decided to make Air Force One invisible. “He called down to the FAA and ordered total radio silence. Forget us. Do not call this plane. Leave us alone.” The plane still did not have fighter escorts, despite having called for them multiple times since takeoff.
So spooked were Marinzel and Wilkinson that they locked down the plane. Everyone onboard was ordered to remain in their assigned seats. Agents stood at the front of every cabin, eyeing everyone for suspicious activity. All cellphones were confiscated. No one was allowed to come forward without authorization.
While Marinzel’s team searched the plane for bombs and drugs, the words ” ‘Angel is next’ continued to echo in everyone’s mind.”
Locked away in a secure cabin, Bush was trying to get a hold of his family. Several of the plane’s commercial systems were down. Commercial phone systems “were jammed by an enormous increase in traffic” as millions of people were suddenly calling loved ones to check on them.
“It was so bad that when the president sent someone up to the communications room to check on his wife and daughters, he was told they had no way of reaching them.”
Back in the PEOC bunker, Darling “kept staring at the oxygen meter” on the wall. “With so many people huddled together, the meter was now showing oxygen levels close to red-line dangerous.” Air Force One was still without protection.
At Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida, Lt. Col. Steve Usher noticed that the plane was flying alone, and no one was doing anything about it. He made a request to his superior, Gen. Arnold, to scramble jets. Arnold technically didn’t have the authority to make that call. “Just do it,” Arnold said, “and we’ll worry about permission later.”
Usher had to get creative. The nearby planes he would have called were unavailable. But the 111th Fighter Squadron of the Texas Air National Guard had what he needed, two F-16s. He sent them into the sky. Later, he learned that the 111th had a pilot on their roster flying an F-102 from 1968 to 1973: 1st Lt. George W. Bush.
Circling in the air over Florida, that pilot-turned-president still insisted the plane needed to get back to DC so he could address the nation on television. His staff couldn’t stomach this. They aimed the plane instead toward Barksdale Air Force Base in Shreveport, La., the nation’s primary nuclear command-and-control center.
“Bush became very animated.” He wanted to be back in DC and didn’t want to look like he was “running away from the bad guys.”
But his security staff made a compelling argument for Barksdale, and the president begrudgingly agreed.
As the plane approached the base, a soldier answered a call announcing, “Code Alpha is inbound.” The soldier on the ground didn’t know what that meant and replied that the plane wasn’t welcome — the base was in the middle of a war game, and “B-52s carrying live nuclear weapons were lined up along the runways.”
Eventually, Lt. Gen. Thomas Keck caught wind of the conversation, realized what was happening and muttered, “We’re living in a Tom Clancy novel.”
At 10:45 p.m. local time, Air Force One landed. Bush climbed out of the underbelly of the plane on a ladder and stepped into a minivan that drove him off. (The bombers on the runway, it turns out, weren’t actually armed with nukes.) After another pit stop in Nebraska, Bush made it back to DC on the morning of Sept. 12.
What to make of the “Angel is next” threat? “If in fact it had been a plot,” writes Robinson, “obviously, it didn’t get carried out.” In the decades since, no one has definitively pieced together where the warning came from. According to the author, Darling believes there was intelligence gathered in Sarasota that there was a threat against the president. A Secret Service agent intended to communicate that threat, and used the appropriate code words, not realizing that the way he passed the message implied what it did. Hence, panic over an insider attack.
This is but one of the many tales from that nightmare day that Robinson knits together in “Ash and Honor.”
Robinson notes that much has been written and filmed about the horrific events of 9/11, but he wanted to tell of “the ashes and the honor of that day.” Of the many people who contributed their experiences to the project, he writes: “the word Honor in the title of this book belongs to you.”
