191. 9/11: The Twin Towers Fall (Ep 5)

18:54David:You don't get two accidents like that. This is an attack.

18:58Gordon:So at that point, you knew. Yeah. And I think everybody else knew too. This is absolutely not an accident. So let's go inside the two towers because there's roughly 100 minutes before they fall. And there's a bunch of ordinary people who were in absolutely desperate situations. So on the 88th floor of the North Tower, there's a Port Authority engineer named Frank DiMartini and a bunch of other colleagues of his who could have fled immediately. But instead, they get a crowbar, flashlights, and they start working their way through the floors, which are filling with smoke. In many cases, they're prying open jammed doors and trying to pull trap people free, probably end up saving dozens of people, and they all die, these rescuers.

19:44Gordon:Elsewhere in the North Tower There's six people who are trapped In an express elevator Just stuck in this kind of sealed shaft And there's smoke seeping in Among them is a window washer Named Jan Demschur And he actually He's got a squeegee And he uses kind of the flat steel blade On there Take turns kind of hacking At the wall of the shaft Punching through drywall Until they can break into a bathroom on the far side and then climb out to safety. There's Brian Clark, who's an executive with a brokerage on the 84th floor of the South Tower, and he's leading a small group kind of down the smoke-choked stairwell.

20:25Gordon:He hears a banging and some noise and a cry for help behind a collapsed wall. On the other side is a banker from the 81st floor who had kind of crawled as far as he could and hit a dead end, and Clark shines his flashlight in. This other banker waves a hand through the gap and then Clark pulls them out over this broken wall and they get out of the tower together before it will come down. Firefighters are beginning to arrive at the scene and they're going up into the towers. Now, above the impact zones where the stairwells and elevators were severed, escape is absolutely not an option. And some people go to the broken windows and some of them

21:07David:fall or in some cases jump yeah and i mean these were some of the most i think in the days after some of the most i don't know striking awful images i mean there was one of these people who was captured by an associated press photographer richard drew of just a figure you know the falling man as it was known you know who jumped headfirst from the tower and I mean I think newspapers sometimes ran it once for impact but then it was so horrific I just don't think you never saw it again and I don't know if that person's ever been identified as who it was but I mean you just put yourself in the mind of someone who knows they're going to die and it's a choice of dying in the in the flames in that burning building or jumping I mean it's just you know truly awful I think so many individual stories from those days you know I think the firefighters as well, rushing to the scene to try and save people who are all going to die themselves.

22:02Gordon:There's Melissa Doy, who's a 32-year-old financial manager. She's up on the 83rd floor of the South Tower. She reaches a 911 operator and stays on the line for nearly a half hour as the heat's kind of climbing toward her and the oxygen's running out. And the operator is not able to send anyone who can help her. And she keeps telling Melissa to stay calm, you know, say her prayers. And near the end, Doy asks, she says, I'm going to die, aren't I? I mean, some who could have fled did choose to stay. And there's a case of a young equities trader named Welles Crowther, who was a volunteer firefighter.

22:39Gordon:In his spare time, he's last seen in the South Tower leading survivors down through the smoke. He's got a red bandana over his face. He's going back up again and again to try to rescue people. And his body's later recovered alongside those of several New York firefighters, it will end up being the deadliest day in the history of American fire service. So for 100 minutes, nobody below, though, really grasps that the towers might fall. So you have people climbing the stairs, you have the rescuers arriving, going up, the crews in the lobby, they all assume that despite all of the carnage and chaos so far, that the buildings will stand.

23:22Gordon:Let's take a break there. Most AI coverage leaves you with one of two impressions. Everything is about to change, or everything is about to end. I'm NLW, and on my show, the AI Daily Brief, I offer something more useful. Clear daily analysis of the stories that actually matter. Is the new model really better or just better on benchmarks? Should your team build agents or buy them? What does the latest lab drama mean for the tools you use every day? Plus, hands-on deep dives that give you AI skills you can use right now. Check out the AI Daily Brief and discover why we're the top AI show on Spotify.

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24:58David:welcome back the twin towers of the world trade center have been hit and at that moment it is clear that this is an attack on the united states so let's maybe go to to langley just outside washington dc cia headquarters where these warnings they've had that something might be coming have now played out in the most terrible away.

25:22Gordon:Well, that morning, the CIA director, George Tenet, he's actually had a breakfast in Washington. The president, President Bush, is traveling in Florida. And he's Michael Morrell. His PDB briefer is with him doing the briefing that morning.

25:36David:And we should say we've spoken to Mike Morrell, and there's a bonus episode there, which is, it's astonishing, really, to hear what it was like to be with the president of the United States on that day. So the president's out of town, But George Tenet is in D.C. and he's going to get told about the attack himself, isn't he?

25:53Gordon:So George Tenet is at breakfast that morning in D.C. His security chief comes up to him, very urgent look on his face and says, a plane's at the World Trade Center. And I think Tenet, who's been steeped in this threat reporting all summer, instantly suspects that something terrible has happened. So he leaves breakfast, gets into his car. And he writes, you know, in his memoir that all the random dots we'd been looking at started to fit into a pattern. And my head was exploding of connections. And he's probably thinking, as no other Americans would, he's thinking of that old KSM plot. Multiple airliners.

26:29Gordon:To blow up airliners over the Pacific. Or even there was a related scheme to fly a plane into CIA headquarters. So Tenet's mind is starting to go to dark places. On the drive, he can't get calls through to Langley on his secure phone. He's having trouble with it. And he describes the drive as the longest 12 minutes of his life. By the time he gets to Langley, the second plane is hit. The South Tower has been hit. At 10 a.m., Tennant gives the order to evacuate CIA headquarters, which is not a normal thing to do. The only time it was evacuated when I was there was there was actually an earthquake in Washington, D.C., and we evacuated headquarters.

27:08Gordon:So this is insane.

27:11David:But it's interesting. It's a counterterrorism center. They don't want to go. So they're exempted from this. And they're saying, you know, well, we could all die. But they're like, we've got to stay and work because they know what it is and what's coming.

27:25Gordon:Keep in mind at this point, it is a very real possibility in the minds of everyone there that there will be a plane. Heading for Langley. Comes to Langley and kills everybody there. The chief of the counterterrorism center had told Tenet, look, no, people have to stay. And Tenet recalls telling him, he's like, well, they could die. and the chief of CTC says, well, sir, then they're just going to have to die. And Tennant says, you're right. And so there is a crew inside CTC that will remain there throughout the entire day.

27:55David:So back to the hijackers then. We've had the two planes hitting the World Trade Center, but there is a third plane now, American 77, a Boeing 757 out of Washington Dulles, which had taken off at 8.20, bound for Los Angeles, and that's the one that's heading for the Washington area.

28:14Gordon:This plane flies normally until about 8.51. Between 8.51 and 8.54, the hijacker sees it. Again, it's the same playbook. Knives, box cutters, probably kill the pilots, use pepper spray to herd people into the back, tell everyone you have a bomb. At 8.54, the plane turns south, which is off course, And then two minutes later, its transponder goes dark, and even radar contact is lost with the plane. It just vanishes from the controller screens. It's doubling back toward Washington, but no one can see it. And then, as on the other flights from the back of the cabin, the calls start. At 9.12, a flight attendant named Renee May gets in touch with her mother in Las Vegas and said the plane had been hijacked.

29:03Gordon:The passengers had been moved to the back. She says, call American Airlines. and her parents do. Around the same time, a passenger named Barbara Olson reaches out to her husband, who's actually the U.S. Solicitor General, a guy named Ted Olson. Tells him the plane's been hijacked by men with knives and box cutters. She called a second time. The pilot has announced a hijacking, she says, and she asked her husband, you know, what should she tell the captain to do? Because the captain's still alive. He tells her, her husband tells her about the two planes that had already hit the World Trade Center.

29:36Gordon:So then she's got to realize what's coming. And then she tells him the plane is flying very low. It's flying over houses. And then the line goes dead. At 9.34 a.m., the plane is five miles southwest of the Pentagon. It swings through this hard 330 degree descending turn and drops toward the ground. And this is the plane that is piloted by Hani Hanjour, who is arguably the worst pilot among the crew. He's pushing the throttles to full power. At 9.37 and 46 seconds, American 77 strikes the Pentagon. It is going roughly 530 miles an hour. Kills everybody aboard and 125 people inside the building.

30:24Gordon:And the recollections inside the Pentagon are of absolute chaos. There's a woman named Sheila Moody who's an accountant. It's her very first day of work at the Pentagon. She spent the morning setting up her new office. And when the plane hits, she gets this burst of hot air hitting her eyes. And when she opens him up, everything around her is on fire. She's trapped in the smoke. She actually survives by tapping on a surface so a firefighter can hear where she is. Near her in the Pentagon, there's an army security manager named John Yates, who's actually blown across the room and burned over much of his body.

30:59Gordon:And when he comes to, the office is totally black. It's thick with smoke. There's furniture everywhere. And he's trying to grope and find a way out.

31:08David:I headed out to the US. It took a few days to get there because airspace was closed, as we'll get to. But I got to the Pentagon on, I think, the Friday, a couple of days after 9-11, and I still remember this sight because there was this blackened scar in the pentagon building where the plane had hit which was still smoking when i got there but what was astonishing is the pentagon building is so big yeah that actually the scar the hole the blackened scar didn't almost you couldn't believe that the plane had hit it it didn't look big enough and it's partly the size of the building and yet to suddenly look at that and think a passenger jet airline had hit at that point i mean anyway it was astonishing but it is at that moment that actually airspace is going to be closed.

31:53David:I mean, something really unprecedented happens because they are now realizing in the Federal Aviation Administration that something bad is going on with multiple airliners. And so, I mean, it's their national operations manager's first day in the job, but he's going to have to order every aircraft in American skies to land at the nearest airport at once and international flights will be stopped from arriving.

32:20Gordon:4 ,000 planes land. It's more than 100 transatlantic flights that are turned back or diverted to Canada. And the US clears its own skies, essentially.

32:30David:So that's three of the planes. Then there is this fourth flight. This is different from the others. Yeah. This is United 93. It's a really powerful film made by Paul Greengrass, actually, which recounts what happens there and will become very famous. And United 93 was running late, wasn't it?

32:48Gordon:And that is a absolutely crucial detail is ATTA, we talked about in the prior episodes, had worked to coordinate the timetables so there wouldn't be delay between these strikes or you could minimize it. And in this case, United 93 is delayed. It doesn't leave the ground until 842. It's more than 25 minutes behind schedule. It's a Boeing 757. It's got 37 people on it. It's also got the smallest hijacking team. There were only four. There were five on the other planes. One of the muscle the Saudi guys meant to round out the team had actually been turned away at the Orlando airport back in August.

33:30Gordon:So they're down a guy. The hijackers on this flight also waited longer than the others. They struck at 9.28 a.m., which is 46 minutes into the flight. And when this happens, the plane suddenly drops a few hundred feet. Air traffic control is catching a couple transmissions amid the struggle, though. There's a mayday, and then moments later, they hear a voice shouting, get out of here, probably one of the pilots. Yeah. Yelling at someone trying to get in the cockpit. Yeah, to get out. That's when Jara, the train pilot, takes the controls. He turns the plane back eastward toward Washington, tells the passengers over the intercom to sit down.

34:09Gordon:There's a bomb aboard. Then, as on the other flights, the calls start. But because it's late, the passengers are calling home. They're learning from friends, family, loved ones. But the other planes have crashed. The other planes have hit the World Trade Center. They've hit the Pentagon. So they understand immediately that it's not a normal hijacking. There's a flight attendant on this plane, Cece Lyles. She leaves her husband a voicemail in really a breaking voice. She says, please tell my children that I love them. Sandra Bradshaw, also on the flight, calls her husband from the galley, says everyone's rushing to first class and had to go.

34:47Gordon:There's a passenger also on this flight named Todd Beamer. He's 32. He's an account manager for a software company. He's a husband, a father. His wife, Lisa, is pregnant with their third child. He's also an alum of my university. And the student center at my college was named after him in the aftermath of this. unable, he can't reach his family. So he speaks at length with the phone operator named Lisa Jefferson. He asks her to pray with him. He recites the Lord's Prayer, and he makes her promise that she'll call his wife. Then she hears him turn from the phone to the others. The other passengers ask if they're ready, and he says, okay, let's roll.

35:30Gordon:Famous words, yeah. So at 9.57, the passengers on United 93 charge, and the cockpit voice recorder catches this kind of melee, which is muffled through the door. There's shouts, there's thuds, there's the sound of breaking dishes, presumably from the meal that may have been served on the plane. Jara, who's piloting it, rolls the plane hard left and then right. He pitches the nose up and down. He's actually trying to throw the attackers off there. I feel you get the sense at this point they've probably subdued or are in the process of subduing some of the muscle. And he's trying to stop them getting into the cockpit and stopping him.

36:07Gordon:Yeah. One of the muscles urging him to hold the door, a passenger crying out that if they don't get into the cockpit, they're all going to die. And the hijackers are about to be overwhelmed. And rather than surrender the plane, Jara rolls it onto its back and drives it into the ground. So at 10.03 in 11 seconds, United 93 slams into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. It is going 580 miles an hour. It's 125 miles short of Washington and its target, whether it was the Capitol or the White House, is never reached.

36:41David:So those people on board die, but their bravery of those passengers stops how many other deaths in Washington. I mean, it's just amazing to think of, you know, them having the bravery to do that and realizing.

36:54Gordon:Yeah, when they could have sat there and hoped for the best, you know, they stood up and did something about it.

36:59David:So should we go back to New York? Because, you know, during this time when we talked about the towers being hit, but no one thinking that they could collapse. I mean, it was inconceivable that they would collapse to anyone. But that is what's going to happen after this delay as we head towards 10 o 'clock.

37:22Gordon:So when we hit 9.59 a.m., the South Tower, which is actually the second to be hit, it collapses and it kind of folds down floor by floor like dominoes. many of the eyewitnesses describe the feel of the collapse in terms of like an earthquake or artillery fire and the tower falls and we now we have these iconic videos and images of this cloud

37:51David:of dust i mean sweeping through manhattan i mean it's it's like something like a wave it's like a wave i mean and it goes dark i think that's what's astonishing it goes from this really bright blue ooh, September day that it's been, to just darkness and ash covering everything. It's like

38:09Gordon:a volcanic eruption. Frank Rosano, a guest who was trapped at the Marriott that's positioned between the towers, said, what had been a bright sunny day suddenly turned pitch black. It was as if a curtain of concrete and steel had come falling down, the curtain at a play. I could literally see it coming down past the window, almost in slow motion, turning everything pitch black. So the streets become, as many of the eyewitness and survivor accounts say, it's like nighttime. Yeah.

38:38David:And people are just covered in this ash and dust. I mean, you can see them kind of walking dazed around the streets in the footage from the time, can't you? Just covered.

38:47Gordon:And a lot of the faces look like they're literally painted white, almost, with the the dust and the ash. And the soot is so thick that it actually blocks sound waves. So many of the people who are on the streets of lower Manhattan and who are enveloped in this cloud describe what had been this terrible, violent noise of the tower collapsing, turning into a world of silence.

39:14David:It's worth a moment, isn't it, to understand why the towers do fall because the conspiracy theorists will have a field day with this, and it's nonsense. The idea that they were wired with explosives and that explains it. It's nonsense. But the science of why they fell is important to understand why something happened which no one expected to happen. So the steel didn't melt.

39:38Gordon:And there's a later federal engineering investigation that found that the buildings actually survived the impacts themselves. And the design, as it was intended, just like redistributed the loads around the damage. But what happened is the impact, the nature of the airliners essentially is gigantic fuel bombs. What it meant was that it had actually burned off the sprayed-on fireproofing of the steel. and it started fires across multiple floors, which are first fed by the jet fuel. But then as the fires get hotter and hotter and stronger and stronger, the contents of the offices themselves, the paper, the furniture, all of that starts to turn into the fuel itself.

40:25David:And so the steel doesn't actually so much melt. It just loses its strength as it heats effectively and becomes more soft thanks to the heat. and then that allows the whole kind of effect of it kind of concertining and it's sagging and eventually collapsing.

40:44Gordon:Yeah, because it essentially is, yeah, it's not melting into liquid, but it's losing its strength. The fireproofing has been burned off. It's getting hotter and it's becoming less rigid. And so in the minutes that follow that, that kind of steel becomes soft and pliable. The floor trusses begin to sag. And as they sag, they pull the tower's exterior columns inward. And so it kind of is, it's bowed, it's weakened, and those columns can't hold the enormous load above them. And then it just buckles. And then what happens is, as the top of the building begins to drop, the weight, the force of that -

41:21David:The momentum of it drives it further and further down and takes the whole thing.

41:25Gordon:That's right. And then it becomes, and as you can see, kind of the velocity of the collapse picking up in the videos, it just becomes unstoppable. So floor drives through floor all the way to the ground. And it takes 10 seconds. That's it. And the whole thing is down. And then at 1028, the North Tower falls similarly. And in its final minutes, there's hundreds who are still inside. They're in the stairs, they're in the lobby. There are firefighters and policemen going in to rescue people. They all go down with the building. It's been just about two hours since the first plane was hijacked. And by mid-morning, even though nobody knows it yet, it's all over.

42:13David:And I mean, we didn't know it on the day. And I mean, people thought, what else is coming? Are there more planes that they're going to hit? I mean, the panic, the confusion, the chaos was just so intense. But I guess by nightfall, it felt like things were over. You know, the immediate chaos. But Manhattan that night, I mean, I just think those scenes are just seared into my mind of what it looks like. And anyone who remembers it, just the kind of jagged bits of the buildings which were still there and the dust and the chaos. No one had any idea as well how many people had died. And the estimates were all over the place for how many people had died.

42:55David:Some people thought 10 ,000.

42:56Gordon:I remember seeing estimates even higher than that on the day of, that it could have meant as many as 20 or 30 ,000.

43:01David:And it's going to take a long time to know what's going on. I mean, the ash is still falling and it's, you know, the paper from the office is drifting around. I mean, really, really something else. And then, as I said, at the Pentagon, this kind of scar in the building where the plane had struck. I mean, just chaos and confusion, really. And despair, I think. Despair.

43:23Gordon:Yeah, a tremendous amount of despair. I can remember feeling that. I mean, I was in faraway Minnesota at the time, and you can remember just feeling the sense of everyone's parents came home from work and people came home from school. There's a sense of just disbelief at what we were seeing on the screen. The World Trade Center will become, it's the longest burning structural fire in American history. The collapse creates this kind of deep oxygen-fed pile that the firefighters' hoses, the water actually could not penetrate. And so the fire only dies as they excavate the debris. And that takes nearly 100 days.

44:07Gordon:It's not until the week before Christmas that the fire is out at the World Trade Center. Out in the field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, there's almost nothing left. The United Flight 93 had hit the ground at such speed that it had essentially disintegrated. And there's a smoking crater. There's a field of scattered debris. And the plane has essentially been obliterated. And there's just a few pieces of, you know, like a flight attendant's, you know, book nearby. eye. But I mean, there's just so little left because of the speed at which that plane had hit the ground.

44:41David:In Afghanistan, bin Laden and his followers, I guess, you know, they know it's them. There's gunfire in the streets. As you know, their plan, the plane's operation has succeeded. President Bush, we talk about this more in the bonus episode, don't we? You know, has been in Florida in this classroom, this kind of bizarre scene where he's reading a kid's book in Sarasota, Florida, reading with the schoolchildren when he's told famously by his chief of staff that the second plane is here and America's under attack. And, you know, with Mike Morrell from the CIA, we talk a lot more about what happens that day, you know, being on Air Force One with President Bush as they fly around, still worried about further attacks before they eventually return to Washington that evening.

45:27David:With President Bush then addressing the nation from the Oval Office looking, I think, pretty shaken as they worry about further attacks.

45:36Gordon:And he has a very memorable line from that speech, which I think characterizes so much of what's to come and a lot of the aftermath that we'll talk about in the next episode, where Bush says, we will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them. And it does start at the first priorities that wounded and guarding against further attacks, but it's very clear from that moment, that the nation is going to go on a war footing. And George Tenet, CIA director, arrives at the White House shortly after the speech, because there's going to be a big meeting of Bush's national security team at around 9 p.m.

46:11Gordon:that night. And again, in retrospect, we know that the attack was done on the day of. That is very much an open question. There's been threat reporting coming into the CIA that afternoon. In one case, from the French, that said another group of terrorists was inside the U.S. preparing a second wave. There's a rumor that Air Force One itself was a target. The president was a target. So Tenet arrives on the night of September 11th to find the White House basically an armed fortress. He's taken not to the Situation Room, which is where you'd normally have national security meetings, but to an underground emergency operations center where the national security team is convening.

46:51Gordon:And Tenet says it was his first time in that room and last time in that room. He never, ever went there again. George Tenet was the CIA director from 1997 to 2004. He's in this room once on 9-11. Now, by this point in the evening, we talk about this a little bit with Michael Morell in the bonus episode. I think while Michael's on the plane with the president, he doesn't deliver an analytical conclusion, but he basically says it feels like it feels like Al Qaeda.

47:24David:Right.

47:25Gordon:And by this point, Tenet will tell Bush that this sort of looks, smells and tastes like bin Laden. And in fact, when CIA counterterrorism center analysts and targeters had been looking through the flight manifests that day, they see that they've got those two al Qaeda linked Saudi operatives who are on the flight. And so they can know, maybe not with total certainty, but with something approaching it, that this is bin Laden and al-Qaeda. For the moment, that must be for them. Tenet wrote also, I think this is maybe a place to leave kind of the day, is Tenet wrote that that room held more raw emotion in one place than I think I've ever experienced in my life.

48:12Gordon:anger that this could have happened shock that it had overwhelming sorrow for the dead a compelling sense of urgency that we had to respond and do so quickly and a continuing feeling

48:22David:of dread about what might lie ahead and so that morning which began with clear blue skies ends with smoke and ash and dread and close to 3 000 people killed let's leave it there and next time we'll look at the aftermath and some of the questions which still remain and are still debated about whether these terrible terror attacks could have been prevented we'll see you next time we'll see you next time

49:11matter? Is the new model really better or just better on benchmarks? Should your team build agents or buy them? What does the latest lab drama mean for the tools you use every day? Plus, hands-on deep dives that give you AI skills you can use right now. Check out the AI Daily Brief and discover why we're the top AI show on Spotify.

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