Former Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta remembers seeing White House aides running out of the executive building the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, just as he was heading inside in the minutes after the second plane had crashed into the World Trade Center towers.
Mineta recalled that tragic day while speaking to Department of Homeland Security officials on Tuesday at a 9/11 ceremony less than a mile from the Pentagon.
On that morning 17 years ago, Mineta said he had been at his office having breakfast with Belgium’s deputy prime minister and Jane Garvey, the Federal Aviation Administration administrator. The three were interrupted in the conference room and Mineta’s chief of staff asked to speak with the secretary alone. He excused himself and went to his office to see the aide.
“At the other end of the office was a TV console and obviously the World tower – the World Trade Center towers – were on view with black smoke coming out. I said, ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘We don’t know. We’ve heard general aviation into the building. We’ve heard commercial aviation into the building. We’ve heard about maybe the possibility of an internal explosion within the building,’” Mineta recalled.
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He watched TV for a few minutes then told the aide to keep him posted on developments and went back to his meeting.
A few minutes later, the aide re-entered the conference room and asked to see the secretary again.
“He said, ‘It’s been confirmed, it was an American Airlines that went into the building,’” Mineta said. “So I went right up to the TV set, starting watching and listening to all the commentary. As I’m standing there, all of a sudden, I see something get gray and go across the screen and then it disappeared and then from the left-hand side of the TV black, orange, yellow, white smoke coming out. And I said, ‘Oh my gosh, what’s going on?’ Or, words to that effect. So then I really watched television for a little while.”
Mineta ended the meeting and told Garvey to get back to FAA headquarters immediately.
He went back into his office where an aide said someone from the White House had just called telling him to “get over here right away” and he left to meet with then-President George W. Bush’s senior staff.
“As we were driving in West Executive Drive [a closed street on the White House property], people were running out of the [Eisenhower Executive Office Building]. They were running out of the White House. And I said to my driver and security person, ‘Is there something wrong with this picture? Everyone is running out and we’re driving in,’” Mineta said.
The Transportation secretary was taken to the Situation Room and then was moved to a more secure room known as the PEOC, or Presidential Emergency Operations Center, located deeper inside the executive building.
By 9:25 a.m., minutes after the two American Airlines planes had crashed into the north and south World Trade Center towers, Mineta was getting situated in the PEOC room.
He was seated at one of the many chairs that went around a large table he estimated was up to 30 feet long by 15 feet wide. Between each of the chairs was a phone. He picked up a phone on one side and called his office and used the phone on the other side to call the FAA operations center.
“I sat there from roughly 9:30 to about 5 o’clock that evening trying to keep things running,” he recalled. “While I was there, someone came in – a military officer came in and said to the vice president, who was sitting directly across, ‘There’s a plane coming from – towards D.C.’ So I said to Monte Belger, who’s the number two, the deputy administrator of FAA, I said, ‘What do you have on the radar of the plane coming toward D.C.?’”
“We have one plane that’s unidentified and all we’re doing is following the blips because the transponder has been turned off,” Mineta recalled Belger responding.
In those minutes, Mineta kept asking Belger for updates on that specific plane.
“I’d say to Monte, ‘Where is it?’”
“Probably in the middle of Pennsylvania,” Belger said.
“Oh, probably north of Baltimore,” he updated. “Where is it now,” Mineta would ask.
“Oops we just lost the boogie,” Belger said.
“What do you mean you lost the boogie? Where is it?” Mineta recalled asking.
The reply: “It’s somewhere between Pentagon City and National Airport.”
“And then someone broke in to the phones and they said, ‘Mr. Secretary, we just got a call from an Arlington police officer, he saw an American Airlines go into the Pentagon,’” Mineta said. “I said … that is the third commercial airline used as a missile in the last hour and a half.”
Mineta ordered a stand-down, similar to the military action. The 6,438 planes that were in the air at that moment were all ordered to land at the closest airport.
“In two hours and 20 minutes, all those planes were on the ground, safely without incident,” he said.
A fourth plane would crash that morning into the Pennsylvania countryside after passengers fought fought against hijackers.
