The Rest Is Classified - 191. 9/11: The Twin Towers Fall (Ep 5)

Episode Date: September 6, 2026

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For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter, and discounted books. Join the Declassified Club at the rest is classified.com. The day is September the 11th, 2001, a group of Al-Qaeda hijackers, are preparing to commit one of the deadliest terror attacks in history. But what happened on the day itself? Welcome to the rest is classified. I'm Gordon Carrera. And I'm David McCloskey.

For four episodes, we followed the plot, how it was assembled, how the hijackers were trained, how they came into the United States. We've looked at what the FBI and CIA knew about them. The fact the lights were blinking red in the summer of 2001, but with no specific details about what was coming. And we left last time on the night of September the 10th itself with the soon-to-be-be-hideast. jackers preparing themselves for the next morning. This time we're looking at the day itself. September the 11th, 2001. Our hijacking teams awake early and make their way to the airport. And this is the moment of no return. First a word from our sponsors, HP. This episode is brought to you by HP. In intelligence, you quickly learn that you are only as

strong as the network around you. It's rarely a single major event that undermines an operation. It's the gaps between systems. That's where information leaks. It's the same in business. Leaders face a constant battle against strict timelines, mismatch tools, and the worry their security isn't as tight as they think it is. Which is why HP approaches technology, not as a collection of gadgets, but as an integrated system. And crucially, that protection is built in that hardware level. It runs quietly in the background, blocking threats without requiring constant specialist oversight. With the team of business advisors, HP helps businesses of all sizes find technology that fits their needs and budget. To see how HP helps businesses work securely and productively,

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That's NordVPN.com slash rest is classified. The links in the episode description. Going on vacation? We're here for it. With kids, who turned the backseat into a courtroom drama over whose tablet is louder, whose charger is faster,

and while watching the same cartoon for the hundredth time is a human right? Yep, we totally have vehicles to handle that. Because whether it's a road trip or a business trip, where your flight's delayed, your phone's at 2% and your dinner is whatever is open? Yeah, here for that too.

Enterprise, we're here for it. So, David, it was a brilliantly clear blue sky that September morning. I think everyone can remember it from the pictures and yet a day in which some of the darkest things are going to happen in American history. Let's focus on the hijackers, shall we, and what they were up to as they head towards the airports to get their flights. Yeah, and we should say in this episode, we're going to just cover September 11, 2001. And there are two books in particular that we're indebted to as we piece this history back together. One of them is Garrett Graffs the only plane in the sky, which is an oral history of 9-11. And the other is a book by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn called 102 Minutes, which focuses on events inside the World Trade Center itself.

But hijackers to start. Atta, Muhammad Atta, as we said last episode, had driven bizarrely north of Portland, Maine the evening before for reasons we still don't understand. And they had left their hotel at 5.30 in the morning, and they cut things really close. They dropped their rental car in the lot, and they clear security at the Portland airport around 545, just seven minutes before their commuter flight to Boston. And it's crazy to think about because had that flight been delayed, it's possible the whole thing would have unraveled or would have had to have been rescheduled. But it's not. They land at Boston, Logan, 645. And seven minutes later, Atta takes a short call from Shehey, one of the other pilots, who was in another terminal at Logan preparing to board the second plane.

Shea He and his team had checked out of a budget hotel the night before, drove their rental car to Logan, where apparently they argue with someone in the garage over a parking spot. Weird again, just that, yeah. The others are making their own way to the airport. So near Newark, very early, Ziajara, who's written sent that letter that we spoke about last time to his girlfriend. calls his girlfriend and says he loves her three times. Outside Washington, the Pentagon team has checked out of their hotel in the Virginia suburbs. They drive to Dulles and a rental car. They park in an hourly lot.

The interior of this car, which investigators will later turn over, is littered with flight manuals, cockpit diagrams, and maps. And what's interesting is across these three airports, the men go through the security checkpoints, but nothing is found, which is suspicious. By 8 a.m., the four plans are loading. We have American 111 and United 175 out of Boston, American 77 out of Washington Dallas, and United 93, which is out of Newark. These are ordinary flights, full crews, business travelers, you have families heading home, honeymooning couples, right? It's just a typical mix of kind of business and leisure passengers on any transcontinental flight.

flight taking off that morning. So let's look at the first plane, American 11. It lifts off from Boston at 759. It's a Boeing 767 carrying 81 passengers, nine flight attendants, as well as the captain and first officer. And for the first 14 minutes, it's all normal, isn't it, on the flight? But then just before 814, it makes its last routine acknowledgement to air traffic control.

And 16 seconds later, there's a further instruction which goes unanswered. and that's because the hijacking is underway. And it's really swift. It's really brutal. This is the plane carrying those two Saudi brothers we talked about, the Sherry brothers. They're seated in the second row of first class. They stab two flight attendants preparing for cabin service. And then Atta, who is going to take over the controls, moves toward the cockpit.

Behind him, a passenger who is a former Israeli Special Forces officer, is stabbed by one of the other muscle who was seated behind him probably because this guy is getting up to try to stop what he's seeing happening in the front rows and he's not realizing that there's yet another hijacker who's sitting behind him.

The hijackers spray pepper spray to drive passengers to the rear of the plane try to get them away from the cockpit. They claim they've got a bomb. They claim they have a bomb. How, in this case, they get into the cockpit, it's unknown. but whatever they did, within minutes, they have control of the plane,

and it's very likely that the pilot and the co-pilot are dead or dying. Now, what happened next on Flight 11 is known chiefly because two flight attendants made phone calls. One of them is a woman named Betty Ong. She's 45. She's in her 14th year with the airline, and she's aboard that morning, only because she had switched onto the flight to meet her sister and plan a train. trip to Hawaii. One of those tiny details. So many of those from that day, which are so painful. The passengers have been herded into the back with the pepper spray. And what Betty does is she

calls, she gets on one of the phones in the back and calls American Airlines Reservations line and stays on it for about 25 minutes. At 819, she gives this very grim, stark report. She says, the cockpit isn't answering. Somebody has been stabbed in business class. She talks about how there's mace, there's pepper spray in the air. people are having a hard time breathing. When she's trying to give the person on the other end of the line, seat numbers as she sort of pieces together what's happening. The other flight attendant on this flight, Madeline Amy Sweeney,

is filling in that day for a sick colleague. And she reaches a manager who also happens to be a friend back at Logan Airport and reports that a passenger had had his throat cut. Two of the other flight attendants had been stabbed. and again mention there's a bomb that the hijackers have threatened they have in the cockpit, which of course they don't. And then she starts talking about how the plane is descending rapidly. Plan's flying very low. It's flying over the buildings from New York.

And then she says, oh my God, we are way too low. And the call ends. At 824, air traffic controllers hear a transmission from American Airlines Flight 11 that the hijacker at the controls believed he's making to the cabin. And so in kind of broken words, they get a phrase that, you know, they don't understand the full meeting until later. He says, we have some planes. He's trying to communicate to the passengers, he thinks. Right. And to try and, I don't know, calm them, stop them fighting back.

Well, again, I think they're obviously trying to control people and saying, like, we have planes, we have bombs. Yeah. We will detonate them unless you listen to what we say. Which in some respects makes it feel more like a traditional hijacking, which is what people are probably thinking at this point. At this point. And then, I mean, astonishingly, that's 824. There's another 22 more minutes of that flight. Yeah.

I mean, it's just impossible to think what is going through people's minds for 22 minutes as it's flying knowing that. a hijacker is controlled of the plane, but people are still probably hoping they're going to land somewhere. But at 846 and 40 seconds, American Airlines Flight 11 strikes the North Tower of the World Trade Center. It hits roughly between the 93rd and 99th floors. It's flying just about 440 miles an hour when it hits the building. Everyone aboard and hundreds in the building above and around the impact are killed instantly. And the force is absolutely staggering. So the plane is carrying about 10,000 gallons of jet fuel, which ignite into fireballs.

The largest of them is around 200 feet across, right? So it's wider than the tower itself. Much of the fuel burns off within minutes, but some of it is, you know, kind of outside the building, running down the building, getting into elevator shafts. The impact itself shakes the ground, literally, in New York. There are seismographs at Columbia University's Observatory, which are, 20 plus miles away. And they register the jolt for 12 seconds, the impact of this plane hitting the building.

Now, smoke is pouring out of the North Tower after this. And this is the point where news cameras begin to pick it up. So you have local coverage first at 848, where the CBS affiliate in New York crosses over to its traffic helicopter whose reporter is describing seeing smoke coming out of the tower. And then just minutes later, national coverage starts. And international coverage as well. I mean, I can remember this because I was the BBC and working at the Today program.

And immediately our coverage switched to these shots of the World Trade Center. The first impact. And people still don't know what's going on at that point. And people are thinking it's a light plane which has hit the tower rather than a big plane in those first few moments. So something's happening, but absolutely no idea at that point that it's a terrorist attack. Did you think it was a terrorist attack at that point? Not at that point, yeah. Yeah.

I thought it was an accident of some kind of. And I think on the ground in New York, it also looks like an accident because it's one plane. Let's go to bin Laden for a second. He's known the date for probably five days. So he's been waiting. And the morning of September 11th in Afghanistan, he wakes up early and prays, as was his custom. As the first plane hits the North Tower, Al Qaeda guys at his guesthouse are basically trying to get a radio signal. And finally, someone actually tunes into the BBC's Arabic service.

And they get the breaking news that a plane has struck the World Trade Center in New York. And the members of Al Qaeda who know that something was going on and understand that this is al-Qaeda are elated. Yeah. But because the operation had been so compartmentalized, nobody else knows what else is coming. And bin Laden kind of says, look, wait, wait, there's more. And according to Lawrence Wright's account in the looming tower, bin Laden, who at this point is weeping, holds up three fingers for the three remaining planes that are still in the air and still headed to their targets. So let's go back to New York then.

So in the South Tower of the World Trade Center, people are beginning to evacuate. Others are told over the public address system that their building was secure and they could return to their desks. I mean, it's a terrible moment because what they don't realize is that there's a second plane coming for them in the tower. In the Dwyer book 102 minutes, they have this very fascinating explanation for at least some of the disaster of that. day, which is at least part of the scale of the tragedy is due to, of all things, the building codes in New York. Because the World Trade Center is constructed in the late 60s and early 70s, both towers. And had it been erected according to the building code that had been in effect in New York since, I think, the 30s, it probably would have been a very different building.

But there was a new code that had come into effect and that the real estate industry for understandable reasons had promoted, which made it much more lucrative to construct these kind of very tall skyscrapers because it increased essentially the density of the space that you could rent or lease. And what that did was it cut back on potential escape routes. Evacuation routes. evacuation rates. It cut back on the floor space available for evacuation and exit. And the result is that in both towers, it's just going to be that much harder to actually get people out. And it probably means that, you know, some thousand or more people inside the North Tower who would initially survive the impact couldn't reach an open staircase at time. So as this doomed evacuation of the North Tower and this sort of halted, evacuation of the South Tower are underway. United Flight 175 had left Boston at 8.14 a.m. That's just minutes after American Airlines Flight 11 had been seized by Atta and his crew. Now, somewhere between 842 and 846, the five hijackers on United 175, they strike.

Again, similar playbook. They have knives, box cutters. They use pepper spray to herd people back. They say we have a bomb. They kill both pilots. And then, as on the first plane, the passengers who have been herded into the back, they start making calls. Peter Hanson, one of the passengers on this plane. He's 32. He's flying with his wife, Sue Kim, and their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Christine,

who is going to wind up being the youngest of all the day's victims. At 8.52, Peter gets in touch with his father in Connecticut and says, the cockpit's been taken, there's a flight attendant who's been stabbed, hangs up. Minutes later he calls again, and in the transcript of the call, you can hear his voice get really tight

as he seems to understand what's happening. Hijackers have knives and pepper spray. He says, you know, the plane's kind of making jerky movements. He thought that they meant to fly into a building, and he tells his dad, he says, don't worry, dad, if it happens,

it'll be very fast. And there's a scream. woman's scream and the call cut off. His father then turns on the television. And he's watching at 903 a.m. As United 175 banks hard into the South Tower. And this time, the cameras are live because everyone's been watching the burning North Tower.

So millions of people are watching as a bully-loaded passenger jet just soars into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. I mean, I remember actually watching that live. So I was watching the live coverage, saw that second plane in. But what's, what I remember thinking was, even though it said it was live, in my head, I thought this is a replay of the first impact. And I thought, because I couldn't quite compute that a second plane could hit. And so in my head, I was like, oh, they've just gone back.

back and found some footage from 15 minutes ago or 20 minutes ago of the first plane hitting. And then it took a few moments for it to become clear. No, no, no. This was a second plane hitting. And of course, at that moment, at that moment, you realize this isn't, the first one wasn't an accident. You don't get two accidents like that. This is an attack. 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 D. Martini 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 jam doors and trying to pull trap people,

probably end up saving dozens of people, and they all die, these rescuers. 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 Dempshur. 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. Here's 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, Clark shines his flashlight in. Southern 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 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, who jumped head first 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 know you never saw it again and I don't know if that person's ever been identified of 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 building 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 all going to die themselves. There's Melissa Doye. There'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 half hour as the heat's kind of climbing toward her and the oxygen's running out. And the operators 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, Doe asks, she says, I'm going to die, aren't I? I mean, some who could have have fled, did choose to stay. And there's a case of a young equities trader named Wellis Crowther, who was a volunteer firefighter. 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 bodies 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. Let's take a break there.

Spotify, it's Jay Shetty. Are you one of those media strategy people scrolling through spreadsheets, searching for an audience that pays twice as much attention to your ads than they do on social, let me introduce you to fans, and they're here with me on Spotify. Trust me, I know fans. They don't skip, they stay for hours. They don't move on, they manifest. They're not a demographic group, they're fans. Spotify advertising. You're among fans. 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 Langley, just outside Washington, D.C., CIA headquarters, where these warnings they've had that something might be coming have now played out in the most terrible way. Well, that morning, the CIA director, George Tenet, is actually at a breakfast in Washington. The president, President Bush is traveling in Florida. And he's Michael Morel. His PDB briefer is with him doing the briefing that morning. 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? 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 hit 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 had been looking at

started to fit into a pattern. 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. 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 a 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., tenant gives the order to evacuate CIA headquarters, which is not a normal thing to do. Yeah. The only time it was evacuated when I was there was there was actually an earthquake in Washington, D.C. And we evacuated headquarters.

So this is insane. But it's interesting. It's a counterterrorism center. They don't want to go. 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 on work. Because they know what it is and what's coming. 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 Tennant, 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 Tenet says, you're right. And so there is a crew inside CTC that will remain there throughout the entire day.

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 820 bound for Los Angeles, and that's the one that's heading for the Washington area. This plane flies normally until about 8.51. Between 851 and 854, the hijackers sees it. Again, it's the same playbook.

Knives, box cutters, probably kill the pilots, use pepper spray to hurt people into the back, tell everyone you have a bomb. At 854, the plane turns south, which is off course. And then two minutes later, its transponderer 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, the passenger has been moved to the bag, 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, guy named 10. Ted Olson tells him the plane's been hijacked by men with knives and box cutters. She called second time.

The pilot has announced to 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. 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. This is the plane that is piloted by Honey Hanjur, who is arguably the worst pilot. Among the crew. He's pushing the throttles to full power. At 937 and 46 seconds, American 77 strikes the Pentagon. going roughly 530 miles an hour, kills everybody aboard and 125 people inside the building.

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 them up, everything around her is on fire. She's trapped 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. 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. I headed out to the U.S. It took a few days to get there because airspace was closed we'll get to, but I got to the Pentagon on, I think, the Friday, a couple of days after I 11, and saw, and I still remember this site because there was this black and 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 that actually the scar, the hole, the black and scar didn't almost, you couldn't believe that a 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 airliner 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. 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 managers 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. 4,000 planes land.

It's more than 100 transatlantic flights that are turned back or diverted to Canada. And the U.S. clears its own skies, essentially. 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? 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's 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. 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, yelling. Someone trying to get in a cockpit. Yeah, to get out.

That's when Jara, the trained pilot, takes the controls. he turns the plane back eastward toward Washington, tells the passengers over the intercom to sit down, 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.

So the other planes have crashed. The other planes, they've 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. Lyle's. 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. 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 of father. His wife Lisa is pregnant with their third child. He's also an alum of my my university and the student center at my college was named after him in the aftermath of this. 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. Famous words, yeah. So at 957, 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.

They're the sound of like 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. You get the sense at this point they've probably subdued or in the process of subduing some of the muscle and he's trying to stop them getting into the cockpit and stopping him. Yeah. One of the muscles originally 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, Jarrah rolls it onto its back and drives it into the ground. So at 10.03 and 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. 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. Yeah, when they could have sat there and hoped for the best. They stood up and did something about it. So should we go back to New York? Because 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. So when we hit 9.59 a.m., the South Tower 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 have these iconic videos and images. Of this cloud of dust.

I mean, sweeping through Manhattan. I mean, 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 September day that it's been to just darkness and ash covering everything. It's like 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 blood. 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, 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.

And a lot of the faces look like they're literally painted white. almost with 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. It's worth a moment, isn't it, to understand why the towers do fall?

because the conspiracy theorists, you know, will have a field day with this and it's nonsense. You know, the idea they were kind of 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. And there was a later federal engineering investigation that found that the buildings actually survive 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 hot. 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. 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 concertini and it's sagging and eventually collapsing. 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. 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. The momentum of it drives it further and further down and takes the whole thing. That's right. And then it becomes, and as you can see kind of the

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, you know, 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. 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. And I, but by, 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 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. Right. And the estimates were all over the place for how many people had died. Some people thought 10,000. I remember seeing estimates even higher than that on the day of that it could have meant as many as 20 or 30,000. 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. Yeah, a tremendous amount of despair. I can, you know, remember feeling that. I mean, I was in far away Minnesota at the time. And you can remember just feeling the sense of, you know, 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. 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. 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 attendance, you know, book nearby.

But I mean, there's just so little left because of the speed at which that plane had hit the ground. 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 a school. good Sarasota, Florida, reading with the school children when he's told famously by his chief of staff that the second plane is here.

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 with President Bush then addressing the nation from the Oval Office looking, I think, pretty shaken as they worry about further attacks. And he has a very memorable line from that speech, which I think characterizes so much of, you know, 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, you know, it does start at the first priority is 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. that night. And again, you know, 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 operation center where the national security team is convening. 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 Morel 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 Al-Qaeda, right? And by this point, Tenet will tell Bush that this, you know, 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 were on the flight.

And so they can know, maybe not with total certainty, but with something approaching it, that, this is, that this has bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. What a moment that must be for them. Tennant 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, angered 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 of dread about what might.

light ahead. And so that morning which had 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.