Books : After : Excerpts

From After: How America Confronted The September 12 Era

Sergio Magistri was jarred out of bed in Silicon Valley at 6:00 by his girlfriend, who was on the phone from Toronto, where she was attending an airline industry conference that included the executives who run most of America's airports. "Turn on your TV," she said, then hung up. For the first three hours, Magistri recalls, he was "completely spaced out in front of the TV." Then Magistri started to come to grips with the reality of what had happened, and how it affected the company he ran. "I looked up across the [San Francisco Bay] and realized that there were no planes flying into the airport. Then I saw a jumbo jet from one of the Asian airlines coming in -- and saw that it was being escorted by F-16s."

Magistri, who was forty-eight and still spoke with a thick, strange accent that reminded anyone who heard him that he was born in Switzerland and raised among people who spoke German and Italian, was the President and CEO of a small Silicon Valley company called InVision Technologies. InVision made giant machines that screened passengers' checked baggage at airports. The purpose was to see if the bags were carrying bombs. InVision was the clear leader among only two companies certified by the federal government to make these machines.

Magistri had come to InVision in 1990. Some friends from a company that made CT scan machines for hospitals and doctors had started the company two years before, right after Pan Am 103 had exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, when a bomb was planted in the checked luggage. "We were a reaction to Lockerbie," says Magistri.

But Lockerbie had not produced the business Magistri and his cohorts had hoped for. Congress had passed a law in 1990 requiring the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to get explosive detection equipment in place by the end of 1993, but by 1994 the FAA still hadn't approved standards for the devices, which are the size of a minivan. It had taken until that year for Magistri even to sell his first $1 million machine, and the sale was to an airport in Brussels. The Israelis had also become customers, but few other airports were willing to foot the bill. Magistri's machines were expensive, because they required not only an enormous amount of software to pinpoint the combination of mass and density that suggested explosives, but also a giant, rapidly rotating X-ray chamber that can record multiple images from multiple angles at high speed. By the end of 1996, Magistri had sold only twenty units, mostly to airports in Europe and in the United Kingdom (where by September 11, every piece of checked baggage was screened).

He had sold none in the United States. The American airline industry, concerned about passenger inconvenience and maintenance costs (the federal government would buy the machines), had continually persuaded the FAA to forgo the installation of Magistri's machines. Nonetheless, he had somehow been able to take his company public in the spring of 1996.

When TWA Flight 800 exploded over the Long Island coast in the summer of 1996, it looked like Magistri's shareholders had been in the right place at the right time. The stock nearly doubled, and Magistri was certain that the need for his machines had finally been demonstrated. A presidential commission, headed by Vice President Al Gore, investigated aviation safety and recommended the screening of every checked bag. The federal government quickly ordered fifty machines. It seemed that Magistri and InVision had made it. He began producing and selling ten to fifteen InVision units a month. Legislation was passed mandating 100 percent screening by 2013; then, the deadline was moved up to 2010. Magistri pushed his many suppliers to ramp up, while he hired and leased more space.

However, as the memory of TWA Flight 800 faded (or as it became clear that a fire in the plane's fuel system, not a bomb, had caused the crash), America and its government seemed to lose interest. The FAA and Congress stopped appropriating funds for his machines, and the airlines -- who had lobbied against the machines even when the government promised to pay for them, because they feared they would slow down the check-in process -- certainly weren't going to ante up on their own.

Magistri's sales stalled out, so much so that by September 10, 2001, he had sold only 140 in the United States (and about 110 abroad) in the seven years that the product had been given FAA certification and put on the market. Magistri had just subleased a chunk of his factory space and completed a round of layoffs that trimmed his workforce 15 percent, down to 180. Morale sagged among those who remained, as the company tried to cut costs by eliminating even little perks, such as the donuts and drinks that had been the staple of most meetings.

In short, Magistri was generally in the soup along with the rest of his Silicon Valley neighbors. His factory was nearly idle, making only one machine every week or two. He had even diversified InVision, developing an imaging product to track faults in logs for the lumber industry. That hadn't helped much: InVision's stock, which had gone public in 1997 at $12 and soared as high as $25, was at $3.11. To Magistri, the stock's rise and fall seemed to track America's dangerously short attention span when it came to security issues.

Now, by noon, or 3:00 Eastern Time, Magistri, who has the optimist gland endemic to any entrepreneur, was sure that everything had changed, this time for real. True, it seemed that the terror attacks had nothing to do with checked baggage, but Magistri's instinct was that September 11 was a seminal event that would result in a swift hardening of all targets in aviation. So he instructed his chief operating officer to think about ramping up again, quickly. "We had reduced ourselves to be a $40 million [in revenues] company," he recalls. "That afternoon, I decided we should at least ramp up to $60 million."

Magistri made two other decisions that afternoon. He instructed everyone in the company not to talk to the press at all, no matter who called. He did not want to seem to be taking advantage of the tragedy. At the same time, he rehired the PR firm he had laid off a few months before, in order, he says, "to prepare to respond to what I knew would be the new demand for coverage of us in the media and in the investment community. We had to get ready."

New York City's Department of Transportation Commissioner Iris Weinshall found herself with lots of quiet time early that morning. She'd left her Brooklyn home at about 6:30 to vote in the city's Democratic primary, then was chauffeured in her government car to City Hall in Manhattan. She thought she had a cabinet meeting with Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, but when she arrived she found that the 7:30 session had been changed to 9:45. So she grabbed some coffee at Starbucks, then proceeded to her office, which was about two blocks from City Hall and four blocks from the Trade Center. She was doing paperwork at her desk and talking on the phone to a business association leader, who was complaining about a water main and sewer project that was blocking traffic on lower Broadway, when she heard the noise from the first low-flying jet. Weinshall ran to another side of the floor, saw the fire, and was soon in touch with her deputies to make sure they would help clear traffic from the area so the firemen could get easier access. It was only when the second plane hit that she realized this was more than a local traffic problem.

Weinshall had two immediate worries. Her elder daughter, Jessica, was a senior at nearby Stuyvesant High, the elite magnet of the New York City public school system. And her husband -- Senator Charles Schumer -- was in Washington.

Chuck Schumer was watching TV and reading a newspaper in the House of Representatives gym at ten to nine. The senior senator from New York didn't seem the type who'd still be in the gym that late in the morning. He was a notoriously hard worker, the kind of driven politician who mixes obsessive involvement with the details of any issue with such a drive for publicity that the old joke, "he'd show up at the opening of a phone booth," seemed to have been written about him. But, he says, "I sweat a lot when I exercise. Even if I get to the gym at 7:00 and work out for an hour, it takes me another hour to be able to put my clothes on. So I use the time to read the paper and make some calls."

After Schumer saw the reports of the first plane, he called some staff people to ask them to get on the phones to get more information. When he saw the second plane hit he called Weinshall.

"Chuck, could these buildings come down?" Weinshall asked her husband.

"Don't be ridiculous, Iris," Schumer answered with characteristic certainty. "These buildings are built to withstand anything." They agreed to try to reach their daughter and talk later.

When the first tower came down, Weinshall, amid what she recalls as mass hysteria in her building, got her husband back on the phone. Schumer reported that Jessica's cell phone had just gotten through to his office in Washington, where she had told a staffer that she was on the ninth floor of Stuyvesant and was about to be evacuated but that all the elevators were out. Weinshall then took out a street map of Manhattan and counted the blocks from the North Tower to Stuyvesant, which was about four blocks from the Trade Center. The transportation commissioner and the senator now tried to calculate how tall the Trade Center tower was, what the length of an average block was, and, therefore, whether it would hit Stuyvesant if it fell over. "I wanted to leave to go find Jessie," Weinshall remembers. "But I couldn't. I was in charge of all these people and we had responsibilities. It was awful."

Weinshall deployed all of her staff -- from executives to her own driver -- to fan out in the yellow vests they'd all been issued for emergencies, and divert all traffic out of lower Manhattan. Amazingly, Weinshall's driver soon spotted Jessica with her friends running north up West Street. He scooped her up and brought her to Weinshall's office.

When the second tower collapsed, Weinshall's building lost all power and phone service. She and her senior staff, with Jessica in tow, began moving uptown in a caravan toward a Transportation Department depot in upper Manhattan that they would use as a command center. She stayed there until about 11:00 P.M., when she got her driver to take her home to Brooklyn so she could change her soot-laden clothes before attending a midnight emergency command meeting with Mayor Giuliani. As the driver began to go over the Brooklyn Bridge, which like all bridges and tunnels had been closed to the public, a police sergeant leaned in and told Weinshall that "we haven't had a chance to check the bridge out yet; the scuba team won't be here until the morning to look for bombs at the base." Weinshall thanked him, then told her driver to "gun it." They hurtled over at 100 miles per hour, she recalls, "as if we were trying to get a good running start in case it blew up."

Meantime, Schumer, whose Senate office had been evacuated, had commandeered a lobbyist's suite on K Street. He began getting his staff focused on what he saw as the twin callings of his job -- combining, as he puts it, referring to two predecessors, "Al D'Amato when it comes to bringing home the bacon for New York, and Pat Moynihan when it comes to being serious about policy." The bacon had to do with all the aid New York would need to rebuild. Policy had to do primarily with the law enforcement and national security issues related to terrorism.