Books : After : Excerpts

From After: How America Confronted The September 12 Era

When the sun came up over the Memphis airport on Wednesday, September 12, Larry Cox was sure of one thing: He should have splurged and bought automatic pumps for those 5,000 inflatable mattresses. His staff was bone-tired from pumping them by hand. He was still juggling local media interviews, while scrounging for food and water for the 8,000 people still marooned at his airport. Some refused to leave, despite the willingness of the city's families to take them in for a day or two.

Meantime, Cox's fax machine was still spitting out new security directives from the FAA on issues ranging from new fencing requirements around the airport to the security of the planes parked at ramps. Another directive ordered all airports to prohibit travel accessory stores and other shops inside the checkpoints from selling knives. The order seemed to illustrate to Cox and anyone else who read it how much the world had changed in less than a day. Selling Swiss Army knives to people about to board jetliners now seemed suicidal.

One FAA fax that Cox didn't get that morning, but which made him angry when he heard about it months later, was one the agency sent to the airlines. It was a list of about 300 people who the airlines were told were considered dangerous by the FBI, the CIA, or the FAA. When flights resumed, the directive said, these people were not to be allowed on board.

One top American Airlines executive, who had been up all night helping to get the airline's planes back in the air (plus tending to the human and legal issues beginning to emerge from the fact that two of American's planes had been used by the hijackers), was incredulous. Why had they waited until September 12 to send us that, he wondered. They must have had a list on September 10.

Indeed, they would have had such a list had the FAA simply compiled and sent, as they now had done on September 12, the separate lists that the FBI and the CIA had been sending the FAA for at least the prior six months, naming people who were flight risks. The lists were sent to Lee Longmire, a longtime FAA official, who was Director of Civil Aviation Security Policy. They were on his desk on September 10, Longmire acknowledges, although he would refuse to comment about what he did with them or who was on them. But according to an FAA official and a Justice Department official, two of the hijackers were on those September 10 lists -- something that Ashcroft would later say he could not confirm or deny. In fact, says the FAA official, his agency had crossed those names off on September 12 to avoid embarrassment. "We just never got around to setting up a protocol for who would control the list and how we would get the airlines to implement it," says the FAA person.

Among the recriminations to follow in the months after September 11 over who knew what and when that might have prevented the attacks, this failure of the FAA to circulate that no-fly list -- unlike other supposed failures to "connect the dots" -- seems clearly to have resulted in, or contributed to, at least two of the hijackings. That the airlines never complained about it publicly said a great deal about that industry's symbiotic relationship with its regulators. For years, the airlines -- an industry whose product is regulated from Washington like almost no other -- and the FAA have had a mutual support relationship. Their personnel regularly switched sides, going from the agency to one of the airlines' large Washington lobbying offices and back again. They attended the same conventions, and, most of all, they thought of themselves more as partners than adversaries, which had its positive side in the sense that overbearing regulators could easily strangle an industry like this. So, the airlines rarely complained publicly about the FAA, and the FAA didn't hassle the airlines about issues like security.

In fact, on September 11, the FAA was two years overdue on delivering new explosive detection baggage screening regulations mandated by Congress, and its lawyers were at an off-site conference that day discussing what to do with a backlog of 10,000 allegations of breaches of security and hazardous materials regulations that it had not yet acted on.

It was an arrangement that airport directors like Cox resented because, in their view, when the FAA wanted to show it was getting tough on safety, it would send inspectors to check on how well Cox was securing his gates or exit doors, rather than check the baggage screeners, who were under the control of the airlines and who generally operated in a way meant not to hassle customers. For example, the screeners, who were employed by private security companies, never quibbled over whether the customer was bringing a razor blade or a knife on board, as long as the knife's blade was less than 4.5 inches long -- a bizarre standard whose history no one at the FAA after September 11 could remember, let alone own up to.

At 11:00 on the night of September 12, things changed. The CEOs of the airlines participated in a conference call with Norman Mineta, the Secretary of the Department of Transportation, which oversees the FAA. It was a conversation that signaled a new era in federal regulation. A Republican administration that had eschewed Washington regulatory power -- albeit with a former Democratic congressman, Mineta, at the DOT helm -- was about to flex Washington's muscles.

Mineta had told President Bush on September 11 that he'd have the planes up the next day, but September 12 had come and gone. Now the airline executives expected Mineta was calling with the good news that things were go for the next morning.

The call was anything but good news. Mineta sat at his conference table with, among others, John Flaherty, his chief of staff and longtime aide, and Deputy Secretary Michael Jackson, a veteran of the first Bush administration and a Republican, who had worked at aerospace giant Lockheed Martin during the Clinton years.

Because of a classic conference call snafu, Mineta, Flaherty, and Jackson knew that the airlines expected to get the go-ahead even before the call officially started, because they could hear them talking among themselves before Mineta activated his own speaker signaling that the Transportation Department people were on the line. Instead, Mineta told the airlines that they weren't going to fly unless and until a whole raft of new regulations were implemented. These included more careful baggage screening, no razor blades or knives of any kind, no curbside check-in, National Guardsmen at the airports, the hand-searching of a large sample of passengers and their carry-on bags even after they had gone through metal detectors, and arrangements made to accommodate as many as 600 new armed sky marshals immediately to ride (in first class) on selected flights.

Deputy Secretary Jackson told the airline executives they ought to be able to do all that by Thursday or Friday. The airline CEOs said that was impossible. Mineta said they had no choice. The airline people protested that they were running out of cash and would need a federal bailout even if they started flying as early as tomorrow. One offered to fax over a tally they'd begun working up of all the losses. Flaherty and Jackson said they'd consider all that once they got the planes up. They should also understand, Mineta added, that a lot more regulations were on the way, from Congress and the White House.