Retreat And Rebound

ust before 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 11, air traffic controllers at the Federal Aviation Administration knew that terror was in the air. Two commercial airliners leaving Boston had been hijacked and had reversed their westbound courses in favor of a jagged flight path toward New York City. Between 8:40 a.m. and 8:43 a.m., FAA officials made two calls to the North American Aerospace Defense Command. Within minutes, two F-15 fighter planes took off from Otis Air National Guard Base in Falmouth, Mass., to try to limit, if not prevent, casualties. But it was too late. By shortly after 9 a.m., both of the World Trade Center's twin towers had been hit.

Minutes later, FAA Administrator Jane Garvey ordered a halt to all air traffic flying in and out of New York. At the same time, air traffic controllers picked up on their radar a third flying bomb, American Airlines Flight 77, headed for Washington. The FAA again called the Defense Department. Three F-15s immediately took off from Langley Air Force Base, Va., for the nation's capital. FAA headquarters were evacuated.

By 9:25 a.m., Garvey took an action unprecedented in aviation history, ordering all U.S. aircraft out of the sky. Only two planes ignored the order. One, Flight 77, crashed into the Pentagon at 9:43, killing nearly 200 people. The other, United Airlines Flight 93, crashed in rural Somerset County, Pa., killing all 44 passengers and crew members. Within two hours of the order being issued, FAA air traffic controllers successfully landed thousands of commercial flights.

On the ground in Washington, Office of Management and Budget Deputy Director Sean O'Keefe had just left a meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney when he heard that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. When word came to evacuate the Old Executive Office Building, O'Keefe and other senior OMB officials scrambled to a nearby law firm, where they set up shop in a conference room. The top four officials of the General Services Administration were in Philadelphia at the time of the attacks. While Administrator Stephen Perry traveled back to Washington, Joseph Moravec of the Public Buildings Service, Sandra Bates of the Federal Technology Service and Donna Bennett of the Federal Supply Service set up operations in Philadelphia and began coordinating GSA efforts around the country.

Nine blocks from the White House, Comptroller General David Walker learned that the White House and OMB were being evacuated, while false rumors of explosions at the State Department and the Capitol flew across town. Walker's thoughts also were on his wife, Mary, a flight attendant who had boarded a 757 at Boston's Logan Airport headed for the West Coast that morning. Walker tried to reach her by phone, but she didn't pick up. Around 10 a.m., he learned that his wife was not on one of the hijacked planes. "For an hour or so I didn't know if she was on a plane . . . that hit the World Trade Center," he says. In the meantime, Walker still had to worry about his employees. "We were hearing conflicting information. First nothing, then liberal leave, then an ordered evacuation, then we heard the government was closed," he said. Walker decided to keep GAO open, but said employees could leave if they wanted to. Most stayed.

Emergency Evacuations

Sept. 11 was a day of retreat for much of the federal government. The Office of Personnel Management ordered agencies in Washington to close at 10:08 a.m., 25 minutes after the Pentagon crash. Federal employees flooded into the streets of the capital. Johari Rashad, an OPM worker on an evaluation team at the Commerce Department, walked to a window inside Commerce's Constitution Avenue building and saw black smoke billowing from the Pentagon. Rashad was ordered out of the building and followed a crowd to a packed subway station, where she caught a train home.

At the headquarters of the Internal Revenue Service, Assistant Deputy Commissioner David Mader was in charge in the absence of Commissioner Charles Rossotti, who was on a site visit to an IRS facility in Long Island. After the second plane hit the trade center, Mader assembled the IRS security team and shut off access to its Washington headquarters. Shortly after 10 o'clock, Mader and the IRS executive team ordered all IRS facilities nationwide to evacuate and shut down. "We knew this was some kind of concerted effort," Mader says.

NASA closed its Washington headquarters and all 10 field centers across the country within hours of the attacks. Kennedy Space Center in Florida, home to the $8 billion space shuttle fleet, went to its highest level of emergency readiness for the first time in its 39-year history. Putting Kennedy's hurricane preparation plan into action, NASA and contractor workers secured the four winged orbiters in their hangars and went home-leaving behind a "ride-out" team of about 200 people to staff an emergency operations center. Security helicopters patrolled the skies above key facilities, including the shuttle launch pads. At Johnson Space Center in Houston, NASA sent home all but a skeleton crew needed to monitor activities aboard the International Space Station.

Similar evacuations and shutdowns played out in virtually every agency. About 50 overseas embassies closed down. The Immigration and Naturalization Service closed all border crossings. CIA headquarters sent many employees home. The Bureau of Reclamation closed the Hoover and Glen Canyon Dams in Nevada and Arizona to visitors and the National Park Service closed the USS Arizona Memorial in Hawaii because it is part of the Pearl Harbor naval base, which was put on alert. Social Security Administration employees across the country went home early.

The closings allowed thousands of civil servants to be with their families and friends on a day when all Americans wanted to be with their loved ones. Coupled with the shutdown of the air traffic system, the closings also may have drained federal sites of their value as terrorist targets.

Heroes in Action

Sept. 11 was a day of heroism, too. As much of the federal establishment closed up and went home, thousands of public servants rushed into action. FBI agents launched the largest investigation in U.S. history. Federal Emergency Management Agency officials activated the Federal Response Plan, a 300-page document that lays out the responsibilities of agencies in times of crises. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson deployed volunteer teams of doctors, nurses and pharmacists from Boston, Atlanta and other areas to New York and the Pentagon. General Services Administration buyers worked to procure 100 vehicles for the recovery effort, and the agency's Burlington, N.J., depot went on a 24-hour work schedule to meet agencies' needs for office supplies and other necessities.

At the World Trade Center complex and at the Pentagon, federal law enforcement officers, security personnel and office workers helped evacuate people from the destruction. On the plane that crashed into Pennsylvania countryside, the Census Bureau's Marion Britton and Waleska Martinez and Fish and Wildlife Service refuge manager Richard Guadagno perished. Guadagno, a trained federal law enforcement officer, may have helped bring down the plane, his colleagues say, saving people at the White House, the Capitol or some other target in the Washington area. "He was a damn good cop," says Peter Nylander, supervisory special agent for the wildlife service in Oregon.

A lasting memory of Sept. 11 may be the intense cooperation among federal, state and local authorities, as well as public servants and ordinary citizens. Representatives of dozens of agencies worked on the rescue effort at ground zero in New York, including FEMA, the FBI, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. After taking the Metro home, OPM's Rashad joined 200 people in line at a Red Cross blood donor center.

Bouncing Back

Sept. 12 was a day of rebound. President Bush declared the government open for business and urged Americans to return to their routines. Federal executives, managers and employees returned to work to figure out how the missions of their agencies match up with the needs of the nation. "Most of those who perished in the attacks were wage earners and were probably insured under the Social Security system," says Steve Korn, president of the National Council of Social Security Management Associations and manager of the SSA field office in Vallejo, Calif. "The survivors are due monthly benefits." Claims centers put a priority on processing survivor claims. "That's their main duty right now," he says.

The Federal Supply Service sent protective firefighting clothing from Stockton, Calif., to aid rescuers, while GSA real estate specialists began negotiating deals to lease office space for the 2,800 federal employees displaced by the attacks. "We were doing in three days what it usually takes three months to do," says GSA Administrator Stephen Perry.

Under the leadership of the Forest Service, incident management teams from the West-typically assigned to fight wildfires-started boarding military transport vehicles to aid rescue and recovery efforts in New York and at the Pentagon. Doug Pumphrey, normally a land, mineral and resources director at the San Bernardino National Forest in California, went to help FEMA manage the logistics of rescue and recovery at the Pentagon. "We have a mission to do," Pumphrey said when he arrived in Washington. "I'm very proud to be an American and proud to be here." INS border patrol agents reopened the borders, checking every car entering the country and inspecting immigration documents more closely.

Federal travelers, many stranded by the air traffic system shutdown, made their way back to their offices. Some boarded buses and trains. Others rented cars and drove halfway across the country. The General Services Administration eased travel regulations to give stranded travelers more options. "Bus, rail, car, whatever way we can get people back home, that's what we're telling people to do," said Jim Harte, GSA's travel team leader, just days after the attack.

At 2 p.m. Wednesday, IRS and Treasury officials gathered in Washington to hammer out tax relief policies. Within two days, the IRS had policies in place to make sure citizens wouldn't be burdened with tax issues if they were coping with losses.

Federal employees also lost family members and friends in the attacks. "We weren't sure we could account for all of our employees, and there were certainly many, many employees who were personally affected, with friends or relatives missing or deceased," Mader says. "In spite of all that, they recognized they had a responsibility to service our taxpayers."

Sept. 12 also was a day of reinforcement. The federal building in Los Angeles, whose main tenant is the FBI, was open only to government workers with ID cards. Armed agents turned others away. Social Security began stationing guards at all its offices to check bags before people entered. NASA reopened its headquarters Wednesday but field center workers did not return to their jobs until Thursday. Kennedy Space Center was at C-level alert, just one shy of the highest level. Increased identification checks and random vehicle searches caused miles-long traffic jams at the space center gates, as more than 12,000 employees tried to get to work. Similar traffic jams greeted returning workers at military bases across the country.

In the week following the attacks, a new appreciation of public service emerged. A recent business school graduate says the attacks motivated her to go online and find out how to apply to work at the CIA. "Working for the federal government has always been in the back of my mind, but it didn't become a serious search until [now]," she says.

Americans face years of questions and years of studying the lessons of Sept. 11. Entire agencies and departments, such as the Defense Department, the FAA and the CIA, must re-examine their missions, while other agencies, such as INS and the State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs, must try to close the holes in the nation's security. Evacuation and emergency procedures across the country worked poorly. In Los Angeles, local media reported incorrectly the day after the attacks that all federal offices were closed. As a result, many workers stayed home even though they were supposed to go to work.

Following the attack, many employees rededicated themselves to serving the country. Charlotte Lewis, a Social Security employee in Chicago Heights, Ill., surely was not alone as she sat at her desk after hanging up the phone with her 9-year-old niece on the morning of Sept. 11: "After that phone call and after much struggle to remember the words, I silently said the Pledge of Allegiance."