T3 B11 EOP Produced Documents Vol III Fdr- 8-6-02 Terry Moran-ABC Interview of Rice 003

8/14/2019 T3 B11 EOP Produced Documents Vol III Fdr- 8-6-02 Terry Moran-ABC Interview of Rice 003

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THE WHITE HOUSEOffice of the Press Secretary

R E C E I V E DInternal Transcript August 6, 2002

J U N . 7 2 0 0 3INTERVIEW OF N a t i o n a l Commission n

NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR CONDOLEEZZA RICE e r r o n s t A t t a c k sBY TERRY MORAN OF ABC

Vice President's Ceremonial Office

4:56 P.M. EDT

Q September llth, the President is in Florida, theSecretary of State is in South America. As the NationalSecurity Advisor, what was your day shaping up like?

DR. RICE: My day was shaping up as a fairly normal day. Igot up that morning, I went into the office, I had done myintelligence briefing and I was standing at the desk gettingready to go down to my senior staff meeting, and my executiveassistant came in and said a plane had hit the World TradeCenter. And- I thought, well, that's a terrible accident. Andin my own mind it was probably a twin-engine plane of some kind.

And I called the President in Florida and told him, and hehad exactly the same response. So I told my executiveassistant, well, let me know what happens. And I wentdownstairs to start my senior staff meeting. And a few minutesi n , I got a note that said that a second plane had hit the WorldTrade Center, and I thought, well, this is a terrorist attack.

Q A general question: On that morning, how would youdescribe the mood of the American people when it came to thethreat of terrorist attacks in the U n i t e d States?

DR. RICE: That morning when Americans woke up I believethey knew that the threat of terrorism was there, but associatedi t with terrorism abroad. Americans knew that there had been abombing of an American ship, the Cole. They knew that theAmerican embassies in Tanzania and Kenya had been bombed.Terrorism had been a part of the American experience, of course.

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And then, of course, we had the domestic terrorist incident inOklahoma City. It had all been a part of our experience, butprobably until that morning, on September llth, no oneassociated terrorism with the kind of dramatic, mass casualtyevent that we experienced.

Q If you'd thought that first plane t h a t - h i t the firsttower was an accident, why did you call the President?

DR. RICE: Because if the President of the United States isout of the White House and something bad has happened in theUnited States, it's important for him to know. Frankly, we tellhim those sorts of things so that he isn't told first by thepress that a plane has hit the World Trade Center. But it waskind of normal procedure. And what was different about thatmoment was that nobody could be certain, there seemed to be someconfusion about what kind of plane it was. And I remembersomeone saying -- and I don't actually remember who nowsaying, it's an awfully big fire for a small plane. And inretrospect, that was a tip.

Q And did you have any hunch at that point that it mightbe terrorism?

DR. RICE: It just didn't come to mind immediately that itmight be terrorism. We knew a lot about al Qaeda. We knew thatal Qaeda really coveted an attack against American interests,maybe even against the United States. We had gone through asummer in which we had heightened states of aLert abroad for ourembassies and for our forces, because we were getting a lot ofchatter in terrorist channels. But most of it was pointingall of it was pointing abroad, that there was going to be somekind of attack abroad. And the human mind doesn't always puttwo and two together very quickly, and so, no, in that firstattack, it didn't come together for me. When the second planehit, though, it came together very, very quickly.

Q So you called the President after the first plane hitthe first tower, told him what had happened. What did he say?

DR. RICE: He said, what a terrible -- it sounds like aterrible accident; keep me informed. And he went then off tobegin his event in -- the education event that he had going onin Florida. And I wejit down and went on to my staff meeting. Iknow that it was Andy Card who told him that a second plane hadhit the World Trade Center, and I believe he said somethinglike, America is under attack. And there's a picture that I

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will never forget of the President's face when he was told that.The remarkable thing is he finished reading to these third-graders, and then left and got ready to try and come back.

Q That picture is etched in American memory now. Youknow him so well, you know that face so well. What do you seein him at that moment?

DR. RICE: At that moment, I saw a sense of horror, really,could this be. And I suspect that right after that moment, hismind had to have been racing to think about what to do. Buthe's an amazingly disci plined person and he clearly made adecision that he was going to stop, finish this, and then Italked later to Rod Paige, the Secretary of Education, who waswith him, and Rod said that the President said to him, I've gotto go back to Washington. You're going to have to carry thisevent. And then he left. And it wasn't until later that theSecretary of Education knew what had happened. The Presidentwasthat calm.

Q Let me go back to how you found out about the secondplane. You went to the Situati on Room.

DR. RICE: I went to my staff meeting, which is held in theconference room wi thi n the Situati on Room. And I was goingaround asking each of my senior directors to report on theirpart of the worl d, something we do every day. And I was aboutthree people in when the executive assistant came in, handed mea note that said a second plane had hit the World Trade Center.And senior staff members have said that I stopped in mid-sentence and said, I have to go. Because I knew that this was aterrorist attack.

And then I went into the Situation Room proper, which isoff the conference room, and I began to try to gather thenational security principal s. Colin Powell was in Peru. Ifirst thought he was in Colombia, and that concerned me andworried me, given the fact of terrorism that has been a problemin Colombia. I then tried to find George Tenet; I wanted tofind my own counterterrorism person, Dick Clark. I was tryingto find Don Rumsfeld. And in that moment, when I was trying tomake all those phone call s, it seems to me like it's a veryshort period of time unti l I turned around and saw on television.that a plane had hit the Pentagon. In retrospect, I now knowthat some period of time actual ly elapsed w hile I was doingthat, but the human brain sort of shortens that period of time.

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Q And during that period of time, did you get a chanceto talk to the President again?

DR. RICE: As I was trying to find all the principals, theSecret Service came and said, you have to leave now for thebunker. The Vice President is already there. There may be a^plane headed for the White House. There are a lot of planesthat are in the air that are not responding properly. And Istopped and I made a phone call to the President, and thePresident now had left the event in Florida. He'd gone to theairport. He said, I'm coming back. I said, Mr. President, youmay not want to do that. My Defense -- one of my Defensepeople had whispered in my ear, he can't come back here. And Isaid, you may not want to do that, Mr. President, becauseWashington is under attack. We don't know where the next attackis coming.

I then left the Situation Room to go to the bunker. Andwhen I got to the bunker, the President was talking to the VicePresident on the phone and the Vice President was"saying thesame thing, you can't come back here. I suspect the Presidentreally, really wanted to come back, and he was telling everybodyhe was going to come back, but we ^?new it would have been thewrong thing to do.

Q And he started back, right?DR. RICE: He ended up deciding that he shouldn't come

back, and he went, of course, first to Louisiana, and then toOffutt Air Force Base, which is where we were able to have thefirst video contact with him. But there was no doubt thathaving him land at Andrews Air Force Base would have been a verybad thing.

Q Why? Why didn't the President come home, back toWashington, and take charge of the government?

DR. RICE: At that moment, you have to worry about thecontinuity of the United States government. It's very clearthat Washington was under attack. It's very clear that theywere going for symbols of power and for the .seats of power. Andto bring the President back and to put him in the same buildingwith the Vice President would have been foolhardy, frankly,because decapitation then of the U.S. government is quite easy.

The President has to be protected at that moment. We spenta small -- a large fortune during the period of the Cold War

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putting together all kinds of plans and all kinds of vehicles sothat the President would not be endangered in a time like that.To have him come back into the White House at that moment wouldhave been really irresponsible.

Q So you're told then that you have got to get out ofyour office and down into the bunker. Who's there when you getthere?

DR. RICE: When I left the Situation Room and got to thebunker, the Vice President was there; several other people werethere, including Norm Mineta, the Transportation Secretary whowas trying to ground all of these aircraft. And the work atthat moment was to try and get some read on how many planes werestill in the air, how many were responding properly, which oneswere not responding properly.

I also came into the room and my old nuclear war trainingas a Soviet specialist kicked in, and I thought I have to getsomeone to get a cable out to posts around the world tellingthat that the United States government is still functioning,because all that they could see on televisions around the worldwere planes going into the Pentagon, and you weren't getting anyword out of the White House. So I first asked Rich Armitage atthe State Department to make sure- that posts knew that Americawas still functioning.

Q At what point during the course of these attacks didyou think, Osama bin taden?

DR. RICE: It was not immediately that I thought Osama binLaden. I did think just in a flash, al Qaeda, just byconditioning, because we knew al Qaeda. But it receded ratherquickly because there was so much to do and so much to worryabout, and it wasn't the sort of thing that you you weren'tgoing to try to make a case right at that moment. " It wasdealing with the consequences. But it was not long -- it wasa little bit later in the day at the NSC meeting that GeorgeTenet said, we think it's al Qaeda, it smells like al Qaeda, itwalks like al Qaeda, it quacks like al Qaeda, it's probably alQaeda.

Q Back to the bunker. Describe that. We've seen thisbunker portrayed in Hollywood movies and such and such -- whatis it like down there, what does it look like?

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DR. RICE: Well, i t ' s just a conference room, you know,with other things there. And it's -- the conference room is aplace where you can talk and watch TV and all of those things.I remember being struck by the fact that somebody had gone tothe trouble of finding food for us, at some moment during thattime. Somebody was trying to attend to our needs. But the

Q Were you hungry?DR. RICE: I don't remember being hungry, but I think I

ate. Why not, it was there. But the really important thingabout that scene was that it was not panicked. Everybody satand did their work. There were a lot of support people around,from military officers who are detailed over to the White Houseto help, and everybody went about doing their jobs, despite theshock that we'd just been through.-

Q As people around the country watched those eventsunfold, one of the emotions that people felt_was fear. Were youafraid at all that morning?

DR. RICE: I didn't have time to be afraid. I didn't thinkabout my own safety at that moment, although maybe it was in theback of my mind, because I stopped on the way to the bunker tocall-my aunt and uncle in Birmingham and to say, I'm all rightand you should tell everybody I'm all right, because I knew thatthey would see these pictures on television and the Rays andRices are a pretty close-knit clan, and I was worried aboutthem. _

Q And when you saw the towers come down, did you take amoment and gasp or shed a tear at the sheer scale of thisattack?

DR. RICE: I just remember seeing the horror of it, and itjust collapses and there's all of this dust and smoke and peoplerunning. And I -- yes, the horror of it registered. But Ididn't really have time to react to it. We were still trying todeal with the consequences. We were still, by this time, tryingto get ready for the President to make a statement to thenation. You just have to keep plowing through.

Q At one point that morning, the President gave an orderto the Combat Air Patrol pilots giving them permission to shootdown U.S. commercial airliners. How did that decision comeabout, and how did you take on board the gravity of thatdecision?

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DR. RICE: The President did give the order to shoot down acivilian plane if it was not responding properly. And it wasauthority through channels by Secretary Rumsfeld, and the VicePresident passed the request, the President said yes. And ithad almost immediate consequence, because when the plane wentdown in Pennsylvania, Flight 93, there was a time when we didn'tknow whether it had gone down by the hand of an American pil ot.And it turned out to be difficult to find out because a lot wasgoing on at the Pentagon by now, and we were trying to ask thequestion, did an American pilot report engagement with acivilian aircraft. And for what seemed like an endless periodof time, we couldn't get an answer to that question. And so,for those horrible minutes, you thought that maybe this planehad been shot down.

When we learned later that it had not been shot down, butthat it had been driven into the ground by the passengers,rather than let it fly_ into another building,- it was quite ashock. And I just remember thinking what an awesome feat thesepeople had engaged in. And you- wonder at that time, could youever have mustered the courage that the people on Flight 93mustered.

Q But for a time _ there was a real possibility that heorder the President had given had resulted in the shooting downof this U.S. commercial plane. It didn' t turn out to be thatway, but how did that affect you in your conscience? Did youpause at all? _

DR. RICE: That possibility was really horrible. I thinkthe reason that we kept asking -- and I know the VicePresident kept asking , too -- we were there together and wekept saying, did an American pilot engage a civilian aircraft.You must know if an American pilot engaged a civilian aircraft;they would hav e reported back. Did they? And I think that wasthe only time that the kind of desperation to know wasassociated with the enormity of getting that answer, that maybean American pilot had brought down a civil ian airc raft.

Q At 3:00 p.m. in the afternoon, from Offutt Air ForceBase, the President convenes this video conference NationalSecurity meeting. This is really the first war Cabinet meeting.What was the mood__ among the principals who were prepared torespond to this attac k?

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DR. RICE: The mood among the principals was already prettybusinesslike. People had been going about doing their jobs allday. Tenet had been getting the assessment. Rumsfeld hadprobably had the most difficult day of many of us, frankly,because there was a time when he went out to help the injuredand the victims, and then came back to his office, so he wasoperating in a sense from a war scene. I marvel at his focusthat day.

And we sat down, and the President said, first of all, letme tell you that whoever did this to us, we're going to getthem. George, you get ready. Don, you get ready. And then hesaid, and I'll be J3ack tonight. I'm coming back tonight. Andhe said it in a way that it was pretty clear that there -was noarguing with him this time. He made up his mind that he wasgoing to come back.

He was very concerned -- the President was very concernedabout questions like the banking system, what did this mean, howlong was it going to be before we could start to show somenormalcy, were the victims getting everything they needed in NewYork. There was a kind of consequence management part of thisthat really -- we didn't focus al l that much initiallyon whatwe were going to do in response. It was, we will respond; let'stry and get a better assessment of the situation.

It was later that night after the President's speech to thenation that we really began to hand out assignments for the nextday, to begin to. think about response.

Q And when the President did get home that night, andyou saw him for the first time, this man that you know so well,and saw him for the first time with this burden that haddescended on him, what did you see, what did you think?

DR. RICE: I saw somebody who had in his mind I thinkdecided that it was just time to get after it. He knew thatit's his favorite phrase, let's get after it. And he hadclearly in his mind that the most important thing that he coulddo that night was to reassure the country, but to also makeclear that we had a hard course ahead, but we were going to win.And he was so resolute and so clear and -- not withoutemotion, but not overly emotional either when I first saw him,that it was quite remarkable.

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Q To what do you attribute that? This was a relativelyuntested President, who in the face of this crisis and thisattack, had this demeanor. Where did he get that?

DR. RICE: It was the George W. Bush that I had come toknow over the last several years, somebody who, when things geta little -- get diff icul t, gets tougher, gets more resilient,feels that he, himself, has to make others around himcomfortable and ready - t o go. I mean, he sort of takes it onhimself to bring up the morale of others around him. And therewas some of that that night, too, with the National Securityteam, pulling the team together.

It wasn't at all a surprise to me that he could do it, butanybody in that circumstance could have failed to do it and notbeen blamed for being resilient and resolute. I wasn'tsurprised, but I'm still pretty awed by it.

Q Although, in retrospect, people do look back at someof his first comments and are struck by their informality , thatwe'll get the folks who did this, and some see hesitancy inthat. Speaking to the nation is one of the key roles thePresident has at a moment like that. How did you go aboutpreparing him for that?

DR. RICE: The President's address that night was puttogether really rather quickly. He had asked Karen Hughes andme and Mike Gerson, his speechwriter , and others to work on adraft for him to see when he came back - t o the White House. Andthere were a couple of policy decisions that had to be madehow global would it sound. And the President was from the verybeginning pretty clear that this shouldn't sound as if it hadjust happened to us, it should acknowledge that this was a bigattack on values. He also -- we clearly decided that we weregoing to have to worry about the issue of sanctuary. And thatwas probably the most important policy decision that nightthat in the first real statement about what we had ahead of us,that we would say that it was the terrorists and those whoharbored them.

You could have just said, we will get the terrorists. Butby saying, those who harbor them, the doctrine, as people cameto talk about it, was now clear and it meant Afghanistan and itmeant the Taliban, and I think the fact that he said it in thatfirst statement sent a chilling message to a lot of countriesthat harbored terrorists.

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Q Did you get any sleep that night?DR. RICE: I got very little sleep that night. I stayed at

the White House that night. We, in fact, had a false alarmlater in the evening when, at about 11:30 p.m. that night, afterthe National Security principals had met, I was sitting in myoffice with Steve Hadley, the Deputy National Security Advisor,and Andy Card, Chief of Staff, and the Secret Service came in.and said, you have to go back to the bunker, there's anotherplane headed for the White House.

And so we headed off to the bunker, and that was a kind ofsurreal scene because the President was in his running shorts,and Mrs. Bush was in her bathrobe. And we got there and wethought, what's going on here. And everybody sort of milledaround for a while. And then the President said, I'm going tobed. And he headed off, and we all sort of headed off down thehallway behind him. It was a very strange little scene.

I was asked to stay here that night because Service didn'treally think I ought to go home. I spent the night in the WhiteHouse; I didn't sleep very much. I got up the next morning andgot gcdng.

Q A couple final- questions. When you finally did getsome sleep, and since then, have you ever lain awake at nightand thought, did we do everything we could? Could we have seenthis coming and done more to stop it?

DR. RICE: You would not be human -if you didn't ask thatquestion over and over and over again. I really do believe thatwe did what we could. That given that we're human beings, giventhe experiences that we had, have had, given the informationthat we had, we acted in the way that we thought best for thecountry. I don't believe that anything that could have beendone in those months running up to September llth would haveforestalled this attack. There's every reason to believe thatit had been planned at least a year, two years before. There'severy reason to believe that this was an organization that wasdecentralized enough to have had pulled it off, even if some ofthe people had been apprehended.

It's also the case that this is an organization that had abase in Afghanistan that we've now been able to take down. But,frankly, it would have been very hard to take that base down" inthe way that we did before September llth. So, of course, youask that question. But this administration, and I believe

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everybody who dealt with al Qaeda before us did what we could totry and protect the American people.

We now know more about our vulnerabilities. We now knowhow they used our openness and our generosity to attack us. Andso we're responding to that world, which is a thoroughlytransformed world from where we were on September 10th.

Q Last question: When you look back on that day andyour role right at the center of it, is there a moment or animage, something not necessarily grand or historic, that evokesits -- the awesomeness of that day and the significance of itfor you?

DR. RICE: The image that probably for me evokes theawesomeness of that day is the President giving that address tothe nation. I'm a student of international history, andAmerican Presidents responding to crises. And the address tothe nation is, for me, always the defining moment. John F.Kennedy's address to the nation on the Cuban missile crisis, Iwill never forget. George H. W. Bush's address to -the-Americanpeople at the time of the Gulf War. Those are defining momentsfor a presidency, and defining moments for the President.

~ This one was, in many ways, unlike any one that I am oldenough to have seen because it was addressing an existentialthreat to the United States. It was addressing an attack onAmerican territory, something that for several generations ofAmericans _had been thought to be unthinkable. And so, in that^_sense, it felt that this presidency had entered into a differentrealm, the realm of the Roosevelt presidency for World War II,or maybe even the Lincoln presidency for the Civil War.

And that night, I do remember thinking that that momentwhen the President addressed the nation would mark a crack intime for the United States and the way that we thought aboutourselves.

Q Thank you.END 5:23 P.M. EDT

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