THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary

RECEIVED
Internal Transcript August 6, 2002
JUN . 7 2003
INTERVIEW OF National Commission on
NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR CONDOLEEZZA RICE erronstAttacks
BY TERRY MORAN OF ABC

Vice President's Ceremonial Office

4:56 P.M. EDT

Q September llth, the President is in Florida, the

Secretary of State is in South America. As the National
Security Advisor, what was your day shaping up like?

DR. RICE: My day was shaping up as a fairly normal day. I

got up that morning, I went into the office, I had done my
intelligence briefing and I was standing at the desk getting
ready to go down to my senior staff meeting, and my executive
assistant came in and said a plane had hit the World Trade
Center. And- I thought, well, that's a terrible accident. And
in my own mind it was probably a twin-engine plane of some kind.

And I called the President in Florida and told him, and he

had exactly the same response. So I told my executive
assistant, well, let me know what happens. And I went
downstairs to start my senior staff meeting. And a few minutes
in, I got a note that said that a second plane had hit the World
Trade Center, and I thought, well, this is a terrorist attack.

Q A general question: On that morning, how would you

describe the mood of the American people when it came to the
threat of terrorist attacks in the United States?

DR. RICE: That morning when Americans woke up I believe

they knew that the threat of terrorism was there, but associated
it with terrorism abroad. Americans knew that there had been a
bombing of an American ship, the Cole. They knew that the
American 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 in
Oklahoma City. It had all been a part of our experience, but
probably until that morning, on September llth, no one
associated terrorism with the kind of dramatic, mass casualty
event that we experienced.

Q If you'd thought that first plane that-hit the first

tower was an accident, why did you call the President?

DR. RICE: Because if the President of the United States is

out of the White House and something bad has happened in the
United States, it's important for him to know. Frankly, we tell
him those sorts of things so that he isn't told first by the
press that a plane has hit the World Trade Center. But it was
kind of normal procedure. And what was different about that
moment was that nobody could be certain, there seemed to be some
confusion about what kind of plane it was. And I remember
someone saying -- and I don't actually remember who now
saying, it's an awfully big fire for a small plane. And in
retrospect, that was a tip.

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

DR. RICE: It just didn't come to mind immediately that it

might be terrorism. We knew a lot about al Qaeda. We knew that
al Qaeda really coveted an attack against American interests,
maybe even against the United States. We had gone through a
summer in which we had heightened states of aLert abroad for our
embassies and for our forces, because we were getting a lot of
chatter in terrorist channels. But most of it was pointing
all of it was pointing abroad, that there was going to be some
kind of attack abroad. And the human mind doesn't always put
two and two together very quickly, and so, no, in that first
attack, it didn't come together for me. When the second plane
hit, though, it came together very, very quickly.

Q So you called the President after the first plane hit

the first tower, told him what had happened. What did he say?

DR. RICE: He said, what a terrible -- it sounds like a

terrible accident; keep me informed. And he went then off to
begin his event in -- the education event that he had going on
in Florida. And I wejit down and went on to my staff meeting. I
know that it was Andy Card who told him that a second plane had
hit the World Trade Center, and I believe he said something
like, 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. You

know him so well, you know that face so well. What do you see
in 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, his
mind had to have been racing to think about what to do. But
he's an amazingly disciplined person and he clearly made a
decision that he was going to stop, finish this, and then I
talked later to Rod Paige, the Secretary of Education, who was
with him, and Rod said that the President said to him, I've got
to go back to Washington. You're going to have to carry this
event. And then he left. And it wasn't until later that the
Secretary of Education knew what had happened. The President
was—that calm.

Q Let me go back to how you found out about the second

plane. You went to the Situation Room.

DR. RICE: I went to my staff meeting, which is held in the

conference room within the Situation Room. And I was going
around asking each of my senior directors to report on their
part of the world, something we do every day. And I was about
three people in when the executive assistant came in, handed me
a 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 a
terrorist attack.

And then I went into the Situation Room proper, which is

off the conference room, and I began to try to gather the
national security principals. Colin Powell was in Peru. I
first thought he was in Colombia, and that concerned me and
worried me, given the fact of terrorism that has been a problem
in Colombia. I then tried to find George Tenet; I wanted to
find my own counterterrorism person, Dick Clark. I was trying
to find Don Rumsfeld. And in that moment, when I was trying to
make all those phone calls, it seems to me like it's a very
short period of time until I turned around and saw on television
.that a plane had hit the Pentagon. In retrospect, I now know
that some period of time actually elapsed while I was doing
that, 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 chance
to talk to the President again?

DR. RICE: As I was trying to find all the principals, the

Secret Service came and said, you have to leave now for the
bunker. The Vice President is already there. There may be a
^plane headed for the White House. There are a lot of planes
that are in the air that are not responding properly. And I
stopped and I made a phone call to the President, and the
President now had left the event in Florida. He'd gone to the
airport. He said, I'm coming back. I said, Mr. President, you
may not want to do that. My Defense -- one of my Defense
people had whispered in my ear, he can't come back here. And I
said, you may not want to do that, Mr. President, because
Washington is under attack. We don't know where the next attack
is coming.

I then left the Situation Room to go to the bunker. And

when I got to the bunker, the President was talking to the Vice
President on the phone and the Vice President was "saying the
same thing, you can't come back here. I suspect the President
really, really wanted to come back, and he was telling everybody
he was going to come back, but we ^?new it would have been the
wrong 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 to
Offutt Air Force Base, which is where we were able to have the
first video contact with him. But there was no doubt that
having him land at Andrews Air Force Base would have been a very
bad thing.

Q Why? Why didn't the President come home, back to

Washington, and take charge of the government?

DR. RICE: At that moment, you have to worry about the

continuity of the United States government. It's very clear
that Washington was under attack. It's very clear that they
were going for symbols of power and for the .seats of power. And
to bring the President back and to put him in the same building
with 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 spent

a 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 so
that the President would not be endangered in a time like that.
To have him come back into the White House at that moment would
have been really irresponsible.

Q So you're told then that you have got to get out of

your office and down into the bunker. Who's there when you get
there?

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

I also came into the room and my old nuclear war training
as a Soviet specialist kicked in, and I thought I have to get
someone to get a cable out to posts around the world telling
that that the United States government is still functioning,
because all that they could see on televisions around the world
were planes going into the Pentagon, and you weren't getting any
word out of the White House. So I first asked Rich Armitage at
the State Department to make sure- that posts knew that America
was still functioning.

Q At what point during the course of these attacks did

you think, Osama bin taden?

DR. RICE: It was not immediately that I thought Osama bin

Laden. I did think just in a flash, al Qaeda, just by
conditioning, because we knew al Qaeda. But it receded rather
quickly because there was so much to do and so much to worry
about, and it wasn't the sort of thing that you — you weren't
going to try to make a case right at that moment. " It was
dealing with the consequences. But it was not long -- it was
a little bit later in the day at the NSC meeting that George
Tenet said, we think it's al Qaeda, it smells like al Qaeda, it
walks like al Qaeda, it quacks like al Qaeda, it's probably al
Qaeda.

Q Back to the bunker. Describe that. We've seen this

bunker portrayed in Hollywood movies and such and such -- what
is it like down there, what does it look like?

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 DR. RICE: Well, it's just a conference room, you know,
with other things there. And it's -- the conference room is a
place where you can talk and watch TV and all of those things.
I remember being struck by the fact that somebody had gone to
the trouble of finding food for us, at some moment during that
time. 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 thing
about that scene was that it was not panicked. Everybody sat
and did their work. There were a lot of support people around,
from military officers who are detailed over to the White House
to help, and everybody went about doing their jobs, despite the
shock that we'd just been through.-

Q As people around the country watched those events

unfold, one of the emotions that people felt_was fear. Were you
afraid at all that morning?

DR. RICE: I didn't have time to be afraid. I didn't think

about my own safety at that moment, although maybe it was in the
back of my mind, because I stopped on the way to the bunker to
call-my aunt and uncle in Birmingham and to say, I'm all right
and you should tell everybody I'm all right, because I knew that
they would see these pictures on television and the Rays and
Rices are a pretty close-knit clan, and I was worried about
them. _

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

DR. RICE: I just remember seeing the horror of it, and it

just collapses and there's all of this dust and smoke and people
running. And I -- yes, the horror of it registered. But I
didn't really have time to react to it. We were still trying to
deal with the consequences. We were still, by this time, trying
to get ready for the President to make a statement to the
nation. You just have to keep plowing through.

Q At one point that morning, the President gave an order

to the Combat Air Patrol pilots giving them permission to shoot
down U.S. commercial airliners. How did that decision come
about, and how did you take on board the gravity of that
decision?

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

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

Q But for a time _ there was a real possibility that ±he

order the President had given had resulted in the shooting down
of this U.S. commercial plane. It didn't turn out to be that
way, but how did that affect you in your conscience? Did you
pause at all? _

DR. RICE: That possibility was really horrible. I think

the reason that we kept asking -- and I know the Vice
President kept asking, too -- we were there together and we
kept saying, did an American pilot engage a civilian aircraft.
You must know if an American pilot engaged a civilian aircraft;
they would have reported back. Did they? And I think that was
the only time that the kind of desperation to know was
associated with the enormity of getting that answer, that maybe
an American pilot had brought down a civilian aircraft.

Q At 3:00 p.m. in the afternoon, from Offutt Air Force

Base, the President convenes this video conference National
Security meeting. This is really the first war Cabinet meeting.
What was the mood__ among the principals who were prepared to
respond to this attack?

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

And we sat down, and the President said, first of all, let
me tell you that whoever did this to us, we're going to get
them. George, you get ready. Don, you get ready. And then he
said, and I'll be J3ack tonight. I'm coming back tonight. And
he said it in a way that it was pretty clear that there -was no
arguing with him this time. He made up his mind that he was
going to come back.

He was very concerned -- the President was very concerned

about questions like the banking system, what did this mean, how
long was it going to be before we could start to show some
normalcy, were the victims getting everything they needed in New
York. There was a kind of consequence management part of this
that really -- we didn't focus all that much initially—on what
we were going to do in response. It was, we will respond; let's
try and get a better assessment of the situation.

It was later that night after the President's speech to the

nation that we really began to hand out assignments for the next
day, to begin to. think about response. —

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

DR. RICE: I saw somebody who had in his mind I think

decided that it was just time to get after it. He knew that
it's his favorite phrase, let's get after it. And he had
clearly in his mind that the most important thing that he could
do that night was to reassure the country, but to also make
clear that we had a hard course ahead, but we were going to win.
And he was so resolute and so clear and -- not without
emotion, 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 relatively
untested President, who in the face of this crisis and this
attack, had this demeanor. Where did he get that?

DR. RICE: It was the George W. Bush that I had come to

know over the last several years, somebody who, when things get
a little -- get difficult, gets tougher, gets more resilient,
feels that he, himself, has to make others around him
comfortable and ready -to go. I mean, he sort of takes it on
himself to bring up the morale of others around him. And there
was some of that that night, too, with the National Security
team, pulling the team together.

It wasn't at all a surprise to me that he could do it, but

anybody in that circumstance could have failed to do it and not
been blamed for being resilient and resolute. I wasn't
surprised, but I'm still pretty awed by it.

Q Although, in retrospect, people do look back at some

of his first comments and are struck by their informality , that
we'll get the folks who did this, and some see hesitancy in
that. Speaking to the nation is one of the key roles the
President has at a moment like— that. How did you go about
preparing him for that?

DR. RICE: The President's address that night was put

together really rather quickly. He had asked Karen Hughes and
me and Mike Gerson, his speechwriter , and others to work on a
draft for him to see when he came back -to the White House. And
there were a couple of policy decisions that had to be made
how global would it sound. And the President was from the very
beginning pretty clear that this shouldn't sound as if it had
just happened to us, it should acknowledge that this was a big
attack on values. He also -- we clearly decided that we were
going to have to worry about the issue of sanctuary. And that
was probably the most important policy decision that night
that in the first real statement about what we had ahead of us,
that we would say that it was the terrorists and those who
harbored them.

You could have just said, we will get the terrorists. But
by saying, those who harbor them, the doctrine, as people came
to talk about it, was now clear and it meant Afghanistan and it
meant the Taliban, and I think the fact that he said it in that
first statement sent a chilling message to a lot of countries
that 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 alarm
later in the evening when, at about 11:30 p.m. that night, after
the National Security principals had met, I was sitting in my
office 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 another
plane headed for the White House.

And so we headed off to the bunker, and that was a kind of

surreal scene because the President was in his running shorts,
and Mrs. Bush was in her bathrobe. And we got there and we
thought, what's going on here. And everybody sort of milled
around for a while. And then the President said, I'm going to
bed. And he headed off, and we all sort of headed off down the
hallway behind him. It was a very strange little scene.

I was asked to stay here that night because Service didn't

really think I ought to go home. I spent the night in the White
House; I didn't sleep very much. I got up the next morning and
got gcdng.

Q A couple final- questions. When you finally did get

some sleep, and since then, have you ever lain awake at night
and thought, did we do everything we could? Could we have seen
this coming and done more to stop it?

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

It's also the case that this is an organization that had a

base in Afghanistan that we've now been able to take down. But,
frankly, it would have been very hard to take that base down" in
the way that we did before September llth. So, of course, you
ask that question. But this administration, and I believe

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

We now know more about our vulnerabilities. We now know

how they used our openness and our generosity to attack us. And
so we're responding to that world, which is a thoroughly
transformed world from where we were on September 10th.

Q Last question: When you look back on that day and

your role right at the center of it, is there a moment or an
image, something not necessarily grand or historic, that evokes
its -- the awesomeness of that day and the significance of it
for you?

DR. RICE: The image that probably for me evokes the

awesomeness of that day is the President giving that address to
the nation. I'm a student of international history, and
American Presidents responding to crises. And the address to
the nation is, for me, always the defining moment. John F.
Kennedy's address to the nation on the Cuban missile crisis, I
will never forget. George H. W. Bush's address to -the-American
people at the time of the Gulf War. Those are defining moments
for a presidency, and defining moments for the President.

~ This one was, in many ways, unlike any one that I am old
enough to have seen because it was addressing an existential
threat to the United States. It was addressing an attack on
American territory, something that for several generations of
Americans _had been thought to be unthinkable. And so, in that^_
sense, it felt that this presidency had entered into a different
realm, 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 moment

when the President addressed the nation would mark a crack in
time for the United States and the way that we thought about
ourselves.

Q Thank you.

END 5:23 P.M. EDT

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