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already there. As we touched down, we watched ourselves landing live on the plane’s TV screens tuned to an Omaha station. Offutt Air Force Base is headquarters of the Strategic Command, and its underground bunker is bombproof. More important, it is equipped with live secure video conferencing communications whereby the president could at last see and hear directly from the White House PEOC and the military. I called in again on my Motorola clamshell flip phone to ABC’s anchor Peter Jennings in New York. Live on the air I surprised even myself when describing the president being led not toward but away from the big buildings. He ducked into a tiny cinderblock shack followed by many others. “He’s going down the rabbit hole.” It was the backstairs fire escape and the fastest way down to the bunker. Our small press pool remained outside.
white house history quarterly
This was finally the moment President Bush could hear and see those back in Washington wrestling with the chaos. CIA Director George Tenet answered the burning question: his analysts had searched the passenger manifests of the hijacked airliners. Three of the passengers on the first plane “had known, and definite, links to Al-Qaida.” Indeed, just as CIA briefer Mike Morell feared, blame could be placed at the doorstep of Osama bin Laden. By now it now appeared that the skies over America had been cleared and the attacks were over. The president recalls he declared during the hour-long video conference: “‘I’m coming home.’ And they said, ‘We recommend you not do so.’ And I said, ‘Fine, I’m coming.’” As we scrambled back on board Air Force One for the last leg of the journey, I phoned in the pool report news of his return, on the record. The landing location was off the record.
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