My 9/11. A Personal Story

My 9/11 A Personal Story

By Steve Douglass

I had slept late that morning—late for me, anyway. I’d been up much of the night before, as I often was, monitoring the airwaves.

There was a small television on the nightstand beside my bed. I stretched, reached over, and turned it on, still trying to clear the cobwebs from my brain.

The news was already on. At first I wasn’t really paying attention, but gradually I became aware they were talking about a small plane hitting one of the World Trade Center towers.

I glanced over at the screen.

One of the towers was burning, a huge black wound cut into the side of the building.

I remember thinking, "That’s a pretty big hole for a small plane."

Then, as I watched, the second airplane slammed into the other tower.

For a moment, I was confused. Was this a replay? Then it dawned on me. It was a second plane.

In that instant, I knew. This wasn’t an accident. This was terrorism.

Almost immediately, my phone rang.

I picked it up. The voice on the other end belonged to someone I never expected to hear from that morning—my friend “Mark.”

There was no small talk.

He only said:

“Turn everything on. America is under attack.”

I knew exactly what he meant. Despite the shock, we were on the same page. I fired up my monitoring room, scanners. HF radios. recorders. Everything I had capable of monitoring aviation and military communications.

It was going to be a long and terrible day, and through radio monitoring I was going to have access to information few others would.

Within minutes, my monitoring room was alive.

At first, I concentrated on the civilian aviation bands. The FAA was ordering aircraft down, clearing the skies over the United States in a way that had never happened before. Commercial flights and private aircraft were being told to land as quickly as possible.

The message was unmistakable:

The sky itself had become part of the battlefield.

For the first few hours, the frequencies were chaotic, then something un unprecedented happened. They began to go quiet.

One aircraft after another disappeared from the airways until the normally crowded civilian aviation bands became almost eerily silent.

So I changed tactics.

I moved away from the civilian frequencies and began searching the UHF military bands.

That was where I hit the gold mine.

The military airwaves were very much alive.

I began hearing fighters talking to one another, tankers being requested, aircraft being repositioned, and Combat Air Patrols—CAPs—being established over parts of the country.

One of the first things I found was a fighter CAP being redirected to protect Air Force One.

That immediately caught my attention because, at the time, one of the big questions being asked on national television was:

*Where is the President?*

The public knew President George W. Bush had been moved from Florida to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. He had made a statement there and then departed again.

For a period of time, his next destination was not publicly clear.

I knew where he was going before most people watching television did.

Not because anyone had told me.

Because I could hear the pieces coming together over the military frequencies.

I followed the fighters and the plane-to-plane chatter. I heard air traffic controllers alerting them to noncompliant aircraft—most of them civilian pilots who had not gotten the word, or medevac flights that still had to fly.

I heard Combat Air Patrols being positioned over sensitive areas, including strategic and nuclear sites, one of them near my home.

Then I began hearing traffic associated with Air Force One being routed toward Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. I also noticed the telltale encrypted wideband channels used for communications with Air Force One and other high-priority aircraft began stopping my scanner.

I couldn’t decrypt what was being transmitted, but I didn’t need to.

Their mere presence spoke volumes.

That was the beauty—and sometimes the danger—of monitoring radio communications.

Nobody had to come on the air and announce:

“The President is going to Nebraska.”

You listened. You collected little pieces.

A tanker here. A fighter being redirected there. A CAP moving east.
Call signs changing frequencies.

Eventually, the picture formed. Air Force One was headed for Offutt.

Meanwhile, my own phone was ringing, assignment editors from CNN. ABC. CBS.

I had spent years building relationships with news directors who had my number on speed dial. I had broken many national and international stories simply by monitoring the right frequencies and knowing the right people.

They wanted to know what I was hearing.

I passed along what I could determine from the radio traffic, including that the President appeared to be headed toward Offutt.

By the time Air Force One made its approach into Nebraska, the media knew where to look.

For years, I had monitored military and aviation communications because I was fascinated by what you could learn simply by listening. Most nights it meant catching an unusual military flight, tracking an exercise, or occasionally hearing something nobody was supposed to notice.

Eventually, my obsession became my profession. I became a professional news-gatherer.

On that day, during the lulls—between the phone calls and bursts of radio traffic—I would look back at the television.

That was when the enormity of what was happening really began to sink in.

All I wanted at that moment was to know that my family and friends were safe.

My granddaughter had been born only a month earlier. She had barely entered the world, and suddenly I found myself wondering what kind of world she had been born into.

I started making calls. I tried my uncle in New York.

No answer. Then I called my friend and editor Stuart Brown at Popular Science magazine.

What happened next was almost surreal.

Stuart had no idea what was going on.

“My TV gets nothing but snow,” he told me, and asked if I knew anything.

I could hardly believe what I was hearing.

I told him what had happened—that airplanes had struck the World Trade Center and that the country was under attack.

He went outside.

From where he was on Long Island, he looked toward Manhattan.

He could see smoke billowing into the sky.

Then the reason for his dead television signal became obvious.

Much of the over-the-air television broadcasting in the New York area came from the enormous antenna complex atop the World Trade Center. The building carrying his television signal was burning.

I told Stuart everything I knew.

Then I told him to be safe.

At some point, I turned my attention back to the television and watched the towers come down.

That was when I lost it.

Until then, I had been functioning almost mechanically—listening, recording, answering phones, passing along information, trying to put together the constantly changing pieces.

But watching those buildings collapse broke through all of that.

I just bawled.

There was nothing professional about it.

Nothing analytical.

Nothing detached.

I cried for the people inside those buildings.

For the firefighters and police officers running toward something everyone else was trying to escape.

For the people on the airplanes.

For their families and maybe for all of us, because somewhere in those terrible minutes, I understood that the country I had awakened in that morning no longer existed.

It took me a few minutes to pull myself together.

Then the phone rang again.

I wiped my face, took a breath, and answered it.

There was still work to do.

Years later, I finally learned why I had been unable to reach my uncle that morning.

He owned a limousine service whose garage was located in one of the Twin Towers.

That morning, by sheer chance, he had gotten out early. He was on his way to Teterboro Airport to pick up members of the Catholic Archdiocese of New York.

As he was coming back toward the city, he saw the first airplane hit the World Trade Center.

He immediately got on the limo phone and started calling every one of his employees.

Stay home.

Don’t come in.

Then he called his office to make sure nobody had decided to show up early.

No one had.

All of his limousines were lost.

His business was gone.

But every one of his employees survived.

He would later tell me that he lost quite a few friends that day, but he didn’t lose a single employee.

The business could be rebuilt. People couldn’t.

That story stayed with me because, on a day remembered for such enormous loss, there were also thousands of smaller decisions being made in real time by people who had no idea what was coming next.

My uncle made one of those decisions and it saved lives.

There was another strange element to that morning.

At the time, I was being watched—or at least I was pretty certain I was.

I believed the men keeping an eye on me were federal agents, or perhaps contractors working for a federal agency. Nobody ever walked up, flashed a badge, and confirmed it.

It happened periodically, mostly because my column in *Monitoring Times*, a radio hobbyist magazine, was called “The Fed File” and centered on intercepting government communications.

The column had developed a following, and one of my biggest contributors was “Mark,” who obviously had extraordinary access.

I never published anything anyone could reasonably consider classified or a leak, but by all accounts the column irritated people in several three-letter agencies—many of whom, ironically, were also subscribers.

By then, I was used to being shadowed, and the arrangement had become almost strangely routine.

I knew they were there. They were easy to spot.

Usually two or three men, sometimes accompanied by a woman, staying in a house across the street and only leaving when I did, shadowing me in a Suburban that stuck out like a sore thumb.

Then there was the observation through partially drawn drapes with binoculars. Subtle, they weren’t.

I hadn’t broken any laws, so I tolerated their presence, although my wife at the time didn’t like it.

I rather saw it as a feather in my cap—confirmation that my reporting was apparently hitting close enough to something to get their attention.

What made me interesting was what I knew, what I listened to and, more importantly, who I knew.

Over the years, I had developed sources connected to parts of the military and government most people never encountered. Those sources sometimes pointed me toward things that were not supposed to attract attention.

One source in particular was undoubtedly of interest to whoever was watching me. "Mark."

The same Mark who had called that morning and told me:

“Turn everything on.”

So on the morning of September 11, while I was sitting in my house listening to a nation under attack, there were men across the street whose job—whatever agency they actually worked for—apparently involved keeping an eye on me.

The absurdity of it finally struck me.

The United States was under attack, and these guys were still watching the guy with the scanners.

So I walked across the street, still wearing my pajamas.

I knocked on the door and essentially told them:

“You guys have bigger fish to fry. Turn on the television.”

For a few moments, whatever relationship existed between watcher and watched didn’t matter.

We stood there looking at the television as smoke poured from Manhattan.

The next morning, they were gone.

The Suburban was gone.

The surveillance was gone.

September 11 had rearranged the priorities of an entire country overnight.

It also marked a dividing line in my own life.

There was the world before 9/11, and the world after.

I happened to hear a lot of that transition through a pair of headphones, connected to an almost hidden world through radio circuits and antenna wires,

Postscript:

Nearly ten years later, on the late afternoon of May 1, 2011, my phone rang again.

It was Mark.

The call was brief.

“They got him.”

Then he hung up. He never said who. He didn’t have to.

I knew instantly. It was Osama bin Laden.

I knew it hours before the rest of the world would.

I sat there for a moment, thinking about what to do with that information.

There were no details. No confirmation I could point to.
Nothing I could quote publicly.

Just Mark.

So I took a gamble.

I posted a photograph of bin Laden on my Deep Black Horizon blog with one word stamped across his face:

"DEAD"

What if I was wrong?

That thought certainly crossed my mind, but I trusted Mark, and I trusted my gut.

I offered no explanation. I didn’t pretend to know the details.
Those would come later.

Hours later, President Obama addressed the nation and confirmed that U.S. forces had killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

Almost ten years after Mark had called me on September 11 and said, “Turn everything on,” he called again to tell me, in three words, that one chapter of that terrible day had finally come to an end.

Those words hit me like a sledgehammer. “They got him.” I wept again, but out of joy.

Tomorrow marks the 25th anniversary of September 11, 2001. For most people, the memories will come back through television images, photographs, and stories from that terrible day.

For me, there will always be another soundtrack—the voices in my headphones, the sudden silence of the civilian airwaves, the military traffic filling the bands, and the encrypted signals that told their own story even when I couldn’t hear the words. So tomorrow, as I have done for so many years, I’ll remember where I was, what I heard, and how quickly the world changed.

And I’ll be listening.