NY B9 Farmer Misc- WH 2 of 3 Fdr- 9-4-02 Charlie Gibson-ABC Interview of Cheney 467

8/14/2019 NY B9 Farmer Misc- WH 2 of 3 Fdr- 9-4-02 Charlie Gibson-ABC Interview of Cheney 467

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THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary

Internal Transcript September 4, 2002

INTERVIEW OF THE VICE PRESIDENTBY CHARLIE GIBSON, ABC

Mrs. Cheney's OfficeDwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building

2:47 P.M. EDT

Q Mr. Vice President, when were you first aware that daythat something was up?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I was in my office, working with myspeech writer, when the Secretary called in and said a plane hadhit the World Trade Center. And we turned on the television setand watched then a few minutes later when the second plane hit.

Q But there was no ambiguity when you got the call, itwas a plane that went into the first tower?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: The first one, yes. But we didn't knowwhy. I mean, we were debating -- the weather is perfectly clear,

how do you explain an accident like this? Didn't really thinkterrorism until the second plane hit, and then we knew it was aterrorist attack. .. . ..

Q And what went through your mind at that moment?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, that you know, that we had toget organized. That first, to start to think about continuity ofgovernment. At that point, we didn't know about the attack onWashington that was to come about 30 minutes later. But thePresident is down in Florida, and you've got a counterterrorismtask force you've got to get together. We had no idea how big anattack it was or whether or not there were more planes at thatpoint. It was just an immediate matter of -- Condi Rice camedown to my office, Scooter Libby, who is my chief of staff,others assembled in my office.

Q But I'm amazed you thought bureaucratically . I mean,your first reaction has got to be -- I mean, mine was, thatconfirms what happened in that first building; now we know.

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TH E VICE PRESIDENT: Well , then we knew it was an attack atthat point. But, I mean, it wasn't -- you know, that's what youdo, it's what you're -- that's the way the office works andshould work, to some extent. I mean, you've got to begin todeal. Here's a problem, here's a crisis, you've got to work yourway through it, you've got to deal with it. You can't allowemotion or surprise to throw you off stride. You've got to go tO

work. You've got a problem to solve. You've got to figure ou twhat happened. You've got to figure out who did it. And we'vegot to talk to the President.

Q But this is not just one more problem,this must have struck you right away.

The enormity of

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, it grew during the day, too. Imean, you know, as you watched, as we found out the Pentagon.hadbeen hit. And then we watched and saw the towers collapse, thenorth and south tower come down. That got to be a very emotionalkind of moment. I mean, it built in terms of the gravity of theevents.

Q Which office were you in?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I was in my West Wing office.

Q And did they come and get you out?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I saw the second plane go in. Italked to the President on the telephone before he made hisstatement from Florida, shortly after his made his statement --then my agent -- one of my agents all of a sudden was standingbeside me and he grabbed me and said, "Sir, we have to leavenow." And it wasn't a debatable point, obviously. Put his handon the back of my belt, grabbed me by a shoulder and sort ofpropelled me down the hallway. _

And what I found out later was they had received a call fromthe air traffic controllers at Dulles that a plane was headed forthe White House. And it was at that moment that they evacuatedme to the basement.

Q That was the flight that went into the Pentagon?

TH E VICE PRESIDENT: Went into the Pentagon. At the time itwas headed for the White House and, of course, it didn't hit.

But they got me down into the -- not all the way to thePresidential Emergency Operations Center, but there's a tunneldown there where we stopped, it's got glass doors on each end.There is a secure phone there, as well as a television set. Andwhen I got there, I got on the telephone again and talked to thePresident for the second time.

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And at that point, urged him not to return to Washington,because it was clear then that an attack included Washington, aswell.

Q So it was on the basis of that third plane, the onethat eventually hit the Pentagon, that you said at that point tothe President, you can't come back here?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Right; we don't know what's happening.And the plane -- as I say, initially headed for the White House,but then we found out later it had hit the Pentagon. What it haddone is a complete 360, circled around and came back in and hitthe Pentagon.

But at the time it wasn't clear -- we knew the Pentagon hadbeen hit, it wasn't clear what had hit the Pentagon. There wasstill confusion in the reporting. I had the television set onthere so that they knew the Pentagon had been hit. Initially, asI recall, the reports were maybe it was a helicopter because itover next to the helo pad on the west side of the building.

Q When the agent put his hand on your shoulder andanother one in your belt and was propelling you along, did youthink -- what was going through your head? It's not often thatsomebody is pushing THE VICE PRESIDENT of the United States alongat that pace.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, but these guys are professionalsand they train for this sort of thing and I assumed there was agood reason for it. I didn't find out really until we gotdownstairs that there was a plane en route to the White House.

Q When you got to the PEOC, what was the -- this wasunprecedented. There has never been anything like this before.What was the mood in that room?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Serious, professional. People with alot of work to do, trying to find out what exactly had happened.Norm Mineta was there, he arrived about the same time I did.And, of course, Norm, the Secretary of Transportation, wasbeginning to work the problem of getting the aircraft down out ofthe sky. So he was in touch with the FAA.

And in those early hours we had initially an estimate of sixaircraft that had been hijacked, six that we couldn't account

for; three that we knew that had hit. And the fourth one, ofcourse, was the one that went in, in Pennsylvania, but thatdidn't happen until later.

And then we had a report of one that had gone down on theOhio-Kentucky border, but it turned out that was the flight thatwas the flight that hit the Pentagon. It had dropped off theradar screen and turned around and come back towards Washington.

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But, initially, it had been reported as down in Kentucky andOhio.

Q Was there any discussion at the time of getting theplanes ou t o f . th e air?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: You mean in terms of taking down the

commercial airliners? That activity had already started. Imean, the FAA had already begun that process and Norm was there,in touch with the FAA, working with me. I had a yellow legal padwith a list of the flights on it that we thought we couldn'taccount for. And as I say, there were six flights.

Q You had some time on your hands. You're sitting there,I gather, on a piece of paper, making the list of the tailnumbers?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I had tail numbers, yes.

Q Of the flights that you didn't know where they were?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: That we couldn't account for. Or hadsome reason to believe they might have been hijacked. Later on,during the course of the day, there were at least another five,as I recall, international flights that were reported at one timeor another as potentially hijacked victims, headed this way. Oneflight coming in from Korea that we scrambled jets for, overAlaska. And flights coming in from the Atlantic and so forth,that for one reason or another we had reporting that these hadbeen taken over by hijackers. And, of course, we didn't know forsure how many there were until later in the day, after we goteverything down and everything had been resolved.

Q And as you account for a plane, were you literallysitting there, crossing i t off? _ _ _ _ _

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, there was confusion over it,because obviously there were only four, not six. Confusion overtail numbers. Reports -- first reports are always wrong. Whenyou get into a situation like that -- if you've been through onebefore, you know that there's a lot of bad information coming in,as well as good information. We had a report of a car bomb atthe State Department. Another report that a bomb had gone off atthe Washington Monument. Another report of a threat against AirForce One. So there was a steady flow of information, some of

which is valid, some of which isn't. And you have to deal with asituation as best you can.

Q We now know, of course, there were four planes. Butthere was, as you say, a lot of talk or thought that it could bea lot bigger than that, at the time. Didn't the enormity of thisreally astound you?

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Obviously, I thought it was a good decision, too. It was more amatter that -- it didn't make any sense to put up a combat airpatrol over the city, but then not give them instructions ordirection as to how to proceed.

My own background in the Defense Department, you always haverules of engagement any time you deploy forces. You can send oneguy to Ecuador, he's got rules of engagement. I mean, you always-- that's just part of the drill. And so it wasn't strange orunusual by any means to do that, but it was clear that -- youknow, the significance of saying to a pil ot, an Air Force pilot,Air National Guard, that you are authorized to shoot down thatplane full of Americans. It's an order that had never been givenbefore. The President made that decision.

Q I was going to say, do you know of any instance everwhen a military pilot or a military force was given the order toperhaps have to kill a large number of American civilians?

THE VICE PRESIDENT:I can't think of any right offhand.It's a historic first, as far as I know.

Q Never happened before?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I can't say that it never happenedbefore, but I -- not that I know of. I suppose you'd have to goback to the Civil War to find an equivalent period of time, awhole different set of circumstances.

Q So who said to Rumsfeld, the order has to go out tothose pilots to take down a plane?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, the request had come in, I don'tknow, perhaps from the commander of the unit. I just know thePresident talked to me about it. - I know, he subsequently alsotalked to Rumsfeld about it. And he had another conversationabout it, I believe, once he got to Offutt, with the head of theNorth American Air Defense Command.

Q At the time that decision was made, did you know theUnited 93 was headed for Washington?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: There were reports of incoming aircraftheaded for Washington. There was a report of one coming in, as Irecall, some 80 miles out, was the way it was phrased. Icouldn't give you the exact sequencing and timing and whichreport came in when. Eventually, of course, we never fired onany aircraft.

Q But you knew at the time that order went out that therewas a plane that was a threat?

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THE VICE PRESIDENT: But I can't in my own mind, Charlie, Ican't hook up and say, we've got a plane coming in, we needauthorization to act against that aircraft. I mean, because itwas a flurry of activity. I'd had the conversation with thePresident. We had reports during the course of the morning ofaircraft coming in, and I do remember one coming in, supposedly,about 80 miles out over Pennsylvania. But we had others reported

coming in, as well, and they would land -- it would be resolvedone way or the other. And we never got a report back thatanybody had fired on any aircraft. So I never knew until later,really, what had happened to the plane in Pennsylvania.

Q That's a very sobering decision --

THE VICE PRESIDENT: It i s .

Q that has to be made, to say, you have authorizationto shoot down a civilian airliner.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: That's right.

Q When it was made, and when the word went out that thatcould happen, was there a moment of sobriety in the room? Wasthere a moment of pause? Was the momentousness of that noted inany way?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: The whole morning was a moment ofsobriety. I mean, this was serious business from the outset.And I remember the conversation with the President and thecommunication with the individual who was talking with me,seeking authorization, who was part of the PEOC staff.

Q Do you remember your own thoughts, as to whatthinking?

you were

TH E VICE PRESIDENT: Yes, that this was a very difficult,difficult proposition, but it had to be done. Once that airlinerwas hijacked, taken over by terrorists -- we'd seen what hadhappened to the World Trade Center -- it became a weapon aimed atthe United States. And it was extraordinarily unfortunate thatthere were American civilians on board.

But the way I thought about it, and I think the way thePresident thought about it -- at least this is the way itoccurred to me was, if we had been able to intercept the planes

before they hit the World Trade Center, would we? And the answerwas, absolutely, yes, given the scale of the threat and thedamage and the destruction and the lives lost. So in any sort of-- it sounds cold to say it, but in any sort of analysis, therelative cost versus what's saved, it's a clear-cut decision.

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Q There were two F-16s out of Selfridge Air NationalGuard Base near Detroit, scrambled to find United Flight 93. Didyou know they had no weapons?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: No. I just heard that the other day.I'd never heard that before.

Q Was there any discussion of the fact that maybe theywould have to ram that airplane to bring it down?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: If there was, I wasn't a party to it.

Q Did you have any thoughts at the time as to what thetarget of that airplane might be?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Washington. I thought probably WhiteHouse or Capitol. Those were the two targets that stood out inmy mind. The Pentagon had already been hit. But -- and we foundout later, and I'm trying to be clear here in terms of what Iknew then and what I learned later -- we learned later from

interviewing people who were detained, al Qaeda membersreporting, from some of them that said the fourth plane wasintended for the White House.

Q It's fairly a sobering thought.

Pfc-~ :v "x THE VICE PRESIDENT: It is, indeed. And it was -- you know,I you hark back to what those men and women did on that aircraft to

- - challenge the terrorists.

Q When you heard the plane was down, without a shot beingfired at it, do you remember what you said?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Something about an act of heroism, thatwe'd just witnessed an act of heroism. . . . .

Q You thought at the time probably --

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes. Thought somebody --

Q -- those passengers had done something --

THE VICE PRESIDENT: -- somebody had taken it down, yes.

Q Was there any talk in the PEOC about the fact that they

may be trying to decapitate the United States government?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Certainly that was a thought that hadoccurred to me, and I assume others as well, too. By the timeyou've had the World Trade Center hit, you've had the threatagainst Air Force One, you've had the Pentagon hit, you've got

^ another aircraft that was headed for Washington that never' j arrived, you're very much thinking in terms of the continuity of

V. J

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the government. And that's in part why, number one, I urged thePresident not.to return until we could find out what was goingon. It was important that we not bunch up in Washington.

Secondly, we arranged for the evacuation of thecongressional leadership, especially Denny Hastert, the Speaker,who was in the line of succession for the Presidency after me.

Third, there were questions of Cabinet members, and we got someCabinet members relocated to secure facilities outsideWashington, also people who were in the line of succession, tomake sure that whatever was going on -- and we didn't know atthat stage what the scale of the attack was -- whatever was goingon, that the government of the United States would survive. Andpart of that is just training that some of us have been involvedin over the years. It goes back to the Cold War.

Q Did the thought occur to you, they're trying to killme?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I didn't think of it in personal terms.You think of it in --

Q You're THE VICE PRESIDENT of the United States.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I know, but you don't think of it inpersonal terms, Charlie, you really don't. You've got a job todo. And you think about it in terms of the institutions, theConstitution, responsibilities, the government. I don't knowthat I talked to anybody, any of our senior people that day whothought about it in purely personal terms.

Q It was late in the afternoon by the time the President

got to Offutt Air Force Base and you were able to set up ateleconference among everybody. But in retrospect, did thecommunications work, or did it take a long time -- too long -- toget everybody "that was necessary to consult with hooked uptogether?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, I think -- I mean, you can alwaysgo back and find problems. Any time you go through one of theseevents, you learn lessons from it. We had a problem in the PEOCbecause we had multiple television screens, including the closedcircuit system to Omaha, for example, but we could only get onesound system. If you had a TV station turned in, if you werelistening to ABC, you couldn't get anything else. Those kinds of

problems get resolved.

But, in fact, with respect to the chain of command, withrespect to the President's ability to control events, I think wemaintained the integrity of that system from the very beginning.From the moment he was informed in Florida of what had happened,his travel to Air Force One, while he was on Air Force One, he

-} and I were in touch several times during the day. He spent a lotI

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of time talking to Rumsfeld and others, and so the chain ofcommand was there. It was established from the President to theSecretary of Defense, is the way it goes, and then down towhatever combatant commander might be involved. And that alwaysworked.

Your ability to get all of your other senior advisors

together, that takes a little longer. Colin Powell was in LatinAmerica, as I recall. Colin was on his way back. John Ashcroftflew back in during the course of the event. So you haddifferent people different places and locations, but moderncommunications -- the President was always in command of _theassets he needed to be in command of in order to do his job asPresident.

Q Remember the first time you heard the words "bin Laden"that day?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: My recollection is that it came up thatevening .

Q Not until then?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: It may have come up sooner than that,but what I recall is -- we had an NSC meeting, in effect, afterthe President went on nationwide television when he returned tothe White House. And my recollection is that al Qaeda, Osama binLaden, the possibility that this was an attack from them wasdiscussed that evening.

Q There wasn't any discussion prior to then of who wasdoing this to us?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, there might have been questionsasked. I don't recall his name or the name of the organizationcoming up before that. I could be wrong, the ; re may well havebeen other people talking about it and I just wasn't party to theconversation .

Q Were you fully confident by the time the President cameback to Washington that it was safe for him to come back?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I recommended that he come back when hedid. And once he was in Omaha, by then we're late in theafternoon, we've got virtually all of the aircraft down, we're

pretty well confident we know the extent of the threat and weknow we didn't have six domestic flights, we had four. We knowthat foreign flights coming in, all those had been resolved.

Q Was there anywhere in your mind still about anotherkind of attack at that point?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Not really.

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Q So you felt there was an all-cle ar by then?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well , I couldn't say all clear. Imean, the Secret Service didn't want him to come back. But Ifel t at that point -- there are tradeoffs involved here. Andfirst of all, he really wanted to come back. I don't know that

you could have kept him away. He wanted to come back f irst thingthat morning.

I gave him the best advice I could, and then he had to makethe decision, as he did. But by the time he got to Offutt inOmaha, and we had meetings, and he asked me then what I thought,and I said I think it's okay to come on back.

Q When you first saw the President that day, when he-ar ived back -- and he came to the PEOC at that point?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes.

Q Can you describe what he was like? What his mood waslike, what his countenance was like?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well , for all of us it was somber. Ithad been a very emotional day.

Q Was he angry?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Dete rmined, I would say, would be theway I'd describe it. He had --

Q Were you angry?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Oh, yes . I think we were -- I canremember lifting off that night, after his. speech -and after ourNSC meet ings. My wife and I went out on the South Lawn, we goton one of the white-tops, helicopter, and l if ted off to a securelocation. And I remember as we flew out over the city, you couldlook down and see the Pentagon, and the smoke rising from theruins in the Pentagon. And it was a subject that clearlygenerated anger -- that you wanted to find out who had done it ,and you wanted to make certain it never happened again.

But the President was very determined, very decisive, verycommitted that this was going to be the number one priority of

his Presidency, was to make certain that we did in fact wrap-upwhoever had done this to us.

Q When he came back, and the discussions of the speechensued, was there any question, any uncertainty, about whether wewere at war, should be ?

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THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, he used the word during thecourse of the day, that we were at war. My recollection is thatwe left it out of the speech that night. He used it again thenext day, and it became fairly standard after that. I think --I'm speculating, but my recollection is he was concerned aboutthat his speech that night needed in part to be reassuring to theAmerican people -- you know, the government is up, it's running,

it's functioning. We've suffered a grievous blow here, but we'llrecover from it and we'll get whoever did this to us.

And it was that kind of , I think, sort of calm reassurance,but determination, that he wanted to convey. And my recollectionis we didn't use "war" in that speech, but I have to go back andcheck.

Q You've served a lot of Presidents.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I have.

Q You've been in a lot of security briefings. Have you

ever thought, in all the time in Washington, about thepossibility of a commercial plane being used as a weapon?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: No. I mean, we think about it all thetime now. But at the time - - a t the time that it happened, no, Ihadn't.

Q Had you ever heard anybody suggest it --

THE VICE PRESIDENT: No.

Q -- as a possibility?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I guess the only place I'd seen it wasin a Tom Clancy novel. Tom wrote a piece .-- I know Tom Clancy,and he wrote a book years ago around the theme of a 747 crashinginto the Capitol building at the State of the Union address. Andthat's the only time. It had never come up , never sort ofregistered in my mind. And that was fiction.

Q And did you think it as wild, speculative fiction?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: At the time, sure. I don't now. Butit' also one of the reasons why we always have somebody in theline of succession not in the Capitol building on that night, in

case somebody should try to decapitate the federal government.

Q When during the day did you have time to think aboutfamily?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I had Lynne was with me, mywife. And --

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Q Did you call the girls?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I didn't talk to them, but she checkedon them through the Secret Service. And she'd been -- I thinkshe'd been in touch with them by telephone. I didn't talk tothem directly until that night, and they had been moved -- onedaughter and granddaughters had been moved to the same location

we went to. And our other daughter was out of town, in Colorado.

Q Did she report back, Mrs. Cheney, report back to youduring the day --

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Reported back --

Q -- about how the girls were?

THE VIC E PRESIDENT: -- and said everybody's fine.

Q And what were they asking about dad?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: You'd have to ask her.

Q She didn't tell you?

THE VI CE PRESIDENT: No.

Q Did that not worry you? Their worry about you?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I'm I mean, it's you know,you obviously -- anybody is concerned about their family underthose kinds of circumstances. But I knew Lynne could take careof it. And my job was such that I didn't -- I didn't have a lotof time to spend on personal matters.

You know, you've got a job to do. ..You're THE VICE PRESIDENTof the United States. I happened to be here when the attack tookplace; the President happened to be in Florida. But, you know,you've got things you've got to do.

Partly it's a matter of working with everybody else. It'seasy -- if the person in the center of the room, the guy on thetelephone, sounds frenetic or panicky, that that immediatelyspreads. And so you don't want that to happen. And it'simportant to be calm, objective, to get the best out of otherpeople and to not let emotion detract from what you have to do.

Q Did you talk yourself through that during the day?"I 've got to be calm, I've got to be reassuring, or others

will"

THE VICE PRESIDENT: It's just automatic. No, it's justautomatic. It was for me, anyway. But you know, part of that

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