ick Rescorla
began the day as he usually did. He got up at 4:30 A.M., kissed his wife
goodbye, and took the 6:10 train to Manhattan. A combat veteran who fought
in Vietnam's bloody Ia Drang Valley, Rescorla was at his desk in a corner
office of the World Trade Center by 7:30. It was September 11, 2001, and
outside the day was clear and bright. Rescorla was on the forty-fourth
floor of the South Tower when the first hijacked airliner slammed into
its nearby twin. Rescorla sprang into action. Grabbing a bullhorn, he
went to work in the same calm fashion that he showed under intense combat
fire in Vietnam.
Born Cyril Richard
Rescorla in Hayle, Cornwall, England, Rick was vice president for security
at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, one of Wall Street's largest brokerage
houses. The company had 3,700 employees in the World Trade Center —
2,700 employees in the south tower on floors forty-four through seventy-four
and 1,000 employees in Building Five across the plaza. There was no hesitation.
He ordered everyone to evacuate the building immediately. A short time
after the aircraft hit, an official of the Port Authority of New York
and New Jersey, which owned the Trade Center towers, called. Everyone
in the building should stay put because there was no danger, the Port
Authority man said. Rescorla shot back: "Piss off, you son of a bitch.
Everything above where that plane hit is going to collapse, and it's going
to take the whole building with it. I'm getting my people the f*** out
of here." He recounted the exchange in a telephone call to his longtime
friend Dan Hill, then ran off and began helping the evacuation.
As a security professional,
it was Rescorla's job to think like a terrorist. In 1990, he saw that
the World Trade Center was a likely target for a terrorist attack because
it was a symbol of American economic power. He did a security survey of
the building and concluded, with Hill's help, that driving a truck bomb
into the basement near a key supporting column would bring down the entire
complex. On February 26, 1993, that exact scenario almost played out.
Islamic terrorists set off a homemade chemical bomb packed inside a rental
truck that was parked in the basement, in an attempt to make the towers
collapse.
Rescorla knew the
Islamic terrorists who failed the first time would try again. He thought
the terrorists' next attempt would be to fly a plane, possibly filled
with chemical or biological weapons, into the towers. He had advised Morgan
Stanley executives that the company should move from the Twin Towers to
a safer location. But the company's lease went until 2006. The next best
thing, Rescorla thought, was to practice evacuation drills. He pressed
the company to conduct regular drills even though some employees grumbled
and joked about them. Every few months, all 2,700 employees in the South
Tower would be marched, with Rescorla at the bullhorn, in an arduous trek
down the long winding stairwell of one of the world's highest skyscrapers
and out of the building, just for practice. Another 1,000 employees would
be evacuated from the Morgan Stanley offices nearby.
On September 11,
the evacuation was real. A fireball erupted in the nearby tower, and all
of Morgan Stanley's employees were making their way down and out of the
other tower. By the time the second hijacked airliner hit the south tower
at 9:07 a.m., most of the company's employees were out. But Rescorla's
work was not finished. Three employees were missing. Rescorla and two
assistants went back to look for them. Rescorla was last seen on the tenth
floor of the burning tower. He died when the building collapsed a short
time later. But he had saved thousands of lives. Out of 3,700 employees,
Morgan Stanley lost only six, including Rescorla. R. James Woolsey, former
director of Central Intelligence, sees Rescorla as the kind of person
urgently needed by U.S. intelligence. An iconoclast and strategic thinker
who wasn't afraid to buck the system, Rescorla "is an example of
somebody who should have probably been at the top of the intelligence
community, but wasn't," Woolsey told me. "He's a perfect example
of the kind of guy that the Germans say has fingerspitzengefühl —
fingertip feel" or intuition, he said. "God, it would have been
wonderful if he had been the head of the DO's [the CIA's Directorate of
Operations] counterterrorist operations, but at least he saved 3,700 people."
Aside from his military
experience, Rescorla, sixty-two, had worked for British intelligence,
conducting special operations in some dangerous places. And while his
specialty was corporate security, intelligence and security are symbiotic.
On September 11, they were hopelessly divided.
—
Bill Gertz has been defense and national-security reporter for the Washington
Times since 1985.
ick Rescorla
began the day as he usually did. He got up at 4:30 A.M., kissed his wife
goodbye, and took the 6:10 train to Manhattan. A combat veteran who fought
in Vietnam's bloody Ia Drang Valley, Rescorla was at his desk in a corner
office of the World Trade Center by 7:30. It was September 11, 2001, and
outside the day was clear and bright. Rescorla was on the forty-fourth
floor of the South Tower when the first hijacked airliner slammed into
its nearby twin. Rescorla sprang into action. Grabbing a bullhorn, he
went to work in the same calm fashion that he showed under intense combat
fire in Vietnam.
