Richard Lawes

Twenty-five years ago today, the first warning anybody on the ground received did not come from the FAA, or NORAD, or the FBI. It came from a 45-year-old flight attendant crouched in the back galley of the plane that was already hijacked. American Airlines Flight 11 left Logan at 7:59 a.m. It was taken somewhere over central Massachusetts around 8:14. At 8:19, Betty Ong got on an airphone with a calling card and reached American Airlines operations in Cary, North Carolina. The man who picked up thought at first it was a prank. She stayed on that line for 23 minutes. She stayed on it until the aircraft hit the North Tower. Listen to what she is actually doing in those 23 minutes. She is not screaming. She reports that the cockpit will not answer. She reports that two flight attendants have been stabbed, and names them, Karen Martin and Barbara Arestegui. She reports a passenger stabbed in business class. She reports that someone has sprayed mace in the forward cabin and that they cannot breathe back there. She says, in a voice people who have heard the tape describe as almost conversational, that she thinks they are being hijacked. Then she starts giving seat numbers. At the same time, in another galley on the same airplane, a 35-year-old flight attendant named Amy Sweeney was on a line to Michael Woodward, the flight service manager at Logan and a friend of hers for ten years. She had two small children at home in Acton, Massachusetts. Sweeney gave him three seats. 9D. 9G. 10B. Woodward wrote them down. Somebody pulled the manifest and looked up those seat assignments while the plane was still in the air. 9D was Mohamed Atta. 9G was Abdulaziz al-Omari. 10B was Satam al-Suqami. Names, addresses, phone numbers, credit cards. The men who planned the entire operation to be anonymous were identified by name before the second plane had even hit, because a flight attendant on a hijacked aircraft did the most boring, most disciplined thing imaginable and read out seat assignments. Woodward asked Sweeney to look out the window and tell him what she could see. She said she saw water. She said she saw buildings. She said they were flying very low, way too low. Then she said, "Oh my God." The line went dead at 8:46. Two women, on the first aircraft, with no training for any of this and no reason left to believe they were going to live. They spent the last twenty minutes of their lives calmly feeding intelligence to people on the ground. Everything the country learned that morning, it learned from them first.