Ted Olson reported, according to CNN, that his wife had “called him twice on a cell phone from American Airlines Flight 77,” saying that “all passengers and flight personnel, including the pilots, were herded to the back of the plane by armed hijackers,” who had “knives and cardboard cutters.” [1]

Although Olson had originally told CNN that his wife had used a cell phone, the FBI’s September 11^th summary of its interview of him said: “[Mr. Olson] doesn’t know if the calls were made from [Barbara Olson’s] cell phone or the telephone on the plane.” [2] But during a September 14 interview on Hannity & Colmes, Olson suggested that his wife had reached him at the Department of Justice by using the “airplane phone.” [3] Ted Olson continued to go back and forth between the two alternatives. [4]

In any case, the first call from his wife, Olson told the FBI, lasted “about one minute.” [5] The second call, he told Larry King, lasted “two or three or four minutes.” [6]

The 9/11 Commission Report stated (in 2004) that the FBI and the Department of Justice believed that there had actually been four calls from Barbara Olson. [7]

The story about Barbara Olson’s report of the hijacking of AA 77 was foundational for the official account of 9/11. This foundational role is illustrated by the fact that, although it has been widely held that the hijackers had box cutters, this idea was provided only by Ted Olson’s report of his wife’s phone calls. In any case, in spite of the foundational role of the Olson story, there were three serious problems with its credibility:

1. One problem is that, although Ted Olson went back and forth on whether his wife had used an onboard phone or a cell phone, she evidently could not have used either:
   • With regard to the possibility that Barbara Olson had used a cell phone, the FBI ruled this out in 2004, saying: “All of the calls from Flight 77 were made via the onboard airphone system.” [8]
   • There is also evidence that Barbara Olson could not have made the calls attributed to her in The 9/11 Commission Report: This is the evidence, cited in the Burnett section of Point PC-4: “Cell Phone Calls from the Planes: The Second Official Account”, that the cell phone technology available in 2001 would not have allowed cell phone calls from this airliner. [9]
   • Further evidence that Barbara Olson could not have used an onboard phone to call from AA 77 is provided by a page in the Boeing 757 Aircraft Maintenance Manual (757 AMM), dated January 28, 2001. The first sentence of this page states: “The passenger telephone system was deactivated by ECO FO878.” (ECO F1463 and F1532 were later orders to remove the phones.) This page indicates, in other words, that by January 28, 2001, the passenger phone system for the AA 757 fleet had been deactivated. [10]
   • The impossibility of Olson’s having used an onboard phone is further supported by a pilot and a flight attendant:
     • After being a fighter pilot, and having attended the US Navy Fighter Weapons School, Captain Ralph Kolstad served as an airline pilot for 27 years, during 13 of which he flew Boeing 757s and 767s for American Airlines. He wrote: “[T]he ‘air phones,’ as they were called, were … deactivated in early or mid 2001. They had been deactivated for quite some time prior to Sep 2001.” [11]
     • Flight attendant Ginger Gainer, after reporting that the Boeing 757s prepared for international flights had stickers on the seatback phones “indicating that they were inoperative,” added: “I asked several current and former Flight Attendants for American … who flew domestic … and they all said that they recalled the phones as having been disabled at the time, or gone.” [12]
   • There is one more reason to be skeptical about the claim that Barbara and Ted Olson talked that morning by telephone: Neither the telephone company records, nor the Department of Justice phone call records, nor Barbara Olson’s cell phone call records have ever been made public, in spite of the fact that there has been much discussion of the authenticity of the reported phone calls from her. [13]
2. A second more serious problem is that the Olson story was contradicted in the FBI’s 2006 report to the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui. In its report about phone calls from AA 77, the FBI stated that there was one call from Barbara Olson (not two), and that this call was “unconnected,” so that it lasted “0 seconds.” [14] This report thereby contradicted Ted Olson’s report that his wife had made two calls to him, one that lasted “about one minute” and another that lasted “two or three or four minutes.” [15]
3. A third problem is that Barbara Olson’s story as told by her husband is simply implausible. According to this story, 60 passengers – including pilot Charles “Chic” Burlingame, a former Navy pilot who was a weightlifter and a boxer [16] – were held off in the back of the plane by three or four hijackers (one or two would have been in the pilot’s cabin). And yet these alleged hijackers were, as a 9/11 Commission staff document mentioned, “not physically imposing, as the majority of them were between 5’5″ and 5’7″ in height and slender in build.” [17] If these small men were armed only with knives and box cutters, the pilots and the male passengers could have easily overpowered them.

1. Barbara Olson’s account of what occurred on AA 77, as told by her husband, is implausible.
2. The FBI’s report on phone calls from AA 77 indicates that she did not reach her husband from that flight.
3. Various accounts indicate that she could not have called her husband from AA 77. [18]