ROBERT HAGER: Secretary Mineta, thank you very much for being with us.

NORMAN MINETA, SECRETARY OF TRANSPORTATION: Not at all.

HAGER: What, what would your day have been like -- what were you planning on as you came into work that day?

MINETA: I had a breakfast meeting with the Deputy Prime Minister of Belgium who also is the minister of Transport. She, Mrs. Durante, Jane Garvey, the head of FAA, and I were going to have breakfast.

And so we were in the midst of having breakfast and my chief of staff came into the breakfast and said, "Mr. Secretary, may I see you?"

So I excused myself, went into my office, and at the other end of the office is a TV set and as I walked in, obviously it's the World Trade Center, black smoke billowing out of there, and I said, "What the heck is that?"

He said, "Well, we don't know, we've heard explosion, we've heard GA -- general aviation -- aircraft go into it. So we don't know."

I said, "Well, keep me posted," and I went back into the conference room, and then told Mrs. Durante about what I saw and knew so far about what was happening in New York.

Then about five minutes later, John Flaherty, my chief of staff, came back in and said, "Mr. Secretary, may I see you?"

So I came back into the office and he said it's been confirmed, it was a commercial airliner that went into the World Trade Center, and so as I then started getting closer to my TV set and I was watching it, and all of a sudden from the right side of the set I see something gray, and then it sort a disappears, and then from the right side of the screen I see this white billowing, yellow-orange cloud, and I go, "Holy cow!"

I turned around, ran into the conference room, and I said, "Mrs. Durante, I'm going to have to excuse myself cause I don't know what's going on in New York City. Jane, you've got to get back to FAA."

And so by the time I came back into my office, I had a call from the White House saying, "Get, get over here right away." So I grabbed a, a few papers and a manual, and ran down to the car, red light and sirens, went over to the White House.

HAGER: So you already knew commercial airliner fairly early on then. Initially, initially you were wondering, "Is it general aviation?"

MINETA: That's right.

HAGER: Which would be the first reaction.

MINETA: That's right. And I was thinking about the, the B-25 that went into the Empire State Building during World War II.

And so anyway, we drove into the White House on West Executive Drive. People were coming out of the White House, pouring out of the Executive Office Building, running over towards Lafayette Park, and I said to my driver and security person, I said, "Hey, is there something wrong with this picture, cause here we are driving in and everybody else is running out."

So I ran into the White House and someone said you have to be briefed by Dick Clarke of the National Security Council.

So I went into the Situation Room and he briefly told me what was going on, and then he said you've got to be down in the PEOC with the Vice President. I said I don't know where the PEOC is, the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, and there was a Secret Service agent standing there, and he says, "I'll take you over there right away."

So we went running down and went into the PEOC which is the bunker, as you know, under the White House.

I started to establish a direct line to the FAA to find out what was going on, and the Vice President and I were across from each other on the conference room table in the PEOC, and about this time someone came in and said this was -- when I finally got in there, it was probably about 9:27, is what I recall.

And a little later on, someone said, "Mr. Vice President, there's a plane 50-miles out." So I was talking to Monte Belger, the Deputy Director of the FAA, and I said, "Monte, what do you have 50-miles out?"

He said, "Well, we have a target, bogey, on the radar, but the transponder's been turned off, so we have no identification of this aircraft. We don't know who it is. We don't know what altitude it's at, speed or anything else. All we're doing is watching with the sweep of the radar, the dot moving from position to position."

So then someone came in, the same person came in and said, "Mr. Vice President, it -- the plane's 30-miles out." So I said, "Monte, can you see it, and where is it in relationship to the ground?"

He said, "Well, that's difficult to really determine. I would guess it's somewhere between Great Falls and National Airport, coming what they call the DRA, the down river approach."

And so then the person came in and said, "Mr. Vice President, the plane's ten-miles out," and so I said, "Monte, where is it?" and he said, "Well, I'm not really sure but I'd be guessing somewhere maybe between the USA Today building and, and National Airport."

And then pretty soon he said, "Oh-oh, we just lost the target." And so a few moments later, someone came in and said, "Mr. Vice President, there's been an explosion at the Pentagon."

So I said, "Monte, is there something -- can you identify it as being at the Pentagon?" He said, "No, we can't really pinpoint it like that."

Then about that time someone broke into our phone conversation and said, "Mr. Secretary, we've had a call from an Arlington County police officer saying that he saw an American Airlines airplane go into the Pentagon."

At that point I said, "Monte, bring all the airplanes down," and we had a slight conversation about that, and then the professionalism of the air traffic controllers and the skill of the pilots and the flight deck, and the flight attendants in the flight cabins, we're able to bring down over 4600 airplanes in about two hours, safely and without incident.

And it was one of these, where every so often Monte would call me and say, "3212 airplanes still in the air." "2112." "1174." And he just kept on reporting back to me as to the number of airplanes left. And as I recall, about 12:20, somewhere around in there, I finally said to him, -- to the Vice President -- I said, "Mr. Vice President, all the airplanes are down" and to me it was just miraculous that the great working team of the airplanes and the air traffic controllers were able to bring everything down safely.

HAGER: Let me take you back over some of that. Now, when you're in your office and you're first seeing it on the TV, I think you said your initial reaction is maybe it's a private plane of some kind. But I think in the second case, you knew right away that was a commercial airliner.

MINETA: I saw a gray airplane, and first I thought maybe -- and I didn't think of it in terms of a commercial airliner and I thought maybe it might be the size of a King Air or a G5, or something of that nature. And then I really should have, if I thought about it, gray -- United Airlines, and -- but it just happened so quickly, that it just, other than seeing a gray object come in, I really couldn't assess what kind of an airplane it might have been.

HAGER: I'm wondering when the first explosion occurred, you could think, you know, somebody had a heart attack -- a pilot, or somebody lost, something like that, equipment failure. But when the second tower is hit, I'm wondering what was flashing through your mind, because then we begin to get sinister implications.

MINETA: Well, the whole issue was what was the nature of what's going on, not only was it a commercial airline, but what's going on with two airplanes going into the World Trade Center, into the twin towers?

Well, when that third one went into the Pentagon, it's like anything else. If you see one of something it's an accident. When you see two of the same thing, it's a pattern or a trend. But when you three -- see three of the same thing occurring, then you know it's a program or a plan.

And so that's when it was decided that all the airplanes had to be brought down.

HAGER: Had the implication of the idea of terrorist attack -- was that one of the things you might have thought of after the second tower?

MINETA: Not at all. I mean, to have the thought of a commercial airliner being used as a missile or the weapon itself, at that point was the farthest thing in my mind.

HAGER: Even after the second tower was --

MINETA: Ever after the second one.

HAGER: Now coming over to the White House and you're down there in the bunker, and that third unidentified blip is coming down the Potomac.

For one thing, had you thought about the possibility that it might be -- I mean you're at the White House. That's the center where everything is going on. Is that something that would have gone through your mind?

MINETA: Well, the question was where is it coming. And so as I was asking Monte, it was following pretty much the DRA, the down river approach, and it had not crossed over towards the White House or towards the Capitol. It was staying on its line towards what would normally be the traffic pattern into National Airport.

And in fact, later on, in looking at the radar track, the plane had actually over-passed the Pentagon, then turned around and then came back into it, and it never took a wide sweep to cross over to the east side of the White House.

On the other hand, we had seven or eight uniden -- or unaccounted-for airplanes, and then I heard about an airplane going down on the Ohio-Kentucky border.

So I said to Monte, I said, "Have we heard anything further about what you just mentioned a little while ago, about that plane down in, along the border of Ohio and Kentucky?" And he said no, we haven't heard anything.

I said, "Well, have you called the Ohio State Patrol or the Kentucky State Patrol to find out if they've heard anything?"

Cause if someone sees an airplane crash, they're immediately going to call the law enforcement agency. I said find out from them if they've heard anything.

But that turned out to be negative. And then about what, 10:15 or so, then we heard about the crash up in Shanksville, and so then the question of course -- and the other thing that happened when the person came in and said that the plane was ten miles out, he said do the orders still stand, and the Vice President said of course the orders still stand.

Have you heard anything to the contrary? I was thinking what are they talking about?

Then I thought, "Oh, my gosh, I wonder if they've scrambled aircraft and have aircraft up there now."

HAGER: And the order would be to shoot --

MINETA: Shoot it down. So then when I heard about the Shanksville plane, then I thought what happened to that airplane? Did it go down on its own?

HAGER: When you first heard that plane went down in Shanksville, what were you thinking?

MINETA: Well, the question, when I first heard about that plane was what happened to it. Did it go down on its own or might it have been shot down by one of the aircraft that had been scrambled, and -- now I knew that afterwards, that planes had been scrambled to intercept the airplane coming in on the river approach, but because it was coming up from Norfolk, it was still 10, 11 minutes away when that plane went into the Pentagon.

But by that time I knew that there was an airplane now in the area and so then when I heard about the Shanksville airplane, then the question came up, "Wow, what happened to that?"

Did it go down on its own or was it shot down? And even the Pentagon was not able to answer that until some two hours after that plane had gone down.

HAGER: Was it a fleeting idea at all in, in your head, that, "Gee, they might be coming for us?"

MINETA: Oh, absolutely, it's something like that, but at least at the time the track of the radar was following what would be considered the down-river approach and it never came over to cross the east side of the Potomac River and it just followed the river all the way in.

But the -- of course the thought about, you know, is the White House the target, because I think as we found out later on, about the way al Qaida operates, they were looking for significant, something of a significant nature and that they wanted to go after political, economic and a military icon.

So here in terms of icon, they had hit the twin towers in New York, in terms of economic icon and then now they've struck the Pentagon, the military icon, and you think about political icon either being in the White House or the Capitol.

HAGER: Not to dwell on the personal, but besides being Secretary of Transportation, you're a human being. Did this thing ever get your heart pumping or make your adrenaline go?

MINETA: Oh, absolutely. I mean you're on the edge of your seat and you're saying, "Monte, tell me what's going on. What is it?" Because we're in the bunker and we're getting bits and pieces of news.

We frankly have had CNN, Fox and NBC on in the screens inside the bunker, and that was really as probably up to date news as we were getting in the bunker and then the input that the Vice President was getting from his staff.

HAGER: Now moving to the decision to bring the planes down, you said you had a discussion, but I heard it described as a somewhat more animated discussion than that.

MINETA: It was. What had happened was that earlier that day, as this was all unfolding, I had already talked to Don Carty, the CEO at American Airlines, and Jim Goodwin, the CEO of United Airlines about accounting for their own airplanes, and so they had placed ground holds on their airplanes on the East Coast, in other words, no airplanes were to take off.

When the third one struck, I told Monte -- I said bring all the airplanes down and he said we'll do them, we'll do that according to pilot discretion.

Well, pilot discretion was to me a little too loose in the sense of I don't want pilots to go another hour to flight or their destination. I wanted those airplanes down.

So I told Monte, I said, you know, in effect, "The hell with pilot discretion, get those planes down."

HAGER: Now you mentioned that you weren't sure, that was it just those four, even after Shanksville.

MINETA: That's right.

HAGER: Roughly how many do you think they might have feared at one point or another?

MINETA: Yeah. At that point we're -- this would be about probably until about 10:30, 11:00 o'clock in the morning. We were at about seven or eight unaccounted-for aircraft at the time.

HAGER: And are you thinking about that?

MINETA: Oh, absolutely.

HAGER: Massive conspiracy?

MINETA: Absolutely. I mean here we already have three airplanes that we know of and then I believe it was at 10:14 when the plane went into Shanksville, and at that point we still had these unaccounted for aircraft. So the question was where are they and who are the targets for that.

And even the plane that went down in Shanksville, when you think about the pattern it took after its departure and then flying out over Ohio and then making the big sweep back, and if you were to -- if I were a betting man, I'd say it was probably headed for Washington, D.C. to either hit the White House or the Capitol.

HAGER: Is there any, any indication beyond just speculating about it, that that's what they had in mind?

MINETA: No. That's pure speculation on my part, just looking the next day at the radar tracks.

HAGER: Now when you finally got 'em all down, 12:15 or so I think -- it was, something like that, well, at least anything that's in U.S. airspace -- tell me how that felt, what your emotion was at that point.

MINETA: Well, it was a great relief and when I said to the Vice President, "Mr. Vice President, all the planes are down," he said, "Great," and then the next problem I had to tackle was the fact that we had several hundred airplanes coming in from Asia or Europe. And about a quarter to 11:00 I then called David Collonette, the Ministry of Transport in Canada, and I said, "David, I need your help," and he said, "Well, I'm watching on television, what's happening down there? What is it I can do?"

And I said, "Well, I've got all these airplanes coming in from Asia and Europe and I need you to take them."

So he said, "Okay," and I know on the eastern side of Canada, Nova Scotia, Gander, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, they brought these planes in and had them come in.

As I recall Gander, which has a normal population of about 9000, by the end of the day had shot up to something like 17,000.

HAGER: And I think at first the Canadians weren't sure, should they take these or --

MINETA: Absolutely. That's right. But, with a quick check with the Prime Minister, David said okay. But Gander was just fabulous. I mean they opened up their homes. They opened up church, church halls to these people who had dropped in, and on the 26th or 27th of September, David Collonette came to visit me and he brought with him a picture of the Halifax airport with about 53 wide-body airplanes, wing tip to wing tip, all on the runway there, and the aprons and everywhere else there at Halifax Airport.

But the Canadians were just terrific. The next day we had a cabinet meeting and I asked the President, who called the Prime Minister and thanked him for having done that, and by that time David and I were having 11:00 o'clock, 11:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. phone calls every day, and on Wednesday the 12th, at 4:00 o'clock he said, "Hey, Norm, thanks, the Prime Minister said he had a call from President Bush thanking him for the work that Canada did to, to assist us that day."

HAGER: End of the first day, September 11th, is there a time finally when you can get home after all the chaos of that day?

MINETA: No, the end of the day for me to leave was about 11:00 o'clock from the White House. I did leave about 5:15. That's when I first left, was about 5:15. Came back here to the office.

The President was on his way back from Nebraska to Washington, D.C. and he was going be addressing the nation, I believe it was at 7:30, or 8:00 o'clock, and we had a 7:30 meeting.

So I came here, to the office, and then I went right back to the White House and there was a brief meeting of the National Security Council.

Now I'm not a part of the National Security Council, but given what was happening that day, I sat in on that meeting, sat in on the meeting with the President and then he went on the air, I believe it was delayed until 8:30 that night, and then at about 9:00 o'clock we had a National Security Council meeting in the PEOC that lasted until about quarter to 11:00 I believe it was, and that's when I was able to leave the White House, go home, sleep for a couple of hours, then came right back the office.

HAGER: So, middle of the night, the day is just beginning to sink in, I would think, but you're off the hook for a very brief time.

What are you thinking about?

MINETA: Well, what we were trying to do at that point was get everybody back into the air by 12:00 noon. On the 11th, when I told the President we were bringing all the air -- that we had brought all the planes down, he said, "Well, when can you get the airlines back up?" And I said, "I hope to do that by noon tomorrow," and he said, "Fine." Because one of his themes was to get back to normalcy as quickly as possible.

And so that morning, Wednesday morning, I got a briefing from the intelligence people, as I do every morning, and so I heard some stuff there that I decided I didn't want the airplanes back in the air on Wednesday.

So we let all the airlines know that they wouldn't be able to fly. And then later Wednesday afternoon, I told everybody that they could reposition their aircraft to where they were originally intended to go.

So if you had a plane to go from Chicago to LA and it landed at Salt Lake City, then on Thursday, they could move those aircraft from Salt Lake City on to Los Angeles, re-board the passengers that they had, but no new passengers could board, let's say in Salt Lake City to go on to LA.

Most of them could not gear up on Thursday to move, so they did that on Friday, and Saturday I said you could go back to your normal operations.

But, again, it wasn't enough time for the airlines to really gear up. So it wasn't until probably Monday or Tuesday, the 17th or the 18th, that they were starting to really pick up on their schedule.

In the meantime we kept Ronald Reagan National Airport closed to all aviation traffic.

HAGER: Again, on the human side, end of the first day, are you thinking, thinking to yourself, "Gee, this is certainly the most eventful day or my life, or anything like that, ever?"

MINETA: Well, I guess the adrenaline and the fact that you're on the edge of your seat, what do you do next? How do we make sure airports and airplanes are safe? And the other thing while I was in the bunker, I got a call from Admiral Loy, the commandant of the Coast Guard, saying these are the kinds of actions we ought to be taking relative to the Port of New York and there were things like all incoming commercial ships were given, were -- had to give us 24-hours notice when they were coming into port.

I extended that to 96-hours by 12:00 noon on, on Tuesday, the 11th.

HAGER: So all these things are running through your head when you quit that night --

MINETA: Absolutely. Well, this was at noon, an hour -- I mean, three hours after the initial plane went -- going into the World Trade Center, and so the whole question about how do we secure railroads, how do we secure transit subways, how do we secure pipelines? All of that. Having to talk to staff back here at DOT while I was in the bunker, and right away what we did was to create a, what we call a NISC, a National Infrastructure Security Committee.

And so each of the modes had to, all of a sudden, start thinking about what do we do to secure our own modes of transportation, whether it be highways and bridges, transit subways, the long-haul freight railroads, pipelines, all of that.

One of the interesting things that we had to do was take off of our Web site all of the major transportation modes, whether it be railroad lines or pipelines. We took them off of our Web site so someone wouldn't be able to just go on the Web site and find out where are all the pipelines. And so we took them off the Web site and they haven't been there since.

HAGER: Just not, not to belabor the point, but when the day's through and you're walking out of the White House there at eleven -- 11:30 at night, and you're thinking about the significance of this day for you, for the nation, whatever -- I just wondered if you could just give us a little sense of that.

Is that something that flashed through your mind?

MINETA: Well, it's more probably exhaustion from the events of the day, from roughly ten minutes to 9:00 in the morning to going out to the car, coming out of the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, and sort of the relief that comes from having that tension all this time, and yet it's also a sense of exhaustion, and knowing that I was gonna go home, sleep a couple a hours, and turn right around and come back to the office.

And for about a week I think we had people literally on 24/7 here in the, in the building.

One of the things we had set up previously and activated before that second plane had even hit the World Trade Center was what we called a crisis management center, where each of the modes were in a operations center, getting reports on what was happening in their areas of responsibility and that way I was able to use that as the contact point as to what was happening across the country, if anything, about any potential dangers to any mode of transportation.

HAGER: Okay. Did you, in these early hours, or early days of it, was it evident to you that this was going to change the way we lived or particularly the way we traveled, all of us, forever?

MINETA: Well, I think as it related to aviation, it was obvious we were gonna have to really take a look at how we deal with airport security and airline security, and that became -- what I did right away was to establish a rapid response team and one was made up for airports so that we figured out what to do in terms of security measures at the airports, and the other rapid response team was that it relates to the airplane. So we had people like Boeing and the head of the Airline Pilots Association, and others -- and airline executives, who were on that rapid response team.

And in fact I believe it was about the 23rd of September that I issued a rulemaking, a special rulemaking to harden the cockpit and the air -- airlines all responded by the 5th of November, that all 6,000 commercial airlines had installed the new crossbars in the cockpit door.

So there were a lot of things that started within the first two days after September 11th. Knowing that we had to be cognizance of the, the threat against us, and how best to deal with that.

And so people were trying to deal with, in a rapid response manner, what had to be done.

HAGER: As you look at it today, talk about balance here between being really tough, trying to be safe and to go the extra mile versus personal liberties and making sure people can still get around, how do you work that out?

What's your judgment of how it's going or where it should go?

MINETA: Well, I think from a transportation perspective it's, it's been done in a very balanced manner, and we are adhering very closely to the law that was passed by Congress, the Aviation and Transportation Security Act, and Congress was, was very prescriptive in terms of timeline, what we did and how we were going to do things, and we have -- maybe there are maybe 10 or 12 deadlines that they've established in there, in that legislation, and, and we've met every one of them.

And now the two biggest ones remaining for us are November 19th when we will have all federal passenger screeners to be on board, and December 31, when all the baggage that goes on to an airplane has to go through an explosive detection system.

HAGER: Let's take them one at a time and that first one, the November deadline for whole screening force federal -- can you do that?

MINETA: Yes, we can, and in fact this morning I had a very long meeting about our benchmarks and are we meeting them and we're very, very comfortable that we will be able to meet the November 19th deadline with some 33,000 passenger screeners at the 429 commercial airports across the country.

HAGER: That really involves some scrambling; right?

MINETA: It does, because right now we have roughly 16,000 on board and given the amount of time it takes to recruit, to do the background investigation, train, test, and deploy these people out, we have them phased so that on a weekly basis we know between now and the 31st of October, and the 31st of October is what we're using to have everybody on board for the 19th date.

So, right now, we already have some 16 to 17,000 federal screeners at the airports across the country and we hope to complete that by the 31st of October.

HAGER: And what about that second deadline? That's, everybody says a "tough nut to crack."

MINETA: It is because what's happened is that we requested, President Bush requested, $4.4 billion in supplemental funds for both people and for machines, and the Congress cut that request to 2.9 billion.

So we've had to rework, reprioritize our business plan, given the amount of money that we've been given, and we had originally thought we would need 2200 explosive detection machines, and then we've modified that to 800 to 1100 machines, and so when you think about the 429 commercial airports, we will probably have every one of those airports equipped with either explosive detection systems or explosive trace detectors, except for about 20 to 30 airports, and there we would probably need anywhere from 30 to 90 days more to complete the work at those airports.

Now albeit some of those 20 to 30 airports are also the larger airports. DFW, we will not be able to complete by the 31st of December and -- but we will have -- let's say if DFW's supposed to have 26 explosive detection system machines. Instead of twenty-six, we may have sixteen for them. So that just means that in order to get the throughput on the luggage, it may take longer than if we had our full complement of 26 machines.

HAGER: And how many did you say you would fall short?

MINETA: In terms of the number of airports, we'll be about 20 to thirty that we will fall short --

HAGER: How many might be majors of those, do you think?

MINETA: Well, of those, I would say eighteen to twenty-five would be major airports. I think we would need at least an additional 90 days in order to get those 20 to 30 airports in, in, in full complement, and with people and machines to --

HAGER: Do you have to get legislative authority for that?

MINETA: No.

HAGER: No?

MINETA: No. Well, in terms of -- I think what's going to happen is that when the Department of Homeland Security legislation is being considered, they will probably have an amendment in there to extend the December 31 date for some period beyond.

HAGER: And now on the machines where they swab, the trace detectors, I'm guessing they can't open every bag; right? There just wouldn't be the time, I don't think, to open every bag that they do.

MINETA: No, they won't be able to open every bag but we're comfortable that the explosive trace detector used in its proper way is a very effective machine to, to detect explosives.

HAGER: But it can't detect what's inside?

MINETA: It cannot, but then the machine in terms of the swabbing, it's given on the outside, can give you a very high detection rate on what's in the bag, and in fact on Friday, I spent the whole day up in Atlantic City and going through a lot of the equipment, and the whole issue of how to deal with the new generation machines coming on as well.