A Personal Remembrance at the Pentagon on 9/11

By Captain Terry Roberts, U.S. Navy & SES-03 OPNAV DDNI (Retired)

Some events impact you immediately, some come back at you 20 and 25 years later anew.

September 11, 2001, was a regular workday at the Pentagon for me. At the time, I was the director of the General Defense Intelligence Program (GDIP)¹. My staff and I, along with the DIA comptroller staff, had just moved into our beautiful new offices in the recently renovated section of the Pentagon just three weeks prior.  

After getting into the office around 7:00 am and preparing for the day, my deputy burst into my office when the first plane hit the Twin Towers in New York City at 8:46am. As I walked to the 9:00am Director of the Military Staff Program and Budget staff meeting with my boss (whose office was a few corridors away on the E-Ring next to the Director of DIA’s front office), I was “thinking” the Twin Towers event was suspicious. I was waiting outside in the front lounge for the meeting to start, watching their television news, when I saw the second plane hit at 9:03am. As a career intelligence professional who had been in Desert Storm/Shield and in Kosovo, I knew immediately that this was a terrorist attack and that there could be more to come. While we speculated at our staff meeting on what was happening, we heard—and felt—a plane come too close from left to right across our Pentagon E-Ring windows at 9:37am. And then, immediately after, we felt and heard the impact just two corridors away.

As my boss ran to the window to see what happened, I (as the only military person in the room) stood up, called to her to get away from the window, and started to usher everyone out of the room.  Fortunately, we were not far from the Corridor 3 entrance and forever grateful that the Pentagon Guard was professionally and urgently ushering everyone out the entrance to South Parking. It was almost immediately apparent to us that the Pentagon section hit was around Corridors 4 and 5, where our staff offices were located. While some of our group wanted to go help, I recommended that those with cars and their keys (mine were in my office with my purse) give others rides home, get out of the Pentagon area, and allow the emergency professionals to handle it. We quickly coordinated with each other to ensure all who were in South Parking had rides to clear the area.

One of my directors who was with me offered to give me a ride to Springfield, where my mother-in-law lived, and I accepted. Ironically my sister, a Marine Corps colonel, was also working in the Pentagon as the Chief of Staff for OSD Congressional Affairs, on the other side of the Pentagon. Some of us had mobile phones, but the phone lines were jammed, and no one could reach anyone. So, I couldn’t reach her or let anyone know I was safe—especially my husband, who was working in downtown D.C., our kids’ elementary school, or my parents in Arizona. When I got to my mother-in-law’s house, we were able to listen to radio and TV news updates. I must admit I had no clue when I learned what. Many hours later a relative gave me a ride home, and as phone lines started to open, we were able to begin our staff emergency phone tree. By 9:00 pm that night we had learned that all personnel from the GDIP staff were accounted for but that those from comptroller staff were not. We directed all reachable staff to stay home, while my boss and I planned to go back to the Pentagon the next morning.

September 12 broke, mockingly, with a gorgeous morning sunrise, in stark contrast to the horror of the previous day’s events. Those of us who returned to the Pentagon early that morning parked at Pentagon City and walked across the Pentagon parking lot as smoke continued streaming from the Corridor 4/5 side of the Pentagon. It was a surreal scene as we entered the smoking building. I approached the Corridor 3 entrance around 6:00 am near the DIA Congressional Affairs office. Nobody was in yet, so I went to the DIA Director’s front office where the Army Major executive assistant and the senior enlisted were. Right or wrong, I wanted to see if I could get the purses and keys that had been left in our GDIP staff offices, and the major and the master sergeant were eager to go with me. We wet some paper towels to cover our noses and mouths and entered the smoky section around corridor 4. We were able to get to my office spaces on the 3rd floor, noticing right away how warm the far wall of the office was. We moved quickly, grabbed purses and keys on desks and in drawers, and went back to the DIA front office. Immediately upon our return, we were approached by Pentagon Security and told that NO ONE was allowed in that section—oops!  

By this time, I was ready for a cup of coffee, so I went to the Pentagon Starbucks around Corridor 1. Halleluiah! Not only was Starbucks open, but they were filling all orders for free! As I ran into people I knew, we shared what we knew and what offices were impacted. My memories of that day are sketchy—I have no idea when I found out about those that were directly impacted, such as CNO Intelligence Plot (CNO-IP), Marine Corps Admin, the DIA Comptroller Staff (whose offices were two floors below mine), and those on the plane. I do remember returning to the DIA Congressional Affairs Office to prepare a budget supplemental in support of a probable war—which was declared on 20 September. During that time, I also remember Pentagon Facilities’ personnel came in to check our air quality every few hours. We worked there for several days until offices were provided for my GDIP Team at the DIA building at Bolling Air Force Base, where we ended up working for over four months. Even though our offices were not destroyed, they had to undergo extensive renovation due to the mold caused by water damage. 

Over the next few months, I attended 14 funerals and memorial services. The one I remember the most was for Lieutenant Commander Vince Tolbert, who was the assistant officer-in-charge of CNO-IP during the attacks on 9/11. I first met Vince during a trip to the U.S. Central Command Joint Intelligence Center in 2000. When he was assigned to CNO-IP, I ran into him periodically when he was leaving his watch and I was arriving for work. Vince lived near me in Fairfax Station, Virginia, and his kids went to school with my kids at Silverbrook Elementary. It was his internment at Arlington National Cemetery that shocked us all when we saw that his section of the cemetery faced the burned-out section of the Pentagon. We were forced to look at the site of the Pentagon 9/11 attack as Vince was laid to rest. Seeing Vince’s wife and their three young children facing the damaged Pentagon was an additional, albeit unintended, cruelty.

I continued in my career to work the initial OEF/OIF Supplementals as the GDIP Staff Director at DIA in support of the Services:  then on to COMUSNAVEUR and NATO NAVSOUTH N2 during OEF/OIF, then selected to SES, serving both at the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence (USD-I) and at OPNAV. And while I regularly thought of those lost on 9/11, I rarely thought of that day until the 20th anniversary of that horrific day. It was then that the magnitude of the loss that Defense and Naval Intelligence had experienced really hit me.  And what we had lost as a nation both on 9/11 and after 20 years of war. And 25 years later—As a cyber all-source intelligence professional since 1999, I know we must ensure we are optimized across the U.S. Interagency and with our allies to prevent and be resilient to terrorist, unmanned, and cyber attacks—now in the Agentic-AI Age.

¹In 1992-95, when LTGEN Jim Clapper was Director of DIA, he worked with the SECDEF and the Congressional House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), to establish the Director of Military Intelligence Staff (DMI Staff), a second hat for the Director of DIA, to focus on the coordination, guidance, PPBS process and program execution across the General Defense Intelligence Program (GDIP), which is under the Executive Agency of DIA then and now. The GDIP is one of National Intelligence Program (NIP - back then NFIP) major Intelligence Community Budgetary Programs that includes the military services, the Coast Guard, and DIA.