email581.xml
Title
email581.xml
Source
born-digital
Media Type
email
Date Entered
2002-08-22
September 11 Email: Body
Friends -
Today was a watershed day in all of our lives. No matter what our background, our work, our politics, religion, home country or state, this vicious act of barbarism has touched all of us in ways that we can not yet begin to imagine. None of us can look at the world in quite the same way after this, never again. We will continue to take plane trips, visit high-rise buildings and the like, but never again with the insouciance of the past.
Today, as I sat in a colleague's office watching the surreal events unfolding on TV, I glanced out the window, behind the TV, to Independence Hall less than half a block away, where workers were closing Chestnut Street and putting barriers around the building in the event that terrorists might strike there. To our left, also less than half a block away, the same barricades were going up around the Liberty Bell pavilion. For the first time, I thought about the parking garage that occupies the first four floors of our building, thought about how easy it would be to plant a car bomb, and felt real fear. Sure, there was momentary fear after the first World Trade Center bombing, and again after domestic terrorists took out the Murrah Building in Oklahoma. But this... this was very very different.
This was not a small band of zealots making a single yet spectacular strike. Those were awful but they were, at least to all appearances, stand-alone incidents, however terrible. Not like today. These sequential events -- one tower struck, then a second, then the Pentagon, then the second tower falls, then the first, then the plane in western Pennsylvania ... each with a brief period in between for the horror to hit, each event leaving all of us in that room with unspoken fears -- are we next? if not us, then who? is this how it starts? how it ends?
A few years ago, when I prosecuted a despicable waste of oxygen named Robert Stephan Lipka for spying against the United States, selling our most precious secrets to the KGB during the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was invited to attend the Intelligence Community awards ceremony where John Whiteside, the FBI case agent with whom I was privileged to have worked, received a well-deserved award for his superb work on the case, the oldest espionage prosecution ever brought in this country. The ceremony was in the auditorium at CIA headquarters at Langley. Because the families of the recipients were invited, and few if any of them had the requisite security clearances to hear the still highly classified details of most of the actions for which awards were given (and even those of us with appropriate clearances had no "need to know"), the ceremony became rather comical in its lack of detail. Group after group of serious-faced young men and women, some in military garb, others in civilian clothes, marched solemnly up to receive their awards while the audience was told that these courageous men and women, assigned in a place that could not be named, had risked life and limb to save unidentified treasures of this nation, or its allies, and to prevent the desctruction of numerous lives, by persons and/or groups that could not be disclosed. It sounded very funny at the time, though all of us who worked national security cases knew that there was NOTHING funny about what these folks did - they were real heroes.
I, a former anti-war activist who has never been a flag-waving rah-rah, underwent something of a philosophical transformation working with the FBI's FCI (foreign counterintelligence) agents. Although I have prosecuted many criminal cases in more than two decades as a prosecutor, I have never been so proud or felt so privileged as I did in working with our "hidden heroes." Outside the very insular intelligence community in which they work, they don't get glory, or even credit, for a job well done. As I said at John Whiteside's retirement dinner (after other agents ragged him for dedicating his career to spies rather than bank robbers or Mafia dons), a drug trafficker -- even a highly successful one -- can only blight so many lives, but a single spy can bring down a nation.
I thought a lot about those young men and women today, when all of the politicians and talking heads on TV were crowing about our failure of intelligence. While it is true that this time, intelligence failed -- never mind that it is tougher than any of us can imagine to infiltrate underground groups like Hamas and other of its ilk -- it is so important to remember that we in the public are never told of the scores of successes that the FBI and other agencies in the intelligence community have had in preventing other acts of terrorism on our shores and elsewhere. We don't know who these brave folks are, or what they do, or how they do it, or where, and we should not know. But it must be remembered that it is the courageous work of these unsung and unseen heroes that has for so long allowed us to keep our innocence, allowed us to go about our lives, work in high-rise buildings and travel by air, without worrying that the sky was falling.
Some of that innocence, at least in part, was lost today.
I wish you all peace.
Barb
Today was a watershed day in all of our lives. No matter what our background, our work, our politics, religion, home country or state, this vicious act of barbarism has touched all of us in ways that we can not yet begin to imagine. None of us can look at the world in quite the same way after this, never again. We will continue to take plane trips, visit high-rise buildings and the like, but never again with the insouciance of the past.
Today, as I sat in a colleague's office watching the surreal events unfolding on TV, I glanced out the window, behind the TV, to Independence Hall less than half a block away, where workers were closing Chestnut Street and putting barriers around the building in the event that terrorists might strike there. To our left, also less than half a block away, the same barricades were going up around the Liberty Bell pavilion. For the first time, I thought about the parking garage that occupies the first four floors of our building, thought about how easy it would be to plant a car bomb, and felt real fear. Sure, there was momentary fear after the first World Trade Center bombing, and again after domestic terrorists took out the Murrah Building in Oklahoma. But this... this was very very different.
This was not a small band of zealots making a single yet spectacular strike. Those were awful but they were, at least to all appearances, stand-alone incidents, however terrible. Not like today. These sequential events -- one tower struck, then a second, then the Pentagon, then the second tower falls, then the first, then the plane in western Pennsylvania ... each with a brief period in between for the horror to hit, each event leaving all of us in that room with unspoken fears -- are we next? if not us, then who? is this how it starts? how it ends?
A few years ago, when I prosecuted a despicable waste of oxygen named Robert Stephan Lipka for spying against the United States, selling our most precious secrets to the KGB during the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was invited to attend the Intelligence Community awards ceremony where John Whiteside, the FBI case agent with whom I was privileged to have worked, received a well-deserved award for his superb work on the case, the oldest espionage prosecution ever brought in this country. The ceremony was in the auditorium at CIA headquarters at Langley. Because the families of the recipients were invited, and few if any of them had the requisite security clearances to hear the still highly classified details of most of the actions for which awards were given (and even those of us with appropriate clearances had no "need to know"), the ceremony became rather comical in its lack of detail. Group after group of serious-faced young men and women, some in military garb, others in civilian clothes, marched solemnly up to receive their awards while the audience was told that these courageous men and women, assigned in a place that could not be named, had risked life and limb to save unidentified treasures of this nation, or its allies, and to prevent the desctruction of numerous lives, by persons and/or groups that could not be disclosed. It sounded very funny at the time, though all of us who worked national security cases knew that there was NOTHING funny about what these folks did - they were real heroes.
I, a former anti-war activist who has never been a flag-waving rah-rah, underwent something of a philosophical transformation working with the FBI's FCI (foreign counterintelligence) agents. Although I have prosecuted many criminal cases in more than two decades as a prosecutor, I have never been so proud or felt so privileged as I did in working with our "hidden heroes." Outside the very insular intelligence community in which they work, they don't get glory, or even credit, for a job well done. As I said at John Whiteside's retirement dinner (after other agents ragged him for dedicating his career to spies rather than bank robbers or Mafia dons), a drug trafficker -- even a highly successful one -- can only blight so many lives, but a single spy can bring down a nation.
I thought a lot about those young men and women today, when all of the politicians and talking heads on TV were crowing about our failure of intelligence. While it is true that this time, intelligence failed -- never mind that it is tougher than any of us can imagine to infiltrate underground groups like Hamas and other of its ilk -- it is so important to remember that we in the public are never told of the scores of successes that the FBI and other agencies in the intelligence community have had in preventing other acts of terrorism on our shores and elsewhere. We don't know who these brave folks are, or what they do, or how they do it, or where, and we should not know. But it must be remembered that it is the courageous work of these unsung and unseen heroes that has for so long allowed us to keep our innocence, allowed us to go about our lives, work in high-rise buildings and travel by air, without worrying that the sky was falling.
Some of that innocence, at least in part, was lost today.
I wish you all peace.
Barb
September 11 Email: Date
Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2001 9:19 PM
September 11 Email: Subject
Subject: Some thoughts...
Collection
Citation
“email581.xml,” September 11 Digital Archive, accessed June 26, 2024, https://911digitalarchive.org/items/show/36876.