Rear Admiral Jeffrey Hathaway of the US Coast Guard is presently temporarily assigned to the Navy Command Center at the Pentagon. For about the last two months, he has been in charge of Navy Anti-Terrorism Force Protection. He’d been at the Command Center earlier on for the morning briefings, but headed back to Coast Guard headquarters at about 8 a.m. He’d been aware of the first plane hitting the WTC, yet, despite his specific anti-terrorism role, apparently did not know immediately that the US was under terrorist attack. He later says it was only “apparent to me after I found out that the second plane had flown into the World Trade Center that the first one was not an accident, and that there was some sort of a coordinated attack.” Furthermore, he will claim, “No one knew where it was coming from. It could have been domestic terrorists for all we knew. No one knew why.” He claims there were no indicators that such an attack was imminent, saying, “There were general indicators in the air of general threats; nothing that was in my role that would have indicated hijacked airliners INCONUS [in the continental US].… There was very little attention being paid to anti-terrorism efforts INCONUS for the Navy. We were mostly focused on the fallout from the USS Cole bombing in Yemen.” [US Coast Guard, 6/20/2002 
; National Defense Magazine, 6/2003]
After 9:37 a.m. September 11, 2001: Navy Leaders Gather at Antiterrorist Center
The Navy Command Center at the Pentagon is mostly destroyed when the building is hit at 9:37 a.m. [Washington Post, 1/20/2002] After the attack, the Navy’s leaders start arriving instead at the Navy’s Antiterrorist Alert Center (ATAC), which is located at the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) headquarters in southeast Washington, DC. [US Department of the Navy, 2/2002 ; CNN, 8/27/2002; US Naval Criminal Investigative Service, 8/22/2006] Those who arrive at the center include Admiral Vern Clark, the chief of naval operations; Admiral William Fallon, the vice chief of naval operations; Gordon England, the secretary of the Navy; and Rear Admiral Jeffrey Hathaway of the US Coast Guard, who is currently in charge of Navy Anti-Terrorism Force Protection. According to Hathaway, the NCIS headquarters is “not the official backup,” but “There was not a plan in place that if somebody flew into the Pentagon where would we take folks.” From the center, these officials are able to hold secure video-teleconferences throughout the rest of the day, and also on the following day. Eventually the Naval Operations staff will relocate to the Navy Annex, which is about a mile away from the Pentagon. This will act as their temporary base in the following weeks (see (3:00 p.m.) September 11, 2001). [US Coast Guard, 6/20/2002 ; GlobalSecurity (.org), 5/7/2011]
