Lyndon Willms

The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) activates its Crisis Action Team (CAT) at the Pentagon to respond to the terrorist attacks, although the time this occurs at is unclear. [US Congress, 9/13/2001; 9/11 Commission, 7/21/2003 ; US Air Force, 9/9/2003] General Richard Myers, the vice chairman of the JCS, will later tell a congressional hearing that in response to the attacks on the World Trade Center: “We stood up our Crisis Action Team.… And we started talking to the federal agencies.” [US Congress, 9/13/2001] The JCS’s CAT apparently assembles in the National Military Command Center (NMCC), which is located in the JCS area of the Pentagon and is responsible for monitoring worldwide events for the JCS. [9/11 Commission, 7/21/2003 ; GlobalSecurity (.org), 7/24/2011; Effingham Daily News, 9/12/2011] Myers will state that the CAT is activated just after 8:46 a.m., when the first hijacked plane crashed into the WTC (see 8:46 a.m. September 11, 2001). He will say it is activated “[a]t the time of the first impact on the World Trade Center.” “That was done immediately,” he will add. [US Congress, 9/13/2001] However, other accounts will indicate that the CAT is activated after 9:37 a.m., when the Pentagon attack occurs (see 9:37 a.m. September 11, 2001). Lieutenant Colonel Lyndon Willms is an Air Force officer currently assigned to the Pentagon, working as a joint strategic planner for the JCS. After he and his colleagues in the Joint Vision and Transformation Division of the JCS learn from television reports of the second hijacked plane hitting the WTC, at 9:03 a.m. (see 9:03 a.m. September 11, 2001), they “knew a decision would be made to either send us to augment one of the crisis action teams forming in the National Military Command Center across the hall or be evacuated to another site,” Willms will recall. It appears from Willms’s account, however, that the CAT is only activated later on. By around 9:51 a.m., Willms will state, the CAT is forming in the NMCC, but he and his colleagues are “a bit confused because we thought we would be going in to augment” it. Instead, they are evacuated from the Pentagon. [Effingham Daily News, 9/12/2011] Lieutenant Colonel James Foley, the NMCC operations officer, will also indicate that the CAT is only activated after the Pentagon is hit. He will state that “a Joint Staff Crisis Action Team assembled… within the first two hours, while the situation was entirely uncertain and the Pentagon was burning.” [US Air Force, 9/9/2003] And when they visit the NMCC in 2003, members of the 9/11 Commission staff will be told that a CAT “was stood up” in the NMCC “sometime in the afternoon on 9/11.” [9/11 Commission, 7/21/2003 ] It is apparently standard procedure for the JCS to activate its CAT during a terrorist attack. A Department of Defense memorandum sent in March 2001, about how the US military responds to terrorism, will state that in a crisis, the operations directorate of the JCS “establishes a Crisis Action Team (CAT) to prepare and coordinate deployment, and execute orders.” [US Department of Defense, 3/15/2001]