Key Leaders Whisked to Secure Sites

WASHINGTON, Sept. 11, 2001 — -- Political leaders and key officials were whisked away to secure and in some cases secret installations today as the U.S. government moved swiftly to ensure the safety of the men and women who comprise its very core.

When terrorists crashed hijacked airliners into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington, President Bush was rushed aboard Air Force One and flown under the protection of fighter aircraft from Sarasota, Fla., where he had been scheduled to participate in an education event, to an Air Force base in Louisiana and then onto STRATCOM — an underground military bunker near Omaha, Neb.

Congressional leaders, who were in the Capitol building when it was rocked by the blast from the attack on the Defense Department, were evacuated via helicopters to "Mount Weather" — a secrecy-cloaked mountain facility 50 miles outside Washington in Virginia that was originally designed to serve as the new seat of government in the event of a nuclear war.

The select group of elected officials brought to that underground installation consisted of House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who is second in the constitutional line of succession to the presidency, and seven other top members of the House and Senate leaderships.

Vice President Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, headed to the secure Situation Room in the White House, where they worked for the rest of the day, while Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld remained at his badly damaged headquarters, working out of the National Military Command Center, the most secure part of the building once believed to be impregnable.

"The United States Secret Service immediately secured the president, the vice president and the speaker of the House, and they are all safe," White House counselor Karen Hughes said this afternoon. "They have also secured members of the national security team, the president's Cabinet and senior staff."