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Lisa Sullivan

From: Miles Kara

Sent: Wednesday, May 19, 2004 12:10 PM
To: Lisa Sullivan; Dana Hyde; Geoff Brown; John Azzarello; John Farmer; Kevin Shaeffer
Cc: Team 7
Subject: Taaffe and Merkley Interviews

Here are the take aways from the Taaffee and Merkley Interviews. Team 7, any insights?

Merkley

1. He stayed on the NOIWON for its duration. On initiation he passed the info that Darryl
Smith had received from the initial conference call with Eastern Region. He and Smith
worked Intel issues in tandem inside the SCIF. ACI had the TACNET on open speaker
phone and he Merkley stated that he passed onto the NOIWON information from the
TACNET that he thought important. He thought he specifically passed information about
the report of a bomb on board UA93. He does not recall names or organizations on the
NOIWON, but thought that the usual suspects (He was familiar with NOIWON from a tour
with J2 JCS and the NMJIC) State, WHSR, CIA, FBI, NSA, NMJIC and NMCC were on.
He is not aware of anyone taping the call. Dana, we may still want to try and interview
BG Seip. If Merkley is accurate about the TACNET connection, then that is one line of
communication about air traffic information directly into the DDO shack.
2. He recalled being contacted within a month or two of 9/11 about the issue of DoD being
concerned they were not notified in a timely manner. He thought he had been contacted
by someone in ACI who had been contacted by DoT and/or DoD. He recalls that person
as not being Mike Morse. He thought most likely candidate was John Harris whose
responsibility was terrorism against civil aviation and who put out an annual report
something along the lines of 'criminal acts against civil aviation.'
3. He thought he went upstairs to unlock and setup the mini-SCIF. He recalled it as a very
small one- or at most two-person office. He named Hahn and Kormann as the upstairs
crew. Downstairs, in addition to the leadership—Durgin and Manno—he placed Smith
and Stubblefield and Volaro.
4. He recalled one specific inte! report of interest in Spring/summer 2001, a CIA TD which
spoke to terrorists, possibly Ai Qaeda seeking planes and pilots to move items around
the mid-East. He thought tha ACI opened an ICF on the issue and that he called the
FAA rep at CIA, to further inquire. They finally sent a letter to FAA in
August 2001—no response.
5. He was certain they had no red switch phone , but had five commercial lines in ACI that
were all STU Ill-capable.

Taaffe ,
1 . H e is the author of the "Crisis Management and Event Tracking System, Event Log
Report. He recognized many entries as his work.
2. He acknowledged that the event log combines information from the TACNET, Primary
Net, and the PSI position.
3. He could not recall who manned the Primary Net and was reluctant to place Mike
Weikert as that person.
4. He recalled he was wearing a headset and that he could listen in to either net.
9/11 Closed by S t a t u t e

6/3/2004
 Page 2 of 2

5. He confirmed that the activity sheets that Falcone provided were the mechanism for
passing info to recorders.
6. He thought others in the room included McGlothlin, Bob Clark, and Guffey, in addition
to the dais and first row folks.
7. He confirmed after a review of the log report that there are no NMCC-related entries
and few entries that might be primary net associated.
8. He was specific in recall that there were three positions on the dais—Longmire, Lozito,
and an ATC person. While he could not recall the name (I offered up Griffith and Davis)
he was clear in his recall that the person was in continuous contact with an air traffic
facility.
9. He joined FAA HQ in Feb 2001 and recalled that Carrie Reilly with perhaps help from
Mike Weikert ran several familiarization exercises of 1-2 hours duration about ACC
operations. It was through this training that he gravitated to the primary net recorder
position and assumed that position on 9/11. He thought that those exercises had some
hijacking content. John A., we may need to talk to Reilly about purpose and training of
potential ACC augmentees.

Taaffe broke down briefly as he struggled to recall who was in the room and who was seated
where. Christine informed me that on the way back after her interview Fran Lozito also broke
down and was crying.

Christine provided a pile of documents, mostly repeats. We have another copy of the Canoles
compendium, each of the formal hijack packages, the Tracy Paquin compilation of logs (some
with different handwriting, John will need to take a look) and the complete incident log from the
ACC. She also provided a CD was has much of the info that supported the FAA power point
brief they gave us at the beginning. However, it also has spiffy tracks as captured by the
TRACONS—we've had paper copies, but the electronic version is much better. Interestingly,
the CD (dated as of 9/02) has some of Cheri Gott's stuff on it!!

Miles

6/3/2004