JIM MIKLASZEWSKI: -- Acting Chairman. At what time did you realize that America was under attack?

GEN. RICHARD MYERS, CHAIRMAN OF THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF: It's interesting. I, as you know, I was -- had been nominated to be the Chairman. So that morning I was working on testimony preparation for the confirmation hearing, my confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and then at 9 o'clock I had an appointment with Senator Cleland over in one of the Senate office buildings.

And so I was -- I had actually, actually walked into his office, and in the outer office, there was a television, and it had a picture of the first tower being hit, and everybody was -- the commentator I remember speculating, well, we don't know if this was an airplane. We think it was an airplane. We don't know if it's a big one or a little one.

And being a pilot and realizing what kind of day it was, it was a beautiful day, as everybody probably recalls, I said how could an airplane get off course and hit a building, but -- if it was an airplane.

So then we went into the meeting, and somewhere in the middle of that meeting, they came in and said the second tower has been hit, and both Senator Cleland and I realized that something more is going on that just random events here, and I think that's when we figured out something -- that America or at least the World Trade Center is under attack.

And then I left the office, and General Eberhart called from North American Aerospace Defense Command out in Colorado Springs, and he said, you know, we've got several hijack codes, meaning that the transponders in the aircraft are talking to the ground, and they're saying we're under, we're being hijacked, several hijack codes in the system, and we're responding with, with fighter aircraft.

And I said, well, you've got to do what you've got to do. I'm going to head back to the Pentagon. I'll talk to you there. And then as we're leaving the building, somebody said, "The Pentagon has been hit as well." And I can remember coming across the 14th Street Bridge here in Washington, D.C., and you get a really good shot of the Pentagon from that bridge, and looking over there and seeing on the far side, from the way I was approaching it, this black smoke rising in this beautiful September sky.

So that's, that's what I recall. That's where I was, and that's -- it was pretty clear from the time that second tower was hit that we were under attack. Maybe we should have known after the first one, but there was still -- after the first one was attacked, early on there was no -- people still couldn't agree on what had actually happened. We didn't have a good account at that point.

MIKLASZEWSKI: So, as you were driving across the bridge and you saw the Pentagon, the symbol of America's military might, in flames, what were you thinking?

MYERS: Well, I was thinking I had to get -- quickly get to the Command Center, the National Military Command Center in this case, where it's kind of the duty station when things are, when you need to coordinate with lots of people and figure out what's happening.

You know, it's interesting, though, I -- I mean, while I didn't like what I was seeing and so forth, I didn't have any lack of confidence. I mean, I just thought of this now as we're talking. I mean, I didn't -- I didn't think, oh, this is the end of anything or that we're not going to somehow prevail, it's just we've got work to do, and let's get on with it sort of. So, I mean, I wasn't, I wasn't, I wasn't doubting our ability to handle this.

MIKLASZEWSKI: Did you go to the impact site that morning?

MYERS: I didn't. I think I went there later that day. I did not go that morning. I went -- I wanted to get the National Military Command Center as soon as I could because my boss, General Shelton, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was on his way to Europe. So he was somewhere over the North Atlantic in an airplane, and I felt I needed to get there as soon as I could.

The Secretary, I think, went out to the site, and then he came back into the National Military Command Center and joined me shortly after the time I got there.

MIKLASZEWSKI: Describe the scene for us in the Military Command Center, if you will.

MYERS: Well, first, the scene driving up to the Pentagon, the building had all of the alarms went off, and so people were evacuating the people and had been advised to do so. I met Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz who was on his way to the alternate location where my office, in fact, that's where the Vice Chairman's office is designated to go somewhere else in times of emergency to make sure we have continuity of our command and control, and my office was picking up and leaving this building, getting on helicopters going to -- and all of that part worked, worked very, very well.

And so you're kind of fighting -- you're like a fish swimming upstream as you, as you weave your way into the building. You ask the question is the Military Command Center okay, and they said, sure, it is. And so I went in there, and when I went in there, people were busier than normal, but generally it was trying to ascertain, you know, what had happened, what we could do to protect the country and, and protect our forces, and that was kind of the mood when I walked in.

MIKLASZEWSKI: Could it be described as chaos?

MYERS: Oh, no. I think it was, I mean, the crew we have the National Military Command Center are trained to, to react up to situations involving nuclear war. So I think they were, they were doing the job they were trained to do, and that was anything but chaotic.

MIKLASZEWSKI: That --

MYERS: There was, there was some uncertainty in the air, obviously, but the way they're approaching it was not in a chaotic fashion.

MIKLASZEWSKI: But at that point, what decisions were being made in the Military Command Center?

MYERS: Well, first, the first thing we were trying to ascertain is what had happened, and then very quickly it came, you know, there were continual reports of other events, and we had one -- there was one something about a bomb by the State Department had gone off.

MIKLASZEWSKI: False.

MYERS: False. That turned out to be a false report. There was a report that there was an airplane five miles out and coming into Washington. It turned out to be that one was wrong.

It turned out there was an airplane, and General Eberhart called on this one, there was an airplane showing to the ground that it was transmitting this hijack code coming in, it looked like it was heading towards Washington. It was currently over Pennsylvania, and General Eberhart said we're sending fighters to intercept. And knowing that was a U.S. airliner with Americans on board, the authority to shoot something, an airliner down that was going to create a, commit a hostile act on sites or forces on the ground, requires presidential-level authority. And so the Secretary of Defense wound up calling the Vice President in this case who authorized that if it was necessary.

MIKLASZEWSKI: Describe that chain of command. How would that work? The Vice President authorized the U.S. military to shoot down a passenger plane filled with Americans, and that order went -- what was the chain of command? It went to whom, and did that order go through you?

MYERS: In fact, I mean, I was, I was the one that took the phone call from General Eberhart that requested the order, related that to the or said we may have to take this action. Remembering my days as the North American Aerospace Defense Command Commander, and we had this Lear jet that Paine Stewart, the golfer, was on, and for some reason they all became incapacitated, that issue came up then, and that's why I knew it was not a decision that the military or the Department of Defense could make, it had to go all of the way to -- to the -- to presidential level to get that kind of decision because there were American citizens on board.

We were worried that that Paine Stewart Lear jet would go into a populated area, and if they were already incapacitated, one of the things we thought about was could we shoot it down to keep it from going into a major city.

So we knew what we had to do, and then the chain of command went back from the Vice President, to the Secretary -- told General Eberhart he had that authority. I'm sure he went to his, to his regional commander who went down to the fighters that are involved in this because they're all under control of NORAD at that time.

MIKLASZEWSKI: Did you ever imagine having to give the order to shoot down a passenger plane filled with Americans?

MYERS: No. No, that -- no, other than the fact we'd kind of gone through this in the, in the Paine Stewart case, no, I never -- it wasn't something you think about a lot.

MIKLASZEWSKI: Well, what were you thinking at the time?

MYERS: That this would -- if it ever came to that, this would be a horrible situation, obviously, to be forced to do something like that. But before that could happen, of course, the passengers on that airplane took matters in their own hands, and there would be another airplane crash in Pennsylvania.

MIKLASZEWSKI: Uh-huh.

MYERS: Of course, and as that happened, then there was a lot of -- there were a lot of questions, well, did your fighters get there? Did they, in fact, shoot it down?

MIKLASZEWSKI: Right.

MYERS: We knew fairly quickly that we, I mean, one call to General Eberhart, and you find out that's not true, but it takes, to satisfy others, it took some time to walk through that.

MIKLASZEWSKI: There was a lot of speculation and some criticism that the U.S. military should have been able to respond much more quickly to prevent perhaps even the attack on the Pentagon. Are you satisfied with the performance of the U.S. military on September 11th?

MYERS: Absolutely. I think, given, you know, given the posture we were in at the time, if you recall, since the end of the Cold War, we had gone down to just seven alert sites. We used to have I think it was 22, and we went down to just a handful of fighters on alert in specific areas around the country, and that posture had been reviewed up and down the chain of command many times, and -- and we thought it appropriate given the current strategic environment.

Of course, for better or worse, we had anticipated these airliners being turned into essentially weapons of mass destruction on ourselves, and so that was a little different context, but I think the way that the military responded to this, this future we had not anticipated was very, very good. And some of the hometown folks right here in the District of Columbia Guard, National Guard, responded magnificently over at Andrews Air Force Base in getting F-16s airborne and so forth, as did many other units across the country.

So I think it was a very good performance, actually.

MIKLASZEWSKI: Later in the day, when you finally made it over to the site, the impact site at the Pentagon, describe that scene for us. What did you see?

MYERS: Well, just very chaotic. There were still a lot -- there were a lot of workers there because they were still bringing people out, and the building was in danger again of more collapse. And it was just a lot of tired, and perspiring, dirty people who were trying to help in any way they could, from firefighters, to medical personnel, to police officers, to people responsible for the building itself, to other people who were pressed into action.

I mean, there was a Chaplain's Conference that they all turned to, went out and became volunteers. Several of the medical folks here in the building closed their offices, immediately went out and went from seeing patients on a routine basis to going and helping out there with the triage that was going on, so --

And I guess the sense you get out of it is that people were working as hard as they could and a great sense of teamwork, actually, in trying to get it done. I mean, they were really sacrificing.

MIKLASZEWSKI: Again, things were hard to imagine that day, but looking at that site, did -- had you ever imagined that the Pentagon itself would ever be attacked?

MYERS: Well, I -- you know, I think you think about that, obviously. You know, we know, we've had experience at Khobar Towers with the huge truck bomb that brought down the, the face of a building and killed I think it was 19 airmen, so, and we know what happened to the embassy bombing. So I guess I always, in the back of my mind, I thought, well, if somebody wants to do this, it can be done.

And so I think we had thought about that. We thought about moving the bus circle that intersects here with the Metro. We had, you know, that decision was made well before September 11th, move it away from the building just for that kind of purpose.

Now the use of an airliner to crash into the building on purpose, I don't think it crossed many people's mind, but, but a bomb going off near the building I think had, and that's why we had the kind of security arrangements we do, to keep vehicles like that from coming up close to the building.

MIKLASZEWSKI: But two planes hit the World Trade Center, one plane hit the Pentagon. There were reports of other planes, hijacked planes incoming to Washington. Why on earth would everyone remain inside the Pentagon in the Military Command Center, knowing that it has already been a target once, and possibly a target a second time?

MYERS: I think if the threats had persisted, that we might have reevaluated that. But this one within this one, this one comment there was one within five miles of the Pentagon was probably late reporting from the one that actually hit, and we didn't have any other credible reporting. The FAA and NORAD very quickly grounded most other aircraft. We had fighters overhead very quickly, within 14 or 15 minutes.

I think we felt pretty secure from that type of threat, and we had folks, for continuity, we had folks in an alternate location. So it's where we had the best connectivity. Anyplace else we would have gone would have been second best in that record.

Now we have, you can imagine, since then taken steps to make sure that we -- that there is no second best, that we have several places that we can go for continuity that are very good.

MIKLASZEWSKI: Continuity is a euphemism. In case you get killed, somebody else will carry on.

MYERS: Right. Right. Right. In case, yeah. I felt pretty secure inside. The National Military Command Center is not necessarily a hardened facility, able to withstand the strike that a big airliner could put on it, but on the other hand, it's sort of buried in the more or less the center portion of the building, so I felt that we were pretty secure there.

MIKLASZEWSKI: Even as the Pentagon burned on one end, what preparations for war were going on inside the Military Command Center? What was going on there?

MYERS: Well, we had General Tom Franks, who was the Central Command Commander. He happened to be in the Middle East at that time, and I remember one of the things we did was suggest that he come back to Tampa, Florida, his headquarters, so he could begin the military planning, once it became pretty clear that the al Qaida was behind it, and we, that was not a group unfamiliar to any of us, obviously, being responsible for those North African embassy bombings, the USS Cole bombing in Yemen and so forth, we knew this, this group, and we had attacked it before previously with, with Tomahawk and other cruise missiles trying to get their leader, bin Laden.

MIKLASZEWSKI: So, based on that suspicion, planning began almost immediately.

MYERS: Yeah, I think there was, fairly early on there was evidence, as they looked through the passenger list, and matched some of the videos of people getting on the aircraft and so forth, it was, it was becoming clearer and clearer that al Qaeda, in fact, was behind this.

I think the first time anybody on my team that ever took a note on that was around noon of that day. So that's when people start to think about, well, this could possibly be an al Qaida attack.

So the idea of some sort of response immediately comes up, and the one thing we knew for certain, that a response, given the fact they attacked us on our soil and thousands of Americans, that this response had to be proportionate, meaning a fairly big response.

MIKLASZEWSKI: Give us your assessment, if you will, on the U.S. war in Afghanistan. American troops are still there in great numbers. Al Qaida and Taliban are still there, perhaps not in as great a numbers as they once were, but still pose a threat. What is your assessment of the U.S. war?

MYERS: My assessment is that the initial objective was to drive the Taliban from power, to kill, capture or disrupt the al Qaida organization the best we could, and, and, third, to make a better life for the Afghan population. Because, remember, early on, we started working the humanitarian assistance piece initially from the air and then other ways later on.

I think, on all three counts, we've done a fairly good job. I mean, the Taliban are clearly out of power. There still are pockets of Taliban around. There are still pockets of al Qaida around, but mainly they've left the country, they ebb and flow a little bit on the Pakistani-Afghani border, but -- and that's why we're still there working that piece.

We've got a transitional authority that seems to have the backing of the Afghan people, and I think our job right now is to help train this Afghan National Army to make sure they can provide security for this transitional authority. I think the fact that we have massive refugees coming back, over a million have returned back into Afghanistan, the fact that the private organizations, and the nongovernmental organizations are operating fairly freely inside Afghanistan to bring aid -- you know, we talked about big starvation last winter. I don't think we'll hear, the possibility of starvation last winter, I don't think we'll hear that this winter. I think that that's been improved.

So I think overall it's been -- it's been relatively successful.

MIKLASZEWSKI: But Osama bin Laden and his top commander apparently still remain on the loose. Is that a failure in the U.S. command?

MYERS: No, I don't think we -- I wouldn't say it's a failure. Obviously, it's, it's an issue we have to deal with. We knew early on that we wanted to get -- disrupt this organization. We wanted to get some of their top leadership. We have gotten some of their top leadership. Other leadership remains. We need to continue to, to press that as hard as we can.

I don't think it's a failure. I think we knew all along this was going to take some time, that it's not easy to find individuals, particularly in some of these more, if I may use the term, lawless areas of the world. It's just very difficult when they're being, when they're paying for protection, and the sympathies of the local people are more inclined to be with them than anybody else. It's just a very difficult thing, but let me tell you, we're working on that very, very hard.

MIKLASZEWSKI: There's been a lot of reporting and speculation that Osama bin Laden himself managed to escape the U.S. military during the battle of Tora Bora. Did the U.S. military allow bin Laden to slip through their fingers there?

MYERS: No, I don't think so. Let's, let's recall the situation at Tora Bora. We had well less than 2,000 U.S. military in the country at the time. We had just come into the South with the Marines, south of Kandahar, and we were making our approach on Kandahar when the situation at Tora Bora presented itself.

The only choice we really had was to rely on our Afghan partners to go in and to help them with U.S. air power and let them, that were most familiar with the terrain, and the people, and the local conditions, to let them lead that effort, and it was either that or not take the fight to the enemy in Tora Bora. There was no way to bring a lot of U.S. power to bear in a timely way, so that a decision was made to conduct the operation as we did it.

Certainly, some escaped where we didn't think they were going to escape, and we learned a lot of, a lot of valuable lessons like you're going to do in war. There is not going to be a perfect, a perfect battle.

MIKLASZEWSKI: Was that a major disappointment to you that he escaped Tora Bora?

MYERS: It's always a disappointment when we don't get the people we want, and we don't capture or kill as many as we can. So, yes, it was a -- a major disappointment. You know, I think we understood this was going to be a series of events, and some of those, when we conducted Operation Anaconda, we worked very hard not to repeat some of the same mistakes which we had in the first, first big battle.

MIKLASZEWSKI: Could it have been done differently?

MYERS: Well, again, I would subscribe not in a timely manner, and timeliness was the issue there, and we just couldn't bring the forces to bear. We did not have forces on the ground at Baghram like we do today. We didn't have the lift capability in there to bring people up into, into a region. Remember, it's wintertime now. It's, like I said, the conditions there were very tough, and we figured our Afghan partners were the best ones to take the fight to the enemy there.

MIKLASZEWSKI: Can the U.S. ever declare victory in the war on terrorism as long as Osama bin Laden and his top commanders are on the loose?

MYERS: I would say, even if you got Osama bin Laden and some of his top commanders, that it's going to be hard to declare victory. Remember, the President set out very early on three basic things he wanted to do on the war on terrorism: one is to degrade, and disrupt, and defeat international terrorist organizations; two, to divide safe havens; and, three, to keep weapons of mass destruction from falling into terrorist hands.

Those are, those are the broad strategic goals that we have to march towards. Taking care of the senior leadership doesn't mean that al Qaida is going to go away, and so this is going to be a very long and protracted engagement with the adversary, using all instruments of national power, not just the United States military. It's going to be more than us.

MIKLASZEWSKI: Speaking of weapons of mass destruction, does the U.S. have sufficient evidence to attack Iraq?

MYERS: I'm not going to talk, talk about whether we have evidence to attack. I can talk about the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction program. For certain, we know they have chemical and biological weapons that they continue to conduct research and development on both of those types of weapons and that they have conducted research fairly recently on how to weaponize them and deliver them, which requires some sophisticated research & development.

We also know they have an intense interest in nuclear weapons, and that's what we know.

MIKLASZEWSKI: Is that sufficient to invade Iraq?

MYERS: That decision would be the President's, not Dick Myers'.

MIKLASZEWSKI: And --

MYERS: But as you connect it to the war on terrorism, you do have to worry about those, those folks, whether they be nation states or others that have weapons of mass destruction that are still doing research on them, that they're looking to weaponize them, you have to worry about them because the one thing about September 11th that is clear is that the intent of our adversary, in this case al Qaeda, is to absolutely do away with our way of life, and they killed about 3,000 on September 11th. If they could kill tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, my guess is they would do it, and the way you do that is weapons of mass destruction.

So you have to worry about people that have them and that are refining them and people that want them. I think that's a, that's a real issue.

MIKLASZEWSKI: There's been a lot of reporting, too, recently, that senior U.S. military leaders have been reluctant to go along with an aggressive invasion plan of Iraq. Have you heard that kind of discussion among senior military leaders and are you one of those leaders reluctant to undertake an invasion of Iraq at this point?

MYERS: I like the way you asked that question because have I heard that sort of reluctance. In the conversations that I have with the other Joint Chiefs of Staff and with all of the other people that I interact with on a daily basis, weekly basis or whatever, that's not what we talk about. I think the articles are not accurate in that sense, and so -- and it also goes back to why -- what you expect out of your military.

In this country, the military provides advice on -- military advice to the decision-makers up to the President, and what action we take is not necessarily -- is not the military choice, it's the President's choice on what action we take. Our job is to provide the best military advice we can.

MIKLASZEWSKI: The Saudi government just recently said that they would not support the U.S. military in an invasion of Iraq. Could the U.S. military successfully invade Iraq, overthrow Saddam Hussein without the support of neighboring Saudi Arabia.

MYERS: I can't go in and talk about Iraq or any possible invasion. That's just getting too much into operational matters. I would just say this, though, that we've had a great partnership on the war on terrorism with the Saudi government. We have supported this in many, many ways. Before that, this relationship goes back a long, long ways, I'm confident that we'll continue to get the support from the Saudi government.

MIKLASZEWSKI: Even if the U.S. should invade Iraq.

MYERS: Well, I don't want to talk about the invasion piece. I just can't.

MIKLASZEWSKI: Okay. Finally, where is the war on terrorism headed next? From an earlier description, you sound like this, America is going to be in a perpetual state of war against terrorism.

MYERS: I think it'll be a long hard-fought war. There are many terrorist groups out there. We know that many of them are trying to acquire bigger and better weapons, so, yes, my view is this could go on for some time, some time to come. Or it's headed, you know, we helped the government of the Philippines, we are still helping them principally earlier on against Abu Sayyef group, now to train their own armed forces to deal with terrorist organizations inside their country.

We're doing the same in Georgia. We've done the same in Yemen, and we'll continue to look for opportunities to help other countries control terrorism inside their own borders, and we'll continue to hunt for the al Qaida leadership.

MIKLASZEWSKI: And will the U.S. ever be able to declare victory on the war on terrorism?

MYERS: Well, that's an unknown. I don't know if we can do that. There are a lot of other conditions that have to change to be able to declare victory. I think, I think for as long as I'm in this chair that we probably won't be able to do that. This is going to take some time.

I think the Vice President has said it could take, you know, eight/ten years. I don't remember his exact words, but I think everybody has a view that this is going to be a long process, involving defending the United States and our friends and allies as best we can and also taking the fight to the adversary.

We certainly found out on September 11th that a good defense is not the only thing you need.