Matthew Klimow publishes 9/11 Pentagon account on 25th anniversary

Book reveals Rumsfeld was unreachable for 30 minutes during Pentagon attack

Matthew Klimow was at his desk by 5:15 a.m. on September 11, 2001. A retired Army colonel, he was executive assistant to Gen. Richard Myers, vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at the Pentagon. Klimow, who entered West Point in 1970 and earned a Silver Star for gallantry during the Gulf War, would spend the day relaying information between senior leaders as the attacks unfolded.

His book, “As the Pentagon Burned,” published to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the attacks, draws on Klimow’s experience to provide a first-person account of the building’s leadership response, the Guardian reported.

Myers was about to undergo confirmation hearings for the chairmanship. He had left for Capitol Hill around 8:45 a.m. that morning with his young aide-de-camp, Capt. Chris Donahue, leaving Klimow behind at his desk with a muted television monitor.

“When I looked up, there was the newscast of the World Trade Center burning and I turned the volume up,” Klimow told the Guardian by phone from Monterey, Tennessee. “I was just dumbfounded because it’s such a clear blue sky. I was in denial. I kept thinking it’s some freak accident, a small airplane maybe, and they were speculating the same thing on the newscast.”

The secure “red switch” telephone began to bleep. On the other end was Gen. Ralph Eberhart, commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command. “That set off alarm bells with me as soon as I heard his voice, which I knew,” Klimow said. “He asked for General Myers. I said he’s on Capitol Hill. And he said, ‘Colonel, it’s urgent. Get hold of him. Get him to a phone. I need to talk to him now.’”

Klimow called Donahue and ordered him to barge into a senator’s office and retrieve Myers. The red switch rang again with what Klimow called “chilling” news from Eberhart: “We have several airplanes in the air on radar. An unknown number of them have been hijacked.”

Then the ground shook. “All of a sudden, Mary Turner, our secretary, jumped up and said, ‘I think the building moved!’” Klimow said. “Then there was absolute pandemonium outside our door. People were shouting, running down the corridor and I yelled, ‘Shut the door, Mary, I can’t hear!’” Focused on his calls, Klimow had not heard Flight 77 strike the building. By chance, the plane had hit a recently renovated wedge of the Pentagon fitted with state-of-the-art ballistic glass — a fortification that Klimow wrote helped reduce the casualty count but channeled fireballs through the building’s long corridors. A National Military Command Center watch officer broke into the red switch conference to confirm the Pentagon had been hit.

Klimow made his way to the river entrance to meet Myers. The two men pushed past police officers who tried to bar their entry and descended into the National Military Command Center, a windowless Cold War labyrinth beneath the building.

A critical friction point emerged between Norad and the air national guard, Klimow wrote. Norad scrambled jets from Langley Air Force Base but initially lacked the rules of engagement to shoot down civilian aircraft. The Secret Service separately prompted the launch of fighters from Andrews Air Force Base outside the normal military chain of command, with a more permissive “weapons free” rule of engagement. The Langley pilots initially flew east — following an erroneous generic flight plan and believing they were responding to a cruise missile attack from the sea — a delay Klimow attributes to a lack of “situational awareness.”

When the Pentagon was hit, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s immediate instinct was to run toward the fire, helping carry stretchers and rescue survivors. Klimow regards it as an act of personal bravery that nevertheless created a serious operational problem. “For 30 minutes, no one could get hold of the secretary of defense when our country is under attack,” Klimow said. Rumsfeld eventually reached the National Military Command Center, where Klimow said he was briefed by Myers on Norad’s response and the rules of engagement, while Vice President Dick Cheney asked him about fighters coming from Andrews Air Force Base under different rules of engagement. “They were talking past each other,” Klimow told the Guardian. “They didn’t realise they were talking about two different responses by the air force.”

The personal toll of the day emerges in the details. Klimow’s son Daniel, then in middle school, had been told by teachers that the Pentagon was under attack. “He had this vision of terrorists running through the hallways with machine guns,” Klimow said. His wife, Edie, a retired Army nurse and major whom he met in Germany, had spent the day racked with anxiety.

It was after midnight when Klimow finally walked out of the smoking ruins of the Pentagon, covered in gray soot and smelling of burning jet fuel. As he drove home to Arlington, Virginia, the silence was broken by a sound he had never imagined hearing over the capital. “It was the eeriest thing. It was the sound of American jet fighters overhead,” Klimow said. “When I realised that my own neighbourhood, my own capital city and my own country had to be protected by a combat air patrol, it was humiliating to think that we had been so surprised by such a devastating attack.”

At his house, Klimow found Edie awake, the lights off, waiting for him. “That’s when we had this big emotional embrace and knew that we would get up the next day and start working on a solution,” he said. “All day I had been a good soldier: stolid, resolute, unemotional, rational, and dispassionate,” he wrote. But arriving home, Klimow added: “We, as a nation, had been humbled… The fighting force of which I was part had been impotent, unable to protect our fellow citizens. The darkness I felt matched the darkness inside my house as I opened the door.”

The work Klimow and his colleagues began drafting on September 12, 2001, eventually became the “war on terror” — a sprawling military campaign that, Klimow told the Guardian, “redefine[d] the global order, not necessarily to the US’s advantage.” Looking back from 2026, he said: “We had little choice but to enter Afghanistan militarily and to make sure that the launching pad for what al-Qaida used to do to us was eliminated from Afghanistan. Did we make wise decisions tactically or operationally? Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but strategically I don’t think in the days and weeks following 9/11 there was any doubt in most people’s mind that this required military action, not just diplomacy.”

Among the book’s ironies: Captain Donahue, the aide Klimow had ordered to barge into a senator’s office on 9/11, later rose to become a major general commanding the 82nd Airborne Division. On August 30, 2021, a night-vision photograph was beamed around the world showing the last US soldier to leave Afghanistan boarding a C-17 transport out of Taliban-controlled Kabul airport — it was Donahue. “Talk about the irony of being there at the beginning and being there at the end,” Klimow said.

Donald Trump was scheduled to mark the 25th anniversary of the attacks at a Pentagon ceremony on Friday, September 11, 2026, the Guardian reported. Klimow, who served for five years as US ambassador to Turkmenistan after retiring from the Army, said the days after September 11 were arguably the last time the United States was truly united. Twenty-five years on, he told the Guardian: “I have a firm belief that we go through cycles like this, and America’s principles, and our resilience, and our devotion to liberty and freedom are unshakable.”