'I think it's Al Qaeda': The man who briefed Bush during 9/11 - ABC News & Headlines – Australian Broadcasting Corporation

US President George W Bush listens as then-White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card informs him of a second plane hitting the World Trade Center. (Reuters: Win McNamee)

On September 11, 2001, the White House daily intelligence briefer was standing not far from where George W Bush was entertaining a classroom of children when he watched a plane collide into the World Trade Center live on television.

Up until that moment Michael Morell had been following the US president on an otherwise normal day as he prepared to discuss education initiatives in Florida. He was joined by White House political adviser Karl Rove, press secretary Ari Fleischer and chief of staff Andrew Card.

But after watching the second jet crash in New York, everyone realised this was no ordinary event: America was under attack.

"I was 100 per cent sure that this was terrorism," Mr Morell told the ABC.

Within minutes, Mr Card was making his way over to the president to whisper in his ear the news of what had happened.

The moment, captured on camera and later broadcast around the world, became a defining photograph of the day that shook the United States.

Behind the scenes, there was a flurry of activity at Emma E Booker Elementary as phone calls were made, directives issued and a statement prepared for Mr Bush.

By the time the president addressed the nation with the news that "today, we've had a national tragedy", Mr Morell said everybody in the staff room had been told to pack up and go.

With few details of what other attacks might be planned, the Secret Service's priority was getting the president far from the school and somewhere safe.

President George W Bush and White House staff watch news coverage of the plane striking the south tower of the World Trade Centre while at Emma E Booker Elementary school in Florida. (Supplied: George W Bush Library)

"The Secret Service was really worried … because this [visit to the Booker Elementary] had been on the president's schedule for a while," Mr Morell said.

A decision was made to get the president to the airport and into the sky.

"At that point, I didn't know what was going to happen. I didn't know whether I was going to get kicked off. And I remember the president's military aide came back and he said, 'The President said you're staying with us.'"

As Mr Bush's briefer, Mr Morell was required to provide daily intelligence assessments to the president wherever he was in the world, whether it be the Oval Office, Camp David or his ranch in Texas.

On September 11, Mr Morell had woken at his usual time — just before 4am — and gone straight to work preparing for a busy morning of reading reports.

Michael Morell was the intelligence briefer to George Bush on 9/11 and was a former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency. (Getty: David Hume Kennerly)

About 8am, Mr Morell delivered his briefing inside the president's suite at the Colony Resort Hotel. He distinctly remembers terrorism did not come up, disputing accounts given in the years since that it had been discussed.

About 40 minutes later, he was inside the senior staff van on the way to Booker Elementary when a phone rang.

"Ari Fleischer [answered and then] turned around and said, 'Michael, do you know anything about a plane hitting the World Trade Center?'" Mr Morell said.

Mr Morell started ringing around, thinking a small plane might have crashed in bad weather in New York. A call to the CIA operations centre revealed little more than the scant information he already had, except for one specific detail.

"They did say one thing that changed my thinking immediately … it wasn't a small plane, it was a large commercial jet," he said.

At some point after leaving the school and before arriving at the airport, the news reached Mr Morell and other members of the Bush entourage that a third plane had crashed at the Pentagon.

The symbolic and physical headquarters of the US military sits just outside Washington DC, significantly shifting the scale of the attacks beyond New York.

Mr Morell remembers arriving to an intense security presence at the airport and there being some uncertainty about where to go once they were in the sky.

The Secret Service eventually chose an Air Force base in Louisiana, where George W Bush delivered another statement, before they took off again to an Air Force Base in Nebraska.

Mr Morell recalls being surprised when he was told mid-flight to go see the president in his office on Air Force One.

President George W Bush talks on the telephone as senior staff huddle aboard Air Force One. (Supplied: George Bush Library)

"[That] day was a mixture of the intensity of doing my job and the surreal. And there were different moments of the intensity of doing my job, but one of the biggest was [when] the president asked to see me," he said.

After he entered the room, he remembers Mr Bush turning to him and looking him straight in the eye.

It was somewhere over a stretch of land in North America that Mr Morell was asked a question he will never forget.

"[Mr Bush] said, 'Michael, who did this?'" he recalled.

President George W Bush watches television coverage of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, from his office on Air Force One, on September 11, 2001. (Supplied: George W Bush Library)

"So I said, 'Mr President, one's mind might go to a nation state like Iran or Iraq. And both of them have the capability to do something like this,'" he added, noting he had not seen any 9/11 intelligence prior to the meeting.

"'But doing it is in no way in their interest, right? They have no reason to do this. They're going to get caught. They're going to go to war, right? They're not going to do this.'

Mr Morell said the terrorist group and its notorious leader had been a topic of discussion "more than any other" in the previous nine months. The subject was certainly not a new one to the US president.

Al Qaeda, a designated terrorist group founded by Osama bin Laden, was quickly blamed for the attacks. (Reuters: Hamid Mir/Editor/Ausaf Newspaper for Daily Dawn)

Mr Bush's next question of "when will we know?" wasn't a surprise to Mr Morell either.

"[It's] just the kind of question the president asks you, for which there's no answer, right? So I fell back on the training and the experience of being an analyst," he added.

"And one of the things you get taught as an analyst … is that context is everything … so I gave him some context."

He laid out how long it took to identify the perpetrators behind previous terror attacks, and concluded they could know who was responsible in as little as two or three days, or it "may take quite some time".

"After I said that, he didn't say anything. He just sat there … And I remember starting to feel a little awkward because Andy Card [who was also in the room] didn't say anything either. I mean, it wasn't the moment, right?" Mr Morell said.

"And so finally I said, 'Mr President, is there anything else?' And he said, 'No, Michael, thank you very much.'"

Mr Morell said he later found out the CIA had the same view on the perpetrator of the 9/11 attacks and had shared it directly with Mr Bush.

George W Bush on the phone on September 11. (Supplied: George W Bush Library)

"When I told the president that I hadn't seen any intelligence, the CIA had already figured out that it was Al Qaeda. They just hadn't told me yet" he said.

"What they did is they ran the flight manifests … against our terrorist databases, and there were hits … to Al Qaeda. So they came to the conclusion pretty quickly. It was pretty clear who did it."

After touching down at the Air Force Base in Nebraska, Mr Morell recalled being invited into the room with the president as they called advisors back in Washington, DC.

"At the end of that, the director of the Secret Service was saying, 'We think you should still stay away from Washington. We don't know it's safe,'" Mr Morell said.

"And [the president] said, 'The American people want to know where their president is. I'm coming home.'"

President George W Bush delivers remarks on the terrorist attacks from Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, before departing for Offutt Air Force in Nebraska. (Supplied: George W Bush Library)

The Bush team were on a plane bound for Washington when Mr Morell said he had "the most surreal moment".

"I was in the staff compartment of Air Force One in its old, business class seats, [near] the president's military aide, the guy that carries the nuclear codes, [who] had become [a] friend the previous nine months," he said.

"I saw him looking out the window on the left side of the aircraft and we caught eyes. The lights were dimmed, and he waved me over, so I went over to him and he said, 'Look out.'

Mr Morrell remembered looking out the window on a clear, blue sky and seeing an F-16 plane on the wingtip of Air Force One.

An F-16 escorts Air Force One from Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska to Andrews Air Force Base on September 11, 2001. (Supplied: George W Bush Library)

"He said, that's an F-16, it's from the DC National Guard, there's another one on the other wingtip," he said, noting it was "so close that you could see the pilot".

"In the distance you could see the still smouldering Pentagon. And the military aide said to me, 'Do you know why they're there?' And I had no idea. I'm not a military guy. And every commercial flight had been grounded … So nobody was going to fly a plane into us.

"And he said, they're there in case someone fires a surface-to-air missile at Air Force One on final approach. Their job would be to put themselves between that missile and the president of the United States."

The pilots in those fighter jets were not required to lay down their lives that day. Thousands of others, however, were not so lucky.

"People say to me, 'Did you know at that moment that history would change?' And I said, 'no, I was doing my job'. I was intensely focused on my job, but that's when it really started [to hit me] the magnitude of this," Mr Morell said.

Decades after the tragedy of 9/11, the wake-up call it delivered to America's biggest institutions has not been forgotten, according to Mr Morell.

Flowers and flags on the south pool commemorate the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. (AP: Julia Nikhinson)

"I always have seen 9/11 as a national failure [of] intelligence, policy, congressional oversight, congressional lawmaking, and public attitudes," he said.

Mr Morell added the overwhelming sentiment inside the nation's intelligence agencies afterwards was that an attack of 9/11's scale could not be allowed to happen again.

"That sense flowed from two things. It flowed from guilt that [the CIA] didn't penetrate this organisation enough to learn in advance about what they were doing so it could have been prevented," he said.

"And the other was anger that … the FBI were being blamed for this when we were the only two organisations in the entire US government who were focused on this guy … our warnings over a long period of time, people didn't act on them."

Mr Morell served as the intelligence briefer for Mr Bush until January 4, 2002. He went on to become the deputy director for the CIA and is now co-founder at Aardwolf Global Solutions.

There were many big moments throughout his 33-year CIA career, but he said he will never forget 9/11.

"It's quite possible that in 100 years, historians look back at 2001 and 9/11 is not the most important thing that happened [that year]," he said.

"I think it's going to be really interesting to see how our long-term history judges all of this."