9/11: Moment Rumsfeld knew US was under widespread attack

Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary at the time of the September 11 attacks, has given one of his most detailed and personal accounts of surviving the impact of American Airlines Flight 77 on the Pentagon.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Mr Rumsfeld, 79, described how he was in his office, having just been briefed by the CIA about the two planes that had flown into the World Trade Center, when he felt the building shake and his table tremble. He headed instinctively towards where the explosion appeared to have taken place.

"I went down the hall until people said you just can't go any further," he said. "I went outside and there were little pieces of metal spread all over the grass, and the smoke was billowing up, and the flame was very visible and leaping out of the building."

A dazed lieutenant colonel told him he had seen a plane hit the building and it was at that point, Mr Rumsfeld said, that it "all computed and tied in with New York" and the attacks there.

He grabbed a stretcher and helped carry survivors to where they could receive medical attention. "I was trying to get a sense of what had happened. And I confirmed what had happened. And then your immediate reaction is to try to be helpful.

"Once there were people there that could be helpful, they didn't need me and I could get back. I started to pull together my staff and the military people and went into the command centre."

Before leaving the scene, Mr Rumsfeld picked up a piece of Flight 77 that was several inches long. It is now mounted in his office in Washington.

Once back inside the Pentagon, Mr Rumsfeld declined to leave as the "continuity of government" guidelines laid down. He and his staff had to keep moving. "When a room got too full of smoke we'd move to a different command centre."

Some 12 hours after the attack, Torie Clarke, Mr Rumsfeld's press secretary, asked him if he had phoned Joyce, his wife of 47 years, to tell her he was safe. When he replied that he hadn't, she blurted out: "You son of a bitch."

Mr Rumsfeld admitted: "I never did call her. When I got home at 11 or 12 at night, I don't think I even mentioned it to her. Her comment was that in retrospect she never would've expected me to call. She knew I was busy.

"And I had been told that she was at the Defence Intelligence Agency for a briefing, so she was taken care of."

He recalled approvingly that Sultan Qaboos of Oman had told him shortly afterwards that the September 11 attacks could have been a "blessing in disguise" by providing a "wake-up call that would alert the world" to the threat of Islamist terrorism. The sultan had theorised that the attacks could ultimately have prevented "the possibility of not just 3,000, but 300,000 or 3 million people dying - a weapon of mass destruction, a chemical or a biological weapon, conceivably could kill that many".

Mr Rumsfeld praised President Barack Obama for keeping in place many of the anti-terrorism measures introduced by Mr Bush, despite using language on the campaign trail that appeared to suggest that he would sweep away most of the measures that the Bush administration believed had kept America safe.