[Intro FX: 911 Calls, Firefighter Radio Communications, Flight Attendant Calls]
On September 11th, 2001, terrorists attacked the United States when they flew hijacked commercial jets into both towers of the World Trade Center in New York, and the Pentagon in Washington DC. A suicide attack by a fourth airliner, United Airlines Flight 93 bound for Washington DC, was heroically foiled by passengers, but the plane crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. All total, 2,996 people were killed and more than 6,000 people were injured. Mothers lost their sons. Brothers lost sisters, and sisters, their brothers. Children lost their moms and dads. Heroes lost their lives.
These are the best-known events of September 11th, a day that would come to be known simply as 9/11. A number of reports on other supposed attacks on 9/11, like Dan Rather’s report of a car bomb at the State Department, later turned out to be false, based on faulty information not vetted before airtime on a day when reported events went straight to air. I was in the media that day and broadcasting live when the attacks happened, and I can tell you from my personal experience that it was common on September 11th for someone to come right into my studio and shout updates, “They just hit the Pentagon!” and without much fact checking at all, we went right on the air with it. The events of the day were fast and furious and the need to keep the public informed, and most importantly, safe, was paramount. Clarifications and apologies for erroneous information could be made later.
There are other theories on the events of 9/11, some of them intriguing, many of them outlandish. You’ve likely heard many of them. Thermite in the World Trade Center, brought down in a controlled demolition. A cruise missile struck the Pentagon. Building 7. Some claim the US government orchestrated the events of 9/11, others claim they simply knew in advance and let it happen anyway. Those who are predisposed to believe in these theories, for whatever reason, will be happy to tell you all about their pet hypothesis. Just ask them.
With all due respect, what you’re about to hear is different. My interest in this topic stems from a true crime vantage point. This is not an examination of terrorism or a conspiracy theory conjured from thin air. There will be no unsourced innuendo or accusations. There will be no allegations on complicated topics from accusers with questionable qualifications. I won’t try to convince you about controlled demolitions because I am not a demolitions expert and the topic is above my pay grade. I can’t talk about things I don’t know enough about. What I can do is supply you with names, publications, and dates which you can check yourself, in an effort to highlight one question which, in my opinion, has never been conclusively answered.
When it’s a head of state, we use the word assassination, but from my true crime perspective, the question is: Did terrorists attempt to murder George W. Bush, the American President, on September 11th, 2001?
Tales of True Crime, episode 13:
Did Terrorists Try to Assassinate George W. Bush on September 11th?
Think back on the morning of September 11th, 2001. President George W. Bush was visiting Sarasota, Florida. Remember that? Later in the day, as the President read to school children, Chief of Staff Andy Card would interrupt story time to inform him of the attacks on America, a video clip of which would be replayed countless times in the years to come, but this tale starts in the hours prior to the attacks.
The previous night, September 10th, 2001, President Bush had accommodations at the Colony Beach and Tennis Resort on Longboat Key, a barrier island off the coast of Sarasota. In 2018, in a story about an effort to redevelop the site, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune described The Colony as “vermin and termite infested,” and later that summer the site was razed with plans to build a new five-story hotel, but in 2001, the resort was still considered prestigious enough to host the presidential entourage.
The President, who traveled a lot and had become something of a physical fitness buff during his time in office, frequently invited local dignitaries to join him on his morning run in whatever town he was visiting. He had plans to jog with reporters and local officials on the morning of September 11th, a group which included Longboat Key Fire Marshal Carroll Mooneyhan. The morning jog happened as planned. The President’s group covered 4 ½ miles in 42 minutes. Hours later, President Bush arrived to read to the children at Emma Booker Elementary School in Sarasota just as the attacks in New York were beginning to unfold.
The official account of the remaining events of the day is well-known. The World Trade Center. The Pentagon. Shanksville.
In the aftermath of the attacks, President Bush gave his first address to the nation from the school, before being whisked away on Air Force One to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. Secret Service agents carried Vice President Dick Cheney, tip-toes dragging, to a bunker under the White House in Washington DC. But something that happened earlier at the Colony Beach Resort would surface in a newspaper article 15 days later, and today it is a little-known story that deserves further scrutiny.
An Unexpected Interview with the President
In the days after the 9/11 attacks, Shay Sullivan was the City Editor for the Longboat Observer, a tiny weekly paper that covered the local happenings on Longboat Key. Sometime in the two weeks following 9/11, Sullivan attended a firefighters union meeting where Longboat Key Fire Marshal Carroll Mooneyhan was also in attendance. Sullivan overheard Mooneyhan, in a tone he would later describe as “earnest,” telling a story to a colleague.
Sullivan, whose boss had prudently counseled him to “tell the truth” and “write the facts” in his reporting, chatted briefly with Mooneyhan, then filed his story and departed for a planned vacation with his parents.
On September 26th, 2001, fifteen days after the attacks, just as he was settling into his hotel room at Islands of Adventure, Shay Sullivan’s story was published in the Longboat Observer, detailing what he had heard.
By now, most everyone knows President George W. Bush began that fateful day, September 11th, on Longboat Key, but the FBI is now investigating whether terrorists also began that fateful day here on the island.
At about 6 am September 11th, Longboat Key Fire Marshall Carroll Mooneyhan was at the front desk of the Colony Beach & Tennis Resort as Bush prepared for his morning jog. From that vantage point, Mooneyhan overheard a strange exchange between a Colony receptionist and security guard.
A van occupied by men of Middle Eastern descent had pulled up to the Colony stating they had a “poolside” interview with the president, Mooneyhan said. The self-proclaimed reporters then asked for a Secret Service agent by name. Guards from security relayed the request to the receptionist, who had not heard of either the agent or plans for an interview.
The receptionist gave the phone […] to a nearby Secret Service agent, who said the same thing — no one knew of an agent by that name or of any poolside interview.
The agent told the occupants of the van to contact the president’s public relations office in Washington DC, and turned them away from the premises.
Shay Sullivan has said, at the time, he didn’t know what to think of the story he overheard from Carroll Mooneyhan. He was writing a story about a conversation Carroll Mooneyhan had claimed to overhear between a receptionist and a security guard at the Colony Beach resort. On its face, it was second-hand information and it would be a story that was easy to dismiss. However, in a 10th anniversary interview in 2011, Shay Sullivan said he was convinced.
I believed it more than usual, because he was not telling it to me directly. He was telling a colleague.
Middle Eastern men show up unannounced and claim to have an interview with the President on the morning of September 11th, 2001. Could it have been a legitimate misunderstanding with an actual news crew? If it was, no reporter has ever come forward to claim responsibility for the misunderstanding. Could it be a case of braggadocio from a firefighter, exaggerating something he heard to impress colleagues? It’s a possibility.
But as he watched the news in his hotel room that night, Shay Sullivan saw something else that made him, and many others, wonder if an actual assassination attempt had been made on George W. Bush that morning at the Colony Beach Resort.
Ahmad Massoud and the Camera Bomb
Two days before 9/11, on September 9th, 2001, Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, was assassinated by two suicide operatives posing as journalists. Massoud had been a guerilla resistance fighter against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the eighties, and when the Taliban took control of the country, he became their chief antagonist, committed to resisting Al Qaeda and the Taliban. In the days leading up to 9/11, Al Qaeda sought to take him out under the expectation that the Northern Alliance would be an ally with the United States post-September 11th.
The attackers, who had come with fake Belgian passports and a letter of introduction from an Islamic group in London, claimed to represent a TV station in the United Arab Emirates. It would later be discovered the TV station did not exist. They waited more than a month for an interview with Massoud. According to a former Massoud aide, they got very impatient on September 8th, 2001 (we now know why) and threatened to leave if an interview with Massoud was not arranged in the next 24 hours. On September 9th, they were finally granted their interview.
The supposed journalists started the interview with odd, confrontational questions. “Why are you against Osama Bin Laden? Why do you call him a killer?”
A moment later, they each exploded bombs, one hidden in the camera and another disguised as a battery pack. Ahmad Shah Massoud was critically injured and died in a helicopter on the way to a hospital in Tajikistan.
Terrorism experts mostly agree the attack on Massoud was a pre-emptive attack. Al Qaeda was less than two days away from staging the most cataclysmic terrorist attack ever, and they took Massoud out because they knew he would be a powerful ally when the US military came calling in Afghanistan after 9/11.
Is it possible they tried to assassinate the American President in the same manner as Massoud just two days later? With a fake news crew and a camera bomb?
That night, Shay Sullivan couldn’t stop thinking about the report of Massoud’s assassination.
I couldn’t sleep. It was like a plot twist in a movie. I was suddenly convinced our country had narrowly escaped a presidential assassination on 9/11. As horrendous as that day was, it is terrifying to think of how much worse things could have been.
In the days immediately after 9/11, there were reports of Middle Eastern men who were supposedly up to all kinds of nefarious things, and almost without exception, the allegations later proved false. But people were worried, and the news cycle didn’t help. Just a week after 9/11, someone sent anthrax to media outlets in New York and Florida. A few months later, a mentally ill young man from Minnesota planted pipe bombs in mailboxes in the midwest, intending for the location of the pipe bombs to depict a smiley face on the map. Barely a year later, the DC Sniper attacks terrified the Washington DC area. And with each new event, the media trumpeted new fears and concerns. News consumers were overloaded with new threats and breaking news, and the story of an assassination attempt on 9/11 soon became just another among hundreds of alleged plots against America, lost in the noise.
Carroll Mooneyhan went silent the day after the Longboat Observer story was published.
Sullivan said:
Maybe he had exaggerated. Or maybe he was ordered to stop talking about it. We seemed to get the same order when Secret Service agents visited Executive Editor Lisa Walsh and I. They suggested we back off the story, which in my mind made it more real.
Mooneyhan would later deny saying the things that Sullivan reported, as detailed in a story by Susan Taylor Martin, published in the Tampa Bay Times on the 4th of July, 2004. When asked about Sullivan’s Longboat Observer story, Mooneyhan replied.
“How did they get that information from me if I didn’t know it?” Mooneyhan asked, in a waffling sort of denial.
According to Martin’s story, all the Longboat Key Observer and Carrol Mooneyhan could agree on is that he chatted with a reporter (Mooneyhan said he and Shay Sullivan were friends) and that the Secret Service spoke to both of them after the story was published.
According to Sullivan, the intrigue on the Florida Gulf Coast didn’t end there.
Things got even weirder as news about the hijackers came out and we learned some of them trained close by in Venice. Then, we got a report of Mohamed Atta being spotted in the Holiday Inn bar days before the presidential visit.
We also had a strange police report about the FBI being interested in some sort of sheik who owned a Longboat business in the northern plaza. The business quickly changed hands afterward.
We now know the name of the bartender was Darlene Sievers, and she swears Mohammed Atta was in her bar weeks before 9/11. When she saw photos of Atta on TV after the attacks, she recognized him immediately. Sievers told the Tampa Bay Times that Atta came in during happy hour, sat down by himself and ordered a 4-dollar rum and coke. A few minutes later, another man, wearing a brown, aviator-style jacket sat down next to Atta. Sievers said he didn’t speak English and didn’t want anything to drink, so Atta asked for the check, left a 20 bill, and the two men walked out together. Sievers remembered the interaction clearly because she thought it was odd that she got a 16-dollar tip from a customer she barely spoke to.
As noted by Sullivan, several of the hijackers trained in a flight school on the Gulf coast of Florida, so it’s not entirely implausible that terrorists may have been in the Sarasota area on the morning of the attacks.
In the years since 9/11, no firm answers have been given on the events that took place that morning at the Colony Beach Resort, and the questions still linger.
Shay Sullivan, who has left the journalism business and is now a schoolteacher in Massachusetts, is similarly perplexed and without answers.
I couldn’t believe that our little island seemed to be embroiled in international affairs. To this day, I don’t know what was real and what was falsehood produced by the “Crucible”-esque paranoia of post-9/11 America.
As is the case with so many of the events surrounding 9/11, we’re left with more questions than answers. The President’s schedule is public, so it wouldn’t have been difficult to determine where he would be on the morning of September 11th, but if terrorists actually showed up at the Colony Beach Resort with plans to assassinate the President, it was an absolute stab-in-the-dark. Contrary to the plot on Ahmad Shah Massoud, in which an elaborate ruse had been concocted to gain access to the target, the alleged terrorists had not been able to secure an interview with the President and had no access to the resort.
Did they really think the Secret Service was going to just let them through on their word alone? My first reflex is to say, “No, of course the secret service wouldn’t let them through,” but then, I pause to reflect… Security before September 11th was not nearly what it would become in the days and months after the attacks. The hijackers showed up at airport security screenings with box cutters and fake bombs, and were allowed to board planes. Is it so far-fetched to believe terrorists might just show up at the gate of a prestigious tennis resort and see if they could bluff their way through?
In a ten year anniversary story published in 2011, Longboat Key Police Chief John Kintz told the observer, “There wasn’t a single person who could confirm that it happened. We never found anyone who worked at the gate who could tell us that that happened.” To my knowledge, nobody has been able to get a statement out of Caroll Mooneyhan since 2004. The last record I was able to find of Carroll Mooneyhan is years old and he was running a martial arts academy in Sarasota. His denial to Susan Taylor Martin in 2004, “How did they get that information from me if I didn’t know it?” leaves a lot of room for interpretation in it’s fuzziness. If his account of events on September 11th never actually happened– if he just made it all up–why not just say so, considering the implications? Is the shame of admitting he lied about something powerful enough to preserve Moonheyhan’s silence after all these years? Even if he did admit it was all made up, would true believers in 9/11 conspiracies lend any credence to the admission?
Some have speculated the Secret Service may have been running a drill on the morning of September 11th, testing their own agents on duty at the Colony, something they have been known to do, which would somewhat explain the need for secrecy and the warnings to Shay Sullivan and Longboat Observer Executive Editor Lisa Walsh to let the issue drop. If that were the case, it’s a hell of a coincidence that the Secret Service just happened to run their exercise on the morning of the most lethal terrorist attack in history.
Yes it was a terrorist attack, branded as such because of the weapon–airliners–and the foreign nationality of the attackers. It was a conspiracy… of foreign actors. But it was also murder on the most catastrophic scale. Three thousand people were murdered on September 11th, 2001. We don’t know for sure whether there was a plot to murder one more, the American President, on the morning of 9/11, and we likely never will, because so much is shrouded in a veil of national secrecy. If, however, there was a plot on the President’s life, then we know this–the conspiracy to attack the United States on September 11th was wider than we’ve been led to believe, and the people who tried to do it are still out there.
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[music credits]
- Land of Phantoms by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/3966-land-of-phantoms
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ - Scissors by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/4329-scissors
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ - The Dread by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/4491-the-dread
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ - An Upsetting Theme by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/3362-an-upsetting-theme
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ - Cryptic Sorrow by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/3568-cryptic-sorrow
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ - Additional music used via extended license
[feature image] Nicolas Jaramillo via Pexels.com
[sources]
Tampa Bay Times, July 4, 2004
9/11 Looking Back: John Kintz | Longboat Key
Developer wins another ruling on former Longboat Key Colony property
Casualties of the September 11 attacks
As If Reality Wasn’t Bad Enough
The day before everything changed, President Bush touched locals’ lives
http://web.archive.org/web/20030220064542/http://www.longboatobserver.com/showarticle.asp?ai=1874
9/11 Looking Back: Q&A with former City Editor Shay Sullivan | Longboat Key
The world was shocked by the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud
