On September 11, 2001, law enforcement changed—again. On that catastrophic day, I was serving as the detective sergeant at the Maryland State Police’s Frederick Barrack, which is located near Catoctin Mountain approximately forty miles north of Washington, D.C., straight up Interstate 270. This is close to the site of Camp David, the presidential retreat, which is on top of the mountain. Beneath it is another semisecret government facility, officially named “Site R.” Insiders call it “the underground Pentagon.”
We stood in the radio room watching TV news reports, dumbfounded by what we were seeing. I called my wife, who was working the emergency room at Frederick Memorial Hospital, to see if the kids had gone to school that day. “We’re under attack,” I said. “Are you seeing the same thing I am?” I told her I didn’t know when I would be home. We quickly threw together a loose plan to take care of our family.
Suddenly, the red phone rang. Everyone stopped moving and stared at it. The red light blinked incessantly. This phone rang every Friday at 3 p.m., a test. Never any day but Friday. Today was a Tuesday. The phone, a direct line between our barrack and Camp David, was to ring only in the event that the president’s retreat was under attack or in danger of being attacked.
Camp David was protected by well-armed, highly trained Marines. Our role, once that phone rang, was to provide cannon fodder by manning the outer perimeter or checkpoints. I don’t recall who answered that day, but the orders came down: Site R was being fully activated, and our federal government was being moved to various locations. Also, there was talk that much of the population of the District of Columbia was preparing to flee Washington. We were about to receive something like a half-million people running north right into our laps.
There is nothing like the realization that your planning and practice, or lack thereof, is about to bite you in the ass when the real crisis starts. Someone grabbed a three-ring binder from a shelf in the communications room. Inside that binder were detailed plans outlining our entire response effort from that minute forward. These plans had been discussed—every once in a while—but the truth is, we were ill prepared, understaffed, and would quickly become overwhelmed. So we did what we always do in dicey moments—reverted to our long-held, unofficial state police motto: “One riot, one trooper—put your Stetson on.” In other words, never show the public that you’re scared or unsure. Stand tall and get the job done.
In the days and weeks following September 11, we learned that one of the hijackers who flew planes into the World Trade Center had been stopped the night before the attacks by a uniformed Maryland state trooper on I-95 north of Baltimore. Suspecting that something was wrong, the trooper conducted every criminal record check he had access to, but found nothing. So he issued a citation, and the man continued on his way. Had the trooper had access to the FBI watch list, or to any other intelligence databases, he might have been able to detain the man, throw off the timing of the plan, maybe even stop the attacks. We also learned that several of the terrorists had spent time residing in the Laurel, Maryland, area, a fifteen- to twenty-minute drive from our Intelligence Division offices. In other words, the terrorists pulled this off right under our noses, and we never had a clue until it was too late.
But, of course, in the days pre-9/11 none of us would have been expecting anything like what happened—just as we didn’t anticipate the anthrax attacks that began a mere one week later. The FBI was quick to narrow down the source of the anthrax—it was used at the chemical and biological warfare labs at Fort Detrick in Frederick County. But the investigation came too late for five people who were killed by the substance, and for seventeen others who were infected. Once again, we in the Maryland State Police—the MSP—were painfully aware that an evil plan had been formulated and hatched in our state.
The entire country now had a very bad case of the jitters. We in Maryland, which is full of high-value targets, were on edge, now expecting another attack but not knowing where, when, or how. Governor Parris Glendening and the MSP’s Colonel David Mitchell put the State Police Criminal Intelligence Division back in the game, hoping to stave off future attacks. This was a welcome move, but how long would it last? Law enforcement in the United States, particularly at the local, city, and state level, is cyclical in nature—and when pressed, it tends to be reactive.
Like most such agencies, the Maryland State Police has always been hampered by tight budgets and limited resources, even though the workload always seems to expand. Doing more with the same or fewer resources is normal. When I started my career in the early ’80s, every barrack had a crime prevention program, and there was at least one supervisor and one trooper assigned to work on crime prevention programs in the community. However, as the job changed because of some evident need—or oftentimes as a knee-jerk reaction to some new thing that happened—manpower had to be reallocated, and forward-thinking, proactive programs were sacrificed. Troopers within those programs were reassigned, and the programs were soon forgotten.
Such was the case with the Criminal Intelligence Division. In the early 1980s, when First Lady Nancy Reagan declared a war on drugs, the state police were called on to go in the direction the federal government wanted law enforcement to take. With the federal funds we received, the MSP was able to add a few additional troopers—but nowhere near the number needed to staff a newly formed Narcotics Division. One of the casualties of this situation was the Intelligence Division, whose ranks were raided to staff Narcotics. The Intelligence Division was reduced to civilian employees and a couple of troopers and wound up accepting every odds-and-ends job that didn’t fit into any other division’s job description. Intelligence’s new duties consisted of gathering and tracking race-related traffic stop and search statistics to satisfy court-ordered consent decrees, and tracking how many crimes, as outlined by the Uniform Crime Reporting system, were occurring in each of Maryland’s twenty-three counties. The state police were ordered to collect a mass of statistics but weren’t provided with the help needed to complete the task. In other words, the Intelligence Division was reduced to recordkeeping and statistics. It had become an effective intelligence-gathering unit in name only.
Now, immediately following 9/11, I was promoted from detective sergeant to lieutenant and transferred to the reborn Criminal Intelligence Division. My orders were simple: look at the ranks and choose troopers with the needed skill set, then get boots on the ground gathering intelligence. In that, I was to coordinate with allied state agencies and the feds to make sure there were no more surprises. I was charged with training the troopers on covert operations and teaching them to track and infiltrate groups that could be a threat to national or state security.
For many years we had known that money garnered from criminal enterprises in the United States was being funneled back to terrorist states to be used against us. So part of our new process involved locating and tracking the movements of drug dealers, organized crime, and organized theft rings that were operating within the state. Within a few short months, we had seen the word “terrorist” become a regular part of the vernacular. All of us knew our focus had changed, and these challenges were ones we had to learn to prevent and respond to—and fast.