Most Brits can recall where they were, what they were doing, when the death of Princess Diana was announced at the end of August, 1997. I was on holiday in Greece with my family – we were staying at a beach resort where guests could borrow sailing dinghies. I’d just done quite well in a Laser race.
Somehow, the news felt simultaneously far away and close to home. Her public persona was so warm that, like many in the UK, I felt I knew her. It was one of those ‘I can’t believe it’ moments.
When, four years later, in 2001, the first dribble of news came through that a large aircraft had impacted the north tower of the World Trade Centre in New York, I had just started a meeting with the Treasurer of a London-based, Arab-owned bank. One of his dealers rushed in, apologising for the interruption. He implored us to come to watch what he was seeing.
Like most trading rooms, they had a number of screens tuned to diverse news channels. One service was playing footage of the first World Trade Centre impact on repeat. The programme director switched constantly between talking heads, each searching for some way to fill the shocked silence with their own recitation of the few facts known by the public.
They only had seventeen minutes to wait before the second plane hit the south tower.
Wisely and with admirable politeness, the Treasurer abandoned our meeting. I walked smartly back to my office. My fellow pedestrians were stepping it out more than usual. Such news travels fast.
We now know that a third aeroplane would hit the Pentagon just over half an hour later and a fourth would ditch in a field in Pennsylvania after brave passengers frustrated the hijackers’ attempt to target either the White House or the Capitol Building in Washington.
Of course, all major employers in The City closed their offices, concerned that a similar attack might unfold in London. I remember being grateful to board a train home. Post-work departure of the millions of commuters working in London is normally spread over several hours. That day, it was shortened to little more than ninety minutes. People walked, biked, bussed and hitched lifts out of the financial and cultural centre.
While mainstream broadsheet newspapers like The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph had to wait until the next day (September 12) to print their front-page coverage, the Evening Standard rushed out rapid, evolving breaking-news updates on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. The first headline in the early afternoon edition was ‘Arab Hijackers kill hundreds’. In fact, nearly three thousand people were killed in the Twin Towers.
The world feels the impact of this terrorist attack still. This was the only time in its seventy seven year history when the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (‘NATO’) has invoked the much-vaunted Article 5 – ‘an attack on one is an attack on all’. The NATO Secretary General at the time, Lord George Robertson, formerly UK Defence Secretary, read a statement to this effect during the afternoon of the attack. The UK and other NATO members tightened their internal security immediately and closed air space to all but the most strictly security-vetted flights.
Subsequently, the UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair went to war in Iraq to support President George Bush in his ‘War on Terror’. Much of the turmoil in today’s Middle East can be attributed to the fallout from this pursuit of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda and its surviving splinter group Islamic State, led initially by Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi.
The Islamic State may have shrunken from some 80,000 militants in the Middle East to fewer than 3,000 still operating in Syria and Iraq. But its operational model has adapted to widespread operations throughout the world, including especially in Afghanistan, Russia, Iran and Turkey. It fractured into disparate groups no longer controlling swathes of territory, instead pairing with regional factions elsewhere.
Despite this rapidly-evolving and spreading external terrorist menace, NATO appears under threat from within, as America has lately threatened to resign and few of its members have met their declared GDP annual defence budget requirement. Additional external threats loom from different directions as well – now from further away in China and Russia.
For me, in addition to the foregoing tale, this anniversary of the WTC attack will forever remind me of the first of (I hope) two successful operations to replace arthritic thumb base joints. The miracles of modern medicine, eh? Today’s physio appointment revealed the neatest scar on my left hand I have ever seen.
Because of this, you will understand my reluctance to continue to moan about slimy creatures munching on the second (much reduced) crop of courgettes in the garden.
I have much to celebrate and be thankful for.
What were you doing when you heard about this 11th of September, 2001 attack?
