Dreeke Robin - Sizing people up : a veteran FBI agent’s user manual for behavior prediction

It was a bluebird day, and the last moment of American innocence. Living was easy, money was flowing, democracy was flowering, the Cold War was over, and the United States was luxuriating in a new type of peace on earth: one that feltas hard as it is to comprehend todaylasting.

Each day transitioned into the next so peacefully and predictably that the eras conceit was that wed finally arrived at the end of historyin a good way, believe it or not.

The first shaky baby-steps to the new world order had been taken in 1982, when Ronald Reagan had finally agreed with the Soviet Union to freeze construction of all new nuclear weapons, by invoking the old Russian motto of Doveryai no Proveryai, meaning: Trust, but verify. He meant that hed only trust the Russians if they could prove they deserved it, with facts and figures.

Looking back, it might seem easy to predict that Soviet Russia would soon disband, but at that time their politics were almost completely unpredictable. Americans in both parties thought Reagans deal was doomed. The left believed that trust based on verification wasnt trust at all, and the right thought that there was no such thing as trusting an enemy. They were both wrong. It worked, and Ive never forgotten the lesson.

But that era was about to end. Trust, and the predictability that almost always accompanies it, would be over in a few seconds.

A colleague and I were standing in front of a food cart in the Wall Street district, just outside our towering regional HQ. It was eight forty-five in the morning, but I was ready for my second round of coffee, because Id come to work at five a.m., excited just to be there at such a great time in the long American experiment of trusting only the leaders who act in our own personal best interests: a political philosophy that we call democracy.

I heard a thud.

It looked like a small plane had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. My colleague said, Poor guy must have had a heart attack.

At least its not terrorism, I said.

We rushed back up to our offices, where almost everyone was standing at the windows, transfixed.

A fire truck from a station below screamed toward the scene, and it felt as if we had front-row seats to an inspiring display of heroism that would carry the country to even greater heights.

But five of the firefighters that I saw in the truck would soon be dead, along with hundreds of others.

Debris started to fall from the tower. But as it fell, I realized with a sick feeling that it was people, because their arms and legs were flailing.

Soon a fireball shot through the South Tower. I yelled, Oh my Godits terrorism! and looked behind me. The room was empty.

Ten agents soon returned, all of them former marines, like me, and somebody said that truck bombs were headed for our building, which was one of the tallest in the neighborhood, and also a federal outpost.

We gotta evacuate! I shouted. I was a relatively new recruit at the New York City field office, in a room filled with senior agents, but this was not the time for concern about overstepping authority.

No! one of the agents cried. If its your time to go, its your time to go!

Id long considered that agent to be remarkably reasonable, but his emotion-driven exhortation was reckless and foolhardy. So I shot it down and helped organize a group that ran to an FBI command post at the base of the towers.

In an act of incredible courage, someone charged toward the towers to help one of the people whod stumbled out of the building, but the rescuer got so close that he was killed by one of the jumpers. People were dodging falling debris and flailing people, but in the smoke and dust most people were invisible or looked like stick figures.

Men and women were risking their lives for strangers, but many peopleunderstandablycowered in fear or just disappeared. Some were dumbstruck, but others operated with the military precision of soldiers in combat.

An agent Id worked with, Lenny Hattonan ex-marine explosives specialist whod worked three prior terrorist attacks, and had just testified in an al-Qaeda trialrecognized the need for a communications network from inside the towers. So he ran into the darkness as everyone else was running out.

It was possible, but unlikely, that Lenny had made contact with my former boss at the FBI, John ONeill, who was on his first day as the head of security at the World Trade Center. John and his team had solved the 1993 bombing of the WTC, and hed spent his last four years at the Bureau working the Osama bin Laden case, trying to convince people that bin Laden was capable of a direct hit on the U.S. At that moment, John was on the forty-ninth floor of the South Tower, commanding the evacuation and refusing to leave.