This is the fourth and last part of a series on the response on the ground on September 11, 2001, following parts on the evacuation of Lower Manhattan, the hospital surge that was prepared for and never arrived, and the nine months of work on the pile. It is a biography of Rick Rescorla, who directed security for the largest tenant in the World Trade Center and who required that tenant’s staff to walk down the stairs on a schedule, in pairs, whether or not anything was wrong. The outcome of those rehearsals is one of the few places in this whole subject where preparation can be connected to a number, and the reasons it worked are institutional rather than personal.

Hayle, 1939, and what the childhood record actually is

He was born on May 27, 1939, in Hayle, a small industrial and harbor town on the north coast of Cornwall, and the date and place are consistent across every source I checked, including the compiled reference entry, the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, and an article published by the United States Army. The given names are recorded in two orders, since Wikipedia’s entry has him as Cyril Richard Rescorla while the 9/11 Memorial’s own blog post about him uses Richard Cyril Rescorla, and I have not found a document that settles which order appears on the birth registration. He was known as Rick throughout his adult life and is recorded under that name in the Army and memorial accounts of him. Those few items are the extent of what I would defend without qualification about his origins, which is worth saying at the start of a piece carrying this many checkable claims.

Accounts of the household describe him growing up with his grandparents and his mother, who worked as a housekeeper and companion to elderly people, and this comes through the biographical literature rather than through any public record I could examine. Hayle during the war years had foreign troops in it, and compiled accounts state that in 1943 the town served as a headquarters location for American forces preparing for operations in Europe, which is consistent with the general history of Cornish ports and camps in that period. The stories about the boy watching American soldiers, being given equipment or attention by them, and deciding then that soldiering was what he wanted, are anecdote recounted by biographers and by people recalling their own childhoods decades afterward. I am not going to write them in the declarative voice, because the difference between a documented motive and a remembered one matters more in this article than it would in a magazine profile.

What can be said about the decision itself is narrow. Britain still had National Service at the time, so every young man faced conscription for two years, and enlisting voluntarily for a longer engagement was a recognized way to get better treatment and a choice of arm. Published accounts say he left Hayle around 1956 or 1957, aged seventeen, and took the voluntary route rather than waiting to be called up, and the sources disagree about the year in a way I will come back to in the next section. His county at the time had little industrial employment left and a long tradition of sending its young men abroad to work, in hard rock mining above all, so leaving Hayle at seventeen for the army was an ordinary course for someone in his position rather than a remarkable one.

The class of evidence for everything in this section is memoir rather than public record. Almost all of it traces back to James Stewart’s book Heart of a Soldier, published by Simon and Schuster in 2002, which was built from interviews with his widow, with his closest friend Daniel Hill, and with people who knew him in Cornwall, and which grew out of a profile Stewart wrote for The New Yorker earlier the same year. Yale’s own account of a 2013 talk Stewart gave on campus confirms that the magazine piece came first and that the book followed from it. Stewart is a Pulitzer winner and the reporting is serious, and it is still interview-based reconstruction of a childhood by a writer who never met the subject, so anything in the early chapters should be attributed to him rather than presented as record.

The British service years, Cyprus and Northern Rhodesia

The Army article published by the United States Army in 2015 states that he enlisted in the British Army in 1957, served as a paratrooper, and was stationed in Cyprus and in Northern Rhodesia until his discharge in 1960. The Wikipedia infobox gives his British service years as 1956 to 1960, and a secondary compilation describes him leaving Hayle in 1956 at seventeen and enlisting in 1957 after a period of other work, so the one-year discrepancy probably reflects the difference between leaving home and signing on. Both the Army article and the compiled references place him in the Parachute Regiment for his training, and several accounts say he then served with an intelligence unit in Cyprus rather than in a line parachute battalion, which is the kind of detail that would be settled by his British service record and not by any source I can reach.

The Cyprus posting sat inside the Cyprus Emergency, which was the British counterinsurgency campaign against EOKA, the organization fighting for the end of British rule and for union with Greece, and which ran from the mid-1950s until Cypriot independence in 1960. British soldiers in that campaign conducted cordon and search operations, road checks, internment and interrogation, and the conduct of the campaign has been the subject of sustained criticism and of litigation in the decades since. His British decorations are listed in compiled sources as including the General Service Medal with the Cyprus clasp, which is a campaign award rather than a decoration for gallantry and indicates service in the theater rather than any particular action.

At the end of his engagement he joined the Northern Rhodesia Police as an inspector on a three-year contract, and the dates given consistently are 1960 to 1963. Northern Rhodesia was a British colonial territory and is now Zambia, which became independent in 1964, and the Northern Rhodesia Police was the territorial colonial force, performing ordinary policing alongside paramilitary internal security duties in a territory where the African majority had no meaningful political franchise and where a nationalist movement was growing through exactly those years. A critical piece published on the Medic in the Green Time site notes that very little detail about his specific duties as an inspector is publicly available and reasons from the general character of colonial policing to what those duties probably involved, and I want to mark that clearly as inference by a commentator rather than as anything documented about him. Where a service is judged differently now than it was then, the honest treatment is to name the political context accurately, note that the detail of one man’s part in it is not on the public record, and leave it there.

Two smaller points belong here because they are routinely stated loosely. The first is that the Wikipedia infobox lists service with the Metropolitan Police Service in London in 1963, between Northern Rhodesia and his departure for the United States, and I found no independent confirmation of that, so treat it as unconfirmed. The second concerns his own publisher’s jacket copy, which describes him joining the British Army to fight a colonial war in Rhodesia, a sentence that does not match the service record laid out above, because the army service was in Cyprus and the African service was as a colonial police inspector in a different territory from Southern Rhodesia. The loosening starts that early and in that respectable a place, which is a reason to check the specifics in this story against something better than book jackets and award citations written for ceremonies.

Northern Rhodesia is also where he met Daniel Hill, an American whose description varies across sources between a Special Forces officer, a soldier and a mercenary, and whose friendship with Rescorla lasted the rest of his life and produced most of the surviving testimony about his thinking on security. Hill encouraged him to come to the United States and enlist, according to both the Army article and Stewart’s reporting, and Hill is the source, directly or through Stewart, for a large share of what is published about the World Trade Center years. A reader should hold that dependence in mind throughout, because a single well-placed witness recalling private conversations after the events he is describing is a specific and limited kind of evidence.

The United States Army, the Ia Drang, and the photograph on the cover

He arrived in the United States and enlisted in the United States Army in 1963, taking basic training at Fort Dix according to the Army’s own article on him, and was then selected for Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia. The graduation year is given as 1964 in one published account and as 1965 in another, and since he deployed with the 1st Cavalry Division in 1965 either is possible depending on which course and which commissioning date is being counted, so I am leaving it as a commissioning in 1964 or 1965 that the sources do not resolve. He was assigned as a platoon leader to Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, in the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), and he was still a British citizen when he went to Vietnam, becoming an American citizen in 1967 according to the 9/11 Memorial’s account.

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency page on the Ia Drang Valley incident identifies him, by initials and surname, as a second lieutenant and platoon leader in the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division, on November 16, 1965, which is as close to a primary confirmation of unit and rank as I was able to get. The fighting in the Ia Drang valley ran from November 14 to November 18, 1965, and it involved two separate actions that are often collapsed into one. The first was at Landing Zone X-Ray, where the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, under Lieutenant Colonel Harold Moore, landed on November 14 and fought a numerically superior North Vietnamese force, with elements of 2nd Battalion arriving to reinforce from the evening of November 14 onward. The second was at Landing Zone Albany on November 17, where the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, under Lieutenant Colonel Robert McDade, was ambushed while moving in column and took very heavy casualties.

Published accounts of Albany, including the summary carried by We Are The Mighty, describe Rescorla’s company being brought back in to reinforce after the ambush and describe him as the company’s only remaining platoon leader, leading the expansion of the defensive perimeter before the units held overnight. American losses across the Ia Drang fighting are reported with different totals depending on whether X-Ray alone, Albany alone, or the whole series of engagements is being counted, and I am not going to publish a figure I cannot pin to a stated scope, so for the casualty record I would send a reader to Moore and Galloway’s book and to the unit records rather than to any secondary summary including this one.

His decorations are listed in compiled sources as the Silver Star, the Bronze Star with an oak leaf cluster, the Purple Heart, the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry and the Combat Infantryman Badge, with the Presidential Citizens Medal awarded posthumously after 2001. I could not obtain the official citations for any of the combat awards, and award lists assembled by encyclopedias and by commemorative articles are exactly the sort of thing that acquires an extra medal over twenty years, so anyone who needs that record should request it rather than copy it from a website. One quotation about his soldiering is worth carrying because it is a judgment from a peer who was there: Pat Payne, who was the reconnaissance platoon leader of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, at the Ia Drang, is quoted in published accounts of Rescorla’s service saying that Rescorla was the best combat leader he saw in Vietnam, and I was unable to trace that quotation back to the original outlet, so take it as attributed to Payne and reported secondhand.

The photograph is the part of this section most often stated loosely. The first edition of the Ia Drang book by Lieutenant General Harold Moore, retired, and Joseph Galloway, who covered the battle as a reporter for United Press International, was published by Random House on October 20, 1992 under the title We Were Soldiers Once and Young, and its cover carries a photograph of a gaunt, unshaven infantry officer advancing with a bayonet fixed to his rifle. The identification of that officer as Rescorla is confirmed by the reference entry for the book itself and is stated consistently by 2nd Battalion veterans and by accounts published by the Army, and it is not a rumor. The photographer is credited in several published accounts, including a Substack essay that reproduces the image with a full credit line and an account citing HistoryNet, as Peter Arnett of the Associated Press, with the date given as mid-November 1965, and since I could not reach the original agency caption I would call the photographer credit well supported rather than verified.

Degrees, teaching, and the move into corporate security

He left active duty in 1967 and used the GI Bill to study, and the institutions are consistent across sources: a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree from the University of Oklahoma, both in English or creative writing depending on which account you read, and a law degree from Oklahoma City University. Published accounts say he then taught criminal justice for about three years and wrote a textbook on the subject, and I could not confirm the institution where he taught or the title of the textbook, so both are gaps I am leaving open rather than filling. Nothing I found records him practicing law, and I am not going to assert that he never did on the strength of silence in secondary sources.

He stayed in uniform part-time through all of it. The Army article states that he continued to serve in the United States Army Reserve and retired at the rank of colonel, and Wikipedia gives his American service years as 1963 to 1990, which would put the retirement at the end of that period. For a reader trying to understand his behavior in a skyscraper, the reserve service matters more than the degrees, because it means that for a quarter of a century after Vietnam he spent part of every year in an institution that plans movements on paper, rehearses them, and then criticizes the rehearsal.

In 1985 he moved to New Jersey, settling in Morristown, and joined Dean Witter Reynolds as a security professional at the firm’s World Trade Center offices, according to both the Army article and the biographical accounts. The corporate history matters for anyone citing this story, because the company changed names underneath him. Dean Witter Discover and Morgan Stanley merged in 1997 to form Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and Company, and the firm was operating and being reported as Morgan Stanley by 2001, when it was the largest tenant in the World Trade Center. The 9/11 Memorial’s post describes him as vice president for corporate security at Dean Witter Morgan Stanley in 1993 and Morgan Stanley’s own history refers to him simply as its security director, so the safest way to write it is Dean Witter Reynolds from 1985, the merged firm from 1997, and Morgan Stanley at the time of the attack.

What he brought to the job is visible in what he did rather than in anything he is recorded as saying about method. He treated the building as ground to be reconnoitered, which for an infantry officer means walking it rather than reading about it, identifying the routes off it and the points at which those routes can be blocked, asking which structural elements the whole thing depends on, and then rehearsing the movement until the people who have to make it can do so without being told. That description is my reading of his documented behavior across the next sixteen years, offered as analysis and not as a quotation from him, and the behavior it explains is otherwise hard to account for in a corporate security department in the late 1980s.

The 1990 walk through the garage and the 1993 bombing

The vulnerability assessment is the most embellished episode in the story, so it is worth setting out exactly what the sources support. According to accounts derived from Stewart’s reporting, in 1990 Rescorla asked Daniel Hill, who had counterterrorism training, how he would attack the World Trade Center if he were the one doing it, and Hill asked to see the basement. The two of them walked into the underground parking area without being challenged by anyone, and Hill identified a load-bearing column in the garage as the point to hit, describing in his later telling the method of driving in a truck loaded with explosives and walking away from it. Hill’s phrase for what he saw in the garage, quoted in the accounts that trace to Stewart’s New Yorker piece, was that it was a soft touch.

They then produced a written assessment, and this is where precision starts to matter. The published accounts state that Rescorla and Hill wrote a report for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owned the complex, and that the report pressed for tighter control of the parking garage and vehicle access. The recommendations were costly and were not adopted, and Hill’s account of the meeting with a Port Authority security official, as quoted in several secondary retellings of the New Yorker piece, has them being told that the tenant’s own floors were their concern and the rest of the building was not. I could not find the assessment itself in the public domain, the year is given as 1990 in the accounts that follow Stewart and as 1992 in at least one older compiled version, and the whole episode as published rests on the recollection of one of the two authors, recounted after both the 1993 bombing and the 2001 attack. That is a real qualification and it does not dissolve the substance, because the substance is narrow and checkable in its shape: two men with military backgrounds walked into an unsecured garage under a landmark building, wrote to the landlord about vehicle access, and were refused.

What the assessment did not do is predict aircraft. Its subject, on every account of it I can find, was vehicle access to the substructure and the protection of load-bearing elements in the garage, which is what made it relevant when a truck bomb was detonated in the underground parking on February 26, 1993, killing six people and injuring more than a thousand. The findings that were on paper before and after that bombing, including what the 1993 evacuation revealed about lighting, stairwell smoke and communications, are covered separately in the Communications section of this site and I am not repeating them here.

His part in 1993 is documented in outline and not much more. The 9/11 Memorial’s account states that he was vice president for corporate security at the time and that he led the company’s evacuation on the day of the bombing, and compiled accounts add that he was the last of his firm’s people out of the building, which I would treat as plausible and attributed rather than established. The 1993 evacuation took hours in smoke-filled stairwells with the public address system and much of the lighting out, and whatever else he took from that experience, the record shows what he did next, which was to stop expecting the systems he did not control to work and to start rehearsing the one movement he could control.

The drills, the frequency, and who objected

After 1993 he recommended that the firm leave the World Trade Center altogether. The Army’s article states that he recommended to Morgan Stanley that the company move out because the complex was still a target, and compiled accounts add the commercial detail that office space and labor were cheaper in New Jersey and that he favored a low-rise building there. The recommendation was not adopted, and the reason given in those accounts is a lease that ran to 2006. The popular version of this part has him predicting an aircraft attack on the towers in terms close to what happened, and the support for that is Hill’s recollection of private conversations between two friends, published after the fact, which is not the same class of evidence as the written garage assessment and should not be presented as a documented prediction. The defensible version is narrower and more useful to a planner, since a security director who concludes that a landmark building remains a target, fails to get his employer moved, and then spends eight years drilling the evacuation of twenty-two floors is describing a professional adaptation to being overruled.

What he required is described most precisely by his employer’s own published history, which is worth citing because a corporate history has no incentive to record that its own staff complained. Morgan Stanley’s history page states that he established an evacuation plan for the twenty-two floors the firm occupied in the south tower, that the plan kept people two abreast in the stairwell so that a lane remained open for responders coming up, that upper floors went first, and that he drilled the people under his protection twice a year. The Army’s article on him states instead that he instituted emergency evacuations every three months, and the quarterly figure is the one that circulates most widely in retellings. Those two published figures disagree, both come from sources with some standing, and the difference is not trivial for anyone citing this case as an argument for drill frequency, so the honest statement is that the firm’s own history says twice a year while the Army says every three months.

The mechanism is the part that transfers, and it has nothing to do with the exact interval, because what the program did was make people walk the route. They left their desks, entered the stairwell, went down in pairs at a controlled spacing, and came back, which means that on the morning it mattered they were repeating a movement their legs had already made rather than interpreting an instruction they had heard for the first time. The towers were not simple vertical stacks internally, and the egress stairwells included points where a stair discharged into a horizontal transfer passage before continuing down, so the number of decisions a person had to make between an upper floor and the street was larger than a floor plan suggests. The National Institute of Standards and Technology examined occupant behavior, egress and emergency communications as one volume of its World Trade Center investigation published in 2005, and that volume is the place to get the stairwell geometry and the evacuation findings rather than any narrative account.

The drills were unpopular, and the sources say so without much prompting. Morgan Stanley’s own history records that the rehearsals provoked the odd complaint and that some people argued they did not need to be so frequent, which is corporate prose for resistance from people whose time was expensive. Amanda Ripley’s book The Unthinkable, published in 2008, treats the Morgan Stanley drills as a case study in exactly this friction, where the cost of preparedness is paid in small increments of inconvenience by people who cannot see the benefit. I would add one thing from my own side of the work, which is that a drill of this kind is not an exercise, because an exercise has objectives, injects, evaluators and a corrective action plan, and this site covers that separately in the piece on designing an exercise that finds real problems. What his rehearsals produced was route familiarity in the legs of the people who would need it, which is a narrower and more mechanical thing than an exercise program produces, and a security department that runs rehearsals without ever evaluating the plan will keep its route knowledge and keep its unexamined assumptions as well.

The morning, the announcement, and the last sighting

The sequence and the times are taken from the Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, published in 2004, which records the first aircraft striking the north tower at 8:46 a.m., the second striking the south tower at 9:03 a.m., and the collapse of the south tower at 9:59 a.m. Rescorla was in the south tower, in the Morgan Stanley offices, when the north tower was struck, and the interval available to him and to everyone else on the upper floors of his building between the two impacts was about seventeen minutes.

The announcement over the south tower’s public address system is a documented matter and it is routinely paraphrased into something stronger than the record supports. The Commission’s chapter on the response records an announcement made over the public address system in the south tower at about 8:55 a.m. stating that the building was secure and that occupants could return to their offices, and it records that announcements in that building were not uniform, with a later announcement advising an orderly evacuation shortly before the second aircraft struck. Morgan Stanley’s own history summarizes this as Port Authority instructions to keep his people at their desks, which is a firmer characterization than the Commission’s wording, and the popular retellings go further still. If the wording matters to your briefing, take it from the Commission’s chapter and from the NIST volume on occupant behavior and emergency communications, both of which quote announcement text and discuss who made announcements from the fire command station, and do not take it from a narrative summary.

One other element of the record belongs here, because leaving it out distorts the case study. The Commission and the NIST occupant study both establish that large numbers of south tower occupants began leaving on their own initiative during those seventeen minutes, without instruction and in some cases against what they had been told, so the accurate framing is that Rescorla’s firm evacuated in an orderly and rehearsed way inside a building where self-evacuation was already widespread. What his drills appear to have changed is the speed and order of the movement for a specific population of about twenty-two floors, and not the bare fact that people left.

He did not accept the announcement, and he ordered his firm’s staff out. The accounts agree on the basic mechanics, which are that he used the firm’s own public address arrangements and then a bullhorn, that the staff went down in pairs as they had practiced, and that he moved through the stairwells while they descended rather than going down with them. Morgan Stanley’s history states flatly that he issued the order to evacuate before the second plane hit, and the 9/11 Memorial’s account has him supervising the evacuation of the firm’s employees from the burning building. Susan Rescorla has described in published accounts telephoning him after seeing the news and being told by a colleague that he was out with the bullhorn, and the content of the last call she received from him has been published in several places, which I am not going to reproduce here.

The singing is attested, and it is attested more loosely than the popular version implies. The 9/11 Memorial and Museum’s post about him states that some people who evacuated remember a calming voice singing God Bless America over a bullhorn, and that is the most solid attribution I found, though it is a collective recollection rather than a named account. Other published accounts describe him singing his own version of Men of Harlech, which is a Welsh military song and not a Cornish one, though it has long been sung in Cornwall as well, so describing the singing as Cornish is loose even if the man doing it was. I could not tie any specific set of lyrics to a named survivor’s testimony, and there is a line about it being a day to be proud to be an American that appears in many retellings without a traceable source, so I am quoting neither. Anyone building a briefing on this should say that survivors recall singing, name God Bless America on the 9/11 Memorial’s authority, and stop there.

The last sighting is recorded in two compatible forms. The Army’s article states that he was last seen heading up past the tenth floor as the tower collapsed, and the 9/11 Memorial’s account states that he was last seen climbing the stairs to make a final sweep for other employees minutes before the building came down. A recollection offered by Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Watson at a dedication ceremony in 2015, reported in secondary accounts, has Rescorla responding to people telling him his own staff were out by pointing up the stairwell and saying there were more people up there, and that is a recollection recounted fourteen years afterward rather than a contemporaneous record. His remains were not recovered, according to the published accounts of his death, and no verified account establishes anything further about his final minutes.

The number, the parts usually left out, and what the record supports

The most important figure in this article needs its scope stated with it. Morgan Stanley’s published history says the firm was the largest tenant in the World Trade Center on that day with almost 2,700 employees in the south tower and another 1,000 at 5 World Trade Center, and that of the 2,606 people who died in and around the complex, thirteen worked at Morgan Stanley. The National September 11 Memorial and Museum’s post gives the same count and describes the thirteen as Morgan Stanley employees and consultants who were unable to exit the building safely, with Rescorla among them. Some published accounts give the figure as six rather than thirteen, and the lower number appears in retellings that describe it as employees who died in the south tower specifically, so the likely explanation of the gap is that the two figures count different populations, meaning firm-wide deaths including consultants and contract personnel in one case and a narrower category in the other. I could not resolve which population each source intends, so the accurate statement is that Morgan Stanley and the 9/11 Memorial both publish thirteen, that other accounts publish six, and that those sources disagree.

Members of his own security staff were among the dead, which is a fact that the survival figure tends to hide. Published accounts name Wesley Mercer, a vice president for corporate security who worked under him, among those killed, and describe other security personnel dying as well, and I was not able to obtain a verified roster of the thirteen, so I am naming only what the sources name and leaving the rest uncounted rather than estimated. The point is not decorative, because the people who ran the evacuation were disproportionately the people who stayed in the building while it was being evacuated, and any agency adopting this case as a model should understand that it distributes risk to the staff who hold the bullhorns.

What the figure establishes is limited and worth stating precisely. A tenant with roughly 2,700 people spread over twenty-two upper floors of the tower that was struck second lost thirteen of them, in a building where the interval between the impact on that tower and its collapse was fifty-six minutes, and the factor that every published account points to is that those people had walked the route repeatedly before the day. What the figure does not establish is a counterfactual, because no one can say how many of them would have died without the drills, and it does not support any comparison with other organizations in the complex, which faced different floors, different stairwell conditions, different warning times and, in the north tower, no survivable egress above the impact zone at all. I am not going to use this record to grade anyone else, and a briefing that uses it that way is asserting a comparison that the underlying documents were never scoped to support.

The biography also has to carry the parts that are usually left out, because a life story with the friction removed is an advertisement and it teaches nothing about how preparedness survives in a real organization. He was seriously ill through most of the years in which he ran the drills, and biographical accounts derived from Stewart’s reporting state that he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1994, had surgery to remove the prostate, and had a recurrence about four years later that was treated with injections and medication that left him swollen and dehydrated, so the man running the drills through the late 1990s was doing it while under treatment for a recurrence of cancer. He had married Susan Greer on February 20, 1999, in St. Augustine, Florida, with Daniel Hill as his best man, following an earlier marriage in 1972 and a divorce, and he was sixty-two years old in September 2001.

The drills were genuinely unpopular and he was not universally easy to work with. Morgan Stanley’s own account concedes the complaints about frequency, and the critical commentary that exists, including the Medic in the Green Time essay that objects to the hagiography around him, points to his appetite for soldiering and to his long association with Hill as parts of the picture that the commemorative version omits. Most published testimony about his personality comes from people who admired him, which means the record on this point is thin, and I am not going to build a character assessment on it beyond what is documented, namely that a senior security officer repeatedly interrupted the work of well-paid people who did not want to be interrupted and kept doing it for eight years.

Three findings come out of this record and they are institutional. The first is that the evacuation worked because people had walked the route and not because they were well briefed on the day, which means the transferable item is the walking and not the briefing, and it also means that a plan distributed by email has not produced the effect described in this article. The second is that somebody had to hold the authority to act against an instruction coming over the building’s own public address system, and Rescorla held that authority because he was the firm’s director of security with a standing plan for its floors, which is to say the authority existed before the morning rather than being asserted during it. The third is that the person who insists on drills is unpopular until the drills are needed, and treating that as a character problem gets an organization nowhere, because the fix is structural: the schedule and the authority have to sit in a document with a named owner and a review date, so that the program survives the departure of the one person willing to be disliked.

This closes the series. Parts one to three dealt with the movement of a district’s daytime population off an island with no tasking authority, with a hospital surge that was prepared for and did not arrive, and with the nine months of work on the pile and the exposure record that was not kept, and the Communications section carries the command and control story and the policy record that followed. For this part, the evidence base is a corporate history page giving thirteen dead out of nearly 2,700 in the south tower, a memorial museum entry giving the same count for employees and consultants, an Army article and a set of biographical accounts that nearly all run back through one journalist’s interviews with two surviving witnesses, and a federal investigation that examined the stairwells and the announcements without examining any single tenant’s drill program. Anyone teaching this case should say out loud which of those a given claim comes from.

What to do at your agency

• Ask your facilities manager or building owner for the date of the last full evacuation drill in the building your agency occupies, and establish from the sign-in sheet whether the people who work there walked the route to the assembly point or were briefed on it in a meeting.
• Pick the one building in your jurisdiction where your own staff work above the third floor, and have a supervisor walk every exit stairwell from the top floor to the street this month, noting locked doors, blocked landings, transfer passages and where the stair actually discharges.
• Write down the name and position of the person authorized to order an evacuation of your facility, and if nobody can answer that question in one sentence, put it on the agenda of the next staff meeting you already hold until it has a name attached.
• Establish in writing whether that person may order an evacuation against an instruction from a landlord, a building fire safety director, a campus authority or another agency, and if the answer is unclear, get it clarified in your emergency plan or your lease addendum rather than leaving it to be discovered.
• Check the revision date on the paragraph in your emergency operations plan or continuity plan that grants evacuation authority, and if that paragraph is more than three years old or predates your current chief, rewrite it and have it signed.
• Name one person as owner of the drill schedule, with a review date, so the program does not depend on the willingness of a single individual to be unpopular, and tell that person in writing that complaints about frequency go to the chief and not to them.
• If your agency briefs this case in training, correct the two errors that travel with it by stating that the drill frequency is published as twice a year by Morgan Stanley and as every three months by the Army, and that the figure of 2,687 is a survival count for one tenant’s south tower staff rather than a tally of personal rescues.

Takeaways

• Rick Rescorla was born on May 27, 1939, in Hayle, Cornwall, served in the British Army from about 1957 to 1960 including a posting in Cyprus during the Cyprus Emergency, and then served as an inspector in the Northern Rhodesia Police from 1960 to 1963 in the territory that is now Zambia.
• He enlisted in the United States Army in 1963 and fought at the Ia Drang in November 1965 as a second lieutenant and platoon leader in Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division, which the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency record confirms for unit and rank.
• The officer on the first edition cover of Moore and Galloway’s We Were Soldiers Once and Young, published by Random House in October 1992, is Rescorla, and the photographer is credited in secondary accounts as Peter Arnett of the Associated Press, a credit I could not confirm against an agency caption.
• The 1990 assessment he made with Daniel Hill concerned vehicle access and a load-bearing column in the underground parking garage, was given to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and was not acted on, and the whole episode as published rests on Hill’s recollection as reported by James Stewart in 2002 rather than on a publicly available document.
• After the February 26, 1993 bombing he recommended that his employer leave the complex and was overruled on a lease that ran to 2006, and the popular claim that he predicted an aircraft attack rests on recollection of private conversations published after the event and should not be stated as documented.
• Morgan Stanley’s own published history gives the drill frequency as twice a year, with descent two abreast, a clear lane for responders and upper floors first, while the Army’s article on him says every three months, and those two published figures disagree.
• The 9/11 Commission Report records an announcement over the south tower public address system at about 8:55 a.m. stating the building was secure and that occupants could return to their offices, and it also records that many occupants of that tower were already leaving on their own initiative before the second aircraft struck at 9:03 a.m.
• Morgan Stanley and the 9/11 Memorial both publish thirteen Morgan Stanley dead out of almost 2,700 firm employees in the south tower, other accounts publish six, those sources disagree, and members of Rescorla’s own security staff were among the dead, including Wesley Mercer according to published accounts.