Episode Details

Rick Rescorla, Morgan Stanley’s security director and a decorated Ia Drang platoon leader, evacuated about 2,687 employees from the World Trade Center South Tower on September 11, 2001. He began the evacuation at roughly 8:47 a.m., minutes after American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower and while the Port Authority public address system was telling South Tower occupants that their building was safe and that they should remain on or return to their offices. He had rehearsed the movement for eight years, in unannounced drills, with employees descending the stairwells two abreast while a stopwatch ran. He died in the collapse at 9:58:59 a.m. after climbing back up to sweep for stragglers.

The record supports a specific causal claim, not a sentimental one. The National Institute of Standards and Technology found that more than twice as many people died in the North Tower as in the South Tower, and attributed the difference to the sixteen minutes South Tower occupants had between the two impacts. Over 90 percent of South Tower survivors had begun evacuating before United Airlines Flight 175 struck at 9:02:59 a.m., and over 40 percent had already left the building. Rescorla converted that sixteen minute margin into a completed evacuation for one tenant occupying twenty two floors.

His judgment about the target was earlier still. In 1990 he and Daniel J. Hill, a former Special Forces soldier he had met in the Northern Rhodesia Police, walked unchallenged into the basement parking structure beneath the complex and filed a written report to the Port Authority warning that a truck bomb placed against the load bearing columns could bring a tower down. The February 26, 1993 device detonated in that garage, killing six and injuring more than a thousand. That accuracy gave him the internal authority to impose a drill program that the building’s own fire safety plan never required.

What is settled: the chronology, the awards, the drill program, and the aggregate evacuation statistics. What is contested: the precise number of lives saved, which varies by whether the count includes consultants and the roughly one thousand Morgan Stanley staff in World Trade Center 5.

Detailed Findings

Who was Rick Rescorla and where did he come from?

Richard Cyril Rescorla was born on May 27, 1939 in Hayle, Cornwall, a tin and copper port on the north coast of the Penwith peninsula. In 1943 the United States 29th Infantry Division, including the 175th Infantry Regiment, staged near Hayle while training for the Normandy landings. The American soldiers billeted in the town became the fixed reference point of his childhood, and he later described them as the reason he wanted an American commission.

He was raised by his grandparents and his mother. He set a county shot put record and boxed as an amateur. At sixteen, in 1956, he left Cornwall for military service and did not return to live there.

What did Rescorla do in the British Army and the Northern Rhodesia Police?

He enlisted in the British Army in 1957 on a three year volunteer engagement, qualified as a parachutist, and served with an intelligence unit in Cyprus during the EOKA insurgency. He received the General Service Medal with Cyprus clasp. The Cyprus emergency was a campaign of urban assassination, bombing, and rural ambush conducted by a small organization against a garrison that outnumbered it many times over, and it gave him a working education in irregular violence before he ever commanded a rifle platoon.

From 1960 to 1963 he served as an inspector in the Northern Rhodesia Police, patrolling in what is now Zambia. There he met Daniel J. Hill, an American soldier who became his closest friend and, three decades later, his co author on the World Trade Center vulnerability assessment. Hill urged him to enlist in the United States Army. He returned to London and joined the Metropolitan Police in 1963, found the work static, and l