(9:20 a.m.) September 11, 2001: Barbara Olson Said to Call from Flight 77, but Account Is Full of Contradictions

Barbara Olson. [Source: Richard Eillis/ Getty Images]A passenger on Flight 77, Barbara Olson, calls her husband, Theodore (Ted) Olson, who is Solicitor General at the Justice Department. [San Francisco Chronicle, 7/23/2004] Ted Olson is in his Justice Department office watching WTC news on television when his wife calls. A few days later, he says, “She told me that she had been herded to the back of the plane. She mentioned that they had used knives and box cutters to hijack the plane. She mentioned that the pilot had announced that the plane had been hijacked.” [CNN, 9/14/2001] He tells her that two planes have hit the WTC. [Daily Telegraph, 3/5/2002] She feels nobody is taking charge. [CNN, 9/12/2001] He doesn’t know if she was near the pilots, but at one point she asks, “What shall I tell the pilot? What can I tell the pilot to do?” [CNN, 9/14/2001] Then she is cut off without warning. [Newsweek, 9/29/2001] Ted Olson’s recollection of the call’s timing is extremely vague, saying it “must have been 9:15 [am.] or 9:30 [am.]. Someone would have to reconstruct the time for me.” [CNN, 9/14/2001] Other accounts place it around 9:25 a.m. [Miami Herald, 9/14/2001; New York Times, 9/15/2001; Washington Post, 9/21/2001] The call is said to have lasted about a minute. [Washington Post, 9/12/2001] By some accounts, his message that planes have hit the WTC comes later, in a second phone call. [Washington Post, 9/21/2001] In one account, Barbara Olson calls from inside a bathroom. [Evening Standard, 9/12/2001] In another account, she is near a pilot, and in yet another she is near two pilots. [Boston Globe, 11/23/2001] Ted Olson’s account of how Barbara Olson made her calls is also conflicting. Three days after 9/11, he says, “I found out later that she was having, for some reason, to call collect and was having trouble getting through. You know how it is to get through to a government institution when you’re calling collect.” He says he doesn’t know what kind of phone she used, but he has “assumed that it must have been on the airplane phone, and that she somehow didn’t have access to her credit cards. Otherwise, she would have used her cell phone and called me.” [Hannity & Colmes, 9/14/2001] Why Barbara Olson would have needed access to her credit cards to call him on her cell phone is not explained. However, in another interview on the same day, he says that she used a cell phone and that she may have been cut off “because the signals from cell phones coming from airplanes don’t work that well.” [CNN, 9/14/2001] Six months later, he claims she called collect “using the phone in the passengers’ seats.” [Daily Telegraph, 3/5/2002] However, it is not possible to call on seatback phones, collect or otherwise, without a credit card, which would render making a collect call moot. Many other details are conflicting, and Olson faults his memory and says that he “tends to mix the two [calls] up because of the emotion of the events.” [CNN, 9/14/2001] The couple liked to joke that they were at the heart of what Hillary Clinton famously called a “vast, right-wing conspiracy.” Ted Olson has been a controversial choice as Solicitor General since he argued on behalf of Bush before the Supreme Court in the 2000 presidential election controversy before being nominated for his current position.