Subscribe to the Free Print Edition!
Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 09/11/06 issue

Roger Cressey | Five years of fits and starts

Cressey was the National Security Council’s staff director for transnational threats

By Patience Wait, GCN Staff

That lovely morning, Sept. 11, 2001, Roger Cressey had a doctor’s appointment before he went to his office at the White House, where he was working as the National Security Council’s staff director for transnational threats.

“My pager started going off,” Cressey recalled. “I picked up a voicemail message, and in that classic understated way my assistant had said, ‘Something has happened, you need to get back to the White House.’ I was on K Street, walking back from my doctor's office, when my wife called and said, ‘Did you know a plane hit the World Trade Center?’ It was at that point that I started running.”

By the time Cressey got to the White House gates, an evacuation of the building was under way. He convinced the guards that he really did have to go to the Situation Room. One of his most vivid memories is of walking into the room and seeing Condoleeza Rice, Dick Cheney and several members of the security council staff watching events unfold.

“We had a very large plasma-screen TV in the Situation Room. I had stepped out of the videoconference to take a call. I was on the call when the first tower collapsed,” he said. “We all paused for a second to watch it collapse.”

He knew at that moment that the country had fundamentally changed, but he could not know how it had changed, or how it would affect him.

The most striking personal effect is that Cressey is no longer in the government.

“I never planned to leave the government. I thought I was going to be a career government bureaucrat,” he said. But the events of that day, and the infighting in its aftermath, eventually led to his resignation.

“When people come into office with preconceived notions about how the world works, how things have or have not changed since they were last there—that was one of the problems they didn't fully appreciate, that the world had fundamentally changed since 1992,” he said.

Cressey started his own company, Good Harbor Consulting LLC, in a northern Virginia suburb. He recruited his White House boss, Richard Clarke—President Bush’s former national coordinator for security and counterterrorism, now known for criticizing the administration for not taking the threat of a terrorist attack seriously—to become chairman of the company.

More news on related topics: Homeland Security, IT Management



GCN Popup