Flight of the Intruder

Frank Eugene Corder seemed to know exactly how he wanted to die. Sometime before midnight on Sept. 11, he stole a single-engine plane from an airport north of Baltimore headed south to Washington, flew over the National Zoological Park and down to the Mall, probably using the Washington Monument as a beacon. As he neared the famed obelisk, he banked a tight U-turn over the Ellipse, came in low over the White House South Lawn, clipped a hedge, skidded across the green lawn that girds the South Portico and crashed into a wall two stories below the presidential bedroom. Corder was killed on impact.

The scare was barely lessened by the fact that the Clintons had fortunately been spending the night across Pennsylvania Avenue at Blair House while White House workers repaired faulty duct work. Or that Corder, by all accounts, appears to have been on only a suicide mission and was not angry with Clinton or his policies. The unlikely incident confirmed all too publicly what security officials have long feared in private: the White House is vulnerable to sneak attack from the air. "For years I have thought a terrorist suicide pilot could readily divert his flight from an approach to Washington to blow up the White House," said Richard Helms, CIA director from 1966 to 1972. "It has been said that the Secret Service is primed for just such a venture. Perhaps so, but the episode this week hardly gives one much confidence."

Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, who oversees the Secret Service, launched an immediate investigation into the flight and how to prevent it from recurring. Yet the threat from the air has been a secret worry for some time. The CIA often war-gamed terrorist attacks on the 18-acre White House complex and concluded each time that little could be done, short of installing unsightly Gatling guns on the roof. During the Gulf War, uniformed air-defense teams could be seen patrolling the top floor with automatic rifles or shoulder-mounted ground-to-air missiles. In theory the air-defense teams could take out a threatening plane if it could be spotted, identified and targeted in time. In practice, the notion of firing heavy weapons in an urban area is probably unwise, particularly when one can stand on the South Lawn and watch plane after plane taking off and landing at nearby National Airport. Heat- seeking missiles have been known to find targets other than those intended for destruction. In any case, at nearly 2 a.m. on that Monday, neither theory nor practice was tested. Corder's low-flying, small Cessna gave White House security personnel just enough time to dive out of the way.