No simple blog post can characterize all the feelings associated with 9/11. I can only pay a simple tribute to the heroes and victims of 9/11 by reading stories related to this dark day in world history.  I am reflective and appreciative of the heroes and my freedom on this day. I teach my kids to do the same thing.

In this post, I pay tribute to Rick Rescorla.  I encourage you to read the stories posted on  http://rickrescorla.com/.

Rick Rescorla, Jorge Velazquez and Godwin Forde – leading the evacuation on 9/11 (Grunwald, 2001)

Below is an excerpt from “A Tower of Courage” by Michael Grunwald from the Washington Post (October 28, 2001).  I chose this excerpt because it has takeaways for CISOs.

___________

After the truck bombing that year, Rescorla had warned Hill: Next time by air. He expected a cargo plane, possibly loaded with chemical or biological weapons. In any case, he insisted on marching his troops through evacuation drills every few months. The investment bankers and brokers would gripe, but Rescorla would respond with his Seven P’s: Proper prior planning and preparation prevents poor performance. He wanted to develop an automatic flight response at Morgan Stanley, to burn it into the company’s DNA.

According to Barbara Williams, a security guard who worked for him for 11 years, Rescorla was in his office when the first plane hit. He took a call from the 71st floor reporting the fireball in One World Trade Center, and he immediately ordered an evacuation of all 2,700 employees in Building Two, as well as 1,000 Morgan Stanley workers in Building Five across the plaza. They walked down two stairways, two abreast, just as they had practiced. Williams could see Rescorla on a security camera with his bullhorn, dealing with a bottleneck on the 44th-floor lobby, keeping people off the elevators.

“Calm, as always,” she says.

In his cell phone call to Hill, Rescorla said he had just spoken to a Port Authority official, who had told him to keep everyone at their stations. “I said: Everything above where that plane hit is gonna collapse,” Rescorla recounted to Hill. “The overweight will take the rest of the building with it. And Building One could take out Building Two.”

That, of course, is not exactly what ended up happening. But by the time the second hijacked jet rammed into the south tower at 9:07 a.m., many Morgan Stanley employees were already out of the building, and just about all of them were on their way out.

__________

The Takeaways

• Learn from previous attacks, including predicting potentially new ones
• Use the Seven P’s: Proper prior planning and preparation prevents poor performance
• Practice, practice and practice incident response plans and procedures
• Adopt a philosophy of changing the DNA of people’s behaviors when it comes to security
• Be prepared to handle “griping” by the individuals you are protecting
• Use the OODA loop in incident response: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act
• Be decisive
• Be calm during incident