For my parents’ generation it was President Kennedy’s assassination that everyone remembered: what they were doing, when they heard the news come through.

For me it was the death of Princess Diana in 1997 and the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, or 9/11.
Like most people I was in bed enjoying a weekend lie-in when I heard about Diana’s car crash because the story broke overnight.
But 9/11 – arguably the biggest single news event since World War II – broke slap bank in the middle of our working day.
And at the time I was Deputy News Editor of the 'Daily Mirror', based at London’s Canary Wharf.
The News Editor had booked a holiday that week so I was the one responsible for the day-to-day running of the reporters and drawing up news lists to be presented in conference to the editor. In our office at that time there was a large TV screen showing Sky News round the clock and it was here that I first saw footage of the World Trade Center in New York with smoke coming out of the North Tower.
The TV commentary suggested a light aircraft had flown into the building, an interesting story but not something that would stop me going to buy a sandwich for my lunch. The shop was five minutes away and as I returned to my desk I glanced at the screen, which was still showing the same plume of smoke coming out the tower.
Just as I hung up my jacket with my back turned to the TV screen, the second plane slammed into the South Tower. "Did you see that?’ someone said. "A plane’s gone into the other tower."
An argument then broke out as another person insisted: "No, that was just a replay of what happened before."
It was not long before we realised what was unfolding – that America was under attack by terrorists. "That’s Bin Laden," said one of the reporters, referring to the leader of Al Qaeda, which had been carrying out attacks on US and Western targets for years, although nothing ever as spectacular as this. The Foreign Editor called our man in New York Andy Lines, who was actually living outside New York City, to tell him to get to Manhattan as fast as possible.
Thirty minutes after the plane hit the South Tower, a third airliner flew into The Pentagon in Washington. Seven minutes after that America shut down its airspace and Manhattan closed its bridges and tunnels. So Andy could not get to the Twin Towers and we could not fly reporters over from London to cover the story. The Sky News ticker-tape feed then began reporting that a fourth plane was missing, presume hijacked. We all wondered where that could be heading.
The White House? Congress? Where would all this end?
Our office was on the 22nd floor of the tallest building in London, the pyramid tower at One Canada Square, which was right next to City Airport. Over the coming days planes would be coming into land past us all the time, and people started craning their necks wondering if they were flying past or into us. We knew that our rivals had reporters living on Manhattan who would be on their way to the scene – named Ground Zero -- and we urgently needed to find a reporter who could get there for us.
On a story as big as this every newspaper needs a first person despatch from someone at the scene who can convey the enormity of what has happened. We managed to get hold of a decent news agency reporter working for Splash News, whose name was in the paper the next day even though he was not one of our staff reporters.
Meanwhile we began hitting the phones from London. We got a list of companies working in the towers and began calling them up to try and speak to someone who could tell us what was happening. But we found the numbers were constantly engaged (occupied) either because terrified people were talking to relatives on them or the fires that had started in the buildings had knocked out the telecommunications.
Twelve minutes after the Pentagon was hit the intense heat generated by the fireball caused the South Tower to collapse, live on TV.
It was a truly jaw-dropping moment. None of us expected the building to disintegrate like that.
"My God, how many people work in those towers?" was all that we could think about. "And how many had managed to get out?"
Less than five minutes later another plane crashed in Pennsylvania. Was it the one from earlier which we thought could have been heading towards Washington DC and the White House?
We knew fighter jets had been scrambled so was it shot down before it could get there? What a terrible decision that must have been for the President to make. We still thought there could be other planes out there even though flights had been grounded across the country.
Thirty minutes later the North Tower collapsed. The area look like something out of a nuclear winter as a cloud of dust enveloped Lower Manhattan covering the suits of fleeing office workers in dust.
By now the Editor, Piers Morgan, who had been at home recovering from a back operation, had arrived in the office as had the News Editor, who’d cancelled his holiday. We began preparing for conference: Bin Laden’s terrorist organisation, Al Qaeda, had struck the big one bringing down the most famous symbols of American economic power and the heart of its defence establishment.
Fifty thousand people worked in the towers and nobody knew how many were dead. It was just an unbelievable horror, not just for them, but for the passengers on the planes as well. For now it appeared that the attacks were over and we could get on with getting the paper out.
The reporters were busy filing their copy and the production staff frantically drawing up pages.
We wiped out the front page with the single image that the world’s media went for – a photograph of both towers drenched in a fireball of flame with the headline: ‘War on the World’. By 11pm everything was done and reporters were being briefed to get themselves to New York any way they could.
With US air space probably closed for days, they would have to fly to Canada or Mexico and drive across the border. One reporter who was in Los Angeles was told to start the 3000-mile drive to the East coast. As we went for a late night pizza we spared a thought for the reporter from The Times who had chosen to arrive in style for his new posting in New York.
As the embers of the Twin Towers began to cool he was stranded with his family on a trans-Atlantic cruise and would not disembark in Manhattan for another week!

*Anthony Harwood is a former Head of News at the Daily Mirror and Foreign Editor at the Daily Mail

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