Photo by Erin Nelson.
Johnnie Sharp, special agent in charge at the FBI Birmingham field office. Sharp was working as an FBI agent in Pittsburgh when United Flight 93 crashed in Shanksville on Sept. 11, 2001.
In the early morning hours of Sept. 11, 2001, Ashley Curry was sitting in a Vestavia Kiwanis Club meeting when someone came in to tell the then-FBI agent that he needed to call the office because a plane had hit the World Trade Center.When Curry arrived at the FBI’s Birmingham office, he found out a second plane had hit, and soon, it became evident that the United States was under attack.
Curry told the FBI three words in the wake of the attacks: “Sign me up.”
Both Curry, who is now the mayor of the city of Vestavia Hills, and the current special agent in charge of the FBI’s Birmingham office, Vestavia Hills resident Johnnie Sharp, talked with the Vestavia Voice about their experiences working for the bureau on that fateful day.
Reuters photo.
Two FBI agents at the site of the World Trade Center in New York on September 16, 2001.
COMMITTED TO SERVICE
The FBI sent Curry to Atlanta, working calls coming from New York and serving at one of the central points of the investigation. He can still remember getting a call from a police officer in New York about finding a carousel slide showing a picture of a cockpit, something the terrorists used to practice their takeover of the plane.
That day changed the entire complexion of the FBI, Curry and Sharp said. Up until that point, the FBI had focused on white-collar crime, gang activity and domestic concerns, but 9/11 forced them to pivot and begin to focus on preventing terroristic acts.
Later in his career, Curry worked for the Transportation Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security, creating security plans and threat assessments in the Northern District of Alabama. He saw how 9/11 forced government agencies to be more concerned with preventing terrorist attacks and keeping Americans safe from those who would do them harm.
“Little did we know how much it (9/11) would change the country,” Curry said.
Sharp, who on 9/11 was a 30-year old new agent stationed in Pittsburgh, spent that morning in Cleveland. His team was working on a joint training exercise, and when they arrived at their hotel, they watched as the second plane flew into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
His team leader at the time told them they would continue training until they were told otherwise. After being told a helicopter that was supposed to pick them up from training was recalled to Quantico, Sharp said his team was told about United Flight 93, which had crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. After terrorists hijacked the plane, passengers fought back and overpowered them, forcing the plane down before it could hit its target, which is still unknown. It was that site Sharp and his team would work for the foreseeable future.
When they arrived back in Pittsburgh, the usually busy city was a “ghost town,” Sharp said. Even if it had been lively and active, it wouldn’t have made much of a difference for Sharp, who spent the next few days in his office.
“For the next 72 hours, I worked and slept at the office,” Sharp said.
Sharp was not sent to Shanksville but was instead responsible for handling incoming calls to the office, chasing down leads and more in the Pittsburgh office. Sharp and another agent were responsible for driving evidence collected at the Shanksville site to the New York office, as part of the PENTTBOM investigation, the name of the FBI’s 9/11 investigation.
Sharp said his wife understood the long hours because he was a police officer when they got married. Sept. 11 also wasn’t the first major case that Sharp worked.
His first major case when he joined the FBI was in Murphy, North Carolina, where he joined a plethora of FBI agents searching for bomber Eric Robert Rudolph, who was later found by a sheriff’s deputy.
While he was upset to not be sent to Shanksville with other agents, Sharp said it ended up being a good thing. He has lost two of his colleagues to cancer that has since been attributed to the toxic fumes they encountered in the “smoldering hole” they found in Shanksville.
Working the United 93 case gave Sharp a “flavor” of the level of resources needed to investigate similar large-scale cases, and he was also able to see FBI personnel from all over the country come together to solve the case.
As Curry noted, the FBI’s focus shifted, and there was a realization the FBI needed to do more to coordinate with other agencies, Sharp said. While they did a great job gathering intelligence and information, they weren’t as great at sharing it with other agencies, he said.
Now, the FBI is aware that the more pressing threats come from inside America, rather than from a foreign enemy, Sharp said. Lone wolfs and homegrown terrorists now pose the larger threat, he said.
“I’m just grateful we haven’t had something similar happen,” Sharp said.
While he had to work the case as an agent, Sharp said 9/11 still impacted him personally. Seeing people stuck at the World Trade Center choose to jump to their death rather than burning to death was horrific, he said.
“I’m human like everybody else,” he said.
Three days after 9/11, when Sharp finally went home for the first time since the attacks, he said he was happy to be part of the team helping make sense of the tragedy, and helping to make the country a safer place in the future..
“I didn’t care to work 72 hours straight,” Sharp said. “This is why I signed up.”
