Agency boss on 9/11 says she was scapegoated
In a new memoir, the head of Massport at the time of the 9/11 attacks says she was “scapegoated” by the media and public officials, forced to resign and haunted by the attacks in the 20 years since.
In a North Shore Chamber of Commerce luncheon Thursday to promote “On My Watch,” Virginia Buckingham recalled her horror when she heard that two planes had hit the World Trade Center — and they had taken off from Logan Airport in Boston.
“When I thought later about the image of 9/11 many of us carried most closely, I always thought about the families of passengers on United 175 … who saw it live,” she writes of the second jet that hit just after American Flight 11 did.
During a deposition for a wrongful death lawsuit filed against her, she adds, the plaintiff ’s lawyer asked whether she knew that the FBI thought it was only a matter of time before there was a terrorist attack.
“No,” she writes, “I didn’t. I didn’t know.”
But retired FAA special agent Brian Sullivan told the Herald Thursday night Buckingham was Massport’s CEO at the time making $150,000 and should have done better.
“It is clear that the potential threat and vulnerabilities were well known to Massport and should have been to Virginia Buckingham as CEO,” Sullivan says, adding she was made aware of a “memorandum of Logan shortcomings.”
That risk assessment, he added, “was passed off to an underling.”
Buckingham was quickly called out. “Within 48 hours of the attacks,” she said, “the first story ran, suggesting that I might be fired.”
Six weeks after the attacks, she was forced to resign, she writes, and was “broken by being blamed for the hijackings.”
But in the 20 years since, she has had “the privilege of contact, even friendship with some 9/11 families,” she adds “their embrace helped me to move forward.”