Rick Rescorla


Richard Cyril Rescorla was a British-American soldier, police officer, educator and private security specialist. He served as a British Army paratrooper during the Cyprus Emergency and a commissioned officer in the United States Army during the Vietnam War. He rose to the rank of colonel in the Army before entering the private sector, where he worked in corporate security.
As the director of security for the financial services firm Morgan Stanley at the World Trade Center, Rescorla anticipated attacks on the towers and implemented evacuation procedures that were credited with saving thousands of lives. He died during the attacks of September 11, 2001, going back to help evacuate more people in the South Tower after he had organized the evacuation of the Morgan Stanley offices.

Early life

Rescorla was born in Hayle, Cornwall, on May 27, 1939. He grew up there with his grandparents and his mother, who worked as a housekeeper and companion to the elderly. In 1943, during World War II, the town of Hayle served as headquarters for the 175th Infantry Regiment of the U.S. 29th Infantry Division,
largely composed of U.S. soldiers from Maryland and Virginia preparing for the D-Day invasion of Normandy. A young Rescorla idolized the U.S. soldiers and wanted to become a soldier because of them.
Rescorla was a natural sportsman, setting a school record in the shot put, and was an avid boxer. When a professional boxing match was scheduled between a British boxer and a U.S. heavyweight contender named Tami Mauriello, his friends backed the Briton. Rescorla said "I'm for Tammy" and after Mauriello won the fight, everyone in Hayle knew him as "Tammy".

Military and police career

British military

In 1956, at age 16, Rescorla left Hayle to join the army. At the time, Britain practiced conscription, which required every young man to serve for two years in the Armed Forces. Rescorla, however, chose instead to volunteer. This required him to serve three years as the conditions for volunteers were considered to be better than those of conscripted soldiers. He enlisted in the British Army in 1957, training as a paratrooper with the Parachute Regiment and then serving with an intelligence unit in Cyprus during the EOKA Cypriot insurgency from 1957 to 1960.
Rescorla was awarded the General Service Medal with clasp Cyprus.
At the end of his Short-Service Commission, Rescorla joined the Northern Rhodesia Police as a police inspector on a three-year contract from 1960 to 1963, experiences that made him a fierce anti-Communist. It was during the latter post that he met and forged a "life-altering friendship" with American soldier Daniel J. Hill, who encouraged Rescorla to join the U.S. Army after he chose to accept discharge from the police rather than turn his guns on fellow white colonists resisting independence.
On returning to London, he joined the Metropolitan Police. He later moved to the United States after being unable to settle down in London, being interested in fighting instead.

U.S. military

Upon arrival in the United States, Rescorla lived at a YMCA hostel in Brooklyn until he was able to enlist in the army. "Rick", as he would thereafter be known, enlisted in the United States Army in 1963 and, after basic training at Fort Dix, attended Officer Candidate School and airborne training at Fort Benning. Upon graduation, Rescorla was assigned as a platoon leader in the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division.
Rescorla was sent to Vietnam, where he served under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore. The two participated in the 1965 Battle of Ia Drang, which Moore would later describe in a 1992 book he co-authored We Were Soldiers Once… And Young, ; Rescorla is the soldier pictured on the book jacket cover. Moore described Rescorla as "the best platoon leader I ever saw". Rescorla's men nicknamed him "Hard Core" for his bravery in battle and revered him for his good humor and compassion toward his men; Rescorla jokingly called his platoon "Hard Corps".
He is also mentioned in the book Baptism by Larry Gwin who also fought at Ia Drang. The fourteenth chapter of the book, "Rescorla's Game", describes him as the "Cornish Hawk". Despite this tough image, according to his second wife and widow Susan Rescorla in her book, Touched by a Hero, music was "so central" to Rick's life that he sang to his troops in Vietnam to calm them – something he would later employ during 9/11 evacuations. In the 1965 Vietnam battle, Rescorla sang the Australian version of "Wild Colonial Boy" to give confidence to his troops.
Rescorla's Vietnam War honors included the Silver Star, the Bronze Star with Oak Leaf Cluster, a Purple Heart and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry.
  • Silver Star
  • Bronze Star with one Oak Leaf Cluster
  • Purple Heart
  • Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry
He left active duty in 1967 and reached the rank of colonel in the United States Army Reserve before retiring from the military in 1990. In April 2001, Rescorla was chosen for induction into the Infantry Officer Candidate School Hall of Fame and was invited to participate in ceremonies at Fort Benning.

Post-military career

Education and teaching

After service in Vietnam, Rescorla returned to the U.S. and used his military benefits to study creative writing at the University of Oklahoma, eventually earning a Bachelor of Arts degree, followed by a Master of Arts degree in English, and his Juris Doctor degree from the Oklahoma City University School of Law. He then moved to South Carolina, where he taught criminal justice at the University of South Carolina for three years and published a textbook on the subject.

Corporate security

Rescorla left teaching for higher-paying jobs in corporate security. Moving to New Jersey in 1985, he joined Dean Witter Reynolds at their offices at the World Trade Center in Manhattan.
After the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, Rescorla worried about a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Because his old American friend from Northern Rhodesia, Daniel Hill, was trained in counterterrorism, in 1990 Rescorla asked him to visit the World Trade Center to assess its security. When Rescorla asked Hill how he would attack the building were he a terrorist, Hill asked to see the basement, and after the two walked down to the basement parking garage without being stopped by any visible security, Hill pointed to an easily accessible load-bearing column, and said, "This is a soft touch. I’d drive a truck full of explosives in here, walk out, and light it off." That year, Rescorla and Hill wrote a report to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the site, insisting on the need for more security in the parking garage. Their recommendations, which would have been expensive to implement, were ignored, according to James B. Stewart's biography of Rescorla, Heart of a Soldier. In the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, terrorists would detonate a truck bomb 30 feet from where Rescorla and Hill had predicted.
Following the 1993 bombing, Rescorla invited Hill to New York, where he hired him as a security consultant in order to analyze the building's security. Although no arrests had yet been made in the case, Rescorla suspected that the bomb had been planted by Muslim terrorists or that an Iraqi colonel of engineers might have orchestrated the attack. Hill let his beard grow and visited several mosques in New Jersey, showing up for morning prayers at dawn. Speaking fluent Arabic, he took on the character of an anti-American Muslim in order to infiltrate and interview the other visitors to the mosques. He concluded that the attack was likely planned by a radical imam at a mosque in New York or New Jersey. Subsequently, followers of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a Brooklyn-based radical Muslim cleric, were convicted of the bombing.
Rescorla gained credibility and authority after the bombing, which resulted in a change to the culture of Morgan Stanley. Rescorla wanted the company out of the building because he continued to feel, as did Hill, that the World Trade Center was still a target for terrorists and that the next attack could involve a plane crashing into one of the towers. He recommended to his superiors at Morgan Stanley that the company leave Manhattan office space, mentioning that labor costs were lower in New Jersey and that the firm's employees and equipment would be safer in a proposed four-story building. However, this recommendation was not followed because the company's lease at the World Trade Center would not terminate until 2006. At Rescorla's insistence, all employees then practiced emergency evacuations every three months.
After Dean Witter merged with Morgan Stanley in 1997, the company eventually occupied 22 floors in the South Tower and several floors in a building nearby. Rescorla's office was on the South Tower’s 44th floor. Feeling that the authorities lost legitimacy after they failed to respond to his 1990 warnings, he concluded that employees of Morgan Stanley, which was the largest tenant in the World Trade Center, could not rely on first responders in an emergency and needed to empower themselves through surprise fire drills, in which he trained employees to meet in the hallway between stairwells and go down the stairs two by two to the 44th floor. Rescorla's strict approach to these drills put him into conflict with some high-powered executives, who resented the interruption to their daily activities, but he nonetheless insisted that these rehearsals were necessary to train the employees in the event of an emergency. He timed employees with a stopwatch when they moved too slowly and lectured them on fire emergency basics.
In a 1998 interview conducted on the 44th floor of the World Trade Center that was later incorporated into the short film Voice of the Prophet, which premiered at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, Rescorla recounted his experiences in battle and warned that American military actions abroad could spur retaliation by enemies of the United States. He said, "Terrorist forces can tie up conventional forces and bring them to their knees. Just one man willing to give his life for what he believes in, chooses the time and place and there is no way that any soldiers can be 100% alert."
Rescorla and Hill were also critical of the police response during the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, commenting, "The police were sitting outside while kids were getting killed. They should have put themselves between the perpetrators and the victims. That was abject cowardice." Rescorla felt that if he and Hill were younger, they "could have flown to Colorado, gone in that building, and ended that shit before the law did."