JOINT BASE ANACOSTIA-BOLLING –
Twenty-three years later, Gary Greco can still vividly picture Ron Bucca waving goodbye and passing through the Pentagon Metro Station turnstiles.
Greco didn’t know it would be the last time he saw his friend.
As operations chief for the 3413th Military Intelligence Detachment out of Fort Totten (Queens), New York, Bucca and his team of Army reservists reported to Greco, the chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Terrorism Warning Division.
Bucca had nearly finished his two weeks of annual training at the Defense Intelligence Analysis Center (DIAC) in Washington, D.C, but before the New York City-native headed home in August of 2001, he was insistent on speaking with Greco in his Pentagon office about where a terrorist group called Al-Qa’ida could strike next.
“He was very adamant that they would come back to the World Trade Center,” said Greco, referring to Al-Qa’ida’s ties to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. “Our focus was totally overseas. We discussed how Al Qa’ida had attempted to blow up a U.S. Navy vessel in Aden Harbor (in Yemen) several times and failed, but then finally got the USS Cole there in 2000. Ron noted that they kept trying to come back to major targets.”
About three weeks later, Bucca’s premonitions became his reality. In his day job as a fire marshal for the Fire Department of New York (FDNY), he responded to the calls of terror at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
The 47-year-old climbed to the 78
th floor of the South Tower and attempted to rescue victims in the impact zone of United Airlines Flight 175 — the second jet Al-Qaida operatives flew into the towers that morning — before the tower collapsed.
Bucca was one of eight DIA employees killed on 9/11. The seven others — Rosa Maria Chapa, Sandra Foster, Robert Hymel, Shelley Marshall, Patricia Mickley, Charles Sabin and Karl Teepe — died when American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia.
Bucca and firefighter Orio Palmer are believed to have made it higher than any other first responders in the towers on 9/11 — confirmed only by Palmer’s radio calls.
“In talking to his partner (and boss) Jimmy Devery, when they went down there the day of the attack, he said he just followed my dad because he knew exactly where to go,” said his son, Ron Bucca Jr. “He knew the least crowded stairwell where they could maneuver around the building and that’s what helped him get up to the 78
th floor.”
Ron Bucca was so convinced that Al-Qa’ida would return to the towers that he had a blueprint of the World Trade Center at home and would regularly stop there to chat with people in the building.
“The week before (the attack), he was down at the World Trade Center with another fire marshal and he was talking to the maintenance staff there about egress through the basement,” said his wife, Eve Bucca.
Student of history
Eve Bucca said her husband was a lifelong learner who loved to connect historical events to current events.
“He really enjoyed learning, and he enjoyed it for the sake of it, not because it was a means to an end,” she said.
“He was big on educating us about current events. I was probably the only kid in middle school that knew where Yemen was and could point to it on a map,” said Ron Bucca Jr., with a laugh.
Despite this interest, Ron Bucca wasn’t on a path to the Intelligence Community until a near-fatal fall in 1986 changed his course. He was a paratrooper in the U.S. Army Special Forces and a firefighter for FDNY’s Rescue 1 — a special operations rescue company. While attempting to rescue a fellow firefighter trapped in an apartment building, he fell five stories and fractured his spine.
Ron Bucca somehow survived and was nicknamed “
The Flying Fireman,” but his paratrooper days were over.
In 1989, he left the Special Forces to pursue all-source intelligence as a reservist and in 1992 he was promoted to FDNY fire marshal.
In February of 1993, Ron Bucca witnessed the aftermath of terrorism for the first time when terrorists trained in an Al-Qa’ida-associated camp bombed the World Trade Center’s North Tower. The blast killed six people and injured more than a thousand.
Ron Bucca, as FDNY’s fire marshal, investigated the incident, and his good friend Kevin Shea, working for Rescue 1, was severely injured when the ground underneath him gave out and he fell about 30 feet.
“That personally motivated him to learn more about (why it happened),” said Eve Bucca.
Later that year, Ron Bucca joined the 3413
th Military Intelligence Detachment and began supporting the DIA counterterrorism mission — mainly through weekend work from New York. This gave Bucca access to DIA’s classified intelligence on international terrorist threats.
“I think with the ’93 World Trade Center bombing happening in New York, giving him access while he was a fire marshal, that really tied both worlds together and made him realize there is something here that is very real and allows me to access both the jobs and the access that I have,” said Ron Bucca Jr.
The work Greco could provide his reservists wasn’t glamorous.
“We did the kind of work you could do on a part-time basis. We populated databases,” said Ed Sloan, a former New York Police Department detective who worked in another military intelligence detachment under Greco. “But it meant that we were reading all of the intelligence reports. In August of 2001, we saw the now famous and now declassified presidential daily brief, ‘Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.’ So, we were aware of all this.”
While Greco said it was Ron Bucca’s fireman’s mustache and New York street swagger that stood out to him initially, over time Greco recognized the fire marshal’s passion and growing expertise in counterterrorism.
“(By 2001) Some of the guys in the reserve units, Ron being one of them, had actually been working on the terrorism problem set longer than some of the analysts we actually had working full-time,” said Greco. “In some cases, the guys in the unit had a deeper background than our full-time analysts did.”
In the late 1990s, Ron Bucca also joined the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) as a representative of the FDNY. This provided him with insight into terrorism investigations and allowed him to collaborate with personnel from other organizations and agencies.
“As part of the job description for that, he created a database for them,” said Eve Bucca. “It was like a calendar of incidents of domestic and mostly international terrorism anniversaries and events. He felt like the event anniversary dates would be likely times of attack.”
The more Ron Bucca learned, the more steadfast he became that a terrorist attack in New York was looming. But he didn’t know what form it would take. Eve Bucca said her husband suspected bioterrorism or chemical terrorism. As part of his JTTF duties, he educated first responders about the dangers of each and encouraged them to develop bio and chemical response plans.
“This was a mission in life for him,” said Eve Bucca, referring to his efforts to increase awareness and prepare New Yorkers for a potential attack.
But then in 2000, FDNY’s seat on the JTTF was removed.
“It absolutely crushed him,” said Eve Bucca. “He did everything he could to make the fire department aware of how important this was. The commissioner at the time wasn’t interested in this at all.”
Ron Bucca Jr. said that in the months before 9/11, his father brought home an unclassified link chart showing Al-Qa’ida’s network and participated in a Joint Security Operations Command counterterrorism exercise.
It only further prepared him for an attack he suspected was coming all along.
“On 9/11, I would contend that (Ron) was the only person running into those buildings that actually knew what he was running into,” said Greco, who now serves at as a senior advisor at the
National Counterterrorism Center. “He knew who did it and he knew why they did it.”
Remembering Ron
In 2005, the DIA Joint Intelligence Task Force-Combating Terrorism started presenting The Warrant Officer Ronald P. Bucca Award to recognize the military member who provided the most outstanding contributions to the office’s mission.
Sloan, the NYPD detective who also responded to the towers on 9/11 and later was the first DIA reservist to deploy to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and to Afghanistan, received the first Bucca Award.
“I would like to be like him when I grow up, and I’m 73. He was driven,” said Sloan, who said he was moved when he received the award. “He saw what was coming and could feel what was coming and I think we need that today. We need people who are not merely employees, people with the warfighting spirit who know what’s at stake.”
On August 28, DIA’s Defense Counterterrorism Office recognized SFC James Trackwell as the 2024 recipient of the award. Trackwell reviewed over 300 FBI cases the posed a counterterrorism threat to the Department of Defense enterprise.
Ron Bucca Jr. was there to meet the winner.
“We feel very strongly that this is part of my dad’s legacy and that the work that people do (in the IC) that largely goes unrecognized with the (general) population is hugely important,” said Ron Bucca Jr.
Eve Bucca said the award was very meaningful to her, son Ron Jr, and daughter Jessica Bucca-Hughes.
“I’d like the (people in the Intelligence Community) to know how much he respected them and how much he appreciated the dedication and sacrifice that people made,” she said.
In 2003, the Buccas started an annual tradition of their own. What started as a gathering in a church basement on September 11 has become a full-day event in remembrance of Ron Bucca. It includes a private tour of the 9/11 museum, a luncheon and a twilight parade. Ron Bucca Jr. said around 150-250 people attend each year. They include his father’s former FDNY colleagues and Special Forces members.
“When I look back at it, the number of people who have come up on 9/11 to hear his story and participate in the luncheon with us is truly incredible,” he said.
Greco, meanwhile, continues working to keep Ron Bucca’s memory alive in the Intelligence Community, mainly by speaking with groups from DIA and NCTC. Bucca’s black and white fireman’s baseball card sits in the NCTC Museum at ODNI Liberty Crossing and another is pinned to the top right corner of a blank whiteboard in Greco’s office.
“I literally think about those events and about Ronnie every day,” said Greco, reflecting back to August and September of 2001. “In part, I think back so often because of the enduring lessons that stemmed from that tragedy, but I also just miss Ronnie. He wasn’t just any reservist, he had a true passion for intelligence, and no matter what role he was in, you knew he was always going to be there to help others. Next to the definition of hero in Webster’s Dictionary, Ronnie’s face should be there.”
Link to the ODNI article:
https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/news-articles/news-articles-2024/3992-defense-intelligence-agency-reservist-made-it-his-mission-in-life-to-save-new-yorkers-from-9-11-attack
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