September 11, 2001

I was a senior official in the New York City Mayor's Office for International Affairs on September 11, 2001. Citizens of more than 90 countries were killed in Lower Manhattan that morning. Within hours, the work in front of us was both immediate and unforgiving: help coordinate the evacuation of thousands of people from the area, stand up the City's official missing-persons operation, run the Family Assistance Center, and be the City's channel to the foreign governments and consulates whose nationals were among the victims.

The scale of the missing-persons operation was unprecedented. The City had to gather, compare, and reconcile reports from families, employers, hospitals, and the disaster site itself — and then return what we knew to the people waiting. The Family Assistance Center became the place where that information met the families who needed it, together with support services, translation, and the legal and consular arrangements that follow a death across borders.

New York hosts 193 permanent missions to the United Nations and 115 consulates. Each of them needed the same three things and needed them at once: confirmation of who among their nationals was missing, a route into the City's identification process, and a single named person on the City side who would answer the phone.

We made our office that single point. Instead of leaving each consulate to negotiate separately with the Police Department, the Medical Examiner, the Port Authority, and the federal agencies, we consolidated inquiries, standardized what we could ask families to provide, and returned information through one channel so that no government was working from a different set of facts than another.

Families flew in from Britain, Japan, Colombia, India, Australia, Germany, and dozens of other countries, most of them without visas arranged, many of them without English, all of them arriving into a city that had closed its airspace days earlier. We worked with the U.S. Department of State on emergency entry, with the consulates on accommodation and translation, and with the Medical Examiner's office on the procedures for identification and the repatriation of remains — a process governed by law in two jurisdictions at once and carried out under conditions that made ordinary evidence impossible.

The death certificate question alone took months. A foreign government cannot settle an estate, release a pension, or permit a burial without documentation its own courts will accept, and for a long period there was often nothing to document.

In the weeks that followed, heads of state, foreign ministers, and royal representatives came to the site. Every visit had to be reconciled against an active recovery operation, a criminal investigation, and the exhaustion of the people working there. Our office set the terms under which those visits happened: what could be seen, who accompanied, what was said, and what was never turned into a photograph.

The tone mattered more than the logistics. This was not a diplomatic occasion. It was a recovery site, and every delegation was asked to treat it as one.

Sixty-seven British subjects were killed on September 11 — the heaviest single-day loss of British life since the Second World War. The work with the British Consulate-General in New York and with London ran for months, and it is the work for which I was later appointed an Honorary Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

That connection did not end with the citation. The Queen Elizabeth II September 11th Garden in Hanover Square memorializes those sixty-seven, and I serve on the Executive Board of the organization that maintains it. Coordinating the response to a loss and then helping steward the memorial to it are the same obligation, twenty years apart.