Twelve Days Undercover at Ground Zero

Everyone called it Ground Zero; for twelve days, he called it “home.” Christopher John “C. J.” Chivers, a 37-year-old former Marine and crime reporter at The New York Times, managed to slip into Ground Zero in the days immediately following the September 11 attacks by posing as a sanitation worker. While the site was sealed off by authorities and closed to the press, Chivers chose to blend in with rescuers and laborers, working as a volunteer while observing everything with a reporter’s eye. The result was a front-page diary that captured the birth of an improvised community at the foot of the ruins.

Twenty-four years after the attacks on the Twin Towers, in this issue of Debrief we revisit how that remarkable piece of reporting was made in the heart of the disaster, and why it remains an exception in the history of The New York Times.

This issue is written by Sacha and edited by Luigi.

The Sealed Crater

The area around what was left of the Twin Towers was immediately cordoned off by police and made accessible only to rescuers. New York’s mayor, Rudy Giuliani, had imposed extremely strict restrictions: no journalists, no photographers poking around the wreckage. Access to the “red zone” was effectively denied to the press, except for a few appearances orchestrated by Giuliani himself for media purposes. In those frantic days, Ground Zero risked becoming a stage-managed site, with information kept on the sidelines. And yet Chivers, who had rushed there on the morning of the attack and had already witnessed the towers collapse with his own eyes, knew he had to find a way to stay inside. His professional mission was twofold: to lend a hand in the emergency and, at the same time, to chronicle what was happening in that infernal crater in the heart of Manhattan. A former Marine officer, accustomed to action, he did not hesitate to put himself on the line rather than be pushed out.

The turning point came on the evening of Wednesday, September 12. Chivers approached a checkpoint wearing a T-shirt with the Marine Corps logo. An officer looked him over and, mistaking him for a law enforcement volunteer, waved him through: “Go ahead, get in there and help out, move.” With that final barrier crossed, the reporter made it to the heart of Ground Zero and relieved a colleague from the Times, Katherine Finkelstein, who had stayed on site until then. The scene before his eyes was surreal: smoke, smoldering debris, dozens of exhausted workers, and around them an improvised encampment among the skeletal remains of nearby buildings. Practically everything was missing—electricity, working toilets—so much so that as she left, Finkelstein pointed to a garbage can in an old flower shop and said: “That’s the toilet. Don’t use the real ones—they’re all full of vomit.”

The Yellow Cart

Once immersed in the “village” of Ground Zero, Chivers realized that to be accepted he had to make himself useful. He noticed a few volunteers handing out food: they moved back and forth with a heavy yellow cart, also collecting the trash that no one else bothered to clear. In that hell of rubble and dust, the most common problem—beyond the acrid smoke—was garbage scattered everywhere: dirty paper plates, empty bottles, used respirators, burned gloves, food scraps. The humblest job, hauling away trash, was also the one no one thought about in such a context; precisely for that reason, it became the reporter’s passport to blend in. Chivers grabbed the cart and began pushing it around, filling bags with debris and clearing the few passable spaces. Within minutes, he was mistaken for one of the “crew.” Every few yards someone would stop him: “Hey, can you swing by our truck? We’ve got a pile of junk over here.” “Buddy, wait up, let me throw this in.” Even the police at the perimeter let him pass freely, nodding him through, now convinced he was an authorized worker.

Pushing that rickety yellow cart, the reporter shuttled back and forth across the Pile—the smoldering mountain of debris—and into the makeshift service areas alongside it. About every half hour the cart would overflow with garbage, so Chivers would head out to Vesey Street and dump the load away from the food and rest areas, creating within hours a mound of trash chest-high and several yards across. The young reporter was no heavyweight, and sometimes the load was too much for him to manage alone. Over time, the improvised garbage man gained popularity: people saw him clearing passageways, hauling bags, even tidying up around the police guard posts, sweeping away dust and ashes at their feet. “Thanks, man,” one of the younger officers told him, reassured by his constant presence. Seeing him so industrious, that officer probably assumed he was official staff; he asked where he might get a new pair of work gloves. Chivers pointed him toward the supply station, but the cop shook his head—he was stuck at his post and couldn’t leave. The reporter didn’t think twice: he went to fetch a new pair of gloves and even a hot coffee, and brought them back. “Now I’ll have an ally when they start kicking people out,” he thought with satisfaction. With that simple gesture, he had earned the trust of at least one officer—and, presumably, when the time came, no one would force him out.

Life in the “Village” of Ground Zero

In the first days after the attack, Ground Zero turned into a kind of village teeming with people and constant activity. They called it “the Crater,” “the Pile,” “the Pit,” but beyond those apocalyptic names, on the ashes of the towers a makeshift community was taking shape, determined to reclaim that violated space. Chivers, by now fully integrated among the volunteers, became one of its inhabitants. Day and night he helped in every possible way: moving crates of water, unloading supplies, setting up meal tables, distributing blankets. And then, tirelessly, hauling trash. In between tasks, he kept his cell phone within reach, ready to call the NYT desk “uptown” and dictate updates, scenes, and human details from that organized hell. “I realized I could do both,” he later recalled in Esquire: “be a laborer and at the same time feed the news to my colleagues at the desk. I worked for Dennis (the food station coordinator) and meanwhile I sent the stories to the paper.”

Chivers slept very little in those days. The adrenaline, the smoke, and the roar of diesel generators kept everyone awake. Every so often, exhausted, he too would grab a few hours of rest on one of the makeshift cots lined up in the devastated lobby of a building: lying next to firefighters and police officers, still wearing his dust mask and fluorescent vest. Poynter, the journalism institute, would later recount that the reporter slept on the ground alongside first responders and phoned the newsroom to relay everything he saw and heard. Among rescuers and workers, some even began to recognize him: a few, spotting his Marine T-shirt, gathered around to chat. “You’re a Marine? Me too, ’71–’73. Hell, huh?” a Brooklyn firefighter told him with a bitter grin. In those quick exchanges, in that shared fatigue, a tribal bond formed among all present. They were survivors of a common trauma, and each found solace in manual work, almost as a form of therapy. “The rhythm of the physical labor provided an outlet, a way to channel fear, anger, and adrenaline,” Chivers would write, describing the atmosphere of those moments.

Meanwhile, as the days went by, the nature of operations at Ground Zero began to change. If in the immediate aftermath there was still hope of finding survivors in the rubble, after a week that hope had faded. The work became mostly about recovering remains and clearing debris. Reinforcements arrived: teams of specialized construction workers, firefighters from other cities, and also official sanitation crews with their equipment. On Sunday, September 16, at dawn on his fifth day there, Chivers was joined by a real New York sanitation worker who joked as they shoveled debris together: “Take it slow, brother… no rush, we’ve got all day.” The remark made him smile, but it was also a sign that things were shifting: by then there were enough authorized personnel and registered volunteers, and the security net was tightening. Authorities began requiring red ID badges for anyone who remained on site. Many police officers and National Guardsmen now recognized “the guy with the cart” and kept waving him through; still, Chivers realized it was only a matter of time before someone noticed he didn’t carry an official badge. When he saw two civilians without IDs being arrested and led away in handcuffs, he decided it was time to slip out.

The End of the Secret Mission

After nearly five days undercover at the disaster site, the reporter voluntarily left Ground Zero before being discovered. But it wasn’t a surrender—more a brief strategic retreat. Just a few hours later, Chivers showed up again at the entrance, this time in broad daylight and with his credentials in order. It was Monday, September 17, and The New York Times had secured for him an official press pass to follow the National Guard’s operations from inside. He re-entered Ground Zero aboard a military Humvee, alongside a fellow reporter and a staff photographer, ready to continue his reporting. From that moment on, he no longer had to play any role: he joined Lieutenant Colonel Mario Costagliola’s command post at Battery Park and, from there, followed day by day the progress of the recovery operations. The clandestine “behind the scenes,” however, had already been revealed: in Chivers’s notebooks were dozens of scenes and testimonies gathered precisely thanks to those five days of infiltration among the ruins.

Chivers would later pour that experience into a detailed, visceral testimony. On September 30, 2001, The New York Times published in its A Nation Challenged section his piece, “Ground Zero Diary: 12 Days of Fire and Grit”—a front-page diary from the rubble that chronicled the daily life of that improvised village born out of disaster. In those columns, and in the pages that followed, readers learned what it really meant to be at Ground Zero in the hardest hours: eating together on dusty stairwells, sleeping in the open on broken sidewalks, breathing ash and death yet refusing to stop. The ethical deception—if one can call that disguise as a garbage man—was aimed at a higher good: allowing the world to see, through the words of a reporter, what would otherwise have remained hidden behind police cordons. The outcome lived up to the intent. Those chronicles contributed to a collective journalistic effort that earned The New York Times the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, awarded specifically to the A Nation Challenged section for “helping readers understand the consequences of the terrorist attack.” Years later, Esquire would republish Chivers’s account in full, calling it “the story of how he made Ground Zero his home in September 2001.”

Does The New York Times do undercover reporting?

This story is an exception within the rules of the Times: its ethics handbook explicitly discourages misrepresentation. As summarized by the Society of Professional Journalists, “Times reporters do not actively misrepresent their identity to get a story. We may sometimes remain silent on our identity and allow assumptions to be made — to observe an institution’s dealings with the public, for example, or the behavior of people at a rally or police officers in a bar near the station house. But a sustained, systematic deception, even a passive one — taking a job, for example, to observe a business from the inside — may be employed only after consultation between a department head and masthead editors. (Obviously, specific exceptions exist for restaurant reviewing and similar assignments.)” In the same spirit, the SPJ Code of Ethics asks reporters to “Avoid undercover or other surreptitious methods of gathering information unless traditional, open methods will not yield information vital to the public.” In short: no disguises, except in extremely rare cases justified by clear public interest and when no open alternatives exist—and always with full transparency to readers about how the story was obtained.

That is why the Chivers episode remains one of the very few times the New York Times tolerated mimicry to secure—or rather, to maintain—access: a “liminal” case that still fell within its rules, precisely because Chivers did not invent a false identity but made himself useful, and then explained openly how he had managed to stay inside. It’s also why his “garbage man journalism” has stood the test of time: it wasn’t a sting, but a gesture of service in a zone closed to reporters. Since then, shaped by the legal and ethical lessons of the 2000s, undercover reporting at the Times has remained an absolute exception; in its place, when access is impossible, the paper favors verifiable methods (open source, visual forensics, satellite imagery, audio analysis) that require no disguise. The lesson Chivers leaves us with, on this anniversary, is both simple and uncomfortable: sometimes, to see, you must belong—even if only for a few shifts, with a squeaky cart rolling through the dust—and then account to readers, word for word, for how you got there.

If you are interested in these issues, on September 27 we will be discussing the legal, ethical, and professional limits of such forms of journalism at the international investigative journalism festival DIG Festival 2025 in Modena, Italy, in a panel titled “Every journalist is (at heart) an undercover journalist?”.

If we don’t see you in Modena, we’ll see you in the next Debrief,
Luigi e Sacha

If you've come across an undercover investigation you think we should feature, share it with us here:
👉 https://forms.gle/1JbqMBJUfoRU9MBp7

If you have suggestions, questions, tips (or insults), drop us a line at:
👉 [email protected]

If you enjoyed this newsletter, pass it along to your friends using this link:
👉 https://debrief-newsletter.beehiiv.com/

Follow us on Instagram, occasionally we'll upload content different from the newsletter:
👉 https://www.instagram.com/debrief_undercover/

We've also launched a podcast featuring interviews with the authors of memorable undercover investigations:
👉 https://open.spotify.com/show

And if that's still not enough, join our Telegram channel, where we can keep the conversation going:
👉 https://t.me/debrief_undercover