Peter Yanzsa was working about 700 yards away from the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists piloted a commercial airliner into the building.

And 15 years later, the 1974 Palmerton High School graduate believes that the United States is still susceptible to a 9/11-style attack.“I think it’s only a matter of time before it happens again. As good as we are, we can stop them 99 times, they only have to get through once. It will happen. I hope to hell I’m wrong,” Yanzsa said from his home in Ohio on Wednesday.While the devastation of the World Trade Center is what is burned into the memory of most people who remember the attack, the chaos in Washington was just as harrowing for anyone who was there.Yanzsa worked less than a half mile away from the Pentagon on Sept. 11. Retired from the Air Force, Yanzsa was working for the Department of Justice at the time.He recalled working in his office on the fateful day around 9:30 a.m. when he heard a plane overhead. He and his co-workers already knew about the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, but he didn’t make the connection.“I heard it; felt it. It was the same effect you would get if they were doing a military flyover at Arlington Cemetery, which was also near our office,” he said.But then they heard the impact, and knew it was something else.People in the office started screaming and crying as they saw the smoke rise from the crashed plane. The impact was actually on the other side of the Pentagon.Yanzsa thought there had been some kind of attack from the ground, like a bomb placed in a truck.The building was evacuated immediately. From that point on, he knew less about what was going on than those following the chaotic events on TV.Eventually, as the smoke from a fire raging inside the Pentagon got worse, they got word it was another plane.“We were standing outside. The only updates we got were from listening to the news on people’s car radios as they went by,” he said.His cellphone was useless because so many people were trying to reach their loved ones.Luckily, a friend from California got through to him — so he told the friend to call his wife and let her know that he was not hurt.“That’s how I got a hold of my wife on Sept. 11,” he said.Almost immediately, he and colleagues began to think that Osama bin Laden was behind the attack.While most Americans had probably never heard of him at that time, Yanzsa knew the name well from working as an intelligence officer in the Department of Defense and Department of Justice.“In my particular job, I wasn’t doing terrorist stuff, but he was still someone I was familiar with,” he said.The ride home, which would normally take 45 minutes, took four hours — most of that spent just getting out of the area of the Pentagon. Yanzsa normally took a carpool with employees at the Pentagon, but he had to find a ride with another co-worker.None of the people in the van pool were hurt.Yanzsa thinks now that the hijackers were aiming for the White House.But he said it would be difficult to spot the building in a plane traveling at 500 mph, which in his opinion is why the hijackers chose the Pentagon.He would return to work a few days later after his building was checked for structural damage. Security around the area was heightened.The next time he returned to work, there was a guard armed with an M-16 outside the parking lot where he normally parked. Security was tight all around Washington.Then, surprisingly, the extra security measures fell by the wayside.“Some things changed. But I guess you could say we got back to normal, the way we were before that,” he said.But Yanzsa says that regardless of security, another terrorist attack is a likely possibility. Despite that, the trained intelligence expert says he won’t live in fear because of the experience of seeing the 9/11 attacks first hand.“I was not all that excited riding the metro the first time I had to after 9/11, or fly after 9/11, but I have done both many times,” he said. “Did it change me? Maybe make me a little more aware of my surroundings, but in my job I try to do that anyway.”