Brian O'Hara carries a remarkable eyewitness account of the World Trade Centre atrocity.

The insurance expert was with a colleague en route to deliver a speech at Morgan Stanley’s annual investors conference at its company headquarters in Manhattan.

That was when he saw the first aircraft involved in the September 11 attacks on the twin towers slam into the southern building.

Just weeks later, Mr O’Hara was invited to the White House with other top insurance officials to meet US president George W. Bush and discuss plans to cope with claims.

The 78-year-old, who built up XL Insurance, said: “On the day of the attack I was with my head of investor relations officer, Gavin Arton, and we had flown by private jet from Bermuda to Teterboro Airport, a private jet facility.

“We then took a car to the Morgan Stanley headquarters and at 8.40 in the morning we were on the George Washington Bridge.

“It was an opportune time to go there for the conference, which was called ‘CEO Unplugged’, as a lot was changing in the industry following the dot-com bubble and a lot of competition in the late Nineties in insurance. So I was eager to speak at this conference.

“The idea was to go, give the speech, have lunch and fly back the same day just taking our briefcases with us.

“It was the most beautiful, crystal clear day that day and I was saying to Gavin, 'look how beautiful the World Trade Centre towers look’ when … bang, a huge explosion.

“Just as I said the words the plane hit and there was a huge black plume of smoke coming out near the top of one tower.

“I told the driver to turn on the radio and we just heard that it was the World Trade Centre tower that was struck and we all thought it was an accident and that maybe a small plane, or private jet, had accidentally flown into it.

“Then we got to coming off the bridge on to the West Side Highway and we could see the smoke coming out of the tower, then all of a sudden a huge flash and explosion and a second plane hit the second tower in the middle, a little after 9am.

“We knew then that this was not an accident.

“We pulled into Morgan Stanley's headquarters near Grand Central and as we were coming in, all the investor people were coming out.

“We went into the lobby and Gavin and I saw there was a small television with pictures of the twin towers on fire, then three or four largest institutional shareholder representatives joined us and one turned to me and said, ‘Brian is this going to effect XL?’

“I said, ‘this is going to effect everything,’ which it did.”

He added: “We had a few offices in New York, which is where we went to after and I came out … and stood in Park Avenue and looked at the scenes and it was like a science-fiction movie.

“People were coming out of all the buildings. There was smoke and everything.

“This is Manhattan and the cars are bumper to bumper and it is dead silent.

“Nobody is speaking, nobody is honking and in the background is a mushroom cloud of dust from the world trade towers collapsing.

“I wasn't scared, it was just a feeling of bewilderment. Everyone was completely bewildered.”

Mr O’Hara said it took about four days before he was able to leave the area and fly back to the island.

“We just could not wait to get back to Bermuda and take care of the chaos that was happening in the industry and try to assess what this all meant to us in valuation and the death and destruction and the losses of the two buildings,” he added.

Then Mr O’Hara was asked to play a major role in the recovery of the insurance industry with an invitation to Washington, where talks took place with President Bush and heads of insurance in the US.

He explained: “A bunch of us from the Bermuda operations were invited to the White House a month later to discuss with President Bush how to deal with this.

“Well, all our policies had a war exclusion, so technically we could say that there was no coverage, but that did not feel right.

“Because the US Government was calling it an act of war, I don't think they realised what that meant from our point of view.

“So Tom Donahue, the head of the US Chamber of Commerce, and Hank Greenberg [chairman and chief executive of AIG] arranged this meeting in the West Wing and in the Roosevelt Room, which I was part of and it was a pretty amazing event.

“We concluded an agreement with the Government who would put a fund together to pay for all the costs of death, injuries and all the casualty impacts of the event, while we in the industry would pay for all the property damage associated with it.

“It was a great outcome for the country and the industry.

“The Government put together a fund that might have cost up to $2 billion.”

Mr O'Hara wrote a book —It's not the score, it's the trip — on the industry including the horrors of 9/11 with his eyewitness account.

He said: “I have been very fortunate in life and fate has been very kind to me in coming to Bermuda.

“It has been a great run with a lot of ups and downs and the industry is not a straight line, that's for sure. Some very big ups and some very big downs. But I had to chronicle it.

“I wrote it back in 2019. It has sold both online and in print about 1,000 each as far as I know. I didn't write it to make money. I wrote it to get it off my chest.

“So many people kept saying that I had to tell the story so I did.

“I have been back to the site of the twin towers and the new tower they built in the basement has a museum, which is terrific.”