When Rice asked Bush to stay out of Washington

Condoleezza Rice "ordered" then United States President George W Bush to stay out of Washington after the 9/11 attacks before hanging up the phone, the former national security advisor has revealed in a documentary interview.

In a heated exchange, Rice had to argue with President Bush in Florida - who wanted to "be at the helm of ship" – not to return to the White House as it was a "potential terrorist target".

"The President got on the phone and he said: 'I'm coming back'. I said: 'You cannot come back here. The United States of America is under attack, you have to go to safety. We don't know what is going on here'.

"He said: 'I'm coming back'. I said: 'You can't'. I said to him in a raised voice, and I had never raised my voice to the President before, I said: 'You cannot come back here'. I hung up.

"The President was quite annoyed with me to say the least. I've known the President a long time and I knew that he wanted nothing more than to be there at the helm of the ship," The Daily Telegraph quoted Rice as saying in the 'Channel 4' documentary.

Rice, who later became the US Secretary of State, has also revealed that the bunker beneath the White House, where she was sheltering with the then vice-president Dick Cheney, began to run out of air.

"There were so many people in the bunker that the oxygen levels started dropping and the secret service came in and said we've got to get some people out of here. They literally went around telling people that they weren't essential and they had to leave," she said.

Meanwhile, the government communication systems were failing and even President Bush resorted to an unsecured line to talk to Washington.

Rice said: "Despite all of the sophisticated hierarchy, sophisticated command and control equipment that we had, at that moment much of it didn't function very well and people instead did whatever they could to communicate...

"I think back on the number of cell phones that were probably used to communicate the most sensitive information because somebody was driving in or somebody couldn't get to a landline. And I think how really dangerous that was because if the terrorists were monitoring our communications, they would have heard a lot on cell phones."