World Trade Center
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The World Trade Center was the target at both ends of the terrorism era that consumed John Kiriakou's career, bombed in 1993, destroyed on September 11, 2001.

Kiriakou's September 11

Kiriakou's account of that morning begins at the desk of Cofer Black's secretary, who had the only television nearby. One tower was burning. Told a plane had flown into it, he answered that the same thing had happened in the 1930s at the Empire State Building, "but it was really foggy then, and it's so clear today. How can you not see that you're flying into the World Trade Center?" As he said it, the second plane hit. Neither of them could register what they had seen. He ran to his office: "Guys, I think we're under attack. Two planes just hit both towers." Then the Pentagon was hit, and eventually the Counterterrorism Center was ordered to evacuate, grudgingly, with a plane still in the air.

The 1993 bombing and the ignored files

Kiriakou treats the 9/11 plot as the second act of an old plan. The men caught after the 1993 truck bombing told the FBI their intention had been to kill 200,000 Americans by collapsing the two buildings onto each other, the intelligence, he says, was there all along, not a neocon invention. He goes back further: when Rabbi Meir Kahane was assassinated in 1990, the raid on the assassin's home produced boxes of records that would have led to the group behind the 1993 bombing, and the FBI did nothing with them. The margin in 1993 was brutally thin: had the truck been parked a few feet left or right, the tower might have gone. He also retells the famous flight of captured bomber Ramzi Yousef past the towers in an FBI jet with John O'Neill.

John O'Neill

O'Neill, the FBI's obsessive al-Qaeda hunter, run out of the Bureau, newly hired as head of security at the World Trade Center, died when the building fell on him. Kiriakou's grim recollection is how unpopular O'Neill had been at CIA headquarters: when word came that he was dead, "a lot of people just kind of shrugged their shoulders."

Afterlives

The Trade Center resurfaces in Kiriakou's prison commentary: the Communications Management Units were created for men like the "godfather" of the first WTC attack, but came to house medical whistleblowers, Daniel Hale, and environmental activists instead. Pressed on Building 7 and the unanswered questions, he acknowledges the gaps others raise while holding to his own account of the day.

See also

- Counterterrorism Center
- Cofer Black
- Osama bin Laden
- 911 Attribution of Responsibility
