The second plane
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The second plane is John Kiriakou's account of the moment on 11 September 2001 when he understood that the United States was under attack.

The errand

Kiriakou was due at the White House that morning with Cofer Black for a meeting with Condoleezza Rice. He received a call telling him their car was ready and walked over to Black's office to say it was time to go. 

Black's secretary had a television on her desk, a novelty at the time, in Kiriakou's telling, and one of the towers of the World Trade Center was burning. Kiriakou asked what had happened, and was told that a plane had flown into it. 

Mid-sentence

His reply, which he prefaces by calling himself an idiot, was that this had happened once before, that in the 1930s a plane had flown into the Empire State Building, but that it had been rainy and foggy that day, and that on so clear a morning as this one it was hard to see how a pilot could fail to see the World Trade Center. 

Just as he said it, the second plane hit. The secretary turned to him and asked: "Did you see that? Or did I imagine it?" 

Kiriakou ran back to his own office and told his colleagues that two planes had struck both towers and that they were under attack.  What followed, in the Counterterrorism Center's front office, was the scene culminating in Cofer Black's speech from his desk. 

A second telling, and a date that moves

The 2025 account places the moment precisely: he was in Cofer Black's outer office, having been told the car was ready for a meeting with Condoleezza Rice, and the secretary had a small television on her desk "back in the day when you couldn't watch TV on your computer." One tower was burning. "What happened to the World Trade Center?" "A plane flew into it."

His own contribution he introduces against himself, "because I'm an idiot, I said..."

> "You know, that happened once before, 1932. A plane flew into the Empire State Building, but it was really foggy and rainy, and it's so crystal clear today. How can you not see that you're flying into the World Trade Center? And as soon as the words came out of my mouth, the second plane flew in."

The reaction is what he stresses. "And neither one of us reacted. And then finally she turned to me and she said, 'Did you see that or did I imagine it?'" He then ran back to his own office: "Guys, two planes just hit both towers of the World Trade Center. I think we're under attack."

The year he gives for the Empire State Building crash in this telling is 1932, where he gives 1945 elsewhere in the corpus; both are recorded as spoken.

See also

- The Condoleezza Rice Meeting
- "We're at war today"
- Cofer Black
