Condoleezza Rice was the U.S. National Security Advisor at the time of the September 11 attacks. John Kiriakou recounts that he and Cofer Black had a meeting scheduled with Rice on the morning of 9/11 over a mundane matter: an obscure Government Printing Office report, Foreign Policy of the United States, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, 1949 to 1967, was about to be published, and its declassified cables would out three recruited assets — still alive in their 90s — whom U.S. law would then require the government to protect with citizenship, a house, and money. They wanted Rice simply to pull those cables.[1][2][3] The meeting never happened; as the driver arrived, Kiriakou saw the first tower burning on a secretary’s small TV.[4] In a separate retelling, Kiriakou again describes the scheduled meeting with Rice over the same obscure book — nobody, he says, was ever going to read its 1,200 declassified pages — noting it also happened to contain the names of three still-living CIA sources, whom an obscure U.S. law would require the government to offer citizenship if the agency ever outed them.[5]
Kiriakou recalls that just as he remarked, elsewhere that morning, on how clear the day was compared to a 1930s accidental bombing of the Empire State Building, the second plane struck the second tower.[6]