The Foreign Relations volume is John Kiriakou’s explanation of why he and Cofer Black had a car waiting to take them to the White House at nine o’clock on the morning of 11 September 2001 — a reason he calls, in hindsight, quaint.[1]
The problem
The Government Printing Office was preparing to print a volume of declassified cables titled Foreign Relations of the United States, Greece–Turkey–Cyprus, 1949–1967. Kiriakou’s assessment of its readership is unsentimental: perhaps five or ten copies would be printed, and nobody would ever read it unless some doctoral candidate needed one specific cable.[1] He describes the office itself as small and almost unknown, printing the reports, books and “declassified silliness that comes out of government”, and puts the volume’s length at 1,200 pages — “Nobody is ever going to read this book, ever. I’d be surprised if they ever actually printed any copies.”[2][3]
But three of the old cables identified CIA sources who were still alive. And there is an obscure law, Kiriakou says, that if the United States government outs the identity of a recruited CIA source, it must offer that person citizenship and resettlement in the United States. The men in question were by then around a hundred years old, and in his reading none of them would have taken the citizenship anyway.[4][5][3][6]
The proposal he and Black were taking to Condoleezza Rice was therefore cheap and simple: pull the three cables from the volume. Nobody would miss them, and nobody would know they were meant to be there.[5] Elsewhere he gives the ask as an either/or — pull the pages out or black out the names — on the same reasoning that nobody was ever going to look.[6]
The meeting that never happened
At about a quarter past eight the driver telephoned Kiriakou’s desk to say the car was at the east entrance. Kiriakou walked to Black’s office to tell him it was ready — and found Black’s secretary watching a small television on her desk, on which one of the towers of the World Trade Center was burning.[5][7]
Kiriakou’s own first reaction he reports against himself — “because I’m so smart”. He observed that this had happened once before — a bomber into the Empire State Building in 1930 or 1931 — but that day had been foggy with heavy rain, and this one was crystal clear: how could a pilot not see the tower? “And just as the words came out of my mouth, the second plane hit the second tower.” Neither of them reacted; the secretary finally asked whether he had seen it or she had imagined it.[7][8][9][10]
He ran back to his office and shouted that two planes had hit the towers and that he thought the country was under attack. The Counterterrorism Center — perhaps 150 people in one bullpen — gathered under the televisions hanging from the ceiling, each tuned to a different network, in complete silence.[8][11]