9:00 a.m.-9:37 a.m. September 11, 2001: Top Navy Official Unconcerned about Danger of Attack on the Pentagon

Admiral Timothy Keating, the Navy’s director of operations in the Pentagon, is back in his fourth-floor office for a 9:00 a.m. meeting with Edmund James Hull, the US ambassador-designate to Yemen. Keating has just returned from the Navy Command Center on the Pentagon’s first floor, where he’d received his daily briefing, and where he’d seen the television reports of the first crash at the World Trade Center (see (8:48 a.m.-9:02 a.m.) September 11, 2001). Despite seeing the second plane hitting the WTC on television, Keating and Hull reportedly do not question their own safety at the Pentagon. Though it is now obvious that the US is under attack, they start discussing the upcoming first anniversary of the terrorist attack on the USS Cole (see October 12, 2000). In 2002, Keating will recall, “We were discussing the fact that the Cole attack was coming up on a year’s anniversary—those were almost our exact words at the moment the plane impacted [the Pentagon],” which happens at 9:37 a.m. But in 2006, Keating will give a different account, telling Washington Post Radio that, after seeing the second crash on TV, he understands this is an attack. In response, he will claim, he makes some phone calls and is on his way back to the Navy Command Center when the Pentagon is hit. [Sea Power, 1/2002; Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, 10/2005; Shipmate, 9/2006 ; American Forces Press Service, 9/11/2006] The Command Center will be mostly destroyed in the attack, and 42 of the 50 people working in it will be killed. [Washington Post, 1/20/2002; National Defense Magazine, 6/2003]