Trade Center, Swanson received a call on the phone in his office at the Pentagon in which he was instructed to go and join the CAT. But he reportedly only "realized this was no exercise" when he reached the Operations Center, and "was greeted by both the chief of staff and the secretary of the Air Force, along with various generals and other brass." [49] Did Swanson misinterpret the situation because he thought the Air Force was going to be involved in an exercise that morning, maybe based around a simulated terrorist attack?

We also need to determine if it was simply a coincidence that at exactly the time when the Air Force had to respond to an actual terrorist attack, its leaders at the Pentagon were receiving abriefing about terrorism, which included descriptions of terrorist incidents and slides depicting the faces of terrorists. Or was there a more sinister reason for this concurrence of events?

Might the briefing on the subject of terrorism perhaps have been put together by rogue individuals, with the intention of causing confusion when the 9/11 attacks occurred, since those receiving the briefing might think any reports about the attacks in New York were part of it? Was the briefing therefore intended to hinder the Air Force's response to the attacks? If so, who was responsible for deciding what its contents would be?

And if, as Paul Kimmel stated, the officials at Jumper's meeting initially thought the news of the first crash at the World Trade Center was part of the briefing, when