Dessa övningar som slutar i terror.

WASHINGTON — In what the government describes as a bizarre coincidence, one U.S. intelligence agency was planning an exercise last Sept. 11 in which an errant aircraft would crash into one of its buildings. But the cause wasn't terrorism -- it was to be a simulated accident.

Officials at the Chantilly, Va.-based National Reconnaissance Office had scheduled an exercise that morning in which a small corporate jet would crash into one of the four towers at the agency's headquarters building after experiencing a mechanical failure.

The agency is about four miles from the runways of Washington Dulles International Airport.

Agency chiefs came up with the scenario to test employees' ability to respond to a disaster, said spokesman Art Haubold. No actual plane was to be involved -- to simulate the damage from the crash, some stairwells and exits were to be closed off, forcing employees to find other ways to evacuate the building.

"It was just an incredible coincidence that this happened to involve an aircraft crashing into our facility," Haubold said. "As soon as the real world events began, we canceled the exercise."

THE PLANE-INTO-BUILDING DRILL OF 9-11

On 9-11, an agency of the Dept. of Defense and the CIA was conducting a terror scenario in which an imaginary airplane from Washington's Dulles International Airport was to crash into one of the four towers of the suburban campus of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) in Chantilly, Virginia, just a few miles west of the Pentagon.

The plane that allegedly crashed into the Pentagon, American Airlines Flight 77, departed from the very same airport at 8:20 a.m. on 9-11. When the terror scenario became real in New York and at the Pentagon, the NRO exercise was cancelled and nearly all its three thousand employees, the people who operate the nation's "eye in the sky," were sent home.

BIZARRE COINCIDENCE

The government said it was a "bizarre coincidence" that the NRO, a military intelligence agency working under the Dept. of Defense and CIA, had planned a simulated exercise with a mock "plane-into-building" crash on the morning of 9-11.

"It was just an incredible coincidence that this happened to involve an aircraft crashing into our facility," spokesman Art Haubold told the Associated Press in August 2002. "As soon as the real world events began, we canceled the exercise."

As the agency that operates many of the nation's spy satellites, the NRO personnel come from the military and the CIA. When the attacks occurred, however, most of the 3,000 people who work at the agency were sent home. Why would they do that? Does it make any sense at all for a nation to shut its eyes while it is under attack?

The fact that the spy agency had planned such a drill was casually leaked in an announcement for a homeland security conference in Chicago in 2002. In a promotion for speaker John Fulton, a CIA officer assigned as chief of NRO's strategic gaming division, the announcement said:

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Mr. Fulton and his team ... were running a pre-planned simulation to explore the emergency response issues that would be created if a plane were to strike a building. Little did they know that the scenario would come true in a dramatic way that day.