At around 10 o'clock Eastern Standard Time on the morning of 11 September 2001, George Bush gave Dick Cheney orders to shoot down civilian airliners that had been hijacked by terrorists. The Vice-President passed on the command, unaware that all four aircraft had already crashed, and for a while he was under the impression that two of them had been shot down by the American air force. His instruction did not reach fighter control until 10.30, and the message was so muddled that the lead pilot believed the country was under attack by the Russians. "I'm thinking cruise missile threat from the sea," he said, revealing that he was looking in the wrong direction. "You couldn't see any airplanes, and no one told us anything."