A Rare View of 9/11, Overlooked

A Rare View of 9/11, Overlooked September 7, 2003 By JAMES GLANZ They did not even see the pale fleck of the airplane streak across the corner of the video camera's field of view at 8:46 a.m.. But the camera, pointed at the twin towers from the passenger seat of an S.U.V. on the Brooklyn side of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, kept rolling when the plane disappeared for an instant and then a silent, billowing cloud of smoke and dust slowly emerged from the north tower, as if it had sprung a mysterious kind of leak. The S.U.V., carrying an immigrant worker from the Czech Republic who was making a video postcard to send home, then entered the mouth of the tunnel and emerged, to the shock of the men inside, nearly at the foot of the now burning tower. The camera, pointed upward, zoomed in and out, and then, with a roar in the background that built to a piercing screech, it locked on the terrifying image of the second plane as it soared, like some awful bird of prey, almost straight overhead, banking steeply, and blasted into the south tower. It was not until almost two weeks later that the worker, Pavel Hlava, even realized that he had captured the first plane on video. Even then, Mr. Hlava, who speaks almost no English, did not realize that he had some of the rarest footage collected of the World Trade Center disaster. His is the only videotape known to have recorded both plane impacts, and only the second image of any kind showing the first strike. The tape - a kind of accidentally haunting artifact - has surfaced publicly only now, on the eve of the second anniversary of the attacks, after following the most tortuous and improbable of paths, from an insular circle of Czech-American working-class friends and drinking buddies. At one point, a friend of Mr. Hlava's wife traded a copy of the tape to another Czech immigrant for a bar tab at a pub in Ridgewood, Queens. Mr. Hlava and his brother, Josef, who was also in the S.U.V. on Sept. 11, tried at various times to sell the tape, both in New York and in the Czech Republic. But with little sophistication about the news media and no understanding of the tape's significance, the brothers had no success. Eventually, a woman happened to learn of the tape from the pub deal at a school where one of the Czech immigrants was studying English. She brought it to the attention of a freelance news photographer who doubled as her ballroom dancing partner, and that man, Walter Karling, brought the tape to The New York Times. For all the tape's imperfections - the first plane is seen distantly, and Mr. Hlava's hand is understandably far from steady at many points during the hourlong record - federal investigators who are studying the collapse of the towers say that they are now attempting to obtain a copy for the data it may contain. A lack of information on the first strike, for example, has posed a major challenge to engineers trying to understand exactly why the north tower crumbled. The tape could, for example, help investigators pin down the precise speed at which the first plane was moving when it struck the tower. In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Hlava said through a translator - David Melichar, who with Mr. Karling now describes himself as Mr. Hlava's agent - that the language barrier had much to do with why no one beyond his family and friends had seen the tape. Finally, Mr. Hlava said, so much time had passed that he doubted anyone would still be interested. "All his friends, they told him, `Hey, you made a mistake. You waited too long.' '` Mr. Melichar said. Mr. Melichar also made it clear that the driver of the S.U.V., a Ford Explorer, had strong objections to releasing the tape. And because the driver, a Russian native named Mike Cohen, is Mr. Hlava's boss on his construction job, that wish carried a certain weight. "Three thousand people died in that place," Mr. Cohen said when reached on his cell phone on Friday. "I told him the day he's gonna sell that film, he's not gonna work for me anymore." The New York Times had not paid for the tape, and it had not been sold to any television station, Mr. Karling said on Saturday morning. In the weeks and months after the attack, the tape bounced around in Mr. Hlava's apartment in Ridgewood. Once, he found it in his daughter's closet, Mr. Hlava said; another time, in a drawer in his living room table. On one occasion he noticed that his son was playing with the video camera and erasing the tape. Mr. Hlava snatched the camera away before either of the plane impacts had been wiped away. On the morning of Sept. 11, Mr. Cohen was driving with Mr. Hlava, who was in the passenger seat, to a job site in Pennsylvania. Normally he would have driven around Manhattan. But Mr. Hlava's brother Josef had just arrived from the Czech Republic and was coming along on the trip to Pennsylvania. So, Mr. Cohen recalled, Mr. Hlava asked him if he would drive past the twin towers instead - Josef had never seen them up close. Mr. Cohen had no objection, and he headed for the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. As they drove, he listened to talk radio in English and spoke to the Hlava brothers in Russian, which they understood by virtue of having grown up in a country that was part of the Eastern Bloc. As the brothers spoke to each other in Czech, occasional one- or two-word exchanges in English also punctuated the conversation. Pavel Hlava also decided to try out a new Sony videocamera by recording everything he could see on this trip - traffic, billboards, the cityscape - and sending it back to his family in Europe. So, as the S.U.V. drove beneath the Gowanus Expressway toward the tunnel entrance, he zoomed in on the twin towers, which rose up beyond the other side of the East River, northwest of him. "Now they are beautifully visible," Mr. Hlava narrated in the manner of home movies. "Do you see that? The two tallest buildings in New York: 411 meters." Several officials at the Czech Center in Manhattan, who listened to the tape and translated portions, said that Mr. Hlava's accent was heavy with the cadences of a depressed mining region centered on a town called Ostrava in the Czech Republic. Mr. Hlava said he spent many years working the mines near Ostrava before losing his job and coming to the United States in 1999. The S.U.V. continued toward the tunnel. The electronic signs over the toll booths flashed messages to commuters: "SCHOOL'S OPEN; DRIVE CAREFULLY" and "SEP 11, 2001; 8:45 A.M." Panning left, above the buses and delivery trucks and cars in the toll plaza, Mr. Hlava zoomed in on a poster for the Arnold Schwarzenegger film <object.title class="Movie" idsrc="nyt_ttl" value="253766">"Collateral Damage."</object.title> A big yawn, presumably by Mr. Hlava, punctuated the tape. Then he panned to the right. There were the twin towers again, geometric shapes in whites and pale blues against the slightly deeper blue of the sky. The tops of the towers stuck up above a white railing in the foreground, the south tower closest, the north tower with its television antenna behind. Mr. Hlava would remember that as he zoomed in at that moment, he was looking at the camera's relatively low-resolution LCD display, not through the viewfinder. He did not see the whitish object move nearly parallel to the top of the railing, toward the towers. His camera was jostling around slightly as the object went behind the northeast corner of the north tower. What looked at first like a sort of avalanche of dust spurting from the tower's side, then a silvery, expanding cloud, appeared in the image, growing until its upper edge reached high above the top of the tower. American Airlines Flight 11 had struck the north tower, but seemingly no one at the toll plaza had noticed. The traffic crept forward toward the tunnel entrance. Mr. Hlava kept the camera on. Inside the tunnel, Mr. Cohen heard a radio report that a small private plane had hit the World Trade Center. He warned the Hlava brothers that traffic could slow down, since the towers were straight ahead outside the tunnel. But when they came into the sunlight, the north tower, looming hugely above them, was bursting with flames, like a giant candlestick. `Stop, stop, Mike!' one of the brothers shouted in English. `Oh my God! Oh my God!' another exclaimed. `Stop, Mike,' the first said again. They stopped and got out of the S.U.V. Mr. Hlava could not absorb what he was seeing. He gamely tried to continue with his video postcard. "A short while ago we were camera-ing the twins and they were cool," he said in Czech. "And now they're on fire." For some reason, Mr. Hlava turned the camera sideways, so in the videotape, the towers appeared to be horizontal. He turned it back. Next there was the shrieking crescendo of a jet approaching from behind them. The volume of the noise was terrifying, Mr. Hlava later said.The dark shape of the plane shot into view, its right side tilted up so high that the wings seemed to be almost vertical. The plane dove into the belly of the south tower, an orange fireball burst forth, and papers flew in every direction, fluttering through the air. What looked almost like a dual mushroom cloud crept up a corner of the tower. People were heard screaming on the street. Car alarms went off, like demons released from the earth. "Mike!" Mr. Hlava shouted. "I got it on tape!" Someone else, possibly Josef, shouted: "It's an attack, brother. That's not normal." After a few moments, the reply was "Let's leave or something else will happen, dude." For a few minutes the brothers looked around for the plane, which seemed to have simply disappeared. In the confusion of the moment, Josef Hlava said he thought that it must have shot through and fallen to the ground. Equally confused, Mr. Cohen offered the theory, in Russian, that the first plane knocked out crucial communications by disabling the big antenna on top of the north tower; that, he said, left other planes without guidance and one of them had wandered into the south tower accidentally. In spite of all the chaos, Mr. Hlava still recognized, on some level at least, that he had created an irreplaceable record. "I hope no one takes my camera," he said at one point. By the time police officers had directed the S.U.V. in a wide circle, first to the western edge of the island, then around its southern tip and northward again on F.D.R. Drive along the East River, Mr. Hlava had regained some of his composure and tried to continue with what had become, perhaps, the strangest and most tragic video postcard of all time. "Right now I'm under the Brooklyn Bridge and I'm taping," he said as they drove north, still very close to the burning twin towers. "After the Brooklyn Bridge," he said, panning backward toward the flames, "comes the catastrophe." Soon thereafter, his camera was again rolling as the south tower tilted to one side and then fell amid heavy, black smoke. "Mike!" Mr. Hlava shouted again. "Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop!" "It's falling down!" he said in Czech. Then he shouted in English, "Downstairs, downstairs building," apparently meaning that it had fallen. They drove on to Pennsylvania. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/07/nyregion/07TAPE.html?ex=1063873674&ei=1&en=c337738a5571228f