On the evening of July 3, 1988, National Security Advisor Colin Powell received a phone call from his deputy, John Negroponte, “relaying a Navy report that the USS Vincennes, escorting Kuwaiti oil tankers around the Iran-Iraq war zone, had just come under attack by an Iranian F-14 jet. The Vincennes had shot the plane down. …Twenty minutes later, Negroponte called back to say that the downed plane was not a jet fighter but an Iranian commercial Airbus on a regularly scheduled flight with 290 civilians aboard. All were presumed dead.”
– Karen DeYoung, Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell, Pages 168-169