Flag raised over WTC wreckage missing

From left, Brooklyn firefighters George Johnson, Dan McWilliams and Billy Eisengrein raised a flag at the World Trade Center in New York.

NEW YORK (CNN) -- A flag that has been displayed -- and even autographed by former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and others -- as the one shown in the famous photograph of firefighters amid the ruins of the World Trade Center is an impostor, city officials said Thursday.

The search is now on for the flag that became a patriotic icon when a photographer captured the moment the firefighters hoisted it.

The original flag is either 3-by-5 feet or 4-by-6, its owners said, but it clearly is not the 5-by-8 flag that has been presented as the famous flag since at least last September 23.

It was on that day that Giuliani and Gov. George Pataki signed their names along the border of what is now known to be the larger flag. Current New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg also signed the flag after he took office.

The flag's owners, Shirley Dreifus and Spiros Kopelakis, run a dinner cruise on the American Star yacht. The vessel was moored at a marina near the World Trade Center on the morning of the terrorist attacks, and the flag was borrowed to fly amid the World Trade Center ruins.

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Recently, Kopelakis got the flag back from the city, which has been holding it, for use in a ceremony with Coast Guard dignitaries aboard the American Star.

When he returned it and told the city officials it was the wrong flag, he said, their first response was to accuse him of making the switch.

"But I opened the flag and I showed there were the signatures of Gov. Pataki and Mayor Giuliani and Mayor Bloomberg," he said.

He explained that it was the wrong size, he said, and "then they understand that this is the wrong flag. This is not the flag that has been placed in Ground Zero from our vessel, 5 p.m. September 11, 2001."

A spokesman for the fire department said the disappearance of the original flag might have just been an innocent mistake. Dreifus also thinks that is likely.

"They have an internal affairs investigation going on," she told CNN Thursday. "I think they're doing their best to try and find it. I don't really know if they will. Best case -- I think one day it will just show up. It will have been misplaced and put in a storage locker and someone in the fire department will just locate it."

Asked if he had any idea of the flag's whereabouts Wednesday, Bloomberg told reporters, "None whatsoever, the fire department is looking. No! I don't know where Osama bin Laden is either."

The picture of the September 11 flag-raising, taken by Thomas Franklin, a photographer for the Bergen Record, has been compared to the image of U.S. Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima during World War II.

Dreifus and Kopelakis said they had wanted to donate that flag to a museum and not profit from it in any way.