Published as a Scribd Original and Garrett M. Graff’s first foray into “speculative nonfiction,” DRAGONFIRE is a fast-paced thriller about the little-known terrorist plot that upended the United States government just weeks after the 9/11 attacks. Drawing on his nearly two decades of reporting on U.S. intelligence, counterterrorism, homeland security, and the military, Graff delivers a story—based on a real-life incident—that puts readers in the mindset of our nation’s leaders, whose growing anxiety over a litany of threats led to the decisions they made in America’s War on Terror.
Barely a month after four planes were hijacked and directed at U.S. targets on September 11, a CIA source from Afghanistan—code name Dragonfire—reported an even more terrifying development: Terrorists linked to al-Qaeda had smuggled a nuclear device into New York City. As the U.S. government struggled to mount a response to the horrifying 9/11 attacks, this new threat came as a stunning blow. Was an American Hiroshima on the horizon?
As the fires at the World Trade Center still burned, a small, top-secret cadre of FBI agents, CIA officers, and counterterrorism experts worked around the clock, trying to track down a nuclear bomb that could be hidden anywhere from the Bronx to Lower Manhattan and could detonate at any moment, killing thousands and wreaking havoc on the U.S. economy. No one else in the country — not even New York officials — was alerted to this threat, for fear of the widespread panic that would ensue.
It took months for news of the incident to come out, but the details were still so scant, few took notice. And the mystery remained: Was Dragonfire right? There was no explosion in New York City, but was it because the bomb didn’t exist, or because it was found and disabled in time?
For years, Graff tried to get the whole story, but was repeatedly stonewalled. There was clearly much more to the story than had been reported. But what? Why were people skittish talking about a threat that had supposedly been dealt with years earlier? What if the plot wasn’t actually as harmless as we’d been led to believe?
DRAGONFIRE is Graff’s deeply-reported, informed, and thoughtful speculation at what might have happened in those fraught weeks after 9/11. Drawing on his extraordinary knowledge of the groups involved and how the characters within them operate, he recreates the high-stakes search for the alleged bomb. While largely fictional, his story—procedurally accurate and based on extensive interviews with several of the principal players—has the ring of actual events and the pace of a thriller. But how much of it might have happened? Only the U.S. government knows—and it remains classified.
One thing is indisputable: The Dragonfire threat so deeply affected top U.S. officials
that it accelerated and shaped America’s War on Terror, which in turn gave us the invasion of Iraq and the protracted war in Afghanistan, the calamitous end of which is still fresh in our minds. Whether the bomb was real or not, this little-known event, still shrouded in secrecy, sent shockwaves through the U.S. government that reverberate today – twenty years after that terrifying fall of 2001, when all of America, and especially the nation’s leaders, was on edge.
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Scribd Originals
Dec 1, 2021
ISBN: 9781094434469