THREAD: Excited to launch this new @Scribd Original out into the world today. It's is my first foray as a writer into fiction—or, really, what we're calling "speculative nonfiction." DRAGONFIRE is based on a real-life terror threat in the tense days after 9/11....
https://twitter.com/Scribd/status/1463553689038245895
1) I reported on this incident in my FBI history THE THREAT MATRIX and have always been fascinated by it, partly because we still don't really know what happened. Here's what we do know:
2) In October 2001, the US government received intel from a secret CIA source known as "Dragonfire" that al-Qaeda had smuggled a Hiroshima-size nuclear device into New York City. The plot seemed a worst-case scenario just weeks after 9/11....
3) For one of the only known times in history, the US deployed its elite @ENERGY nuclear SWAT team, known as NEST (Nuclear Emergency Search Team) to Manhattan. Amazingly, they didn't tell any New York City leaders as NEST rushed to search the city for a loose nuke....
4) Of course, we know now that no nuke exploded in New York City in October 2001 (and officials said years later no nuke was found), but according to Bush admin sources, it was a seminal event in the way that the US government thought about WMDs after 9/11....
5) The US government realized that there was almost no chance to stop a WMD once it was on US soil—so the Bush admin wanted to stop regimes that would proliferate WMDs....
6) I went back recently to try to investigate the DRAGONFIRE plot further—and was met with some odd stonewalls by former US government officials. That set off my reporter spider sense. Something is off about what we know publicly about this plot....
7) Which led me to wonder: What really happened in October 2001? And why is the US government still being so secretive about a plot that supposedly amounted to nothing? What if the plot was actually scarier than has been publicly reported? ...
8) DRAGONFIRE is my attempt to answer what might have happened—using real-life incidents, known emergency protocols, and actual policies/units to imagine a WMD incident targeting the nation's largest city. Read it here with a free 30-day trial at @SCRIBD:
try.scribd.com/graff30/?utm_s…
try.scribd.com/graff30/?utm_s…
Or listen here, read by the amazing Jacques Roy, who narrated RAVEN ROCK and my forthcoming WATERGATE book: scribd.com/audiobook/5374…
How much of DRAGONFIRE is actually real? Only the US government knows—and it's classified. scribd.com/book/537477253…
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