Dragonfire: Four Days That (Almost) Changed America

Dragonfire: Four Days That (Almost) Changed America
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11, a fast-paced story about the little-known terrorist plot that upended the United States government just weeks after the September 11 attacks.

Barely a month after four planes were hijacked and directed at U.S. targets on September 11, 2001, 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. It was the worst of worst-case scenarios. 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 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