What did the cia source named dragonfire report on October 11 2001?

Answer 1

Exactly one month after the terrorist attacks on the United States, the White House received a report that a nuclear weapon had been smuggled into New York City. The news came from a CIA source, code-named Dragonfire, who said that al Qaeda terrorists had stolen a ten-kiloton nuclear weapon from Russia and brought it into New York.

No nuclear weapon had been used against people since the United States had dropped two on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki some sixty years earlier. The weapon that Dragonfire reported had slightly less explosive power than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, but experts knew the potential consequences would dwarf what had happened on 9/11 at the Twin Towers. A nuclear weapon detonated in the heart of New York City would kill half a million people instantly and completely flatten every building within one third of a mile from the blast site. Buildings up to three-quarters of a mile would be damaged and destroyed, and hundreds of thousands more people would die as these building collapsed or burned. Radiation and more fires would initially extend out to 1-1⁄2 miles from the blast site.

The National Security Council staff at the White House worried that al Qaeda could have smuggled it into New York City. The CIA knew that Osama bin Laden had a long-standing interest in acquiring nuclear weapons. They also believed that he would attempt something more dramatic and horrific than the attacks of September 11.

Specially-trained government teams secretly went to New York to search for the weapon. No one in New York, including Mayor Rudy Guiliani, was informed of the threat for fear of setting off a panic. In Washington, Vice-President Cheney and hundreds of other government officials went into hiding outside of the city. They would form the core of a new government in case terrorists had also managed to smuggle a weapon into Washington D.C.

Dragonfire's report turned out to be wrong, but government officials had taken it very seriously.