THE PRESENT, THURSDAY, AUGUST 13TH
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY HEADQUARTERS – LANGLEY, VA
It had been four months since the last al-Qaeda attack: a dirty bomb detonated near the center of Hamburg, Germany. More than 24,000 innocent people were killed, and nearly 56,000 were injured, many critically. The death toll continues to mount.
On that gloomy Thursday in Langley, an unincorporated community located along the Potomac River a few miles west of Washington, D.C., CIA director Scott Cunningham was addressing his Counterintelligence Center Analysis Group, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and a few other members of his agency.
Standing five feet, eleven inches tall, Cunningham had a trim and fit physique to go along with his brown, wavy hair and handsome, movie star looks. The former Navy SEAL, at 48, had also spent twelve years in the field in covert operations, and was considered by colleagues to be a true American hero.
The director opened the meeting by saying, “As all of you know, since the attack in Hamburg, the terrorist chatter has been at a fever pitch. We have intercepted threats against at least a half dozen major western capitals. It appears that something huge is imminent. You are also aware of the three al-Qaeda cells that recently were disrupted in the planning stages: one in Yonkers, New York, one in North Chicago, and one in Ventura, California. Yet the threatening communications continue, and are getting stronger every minute. And even though we don’t have any specific information, I intend to inform the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff about the severity of the situation. Unless any of you disagree, I will suggest that the Secretary of Homeland Security raise the National Terrorism Advisory System’s threat level from its present status of ‘Elevated,’ to ‘Imminent,’ our most critical condition indicating a strong threat of an attack.”
Assistant CIA director Lori Colbert then spoke up. “Do we really want to go there, Scott? I know the chatter has been high, but we’ve seen that many times before . . . and in this case, we don’t have any specific dates, times, or places. In the past, these noisy periods turned out to be nothing more than idle chitchat. There hasn’t been a major hit on America since 9/11/2001. If we raise the threat level to Imminent, we could cause panic in the streets, not to mention wreaking havoc on our air traffic system. The airport delays and missed connections could be staggering. And what would Wall Street’s response be tomorrow morning? Do the nine people in this room have the right to negatively impact hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars of the nation’s wealth? Our economy is just getting back to normal since the Bush-Obama recession. Only recently has the dollar stabilized against the other major currencies. So why would we want to take such risky action?”
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