WASHINGTON DC – A dirty bomb explodes in Guam, a U.S. territory in the Pacific. A few hours later, two more dirty bombs detonate, this time on the continental United States.

One bomb goes off at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix, killing an unknown number of people and spreading radiation throughout the airport. Almost simultaneously, a dirty bomb goes off in Portland, Ore., detonated on the Steel Bridge, one of the city’s main arteries across the Willamette River to the downtown area.

Within minutes, the news media broadcast these disasters to the world.

Is the U.S. facing another 9/11, this time with dirty bombs set off by another wave of Islamic terrorists? How many more dirty bombs are set to go off, and where?

As much as the scenario may sound like the screenplay of a Hollywood thriller, these terrorists events were simulated as part of a national training exercise conducted by NORAD and USNORTHCOM in October. Named Vigilant Shield 2008, or VS08, the exercise was also a “top officials exercise,” code-named TOPOFF4.

As a top officials’ exercise, this year’s Vigilant Shield included a week of intensive training involving many top officials of the U.S. government, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, state and local government officials in Arizona and Oregon, the territory of Guam, U.S. Pacific Command, the military combatant command responsible for the Pacific (including Guam) and dozens of other agencies.

According to Gen. Gene Renuart, commander of NORAD and USNORTHCOM, the exercise was designed to stress USNORTHCOM’s ability to integrate and assist state and local responders in the event of a terrorist attack involving radiological dispersal devices, or RDDs, known as dirty bombs.

Within the NORAD/USNORTHCOM headquarters at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs is the command center heart of VS08/TOPOFF4, an inner, windowless room, where some 50 to 60 players from a myriad of federal agencies sit before computer screens and communicate via teleconference with remote players in Washington, D.C., as well as Guam, Arizona and Oregon.

Military and civilian federal players meet in this room every morning at 9 am to begin the information-sharing that is central to the operation of the command group known as the Joint Interagency Coordination, or JIACG.

“Interagency” was the applicable buzz word for the JIACG’s activity as the 9:30 a.m. meeting began with a situation analysis posted on a large flat screen at the front of the room, on which a situation analysis was posted for group review and follow-up action.

Mal Johnson, the day-shift chief of the JIACG “battle cell” known as the Interagency Coordination Group, or ICG, sat comfortably at his computer at the head of the central table in the room. He proudly wore a golf shirt bearing a tyrannosaurus rex emblem copied from the Michael Crichton novel, with name changed from “Jurassic Park” to “JIACG Park.”

Sitting around the room with Johnson are “resident reps” ? those 40 or so non-Department of Defense agencies that have assigned permanent members to the JIACG.

Referencing the “virtual reps,” the dozens of agencies in Washington, Denver and around the country that participate in the JIACG from a distance, Johnson told WND, “With everybody interacting right here in real time, we can advise the USNORTHCOM commander where we might need to go, where the interagency might need help.”

“This is a win-win situation,” he stressed.

In Day Two of the exercise, the JIACG is working hard to get accurate casualty statistics and to evaluate the radiological fall-our risk from the dirty bombs.

Is Sky Harbor Airport closed? How about the Steel Bridge in Portland? Are Phoenix and Denver shut down?

“Our focus in the JIACG is what’s happening right now, today,” Johnson explains, “but not only what’s happening today, but what’s happening tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and the week after tomorrow, so that we can get ahead of the power curve. We are all viewing the same data and asking questions. Quite frankly, this helps bring the interagency together and be more efficient and effective.?

Looking around the room, WND surveyed the following “resident” federal agencies represented in the JIACG at 9:30 hours on Day Two of VS08/TOPOFF4:

* DHS ? Department of Homeland Security

* CBP ? Customs and Border Protection

* Federal Emergency Management Agency

* Transportation Security Agency

* U.S. Coast Guard

* Director, National Intelligence

* Central Intelligence Agency

* Department of State

* U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

* U.S. Geological Survey

* U.S. Public Health Service

* Federal Aviation Administration

* Federal Bureau of Investigation

* Department of Energy

In addition, the following “contingency representatives” were in the room as interagency partners:

* Federal Air Marshals

* Department of Interior

* Department of Health and Human Services

* National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency

* Environmental Protection Agency

* National Aeronautics and Space Administration

* U.S. Department of Agriculture

Communicating remotely by teleconference are state and local government officials designated by the governors of Oregon, Arizona and Guam, who have been assigned to lead the emergency response. Also in the conference are field observers the federal agencies have on site.

In a separate, windowless command room full of computer terminals and telecommunications equipment resides the “White Cell,” the civilian and military planners who form the brain of the exercise.

The White Cell’s job is to keep the exercise moving by monitoring game play and entering new input.

“Earlier in the week, we entered into the exercise a simulated aircraft crash,” explained Steve Zakaluk, a civilian within NORAD/USNORTHCOM at the center of directing the White Cell’s activity. “It turned out to be a civilian airliner. It was not terrorist related, but it was smoke in the cockpit and they crashed back into Ted Stevens Airport up in Alaska, back in Anchorage.”

Entering unrelated events into the exercise demands that players sort out facts and determine if the incident is related or unrelated to the emergency response to the RDD detonations that the exercise is focused on managing.

“So, the airplane crash involved a commercial plane, with 90-some passengers on board, completely unrelated,” Zakaluk explained, “but that’s part of the thing which the players need to be able to do ? to sort out the things that are extraneous to the major problem, because that’s realistic. Other things will be happening in the real world.”

Zakaluk continued, “Up in Alaska, our Joint Task Force Alaska working with the FBI and local people in the airport, state and other local agencies, worked through the civilian airplane problem, and we moved on with the exercise.”

Referring to a computer slide that described the exercise, Zakaluk went through the bullet points that described other incidents scripted into the exercise.

“The second bullet is an operational threat involving a maritime response involving a ‘vessel of interest,’ a cargo ship sailing under a Panamanian flag,” he explained. “The intelligence coming into the exercise connected the possibility of people on that ship, or perhaps material on that ship, that might be related to the radioactive material that had been used in the RDDs. So they had to connect the dots, exactly like a jig-saw puzzle.”

Zakaluk continued, “There’s a procedure whereby the government agencies determine whether it’s a military problem or a civilian law enforcement problem. Tha