10
ICE WATER AND BOMBS

While Ronnie Bucca began his first weeks on the job as an FDNY

fire marshal, Ramzi Yousef was halfway around the world plotting to use his skills as a bomb maker to wreak havoc for the jihad. By 1991, after graduating from bomb school, Yousef returned to Baluchistan province in Pakistan. In Turbat, where his family was from, he courted and married a pretty Baluchistani girl who was the sister of Abu Hashim, a Pakistani militant. Yousef is said to have bought a house in Quetta, the Baluchistan capital, and settled down for a time with his young wife. They had two daughters, one born in 1992, the other during Yousef’s years on the run.

But though his father was a Baluchistani and his roots were there, Yousef considered himself a Palestinian by way of his mother’s family. He spoke Arabic with a Palestinian accent, and more than any other motivation, he was driven by an antipathy for Israel. While other jihadis called for a “perfect Islamic state” that would return them to the seventh-century caliphate,¹ Yousef’s hatred was born in the intifada, the decades-long struggle of Palestinians for an independent homeland. In his logic, the Israeli suppression of the Palestinians, backed by U.S. support, qualified American civilians as targets.

“I have numerous relatives in Palestine,” Yousef said in an interview after his capture. “If terrorist means to regain my land and fight whoever attacks me and my kinsmen, then I have no objection to being called a terrorist….I believe Palestinians [are] entitled to strike U.S. targetsbecause the United States [finances] crimes committed in Palestine….This money is taken from taxes paid by Americans. This makes the American people responsible for all the… crimes to which the Palestinian people are subjected. It is no excuse that the American people do not know where their federal tax money goes.”²

Yousef later compared his World Trade Center bombing to America’s use of atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.³ If these weapons of mass destruction forced the Japanese to surrender, argued Yousef, why not employ the same tactics to get the United States to change its policy toward Israel? What made the bomb maker such a chilling adversary was that he made this argument in a calm, lawyerlike manner. “He’s extremely polished and cosmopolitan,” said Steve Legon, who represented Yousef in the second World Trade Center bombing trial.⁴ He never seemed to resort to the volatile rhetoric of the blind Sheikh, or the fist-pounding theatrics of coconspirators like Abouhalima and Salameh.

“Ramzi was cool,” said Frank Gonzalez, the ex–federal agent hired to assist the Yousef defense team. “The man had ice water in his veins—and when you consider some of the things he had planned—the staggering power of the devices he designed, he had to.”⁵

Though his personal grudge was with Israel, by 1991, Yousef was ready to enlist in the broader “holy war” that had begun against the Soviets and was now turned toward the West. Despite suspicions that his direction and funding came from Baghdad, the evidence is now overwhelming that from the moment he arrived in America, Yousef’s four-year terror campaign was largely financed by Osama bin Laden and endorsed by Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman.

The effective starting and ending point of Yousef’s terror spree was the Philippines, where the first direct Yousef–bin Laden link was forged. In 1988, bin Laden sent his brother-in-law Mohammed Jamal Khalifa to Manila to make contact with Abdurajak Janjalani, the Libyan-trained Filipino jihadi who had fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets.⁶ Janjalani’s Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) was ultimately responsible for the kidnap and murder of a number of U.S. tourists and missionaries. Now it was among the first beneficiaries of bin Laden’s funding.

According to Edwin Angeles, a onetime Abu Sayyaf leader, Ramzi Yousef met with Janjalani in the summer of 1991 on Basilan Island off the southern Philippines province of Mindanao.⁷ At the time, he introduced himself as an emissary of bin Laden and offered to train ASG operatives in the use of explosives. Angeles, who later became an informer for the Philippines National Police, remembered Yousef as “a very humble man, a good man, but a dangerous man.” He said Yousef wanted to use the Philippines as a “launching pad” for a worldwide terrorist campaign.⁸

Bin Laden saw the Philippines as ripe for conversion. An English-speaking country with a large Islamic population exploited for decades by Christian leaders like Ferdinand Marcos, the island nation was centrally located in East Asia. Yousef and his coconspirators could operate there under Abu Sayyaf’s protection and spread terror in a series of strikes worldwide. The most significant piece of intelligence to come from Angeles was the fact that Yousef (whom he called “the Chemist”) had come to the Philippines on behalf of bin Laden and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman. Later, it was the blind Sheikh who made the phone call to Pakistan that summoned Yousef to New York.⁹

But for now, in the spring of 1992, the Sheikh didn’t need him. Rahman’s cohorts were counting on another “brother” in their midst who’d boasted of his explosives training: Nancy Floyd’s undercover asset, Emad Salem. The Egyptian’s identity as an FBI informant had gone undetected by the members of the blind Sheikh’s cell. But as with the Mob, snitches paid a heavy price for ratting out al Qaeda. Edwin Angeles, who gave the Philippines police so much information about Yousef, was later shot to death with a bullet to the head by a member of ASG, the very group he had once led.¹⁰

12 Jewish Locations

By early May of 1992, Salem had burrowed so deeply inside the Sheikh’s trusted cell that he was invited to accompany Nosair’s cousin El-Gabrowny and another follower on a trip to Attica to visit the rabbi’s killer. The gas for the ten-hour car ride was paid for by the FBI. Salem and El-Gabrowny spoke to Nosair in a large visitor’s room, where seventy to eighty other people were meeting inmates. The stay lasted five hours, but right away the impatient Nosair spit bile.

“You are doing nothing to get me out,” said the Egyptian. “I did my part. What are you doing?” El-Gabrowny urged patience while they worked on Nosair’s appeal. But Kahane’s killer eyed the guards and motioned his visitors closer.

“Target the Jews,” he said, mentioning specifically Brooklyn assembly-man Dov Hikand and Alvin Schlesinger, the judge who sentenced him. “He was not merciful with me,” said Nosair, “and we should have no mercy with him.”¹¹

“But what do you want us to—”

El-Gabrowny didn’t even have the words out when Nosair shot back, “Kidnap them. Hold them until they release me.”

Even Salem couldn’t hide his skepticism over this plan. “Kidnapping a judge?” he said. “Where are we going to hide him? I mean…The FBI is all over.”

“You’ve got to realize these people do not have twenty-four-hour security,” said Nosair. “By the weekend, if you surveil him, you can maybe even shoot him….”

“But for this I would need a motorcycle and a sharpshooter,” argued Salem.

Nosair leaned forward, boasting, “I was not a sharpshooter, and there were the three hundred in the room. Nobody saw who killed Kahane.” Nosair moved his hand to belt level and fired off a mock shot.

“Bingo,” as John Anticev would say. Nosair had confessed to the rabbi’s slaying. The FBI didn’t need permission to bug conversations in the prison visitors’ room, and if they’d had audio and video on Nosair, they could have introduced it in court even if Salem hadn’t testified to authenticate it. But nobody in the New York office took any serious steps to tape Nosair’s Attica rantings until six months later.*

By now, Nosair was amped up. He turned to Salem. “You need to build bombs, set up safe houses. I am rotting in here.”

“What kind of bombs?” asked Salem.

“Simple, with a beeper for a detonator,” said Nosair. He described an improvised remote detonator in which the bulb would be removed from a pager and replaced with “a Christmas tree bulb.” The bulb filament would be broken and the device placed near high explosives. When a caller dialed the beeper it would send a charge through the filament, causing a spark that would, in turn, detonate the bomb. “You were in Sadat’s army,” said Nosair. “Can you do this?”

Salem, the FBI informant, swallowed hard. “Let me think about it, broth—”

But Nosair cut him off. “GET ME OUT!”

As soon as he was back to the city and away from the other Egyptians, Salem phoned Nancy Floyd. She’d been working late again, waiting for his call. When she picked up, Salem almost couldn’t contain himself.

“They want me to help them build bombs.”

A month later, on June 14, Salem was summoned to Attica again for a progress report. The Egyptian undercover asset brought a fuse he’d bought in Chinatown, but Nosair couldn’t be placated. He excitedly told Salem that he’d heard the United States had entered into a deal with Iran to exchange political prisoners. Nosair admonished Salem and another mosque member to contact the Alkifah Center in Brooklyn to see if they could arrange a swap.

It was another signal to the FBI of the importance of the center as a base for the Sheikh’s cell. Later, Nosair talked about his plan for bombing a series of targets in the Jewish community. He demanded that Salem get a fatwa, from the blind Sheikh.¹²

Within days, the plot began to thicken. Salem learned that the cell planned to set off bombs at a dozen “Jewish locations” in Manhattan and Brooklyn, including banks and synagogues. Salem tried to slow things down by telling Nosair’s cousin El-Gabrowny that he would have to get detonators from overseas. El-Gabrowny suggested Afghanistan. But a member of the cell referred Salem to a “Dr. Rashid.” He might provide the detonators.

When Salem met the Black Muslim at the Abu Bakr Mosque, “Rashid” told him that he could provide all the weapons he needed, including Uzis and M-16s. Salem briefed Napoli about the meeting— but once again the JTTF missed an important link that would have helped them understand the full dimensions of the Sheikh’s cell. As Napoli later found out, “Rashid” was none other than Clement Rodney Hampton-El, one of the shooters photographed at Calverton in 1989.

Apparently, no one at the Bureau thought to show their key informant, Salem, the surveillance photos.*

The failure to tie Hampton-El to the Sheikh’s cell was a double miss for the Bureau.

In the surveillance photos of the Calverton shooting sessions, Hampton-El’s gray T-shirt had a map of Afghanistan bearing the words Services Office. This was the same network that had been transformed by Osama bin Laden into al Qaeda—and by 1991 the Alkifah Center, which Hampton-El frequented and which Nosair hoped would help arrange a swap with Iran, was its Brooklyn hub.

On June 27, 1992, El-Gabrowny met with Salem after another trip to see his cousin Nosair. The rabbi’s killer was getting more and more impatient. Having stalled on Dr. Rashid’s offer to provide weapons and fully assembled devices, Salem was under increased pressure from the Sheikh’s cell to help carry out the citywide bombing plot. After only seven months undercover, he had achieved a position of extraordinary trust among Rahman’s followers. If the FBI ever had a chance to understand the links between the blind Sheikh, Osama bin Laden, and the Alkifah Refugee Center—now an al Qaeda front—this was it.

“The plans had been formulated,” said an FBI agent inside the investigation. “How many bombs they wanted Salem to build with the help of the other people, who they wanted to target. The thing had been firmed up from the bad guy’s side. That’s when the ball really got dropped.”¹³

“Get That Bitch Off This Case”

From the moment Salem had gone undercover back in the fall of 1991, the Terrorism branch of the FBI’s New York office had been operating without a direct supervisor or an assistant special agent in charge. That changed in April 1992, when Special Agent John Crouthamel became branch supervisor and Carson Dunbar, who had been the administrative special agent in charge of the entire New York office, took over as ASAC.

Dunbar, a former New Jersey State Trooper, hadn’t worked in the field for years. He’d been promoted up the ranks in the FBI’s New York office working primarily as an administrator.

“Carson was a paper guy,” said an FBI source close to the investigation. “No agents answered to him. But then they moved Terrorism underneath him. Back then the branch was a dumping ground. No one thought it was a plum assignment.”

Dunbar was the product of a little-known aspect of the FBI: the two-tiered system that separates brick agents like Floyd and Anticev, who are investigators, from the hierarchy of supervisors, ASACS, and SACs known collectively as “management.”

In other law enforcement agencies, like the NYPD, uniformed officers can advance to plainclothes but must then return to uniform at the precinct level in order to move up the ranks. This forces the brass to maintain their street ties, and reminds them of what it takes to make cases.

But the FBI system forces agents who wish to go beyond the top pay grade of GS-13 to volunteer for management. Once that happens, they leave “the street” and the ranks of investigators for the remainder of their Bureau careers.

“All it takes to go management is raising your hand,” said retired special agent Len Predtechenskis. “You do a couple of years as a supervisor at headquarters, then you go to a field office as a supervisory GS-14, and you return to headquarters as you move on. But all this time you’re a desk jockey. You’ve stopped being an investigator. So what you have is a system in which managers, many of whom haven’t been in the field for years, are signing off on and second-guessing the work of agents who are down in the streets dealing with the real world.”¹⁴

The worst part about the system, says Predtechenskis, is that it forces agents who have developed a specialty in an area like terrorism to leave their field of expertise. “So you have bosses like Carson Dunbar, who had zero terrorism experience, judging them,” he said.

Now, in the late spring of 1992, Dunbar’s appointment came at the very moment Salem was starting to get results. But when Dunbar and his supervisor, Crouthamel, took charge, they radically altered the game plan for Nancy Floyd and her asset.

“You have to remember that Nancy is meeting with Salem almost every night,” said Predtechenskis. “She’s holding his hand, debriefing him, supporting him at a time when he can’t get through to Anticev and Napoli. He calls her at home. She stays till midnight. Sometimes he meets her at one or two o’clock in the morning. He’s come to trust her. The guy is in an extremely dangerous situation, risking his life. He has to have somebody he can count on.”

At this point John Crouthamel, the new Terrorism supervisor, called a meeting with Salem, Anticev, and Napoli without Nancy’s knowledge. The meeting took place at a midtown hotel. One source remembers Crouthamel trying to convince Salem to work directly with Anticev and Napoli. “We want to remove Nancy from the situation,” he reportedly said.¹⁵

But Len Predtechenskis recalled that the tone was much nastier. According to the decorated ex-agent, Crouthamel told Salem, “We’re gonna get that bitch off this case.”¹⁶

Soon after that meeting, the situation was complicated further when John Anticev collapsed on the street with a brain embolism. Though Anticev wasn’t permanently disabled, the incident incapacitated him at a critical juncture. “He was completely out of it,” said the source. “He couldn’t drive. He had to have an agent pick him up.”

Anticev would be out of work for the next three months. This meant that if Nancy was removed from the operation, the entire burden of working Salem would fall on NYPD detective Lou Napoli, whom the informant had found elusive in the first place.

 

The operation began to fall apart when Dunbar learned of a polygraph Salem had taken earlier in the year. The lie detector test had been done behind Nancy’s back, while she was on vacation, and the results had come back “inconclusive.” But as Lou Napoli later acknowledged, “inconclusive to the Bureau means you failed.”¹⁷

“When she found out about the polygraph, Nancy was upset,” said an FBI source. “The way she saw it, they had polygraphed an asset of hers who’d been vindicated many times over.”¹⁸

Floyd felt that the polygraph, routinely given to new informants, was unnecessary for Salem. It created a false cloud of doubt in the Bureau about the ex–Egyptian army major’s credibility. Now it was coming back to haunt them, as Dunbar attempted to assert control over the ongoing undercover operation that had preceded him—an investigation launched not on the criminal side of the Bureau that Dunbar knew best, but the counterintelligence side.

In the absence of a Terrorism supervisor and SAC, Nancy Floyd’s bosses Jim Sherman and Jack Lowe had hired Salem as an asset months before. Now, rather than embrace him and the extraordinary intelligence he was delivering, Dunbar insisted that Salem reaudition for the part.

The Egyptian was shaken, said the FBI source. “Here he was deep inside the Sheikh’s cell, risking his ass, and now the Bureau was changing the play.”

With Anticev out of the picture, the only other Bureau agent who could speak directly to Salem’s bona fides was Nancy Floyd. She had already been called a “bitch” by Crouthamel, who was trying to get her removed as Salem’s control agent, and she soon learned that Carson Dunbar didn’t trust her.¹⁹ All of this was going on while Sheikh Rahman’s cell continued to plan a deadly wave of bombings intended to rock New York City.

Flying Blind

On July 6, 1992, events went from bad to worse when Dunbar demanded to meet Salem face to face and alone, without Nancy Floyd. Despite the obvious risks in having a clandestine asset appear at the FBI, Dunbar insisted that the meeting take place in his office at 26 Federal Plaza.²⁰ It would prove to be a defining moment that would have an impact not only on the World Trade Center bombing but on the FBI’s capacity to understand Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network for years to come.

According to a confidential source, this is how it went:

“First, Salem came in. Carson had his shoes off, and sat across from him cross-legged on the couch, which Salem found to be very insulting. Second of all, Salem felt that Carson had not read the case file. He wasn’t familiar with how much crucial information Salem had learned from these guys. Next, Carson talked to Salem like he was a towel-head. That’s the exact word Salem used. Carson was talking down to him like he was some dumb, uneducated, stupid person. And he basically told Salem, ‘Either you wear a wire and agree to testify, or I don’t want to see you anymore.’ ”²¹

Salem reportedly shot out of that meeting and went straight to see Nancy Floyd and her immediate supervisor in Foreign Counter Intelligence, Jim Sherman.

Months earlier, when Sherman and his ASAC Jack Lowe had brokered the deal with Salem, they’d assured him that as a pure intelligence asset he would never be required to testify as long as he didn’t wear a wire in his clandestine meetings. Now, Dunbar’s threat to make him testify brought back all his fears. If his identity were exposed, the Sheikh and his cell would surely seek revenge upon him. Salem reportedly paced around Sherman’s office, wide-eyed and furious that the tables were being turned on him.

“If I go to court on these men, I am dead,” he said. “Please tell me, is it true? If I wear a wire, will I have to testify?”

Nancy looked over at Jim Sherman, who looked back at her. Both of them nodded. Salem later exited, feeling betrayed. The undercover operation was now in jeopardy.

In an interview for this book, Carson Dunbar described the meeting in a much different way. While acknowledging that he may have greeted the Egyptian with his shoes off, Dunbar insisted that he wanted to keep Salem in the game.

“The whole purpose of the meeting was to try and get him to cooperate,” said Dunbar.²² “I told him that there were a whole bunch of things we could do that would prevent him from testifying if he didn’t wear a wire.”

But Dunbar admitted that one of the options he presented to Salem was that “he could walk away from the case.”

“What you can’t do,” said Dunbar, “is give a one hundred percent guarantee that the person would never be found out as an informant. But that’s what he [Salem] was demanding.”

In his decision to require Salem to wear a wire, Dunbar was supported by Jim Roth, the principal legal officer in the FBI’s New York office.

Speaking publicly for the first time in an interview for this book, Roth made it clear that he had little respect for the Egyptian asset or his recruitment agent, Nancy Floyd.

“Salem is telling Carson and his supervisor all this fantastic information about pipe bombs, but he doesn’t want to do anything to help corroborate it, and he’s resisting,” said Roth. “That was because that dipshit Floyd would tell him everything they [the supervisors] were thinking about, and how to deal with them.”²³

Roth contends that Nancy had become too possessive of Salem. “She suffered what many agents suffer from in dealing with sources,” said Roth. “I call it ‘my-guyism.’ Only he’s not your guy. He’s the government’s guy. You have a business relationship. But with her [and Salem] there were questions in my mind as to who was working for who.”

Len Predtechenskis, who was close to the investigation, disagrees.

“Nancy believed, as I did, that we could have kept Salem under,” he says. “There were various options we could have pursued. We could have recruited another agent to go in to corroborate what was going on and later testify. We could have done surveillance. But there was no effort by management to find anybody else or get wiretap warrants. Management had already made up its mind. Salem had to testify or he was out. People like Dunbar and Roth, who were sitting behind their desks, had no idea how close a brick agent gets to an informant. You have their life in your hands, and when you fight to protect them, inevitably you’re going to have disagreements with management. That’s what happened with Nancy.”²⁴

“The fact that Dunbar still refers to Salem as an ‘informant’ gives some clue to his state of mind back in 1992,” said Kris Kolesnik, the former director of investigations for the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee that investigated the FBI’s handling of the incidents at Waco and Ruby Ridge. “Rather than viewing Salem’s role as preemptive, Dunbar continues to see him in the context of a criminal case.”²⁵

But Dunbar counters: “You call the public information office at FBI headquarters in Washington. Ask them, asset or informant, if a case goes to court, if there’s anybody that can guarantee a person’s anonymity. Go ahead. Call them. Don’t take my word.”²⁶

However Salem’s role was defined, Dunbar made his distrust for the Egyptian very clear. In late July 2002, during the first public interview he’s given about this investigation, the retired ASAC called Salem “a prolific liar.”

“We couldn’t control him,” said Dunbar.²⁷

Further, despite the fact that Salem had already gone deep into the Sheikh’s cell at the time Dunbar met with him in July of 1992, the ASAC claimed, “We didn’t even know if [Salem] had the ability to infiltrate the group….If we couldn’t trust him, we didn’t know if they would trust him. He was not believable to us.”

An FBI agent at the heart of the investigation, interviewed in early 2003, reacted with shock at that remark. “Saying that Salem couldn’t have infiltrated them, when he’d been undercover for months, just tells you that Dunbar hadn’t read the file,” said the agent. “To take that position, especially now, years later, is remarkable.”²⁸

But back in July of 1992, the larger question was Why? Why, at that point in the investigation, had Carson Dunbar forced Emad Salem into a fish-or-cut-bait position? Dunbar later admitted that, while Salem had given the FBI information about “possible” bombings and kidnappings, there was no case yet to be “taken down.”²⁹

Under the asset rules of the FBI’s Foreign Counter Intelligence branch (FCI), Salem could have continued undercover and unexposed. But Dunbar backed him into a corner, forcing him to either tape his undercover conversations or prove himself with another lie detector test. “I tried to encourage him to wear a wire,” Dunbar later testified.³⁰ “When he decided that he did not want to do that, then I asked him if he would submit to a polygraph.”

Following the contentious July 6 meeting with Salem, Dunbar told Nancy Floyd to set up the second test. She felt it was unnecessary, given Salem’s track record, but Floyd followed orders. Salem came away from it unhinged.

“For some reason the [polygraph] examiner made the room where the test was conducted really cold,” remembered a source close to the test. Extremes in temperature are not conducive to reliable test results. Furthermore, said the source, the examiner and Salem got into a full-blown shouting match. “They were screaming at each other. One of the agents asked the examiner, ‘How do you expect this man to pass a polygraph when he’s so upset?’ ”³¹ The results of this test and a third poly ordered by Dunbar in September are subject to debate. The source referenced above said the tests were “inconclusive.” Jim Roth insisted that they indicated Salem was being “deceptive.”

“You have to ask whether this was an exercise in CYA,” said FBI oversight expert Kolesnik, “whether the management in the New York office was looking for a way to justify their loss of this potentially valuable asset, once he’d been shut down.”³²

In any case, Dunbar held to his demand that Salem wear a wire if he was to continue undercover. He also required that Nancy Floyd step down as Salem’s contact agent.

“They tried to get Nancy out of it,” said Len Predtechenskis. “They should have been kissing her ass, because she got [Salem] totally on her own, but Dunbar wasn’t believing that Nancy could get something. Before he was an FBI agent, he was a Jersey State Trooper….His background was all criminal. So he was immediately applying the [standard of] wiretaps, [and] testifying. And Nancy’s saying, ‘No. No. We’re not there. Let me find out. Let me work him.’ ”

Nancy was certain, based on the Bureau’s tradition of maintaining pure intelligence agents, that Salem could continue undercover without having to wear a wire. At that point Dunbar had no way of knowing if Nosair’s bombing plot would lead to indictments, and he acknowledged later that there were other ways that he could have confirmed information from a confidential informant like Salem, including surveillance.³³

“It would just take a little more work” on the Bureau’s part, an FBI source confirmed. “We’d have to take his leads and do surveillance. Follow these guys and contain the threat. This is what the FBI does.”

Predtechenskis was more specific: “I’d have gotten all the information that Emad provided: on this day, at this point, they’re gonna do boom, boom, boom. Then we would have set up a very discrete, loose surveillance—multiple vehicles—and we’d neutralize them. But you don’t give up the source. There was no need to cut this man loose.”³⁴

Jim Roth, the FBI’s lead New York attorney, insisted that without another agent to go undercover and corroborate Salem, the FBI had no choice but to demand that he testify. “Maybe if somebody had searched further around the Bureau and tried harder we would have found somebody,” said Roth. “But the bottom line was, we didn’t have anybody else. So at that point, for Floyd, there was a duty of loyalty. Dunbar had made a decision, and she should’ve gotten on board or gotten out of it. Instead, she actively tried to frustrate what Carson was trying to do.”

Predtechenskis said that Nancy simply disagreed with Dunbar and sought to lobby others in management to find a way of keeping Salem. She went to her own boss, Jack Lowe, the ASAC in charge of the GRU branch, and reminded him of the Bureau’s long-standing practice of running pure intelligence assets who never had to testify. But Lowe, who had approved Salem’s undercover role in the first place, was reportedly reluctant to buck another ASAC, and Dunbar prevailed.*

 

Days later, faced with Dunbar’s insistence that he testify, Emad Salem, the FBI’s secret weapon inside the bombing conspiracy, decided to withdraw.

“We did not cut him loose,” Dunbar insisted in the July 2002 interview. “He walked away from us.”

Still, Lou Napoli admitted that Dunbar was the immediate cause of Salem’s withdrawal. “Carson pushed it and caused it to end,” he said. “Carson pushed it to a point that Emad was fearful that the Bureau would fuck him and he would have to testify.”

At that point, Floyd’s supervisor told her, ‘That’s it—let’s close him up.’ ”³⁵

To protect his Foreign Counter Intelligence branch, which had initiated Salem’s recruitment, supervisor Jim Sherman asked Nancy to give him a memo laying out all the details of Salem’s recruitment and the level of intel he’d furnished. The memo was to include the specifics of Dunbar’s demand that Salem be worked as a criminal informant, and how the entire operation had unraveled.

Floyd got together with Len Predtechenskis, her mentor, and Bob Burkes and John Sapanara, two other agents from FCI. “We helped her put it down on paper,” said Len. “She wrote it up on a twelve-page yellow legal pad. The story of how it happened. Every step. What she did. What Salem did.”

The memo was addressed to Jim Fox, the assistant director in charge of the New York office, but it was handed to Nancy’s supervisor, Jim Sherman, to be typed and circulated. According to Len Predtechenskis, Sherman read it and put it into his outbox. Nancy was confident that the truth of what happened with Salem would reach the upper management in the New York office.

Now the question remained how the Bureau could best separate from Salem. The ex-Army major, who had quit his job and risked his life for five hundred dollars a week, was told that he would be paid for the next three months while he found other work. But he was no longer an official FBI asset. Salem, who had achieved the trust of the blind Sheikh’s closest followers, was now faced with his own withdrawal problem: how to get out of the cell without arousing suspicion. The members of the cell were calling him, demanding to know when he would produce the detonators and start building bombs. Finally, Salem told El-Gabrowny that he had to withdraw from the plot. He used the excuse that he suspected the FBI was tailing him. Given the earlier encounter with Anticev and Napoli outside Nosair’s trial, El-Gabrowny bought the story.

What had developed as perhaps the most important undercover operation in the history of the FBI’s war on terrorism was over.

Now, when it came to Nosair, the bombing plot, and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman—the Federal Bureau of Investigation was essentially flying blind.