The indictments announced on June 25, the day after the bust, referred to an unnamed “informant” who was a key to the unraveling of the plot; Emad Salem was never mentioned by name. Now, a rumor began to circulate that the FBI might have had knowledge of the Sheikh’s murderous cell long before the takedown in the Queens warehouse.
New York Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal was the first to raise questions. He quoted Mike Guzofsky, international chairman of the pro-Kahane movement Kahane-Chai, suggesting that “a proper FBI investigation into Mr. Nosair’s connections after the shooting of the rabbi ‘would have clearly led to Mr. Salameh and prevented the loss of life at the Trade Center.’ ”1
Congressman Charles Schumer (D-NY)—today New York’s senior senator—asked, “Why didn’t they look at it further?”2 He agreed that the Nosair killing “should have sent out more signals.” The chairman of the House Subcommittee on Crime and Criminal Justice, Schumer ordered FBI director Louis Freeh to testify at a hearing into how the Bureau had handled the Trade Center bombing.3
By late September 1993, after Salem’s name had become public, his ex-wife said that on the day of the WTC explosion, Emad told her that if the FBI had only listened to him the bombing could have been stopped. The FBI’s New York office denied the claim, and Salem’s credibility was attacked.
“Authorities say that Mr. Salem was a difficult personality,” reported the New York Times, “and not deemed credible until after the blast.”4
This stance put Carson Dunbar and those attacking Salem in the uncomfortable position of impeaching the U.S. attorney’s star witness in the upcoming Day of Terror case. It was a difficult position to defend. Why would Salem be credible after the blast but not before? And if he wasn’t credible, why had the Feds agreed to pay him $1.5 million as their linchpin witness?
In late October, pouring gasoline on an internal FBI fire, officials from the New York office went on record alleging that Salem “had not warned them that the Trade Center was to be attacked nor, they said, could he have done that by the time his relationship to the Bureau was interrupted, half a year before the attack.”5
The truth was that Salem’s last meeting with Nancy Floyd had been in the fall of 1992. He’d also stayed in touch with the central players: Abouhalima had called him in December, and Salem had made a trip to Attica to visit Nosair less than two months before the February 1993 bombing. But officials in the FBI’s New York office insisted that he’d been out of the loop and unable to predict or stop the blast.
The fallout soon spread to Washington. FBI headquarters announced that it was beginning an immediate internal probe into the way Salem had been handled. At a news conference to discuss television violence, Attorney General Reno was hammered with questions about Salem. Taking no pleasure in the controversy, Nancy Floyd told Salem that “heads would roll.”
The first victim was Jim Fox, the assistant director in charge of the New York office. Fox was an FBI veteran who knew how to work the press. The man credited with “getting Gotti,” Fox made a celebrated quote to the press after the Justice Department’s fourth and ultimately successful attempt to put the mob boss away. “The Teflon is gone,” Fox told reporters. “The Don is covered with Velcro and all the charges stuck.”6 Now the Velcro seemed to be covering Fox’s own shop and he became fiercely defensive.
When Yousef’s fifth battalion letter had surfaced the month after the bombing, warning of a “hundred and fifty suicidal solders” ready to attack U.S. “military and civilian targets,” Fox dismissed the allegation. This put him at odds with evidence Salem uncovered weeks later, when Siddig Ali revealed to him on tape that he had people “very well trained” for “suicidal missions.”7
Now, in late October, New York Newsday and the New York Times quoted Salem in page-one stories criticizing Agent John Anticev:
“I told you the World Trade Center [was a target] but nobody listened.”8
On December 4, appearing on Channel 11’s News Closeup, Fox had had enough. Asked about the allegations, he denigrated Salem: “He gave us nothing. No one gave us anything. If we had information, we would have prevented the bombing.”
But investigators at FBI headquarters, now probing Salem’s charges, knew better. Worse yet, Fox was openly attacking Mary Jo White’s central witness. For the head of the New York office, it turned out to be the interview that all upper-level federal bureaucrats fear—the dreaded CTM, or career-terminating moment. Almost immediately, with Fox just weeks away from retirement, FBI director Louis Freeh sent him packing.
“Director Freeh made the decision to place Assistant Director Fox on administrative leave with pay until his retirement in January,” said John Collingwood, a Bureau spokesman. “He did so after carefully reviewing inappropriate public comments Fox made about a pending prosecution.”
Now an internal conflict was splitting the New York office. On one side were the street agents who knew the truth about Salem. On the other, supervisors who allegedly wanted a cover-up.
One active-duty FBI agent with direct knowledge of the situation put it bluntly: “The supervisors were saying they didn’t know anything; that we didn’t have any information ahead of time. No sources. No nothing. But the street agents were going, ‘Yes we did.’ ”9
What Did They Know and When Did They Know It?
As with many internal disputes in the FBI, none of the details of this struggle would have come to light except for the very device that Carson Dunbar insisted Emad Salem use in the first place: a tape recorder. The Egyptian informant was so distrustful of Dunbar and the other supervisors that when we went undercover a second time, he didn’t just tape the bad guys, he also taped the Feds.
Days after the Day of Terror bust, Salem told an assistant U.S. attorney that for months he’d been making his own bootleg tapes: dozens of recordings on his home phone, and with a hidden microcassette recorder he carried when he met with agents. Who knew what Salem had said on those tapes about the way he’d been handled by the Bureau? Was it possible that he’d warned the FBI about the Trade Center bomb, and they’d ignored him? Senior supervisors had visions of Nixon and Watergate: what did the FBI know about the bomb, and when did they know it? Fear shot through the upper floors at 26 Federal Plaza.
Carson Dunbar was determined to find those tapes. Almost from the moment he first met Emad Salem, Dunbar had seen him as an informant who was beyond Bureau supervision. Now the bootleg tapes seemed to confirm his suspicions.
“He was an informant that was out of control,” Dunbar said in 2002, “the ultimate opportunist.”10 Jim Roth, the FBI’s top New York lawyer, agreed, and he extended his criticism to Salem’s control agent Nancy Floyd.
“Salem was a shaky character [and] she was a shaky character,” Roth said in an interview for this book.11
“Jim Roth didn’t trust Floyd,” a source close to the investigation confirmed. “He saw her as an agent who had crossed the line and become too loyal to her asset [Salem]. There was a sense between Roth and Dunbar that the tapes would confirm this.”12
The federal prosecutors wanted the bootleg tapes for other reasons. Salem had first mentioned the taping as he was being debriefed at a nearby location by Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew McCarthy. A street-smart thirty-four-year-old, AUSA McCarthy had put himself through Columbia College by working as a deputy U.S. marshal.13 Having worked Witness Protection in the Southern District of New York (SDNY), he understood the pressure Salem must have been under. The Egyptian was terrified now that his cover had been blown. He had dozens of questions: Where would he go with his family? How would they live? Most important, how could he trust the Feds to protect them?
The news about the tapes caused McCarthy some concern, but he kept a poker face. He would need Salem’s trust in the months ahead as they prepared for trial. McCarthy carefully explained to Salem that he needed to hear the bootleg tapes for practical reasons. Under the Brady rules, all exculpatory material had to be turned over to the defense.14 In the upcoming trial, the principal defense would surely be entrapment— the argument that if not for Salem’s inducement, the other plotters would never have built the bombs.
If, somewhere in those bootleg tapes, there was evidence that Salem had coerced the defendants beyond what they were predisposed to do without him, the case could fall. McCarthy had to hear them.
But Salem was adamant. “No. I give you tapes of bad guys—the CMs, but not the rest….It is not a crime to record somebody in NewYork. I have checked.”
Salem was right on the law. The CMs were the tapes of Salem’s “consensual monitoring,” done under strict FBI guidelines. As far as his own recordings went, he couldn’t be held liable. New York was a “one party consent state,” meaning that as long as the person doing the recording agreed to be taped, the bugging wouldn’t violate privacy laws. So McCarthy didn’t press the point: Salem still had some of the official CM tapes at his apartment, and the prosecutor needed his cooperation to get them.
Besides, pressure was the worst tactic to use on the Egyptian at this point. Salem was emotionally drained. The Feds hadn’t trusted him enough to give him notice of the safe house bust. They’d even roughed him up a bit in the takedown. Salem complained of having a “panic attack,” and was hospitalized for a time. Now he’d been discharged and was waiting with McCarthy at the debriefing location. There were some personal items in his apartment that he needed. But the only one he would trust to retrieve them was Nancy Floyd.
In the months since the Trade Center bombing, Nancy had left Foreign Counter Intelligence and was working with the FBI’s Special Operations Group—the black bag unit. But virtually every night, as she had during Salem’s first trip under, she would talk to him by phone or in person.
“They’d formed a real bond,” said Floyd’s mentor, Len Predtechenskis. “Salem felt that Nancy was the only person in the Bureau who would tell him the truth. So she was working double duty again, just to calm him down and keep him working.”
On June 29, McCarthy called Carson Dunbar and told him that if he wanted the tapes, he would have to involve Nancy Floyd. On the other end of the line, Dunbar must have winced. He not only disliked Floyd, he didn’t trust her. He’d told another agent as much right in front of her.
“Somebody has to answer for the agents who run amok,” said Dunbar years later, and to him Salem’s bootleg tapes were proof positive that the ex-Egyptian was way out of line. But now he was stuck: if he wanted to hear those bootleg tapes, Dunbar would have to suck it up and reach out to Nancy Floyd. So she was contacted at her SOG off-site location and ordered to report to 26 Federal Plaza immediately.
When she got there, Nancy found Dunbar sitting with Jim Roth, the head lawyer in the FBI’s New York office. According to an FBI source, they asked her about the bootleg tapes, implying that Salem had hinted she knew about them in advance.
Floyd denied any knowledge of the unauthorized recordings and said she couldn’t believe her trusted asset would say such a thing about her. As she eyed Dunbar and Roth, Nancy, the Texan, felt as if she was being fitted for a noose. There was only one way to stop the hanging.
“Let’s call him,” said Nancy. “Let’s get Emad on the phone.”
“I’ve Gotta Take the Hit”
They called Salem at the debriefing site and put the call on the speakerphone. Nancy had to know from her asset what he’d said about the tapes. “Emad, did you tell them that I knew where some tapes were in your office?” she asked.15
“Absolutely not,” shot back Salem. Furious that the one agent he trusted was taking the heat for all this, Salem told them that he would allow Nancy, and Nancy alone, to go to his apartment and pick up the consensual tapes, plus some personal things he had in his closet. At that point Floyd looked over at Dunbar. According to a source with knowledge of the meeting, she thought to herself, “You lying sack of shit. You were trying to set me up.”16
“Nancy wasn’t feeling real comfortable,” said the source. “She began to suspect that something was going on—and it wasn’t just Dunbar. Now Jim Roth was in on it. He was sitting right there and he knew what was going on.”
What Floyd didn’t know at the time was that the management of the New York office was getting called down to Washington to answer questions about whether they had any prior warning of the Trade Center bombing.17 Since Salem was at the heart of those allegations, and he’d made all these tapes, Dunbar and Roth wanted to hear them. Finally,
Andrew McCarthy jumped on the line. Nancy asked him if he was sure there was nobody else who could retrieve them.
“No. Absolutely,” said the AUSA. “He won’t let anybody else, and I need those tapes, Nancy. I need to know what’s on them. He’s agreed to let you go in. He’s signed a consent.”
At the time, Nancy hadn’t seen the consent form or read the wording. It was her understanding that Salem was granting her limited access to his apartment to obtain only the CMs, or “bad guy tapes.” Salem told her exactly where they were hidden: under the cushions of a green chair in his bedroom and the living room sofa.
The document that he signed stated: “I, Emad Salem, give Special Agent Nancy Floyd, FBI, permission to enter my residence, number 525, 2350 Broadway, New York, New York, to retrieve tape recordings currently located there.”
At this point the versions differ. A source close to Floyd said that it was her understanding that Roth would remain outside in the hall while she entered Salem’s apartment, and that Lynn Harris, a female FBI agent from the New York office, would wait at the doorway as an observer. According to the source, Floyd’s belief was based on Salem’s word that she and she alone had permission to enter the apartment.
But Roth saw it differently. “The consent was broad,” he said later. “It said ‘tapes.’ ”18 As far as he was concerned that meant that any tapes could be seized—CMs or otherwise.
For his part, Dunbar remains adamant: “I had nothing to do with [Floyd] or what the strategy was to go and get the tapes,” he said in a recent interview for this book. The former ASAC even denied calling Floyd to the FBI office to discuss the tapes in the first place. “I know there was a meeting with Nancy before she went to the apartment. I don’t remember specifically if I was there. I could have been there, but [the allegation] that I had her brought in—that’s totally incorrect.”19
In any case, a major conflict was about to erupt.
When they arrived at Salem’s building, Nancy entered the apartment and immediately found fifteen to twenty of the consensual monitoring tapes under the cushions, exactly where Salem had said they would be. She was in his closet picking up some of the personal items he’d asked for, when suddenly Roth entered the apartment.
“The next thing Nancy knows, she comes out of the closet and Roth is going through the desk,” said a source. “She [was] freaking out.”
Nancy confronted the lawyer. “What the hell are you doing?” she demanded. Nancy looked down on the desk and saw that Roth had discovered another cache of cassettes: the bootleg tapes.
“We weren’t supposed to take those,” said Nancy. “We only have permission to do this.” She showed him the CMs she’d retrieved. “I’m the one that got Emad into doing this. You’ve got to stop right now.” By that point, Roth had discovered thirty to forty tapes.
“There was a desk that was directly where this green chair was,” said Roth, “and there were two tape recorders there. They were hooked up. There were two tapes in the tape recorders. So we took them. We looked through a couple of the desk drawers and got more tapes there, and also there were some pictures he had taken for a book he was writing that showed how he had concealed the tape recorders in his vehicle. We had a trial coming up, and who knew at that point if it was going to be evidentiary?” So Roth took the pictures as well.
But Nancy wouldn’t give in. “You can’t do that,” she said, lecturing the lawyer. “This is illegal. You had no right to open those drawers in the first place.” She was so worried that she’d been set up to participate in an illegal search that she asked Roth if she should retain her own lawyer.20
Roth got on the phone with Dunbar, and the two of them agreed that all the material seized would be taken to the debriefing location where Salem was being held.
At that point Nancy was in shock. “I’m out of here,” she said. “I don’t want anything to do with this. I’m not losing my job. I’m not getting sued. What you people are doing is wrong, wrong, wrong.”21
The atmosphere in the car on the way to the base was like ice. Roth drove, with Agent Harris in the front passenger seat and Nancy fuming in back. Nobody said a thing.
When they got to the debriefing location, Roth underscored how little trust Dunbar had in Floyd or Salem at this point. “The instruction that we had from executive management was that she was not to be left alone with him,” Roth said later. “She was not to be placed in a position where she could have a conversation with him. Unfortunately, something got screwed up and as he was coming into the room where we were, she had an opportunity to say some things to him. My recollection is that she said, ‘I told them not to do this.’ ”
Salem erupted. “He was livid,” said a source. “He started screaming at Nancy. For the first time in their relationship, he felt she’d betrayed him.”
Roth reportedly told Salem to sit down and shut up.22
AUSA McCarthy intervened and asked Salem to calm down. He assured him that Nancy Floyd had no idea additional tapes would be taken. She hadn’t even seen his consent to search. Salem almost broke down crying. He pulled Nancy away into a room the size of a closet, where Roth couldn’t hear them, and began apologizing.
“I’m sorry, sorry, sorry,” he said.
Finally McCarthy, the level-headed ex-U.S. marshal, spoke to Salem and Nancy alone. He explained that all Salem’s dangerous undercover work would be for naught if he didn’t turn over the bootleg tapes. McCarthy had to listen to the recordings so that they could be shared, if necessary, with the defense. That was the law, the American system of justice. If they didn’t follow the rules, they had no case.
Salem, who’d been mistreated so many times by the Bureau, nodded. He looked at Nancy. “Some of those tapes have you and John [Anticev] and Louie,” he said. He reminded her that she’d made some comments about her bosses in the Bureau that might prove embarrassing.
Now Nancy understood why Salem had been trying to hold on to the tapes—to protect her and his other two control agents. She smiled. “Emad, I can’t imagine anything I said on there that wasn’t true. Even if I cussed, what I said was true, and whatever I said, I’ve gotta take the hit because Andrew needs them and you’ve gotta give ’em over.” She nodded toward McCarthy. There was a long pause as Salem looked into her eyes. He couldn’t trust anybody else. Finally, he nodded and they went into the next room where Roth was sitting.
“Now she had two top managers in the New York office pissed at her,” said Len Predtechenskis. “Carson Dunbar, the administrative special agent in charge, and Jim Roth, the head lawyer.”
Dunbar characterized his feelings years later. “When something happens,” he said, “we look to somebody to blame.”23 As far as he was concerned, that person was Nancy Floyd.
But Len couldn’t disagree more. For years one of the New York office’s top Soviet counterintelligence agents, Predtechenskis was appalled by the way Agent Floyd was treated; it was one of the reasons he agreed to be interviewed for this book.
“Nancy Floyd was a straight, honest, incredibly hardworking street agent,” he said. “If Emad Salem had been the key to bringing down the blind Sheikh’s cell, she was the FBI agent most responsible. She not only recruited him, but she stuck with him day and night, for months, for years, until he delivered.”
Now Nancy was being cast as the scapegoat. From early on, as an agent from another branch of the New York office—and a straight-talking woman from Texas at that—Floyd had rubbed the management of the Terrorism branch the wrong way. Supervisor John Crouthamel had called her a “bitch” and tried to separate her from Salem; Dunbar said openly that he didn’t trust her. There had been the unproven allegations of sexual impropriety floated about the office. But none of that prepared Nancy for what was to come.
Nailing the Coffin Lid Down
Within a few days of going head-to-head with Jim Roth over the tape seizure, Nancy Floyd got word that she was now the subject of an investigation by the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility. “She was in shock,” said a source close to Nancy.
The FBI’s OPR is the Bureau equivalent of a police department’s Internal Affairs Division.24 The office was designed as a well-intentioned internal watchdog unit, set up to root out corruption in the Bureau’s ranks. But by the late 1990s, it had developed into a two-tiered entity, with street or brick agents like Nancy Floyd subject to discipline much harsher than agents above the rank of SAC (special agent in charge). At least that was the perception.25
Worse, an OPR investigation could be opened on a street agent on the basis of little more than a whisper or an anonymous phone call, casting a cloud over the agent’s career that could linger for years.26 Now such a case had been opened against Nancy Floyd, and it not only threatened her status as an agent, it could have resulted in jail time.
“A recommendation went down to headquarters,” said Roth, “to open up a criminal investigation [on Floyd] for leaking information to this guy [Salem].”
Roth was actually recommending to the Justice Department that Floyd be prosecuted. “But something happened over at Justice,” he continued.27 “They declined to prosecute, and the matter was dialed back to an OPR Administrative Inquiry.” That meant that while Nancy was no longer subject to a potential prison sentence, she might still lose her job.
“All of a sudden in ’93, Nancy gets a call from Allen Kroft,” said Len Predtechenskis. “He’s the head of the voucher section. He calls and asks her, ‘Is something going on with you?’ ” Nancy felt a chill and asked him why. “ ’Cause management’s over here,’ ” Len said, quoting Kroft. “ ‘They’re asking about all your financial records. All your vouchers.’ ”
The implication was that, in her many dealings with Salem, perhaps Nancy hadn’t fully accounted for the five hundred dollars in cash he was getting each week in increments. Salem had been paid an additional thousand dollars a month to cover his expenses. Now the voucher section chief was letting Nancy know that management couldn’t find all the receipts she was supposed to have submitted.
Floyd kept meticulous records, though, and soon she was able to establish that any financial discrepancies were the Bureau’s fault, not hers. The Feds had been transitioning to a computerized expense-reporting system, and some of her paperwork hadn’t been logged in. The incomplete computer files had made it look as if she was holding something back. Floyd called the voucher people and offered to furnish them with a copy of every receipt Salem had signed. “Later they called her back,” said a source, “and dropped [that part of] the case.”
Still, the overall OPR investigation continued. “Nancy Floyd got treated the way people get treated when they cross their supervisor in the FBI,” said Richard Swick, a partner in the D.C. law firm of Swick and Shapiro, which handled Nancy’s case.
Swick represented dozens of FBI agents as counsel to the FBI Agent’s Association, and over the years he remembered a number of OPR cases involving Carson Dunbar.
“I’m not saying he did stuff in bad faith,” said Swick, “but if [Dunbar] decides somebody needs to get hammered, he sets out to do it.”28
Again, Dunbar adamantly disagreed. “As far as the OPR goes,” he said, “I had nothing to do with that. I was interviewed by OPR and I gave a deposition [regarding Floyd] that I believe was correct. I had nothing to do with her OPR.”
Like most agents who become subject to an OPR investigation, Floyd had very little sense of the specific charge in the beginning. “Whenever they start an investigation,” said Swick, “they just give a two- or three-word blurb, like ‘the subject agent was insubordinate.’ ” Then agents assigned to OPR conduct a series of interviews to see if the charge or charges have merit.
While an OPR is ongoing, agents are typically prevented from advancing in Bureau ranks, or getting transferred to their OP (office of preference).
As such, the system is subject to abuse.
“Once an agent has an OPR opened against him, he is really knocked out of competition for any promotions,” said Diane Bodner Duhig, a former attorney with Swick and Shapiro who worked on Nancy’s case.29 The system can get downright draconian. In his 1993 book, The FBI, Ron Kessler interviewed Gary Penrith, a special agent in the FBI’s Newark office who described the impact of an OPR: “As soon as OPR is called in, you are stigmatized,” said Penrith. “It’s all secret stuff. As soon as they get to the office and do their first interview we have a rumor. No matter what the outcome is, everyone remembers that OPR came out and interviewed Gary Penrith.”30
In Nancy’s case, besides the unfounded sexual rumors, her situation was inflamed by Salem’s bootleg tapes. In a number of secret recordings made by the Egyptian without her knowledge, Nancy referred to the FBI management as “gutless” and “chickenshits” who “got caught with their pants down after the World Trade Center explosion.”
On another tape, she related a conversation she’d had with her supervisor. Not realizing she was being recorded, she expressed the fear that telling the truth about what she knew of the Trade Center bombing could have repercussions for her down the line.
“I may be nailing my coffin lid down,” said Nancy, “but this thing was handled completely wrong from the very beginning….Emad hadthe information about the bombs and where they wanted to have them placed. If we had done what we were supposed to have done, we would have known about it. We would have used our heads and come up with a solution of trying to neutralize the situation.”31
The implication was clear: there was blood on the hands of the management in the FBI’s New York office.
Suddenly, as word of the tapes got around in the office, Nancy began to feel isolated and frozen out. “I was told, ‘Don’t talk to Nancy,’ ” recalled Len Predtechenskis, the closest thing to a father figure Floyd had in the office.
The Twelve-Page Memo Disappears
Matters went from bad to worse when Floyd tried to retrieve that twelve-page memo she’d written with Predtechenskis and the other two agents back in the summer of 1992, recounting the history of her dealings with Salem. Now Nancy wanted to give it to Assistant U.S. Attorney McCarthy, but she found that it had mysteriously vanished.
“It disappeared,” said Predtechenskis. “The last time anybody saw it was in the outgoing basket of Nancy’s supervisor [Jim Sherman]. Now it was gone.”
So agents began to shy away from her. “They hid in their cubbyholes,” Predtechenskis recalled. “She was under this cloud, which was totally and completely unfair. As I said, they should have been kissing her ass, and now they were trying to make her out to be the scapegoat.”
Predtechenskis was one of the few agents who went to bat for Nancy. As the lead counter-Soviet intelligence agent in the office, his history of service to the Bureau was impeccable. “They couldn’t get to me,” he noted. “I had a track record.”
At that point in 1993, Predtechenskis had already put in enough time to qualify for his FBI pension. He’d reached the point in the Bureau where he was considered KMA. “It stands for Kiss My Ass,” said Predtechenskis candidly. “It’s a big thing in the FBI. It means that I have twenty years in as an agent and I’ve reached the age of fifty. I could retire at the end of the day if I wanted to. It’s a comforting feeling, ’cause if they’re going to zero in on you and OPR wants to start investigating, you can retire before they can open up the paperwork.”
To hear that from a decorated Bureau veteran is an indication of the atmosphere of fear that exists among FBI street agents today—the fear that expressing even modest disagreement with a supervisor, or staying loyal to an asset the way Nancy Floyd had, might result in an investigation with career-ending implications.
Special Agent Floyd had done little more than disagree with Carson Dunbar over a matter of tactics. The ASAC had wanted Salem to wear a wire and become a criminal informant, risking exposure. Floyd believed Salem could safely continue on as an intelligence asset without having to testify. Now, in the summer of 1993, she was being punished for some tough but honest street language captured on Salem’s bootleg tapes long after the fact.
A central charge of Nancy’s OPR was that she had been “insubordinate.” But had she openly disobeyed management or had she merely done her job, then refused to fall on her sword when the bootleg tapes surfaced? Because of the secret nature of the OPR process, the answer to that question remains locked in FBI files. But the evidence does seem clear on one matter—whether Floyd was singled out. In 1993, the average OPR lasted three to four months.32 The investigation of Nancy Floyd would cast a shadow over her career for the next five and a half years.