Overview
On 26 February 1993 a van packed with roughly half a tonne of explosive detonated in the parking garage beneath the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Six people were killed and more than a thousand injured. The intention had been to topple one tower into the other.
The men responsible were identified and convicted within two years. What has kept the case in circulation is not the question of who built the bomb, but what the Federal Bureau of Investigation knew while it was being built.
The Informant
Emad Salem was a former Egyptian army officer who had come to the United States and was recruited by the FBI in 1991 to report on the circle around Omar Abdel-Rahman, the cleric known as the Blind Sheikh. He was productive. He was also expensive and difficult, and in mid-1992 the relationship broke down: Salem refused to wear a recording device or to testify in open court, and the Bureau ended the arrangement.
The bombing happened seven months later. Within days the FBI brought Salem back, this time at a reported cost of more than a million dollars, and ran him against the same network. His work led directly to the interception of a follow-on plot to bomb New York landmarks including the United Nations building and the Holland and Lincoln tunnels, and to the convictions that followed.
By then Salem had learned a lesson from the first falling-out. He had begun secretly recording his conversations with his own handlers.
The Tapes
Portions of those recordings reached the press in October 1993 and were reported at length by The New York Times. In one exchange Salem and Special Agent John Anticev discuss a proposal from the earlier period: that the Bureau should have allowed Salem to build the device under supervision, substituting a harmless powder for the real explosive, so the plot could be run to its conclusion and the participants taken with the evidence in their hands. Salem's account on the tape is that a supervisor overruled the plan.
The agent's replies do not contradict him. At points they appear to accept his framing that the attack might have been prevented.
The Theory
From this the strong version follows: that the FBI had advance knowledge of the World Trade Center plot specifically, chose to let it proceed for operational reasons, and lost control of it. In its harder forms the claim becomes deliberate facilitation rather than failure — a bombing permitted, or steered, to justify what came after.
What the Record Supports
The New York Times, which obtained and published the material, drew a narrower conclusion: the tapes do not establish the extent to which federal authorities knew a plan to bomb the World Trade Center existed, only that they knew bombing was being discussed within the group. The powder proposal on the tape belongs to the earlier period, before the relationship broke down and before any specific target had been fixed.
That distinction carries most of the weight in the argument, and it cuts both ways. It removes the basis for saying the Bureau knew about this bomb, this building, this date. It does not remove the fact that an informant was inside the group, that a supervised-sting option was raised and rejected, that the informant was dropped, and that six people died seven months later.
What It Established
The 1993 case set the pattern for a debate that would recur constantly after 2001: the difference between an intelligence agency that knew and did nothing, and one that held fragments it did not assemble. The tapes are unusual because they are not a leak of what the Bureau concluded but a recording of what its officers said to each other while it was happening — and what they said, on the record, was that a chance had been passed up.