As a preacher and propagandist, Abdel Rahman was responsible for recruiting foreign militants looking to wage jihad and procuring international funding for the fight against the Soviets. It was in this latter capacity that Abdel Rahman would establish relationships with both Osama bin Laden and the CIA to coordinate infusions of cash and fighters for the Afghan war effort. By 1989, the Afghan war was drawing to a close. And despite being one of the most prominent Islamic terrorists on Earth and even listed on the American government's own terror watch list, Abdel Rahman was granted at least four separate visas to enter the United States during this period. The last of which eventually led to permanent resident status. After the World Trade Center bombing, the NYT quoted the head of Egypt's information service, saying: "He raises funds and sends money back to Egypt with couriers. He passes on messages to his followers, giving orders about what they should do next and who they should target. We don't understand why the US authorities have allowed him to enter the country." A State Department report later revealed the obvious. The visas had been granted by the CIA stretching as far back as 1986 at the latest.
Although the Egyptian government wasn't actively seeking Abdel Rahman's extradition, they considered him a destabilizing force in the country's politics and an avowed enemy of the Egyptian state. But if Abdel Rahman's terrorist associations were so widely known, then why was he allowed to enter the United States? Media reports from the time suggest one possibility: ''Abdel Rahman, 55, slipped in the United States from the Sudan in 1990 despite being named on a State Department watch list of suspected terrorists and attracting a following, including Arab militants named in several terrorist cases. An administration official in Washington said Saturday that the authorities could have marshaled enough evidence to justify arresting Abdel Rahman. However, he said the cleric was seen by some officials as an intelligence asset who helped investigators gain information by monitoring those drawn to him. We're in no rush to do anything about the sheikh. He said, "We know what he's up to. He doesn't represent anything we can't handle."
Similar sentiments were expressed by the then president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, who was quoted in Egyptian media calling Abdel Rahman a paid CIA asset: ''The sheikh has been a CIA agent since his days in Afghanistan. He still earns a salary. The visa he got was not issued by mistake. It's because of the services he did.''
Abdel Rahman had worked with the CIA to coordinate American funding of the Mujaheden in the Soviet Afghan war. And the CIA had been directly involved in approving the Shik's visa applications for the US going back to at least the mid80s.
During a taped interview shortly after the Trade Center bombing, Salem claimed that he had known Abdel Rahman from their time in Egypt years earlier.
FBI informant, Emad Salem infiltrated the Sheikh's inner circle early enough that the bureau should have had plenty of advanced warning that the World Trade Center was about to be attacked. So why didn't they stop it? The story that the government told at Rahman's trail was that Emad Salem stopped working for the FBI in July of 1992 because he didn't want to wear a wire. However, in his interviews with Peter Lance decades later, Salem admitted that even during the months when his FBI informant status had supposedly lapsed, he was still attending the blind sheikh's Al Farooq mosque in Brooklyn and had even ''learned that a major bomb plot was a foot.'' According to Salem, he was still meeting with Nancy Floyd, his FBI handler, during this time, months after he had supposedly split with the bureau. This means that he was with the FBI when the Al Qaeda terrorist and explosives expert Ramzi Yousef arrived in NJ and, over the next 7 months, recruited several of the blind sheikh's followers to participate in a bombing plot targeting the WTC.
Bribery - According to the official story, Salem's original break with the bureau, which led directly to the FBI's failure to stop the World Trade Center bombing, was a result of Salem's adamant refusal to wear a wire, but he would be wearing wire a few months later after demmanding and receiving $1M from the FBI for his services, some of the funding for which was apparently raised from private sources in a highly unusual arrangement. However, according to media reports at the time, Salem had tried to use the tapes to blackmail the FBI. At least once on the tapes, Salem clearly tells the FBI that he's been taping his conversations with agents. And at one point, he even tells them in what appears to be an attempt at blackmail that he put the tapes in a safe place and wrote a message: ''if, god forbid, something wrong happened to me from the FBI. These tapes got to be sold to one of the uh CNN or, you know, I did something like that to protect my heirs.'' This implies that the million-dollar payout was really a bribe to keep Salem from revealing everything he knew. This explains why Salem was allowed to keep the tapes of his private conversations with the FBI, which later went missing, unable to be used in Rahman's trial.
John Anticev - One of the main FBI agent on the case, John Anticev, has admitted that in the immediate aftermath of the bombing, he was questioned by the director of the FBI, Louis Free, who suspected that the agents handling Emad Salem as an informant may have known about the bombing plot ahead of time. When Antisev was interviewed on the FBI case file review podcast about his involvement in the 93 World Trade Center bombing case, at about 15 minutes and 30 seconds, he relates the story about being called into a meeting at FBI headquarters with Louis Free and the entire senior management of the FBI at which he was questioned about having advanced knowledge of the bombing: ''I go into Louis's conference room. All the senior management of the FBI, all assistant directors, deputy assistant directors, section chiefs regarding terrorism and everything else are just in the room sitting down and standing along the wall. And Louis free was very nice. He was very gracious. He asked me how I was feeling. He heard that I was sick. And then he says to me, "John, I have to ask you a question. He said, did you know about the World Trade Center before it happened?" And I said, "No, director. It was about 12 pipe bombs." And then he said to me, "Are you sure?" and a million things went through my mind. My response was, "What's the matter? You didn't hear me the first time?" And he looked at me and he smiled and he goes, "I'm sorry."''
The official story says that the FBI didn't find out about Emad Salem's tapes of his conversations with his FBI handlers until months after the bombing. Yet, Antivec seems to imply that this conversation happened in the immediate aftermath of the attack. Unless Anticev has totally confused his timeline, the implication here is that Louis Free must have had some other evidence linking the bureau to the bombing before he even knew about Salem's tapes. Evidence which has never been revealed publicly.
Getting away with it - The confidential informant, Emad Salem, only spent a couple of years in the federal witness protection program before dropping out and settling permanently in an undisclosed location in the United States. Ironically, Salem occasionally gives guest lectures at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, and has even given book and TV interviews over the last 15 years. The FBI's whole alibi for the 93 World Trade Center bombing was that Salem was so terrified of reprisals from other Muslims that he quit cooperating with the FBI in the middle of a sting operation just to avoid being publicly identified as an informant. And yet here he is 10, 20, 30 years later telling on himself on network television.
The actual FBI agents who handled Salem suffered no real professional consequences, with John Anticev even being assigned to work on future terrorism cases. He was even portrayed by Bill Camp under a fictitious name in the Hulu adaptation of the Lawrence Wright book, The Looming Tower.
The (other) ones who got away
Ramzi Yousef - Ramzi Yousef, likely the true mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing, was able to flee the United States before being identified as a suspect. He would go on to commit other terror attacks, including the 1994 Imm Raza shrine bombing targeting a Shia holy site in Iran, and may have even met Terry Nichols from the Oklahoma City bombing case when they were both in the Philippines. In 1995, Yousef was captured in an operation by the Pakistani ISI and the US Diplomatic Security Service and then convicted of various federal crimes. He's serving a life sentence in the ADX Florence Supermax Federal Prison in Colorado.
Siddiq Ali - Despite describing him as the ring leader of the landmark bombing plot in the charging documents, prosecutors allowed Siddiq Ali to plead guilty and accept an 11-year prison sentence in exchange for providing testimony against his codefendants, which buttressed the government's version of events. This included affirming prosecutors accusations that the group had planned to kidnap former President Richard Nixon and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in addition to all the other bombings and assassinations.
Abdo Haggag - Another defendant, Abdo Haggag, agreed to testify against his codefendants and in exchange all of his charges were dropped. Eventually, the nine remaining defendants were sentenced to federal prison terms ranging from 25 years to life.
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By: Psyche History Show
Molested by: Otto Heckel
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