Gold Market part 4 by Orlin Grabbe

"There's been a bomb at the World Trade Center."

We all looked over at Kelley, one of the gold traders. She was quoting the Telerate news ticker off the monitor on her desk. There was no further information.

We then looked past Kelley, out the seventh floor windows of 222 Broadway, and down the half block of a side street to No. 4 World Trade Center (WTC). The COMEX, where gold futures are traded, was on the 8th floor of No. 4 WTC, and Kelley and one of the other gold traders had open phones lines to the trading floor.

The background voices at the COMEX, heard over the speakers where we were, sounded normal. The street scene outside looked normal also.

"Why don't you ask the floor if there's anything unusual over there," I suggested to Kelley. We had two brokers on the COMEX floor.

Nothing out of the ordinary, they said. No bomb here. One opined he had felt a small shake of the building. The other one hadn't noticed even that.

Those of us at 222 Broadway went back to work, filing away this interesting, but seemingly irrelevant piece of information: a bomb at the World Trade Center. It was, in fact, another hour before smoke began to fill the elevators at No. 4 WTC, and COMEX traders were ordered to evacuate the building. In the meantime, Kelley kept us updated as more news hit the ticker.

"It was centered in the garage area," she announced.

For the first time, someone looked concerned. "I'm parked over there," he said.

Tom wandered by my desk. "Want to go take a look?" he asked. Tom was a PhD chemist who had turned option trader. He had a natural curiosity about explosions.

I declined the invitation. Where there is one bomb, there may be two, and I preferred to wait until the excitement was over. If the bomb was in the parking garage, I doubted there was anything to see, anyway. Tom shrugged and left by himself. He returned with a report: the bomb had collapsed the lobby floor of the Vista Hotel on the ground floor of the tower at No. 1 WTC, as well as the floor below that, and a 20- foot crater now extended out to the street beside the tower. From our windows, we couldn't see the activity taking place because No. 4 WTC blocked our view. I reflected that I had passed through the Vista Hotel lobby the previous day, en route to the walkway connecting the World Trade Center to the World Financial Center located on the other (wharf) side of Manhattan's Westside Highway.

As it turned out, the WTC bomb had been planted by an FBI informant, whose FBI handler had insisted he use real explosives, and not fake that part of the "sting". This was reported in the New York Times before Louis Freeh's media handlers went to work and quashed reports of the FBI connection, and diverted all attention to the supposedly purely foreign nature of the "Middle Eastern terrorists" (with U.S. intelligence connections) whose operation the FBI had been assisting under the guise of conducting a "terrorist sting".

It was claimed the bombers had intended to bring down the tower at No. 1 WTC. Though in fact the van filled with explosive (alleged, but not shown, to be urea nitrate) had done no damage to the building structure. Explosive pressure drops off approximately with the cube of the distance, so to do serious damage with a low-power explosive, you need to attached it to the building columns.

What the explosion had done was to take out two floors in a particular area vertical to the van location, and to fill the building cavities with smoke. Most of the 1000 or so injuries resulted from smoke inhalation, and were basically confined to those taking the commuter trains from New Jersey into the train station in the basement of the WTC. That is, to passers-through trapped in smoke, and not to people actually working at the WTC.

By the end of the day, Tom and I were discussing ANFO bombs instead of options. Where I had grown up in Texas, ammonium nitrate was widely used as fertilizer. It was just one of those things prevalent in the environment, like gasoline and butane, that you used and treated with respect. I had never known anyone killed with ammonium nitrate, although I had known two people, including one neighbor, who had blown themselves up welding "empty" butane tanks.

No, the FBI-assisted terrorists hadn't done much damage to the World Trade Center, relatively speaking, aside from the Vista Hotel. But for a few hours on Feb. 26, 1993, they had shut down the COMEX, and-- London trading having finished for the day--most of the world's gold market along with it.