The planning, which began last summer, involved four men, and targeted fuel tanks and pipelines at the airport, law enforcement sources said.
It did not target airplane flights, they said.
The goal was to set off explosives in a fuel line that feeds the airport and also runs through residential neighborhoods, The Associated Press reported, quoting officials close to the investigation.
An official described the suspects as "al Qaeda wannabes."
One suspect, a U.S. citizen who is a native of Guyana and who once worked at the airport, was described by a source as "a very angry Muslim extremist."
Another suspect is a former member of parliament in Guyana, several law enforcement officials said.
The plot was revealed when the planners tried to recruit help from someone who was a law enforcement informant, sources said.
Rep. Peter King, R-New York, said law enforcement had had the plot "under control" for some time.
Another law enforcement official said the plot was never "fully operational."
The FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force have called a news conference for 1 p.m. to provide details of the arrests and an indictment.
CNN's Kathleen Koch and Kelli Arena contributed to this report.
Count the redundancies in this statement.
Aptitude for Destruction, Volume 1
Organizational Learning in Terrorist Groups and Its Implications for Combating Terrorism
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG331/
By: Brian A. Jackson, John C. Baker, Peter Chalk, Kim Cragin, John V. Parachini, Horacio R. Trujillo
Continuing conflicts between violent groups and states generate an ever-present demand for higher-quality and more timely information to support operations to combat terrorism. Better ways are needed to understand how terrorist and insurgent groups adapt over time into more-effective organizations and increasingly dangerous threats. Because learning is the link between what a group wants to do and its ability to gather the needed information and resources to actually do it, a better understanding of the group learning process could contribute to the design of more-effective measures for combating terrorism. This study collects and analyzes the available information on terrorist groups’ learning behavior, combining input from the organizational learning literature, published literature on terrorist and insurgent groups, and insights drawn from case studies and workshop discussions. It describes a model of learning as a four-part process, comprising acquiring, interpreting, distributing, and storing information and knowledge. This analytical framework, by providing a fuller picture of how terrorist groups try to adapt and evolve over time, may help in understanding the behavior of individual groups and the level of threat they pose; in developing effective counterstrategies to detect and thwart their efforts; and in appropriately allocating resources to counter potential and proven adversaries. A companion report, Aptitude for Destruction, Volume 2: Case Studies of Learning in Five Terrorist Organizations, MG-332-NIJ, examines in detail the learning activities of five major terrorist organizations and develops a methodology for ascertaining what and why groups have learned.