The CIA’s largest-ever release of 9/11-related President’s Daily Brief material shows U.S. intelligence repeatedly warned the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations that Osama bin Laden wanted attacks inside the United States, including a 1998 report describing the possibility of an explosive-packed airplane striking an American city.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom.
The CIA released 71 President’s Daily Brief intelligence products Friday marking the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, opening more than 100 pages of previously classified analysis that documented years of warnings about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda before hijackers struck New York, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe described the disclosure as “an act of exceptional transparency”, saying it represented the agency’s single largest release of declassified PDB products related to 9/11. The 71 documents span February 1998 through Sept. 12, 2001, tracing intelligence analysts’ evolving assessment of bin Laden’s intentions amid information the CIA itself described as often sparse, vague and imperfect.
“25 years ago, the 9/11 attacks struck a blow to our Nation, but they did not break us,” Ratcliffe said. “Generations of CIA officers have since dedicated their careers to securing justice for our fallen Americans and ensuring al-Qa’ida would never again harm our country.”
“In the years that followed, numerous CIA officers made the ultimate sacrifice in the Global War on Terror,” he continued. “We honor their memory and service through our commitment to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat those who wish to cause us harm.”
The newly released collection shows that warnings about a possible attack inside the United States extended well into President Bill Clinton’s administration.
A Sept. 10, 1998, PDB memorandum titled “Bin Ladin’s Location and Intentions” said intelligence provided “no conclusive information” about his future attacks but reported that his preferred option was an attack on U.S. soil, specifically Washington. The memo then contained a striking possibility: a group linked in the reporting “may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a US city.”
That language did not identify the eventual Sept. 11 plot, its hijackers, an attack date or the World Trade Center. The 9/11 Commission later noted that pre-attack intelligence included several references to aircraft but lacked specific information about the time, place, method and targets of the operation that ultimately occurred.
Less than three months after the September memorandum, another intelligence product became even more explicit about hijacking concerns.
The Dec. 4, 1998, brief, “Bin Ladin Preparing To Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks,” reported that bin Laden and his allies appeared to be preparing attacks in the United States, including an aircraft hijacking. It said two members of an operational team had evaded security checks during a recent trial run at an unidentified New York airport and that some people within bin Laden’s network had received hijacking training.
The collection contains numerous other intelligence titles illustrating the breadth of the concern, including “Potential Targets for Anti-US Attacks by Bin Ladin,” “Reports That Bin Ladin is Planning Attacks Inside the US,” “Bin Ladin Pursuing Unconventional Weapons,” “Snapshot of Recent Usama Bin Ladin-Related Anti-US Terrorist Threats” and “Bin Ladin Operations Are Expert and Flexible.”
The warnings continued after George W. Bush entered the White House.
The most famous came on Aug. 6, 2001, when Bush received the PDB article “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.”
That document said bin Laden had wanted to conduct terrorist attacks inside the United States since at least 1997 and that al-Qaeda members had lived in or traveled to the country “for years.” It also said the organization apparently maintained a U.S. support structure that could assist attacks and cited FBI information about suspicious activity consistent with preparations for hijackings.
The Aug. 6 briefing was not newly disclosed Friday. It became publicly known years ago and was formally declassified during the 9/11 Commission investigation. The significance of the new CIA collection is that it places that well-known warning inside a much larger sequence of intelligence reporting extending across both the Clinton and Bush administrations.
The 9/11 Commission found that more than 40 PDB intelligence articles between Jan. 20 and Sept. 10, 2001, concerned bin Laden, while the Aug. 6 article was the first that year devoted specifically to the possibility of an attack inside the United States. The commission concluded that the intelligence system received a mounting “drumbeat” of threat reporting during the spring and summer of 2001 but never obtained the operational details necessary to identify the specific 9/11 plot before it was carried out.
Friday’s CIA collection itself contains 18 Bush-era PDB products dated before the attacks, beginning with a Jan. 25 assessment of bin Laden’s links to the USS Cole bombing and continuing through an Aug. 28 paper titled “Bin Ladin Operations Are Expert and Flexible.” It also includes a Sept. 12 intelligence report produced after the attacks.
The documents therefore add detail to a distinction that has remained central to investigations of the intelligence failures preceding 9/11: Washington repeatedly received strategic warnings that bin Laden intended to strike Americans and had considered operations involving aircraft, but officials lacked actionable intelligence identifying the four-airliner operation, its exact targets or the Sept. 11 date.
The 9/11 Commission ultimately concluded that U.S. institutions failed in several ways, including shortcomings in imagination, policy, capabilities and management, along with failures to effectively share and act upon intelligence across agencies. It also found that the bulk of specific threat reporting during the summer of 2001 pointed toward attacks overseas even as concern about a domestic strike remained.
Separate records made public before Friday’s CIA release have also fueled continuing scrutiny of Saudi-linked activity in the United States before the attacks.
Court records and investigative reporting have documented that Saudi government religious officials Adel al-Sadhan and Mutaeb al-Sudairy traveled to Southern California beginning in late 1998 and later accompanied Omar al-Bayoumi on a June 1999 trip to Washington during which landmarks were filmed. FBI investigators later examined the men’s connections to individuals tied to al-Qaeda, although allegations concerning whether Saudi officials knowingly assisted the 9/11 plot remain disputed and have been contested by the Saudi government.
The new presidential briefs do not provide a single intelligence report forecasting that four hijacked airliners would be turned into weapons on Sept. 11, 2001.
What they document instead is a succession of warnings stretching across years: intelligence that bin Laden wanted to bring attacks onto American soil, reports concerning hijackings and aviation threats, assessments of his pursuit of unconventional weapons and, eventually, the blunt August 2001 conclusion delivered to Bush that bin Laden was “Determined To Strike in US.”
Twenty-five years later, the CIA’s release places those warnings together in one public record — showing how much U.S. intelligence knew about bin Laden’s intentions while also illustrating the crucial details it failed to uncover before nearly 3,000 people were killed.
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