The Central Intelligence Agency on Friday, September 11, released 71 President’s Daily Briefs covering early 1998 through the day after the 2001 terrorist attacks, giving the public a direct look at what U.S. leaders were told about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in the years before hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.
The release came on the 25th anniversary of the attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people. Of the 71 documents, 69 had never been made public, the BBC reported. Al Jazeera described it as the agency’s largest-ever release of presidential daily briefs, the highly classified intelligence summaries prepared for the president and the most senior officials. Such briefs typically stay classified for 40 or 50 years.
The documents, many of them still heavily redacted, span the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and run to 101 pages, according to Al Jazeera. The earliest, titled “Terrorists seeking WMD capability,” is dated February 13, 1998.
An early airplane warning
One brief, dated September 10, 1998, said bin Laden’s preferred target was inside the United States, with Washington a prime location. The group behind that summer’s bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania “may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a US city,” a CIA analyst wrote. The same memo cautioned that intelligence offered “no conclusive information” about his plans for future attacks.
The 9/11 Commission’s 2004 report noted that U.S. intelligence believed al-Qaeda was considering using an airplane in an attack, but it was never clear whether that warning reached Clinton, the BBC reported.
The August 1998 embassy bombings killed 224 people and prompted U.S. cruise missile strikes on targets in Afghanistan and Sudan. A brief written on August 28, 1998, warned that bin Laden’s network remained intact and that he was actively “considering attacks in the US.”
Later that year, a brief dated December 4, 1998, and titled “Bin Laden Preparing To Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks,” described conspirators who “had evaded security checks during a recent trial run at an unidentified New York airport” and said that “some members of the Bin Laden network have received hijack training,” Al Jazeera reported.
Weapons, finances and the Taliban
Other briefs tracked bin Laden’s movements, his financing and his networks in the United States and abroad. Analysts recorded his interest in chemical, biological and radiological weapons, and by June 1999 the briefs included reports that his operatives had experimented with explosives as part of an effort to build so-called dirty bombs.
An April 1998 brief found no sign the Taliban planned to hand bin Laden over. It described him as their “guest” and said the group’s gratitude for his help during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan left it “reluctant to alienate him by monitoring or controlling his activities.”
The warnings grew more frequent after Bush took office in 2001. By that summer the language had become more urgent, including the well-known August 6, 2001, brief titled “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US,” which was declassified in 2004 at the 9/11 Commission’s request.
The day after
Only one brief in the release was written after the attacks. Sent to the White House at 4 a.m. on September 12, 2001, less than 20 hours after the first plane hit the World Trade Center, it said “mounting evidence” suggested extremists in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf had been aware an attack was imminent. A partly redacted passage said the plot was “widely known” among extremists, the BBC reported.
Less than a month later, the United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan.
What the files add
The documents provide little new information about how the attacks were planned, Al Jazeera noted, but they offer a paper trail of mounting warnings in the analysts’ own words. They echo the 9/11 Commission’s conclusion that U.S. intelligence repeatedly warned of a possible attack but lacked details about its timing, targets or scale.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe called the release “an act of exceptional transparency.” In a statement, he said: “Twenty-five years ago, the 9/11 attacks struck a blow to our nation, but they did not break us.” He added, “Generations of C.I.A. officers have since dedicated their careers to securing justice for our fallen Americans and ensuring Al Qaeda would never again harm our country.”
