On the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the CIA declassified and released 69 presidential daily briefs and related intelligence documents from the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. The cache reveals a long-running drumbeat of warnings regarding Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida, including a September 1998 briefing that warned of potential aircraft hijackings.
The 1998 Airplane Warning and Years of Unheeded Intelligence
Tucked at the end of a September 10, 1998, presidential intelligence brief delivered to then-President Bill Clinton was a chillingly specific assessment: a group associated with al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a US city. While that particular threat did not materialize as an explosive-laden aircraft on that timeline, it formed part of a broader, years-long stream of reporting delivered to two successive White Houses.
The CIA released more than 100 pages of presidential daily briefing papers on a Friday coinciding with the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. This cache represents the largest release focused on the Sept. 11 attacks, according to agency officials. These documents, typically guarded under a standard practice of a about 40-year embargo to ensure no sources are compromised and minimize any potential tension with allies, offer an unvarnished look at the information available to senior policymakers before the attacks.
Inside the Declassified Briefings and Threat Reporting
The declassified records, spanning from February 13, 1998, to September 12, 2001, reveal fragments of intelligence flickering through presidential briefings. The reports detailed al-Qaeda’s aspirations to acquire nuclear bomb materials, launch chemical weapons attacks, target shopping malls in Washington, or kidnap an American whose name is redacted. Yet analysts acknowledged that much of the information was frustratingly vague.
In a briefing held on Thursday, CIA analysts explained that before the attacks, terrorist threats were not a primary focus to collect intelligence on, and reporting on bin Laden and al-Qaida was limited. As senior officials noted, part of the problem was finding ways to provide effective warnings, and as the agency wrote more presidential-level reports on al-Qaida, there were concerns about warning fatigue, a senior CIA official said who spoke on the condition that their name not be used, in keeping with the agency’s practice. A senior CIA counterterrorism analyst added that collection from human sources before the attacks was not fantastic, and overall collection on al-Qaida was spotty, leaving a large amount of noise obscuring the clues.
The final warning from the CIA dated August 6, 2001, carried the headline Bin Ladin Determined To Strike In US. That document reported that al-Qaeda members had resided in or traveled to the US for years and that the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks. Concurrently, FBI information at the time indicated patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York, with 70 full field Bin Ladin related investigations underway in the US at the time.
Reflections From Agency Leadership and Historical Context
CIA Director John Ratcliffe emphasized that the document release honors the memory of those killed on September 11, along with the CIA officers who subsequently gave their lives.
“Twenty-five 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-Qaida would never again harm our country.”
John Ratcliffe, CIA Director
Historians and the declassified files alike underscore that the records do not fundamentally change intelligence historians’ understanding of what the US government knew before the attacks, or how it had failed so badly to predict them. A 2004 report by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States previously established that although the intelligence community had warned two successive White Houses of the threat from al Qaeda, it failed to adequately predict or communicate the scope and urgency of those threats, and a silo’ed intelligence apparatus kept intelligence analysts at different agencies from putting the pieces together in a meaningful way.
The 4 a.m. Situation Report on September 12
Among the newly public documents is the final document in the release, dated 4 a.m. on the morning of September 12. Written in the detached, factual style characteristic of presidential updates, the report cites a Kandahar-based Arab, who said the attacks were the result of two years planning and were the beginning of the wrath.
The release preserves redactions to obscure the sources of the information. While these files close the loop on decades of classification regarding these specific daily briefs, they cement the historical record of an intelligence community that saw the warning signs accumulating yet failed to connect the fractured pieces before time ran out.
