Washington — The CIA on Friday declassified 71 intelligence reports produced in the months and years before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, offering a fresh account of what the agency warned Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush about al Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden, before the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.
The collection includes analyst assessments written for the President’s Daily Brief, the classified intelligence summary delivered to the president and top administration officials. Released alongside ceremonies marking 25 years since the attacks, the archive contains 70 reports written before Sept. 11, 2001, and one from the following day. Two of the records had previously surfaced during the congressional 9/11 Commission investigation.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe described the disclosure as “the single largest release of CIA analysis related to 9/11 ever.”
“25 years ago, the 9/11 attacks struck a blow to our Nation, but they did not break us. 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,” Ratcliffe said in a statement.
What’s in the new 9/11 documents?
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The newly released material underscores how extensively the CIA had tracked bin Laden and his network’s stated ambition to attack the United States before 9/11. The assessments appeared in daily intelligence briefings prepared for Clinton and Bush. Nearly every document released Friday contains redactions.
The oldest report, dated Feb. 13, 1998, said bin Laden and other Islamic extremists “met [redacted] and agreed to procure unspecified chemical, biological, and nuclear substances from open markets.” It added that bin Laden possessed “legitimate companies, business relationships, and a financial empire” that could help support his pursuit of such weapons.
Bin Laden and his fighters operated from Afghanistan under Taliban protection. Multiple reports outline the Taliban’s reasons for sheltering him while also describing his purportedly expanding influence in Afghanistan’s drug trade. An October 1999 assessment said he had “made a substantial investment in 57 narcotics laboratories associated with” Taliban leader Mullah Omar and had enlisted specialists “to develop more addictive drugs — possibly ecstasy or methamphetamine.” The 9/11 Commission later concluded, however, that there was “no reliable evidence that Bin Ladin was involved in or made his money through drug trafficking.”
A separate February 1998 report said bin Laden and others had issued a fatwa urging “all Muslims to attack US interests and civilians worldwide” until the United States “retreats” from Saudi Arabia and “Palestine.”
One particularly stark memo, dated Sept. 10, 1998, warned that extremists “may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a US city.” The assessment cautioned that the intelligence at hand “provides no conclusive information on Bin Ladin’s intentions for future attacks,” but noted that he had said his preferred course was to strike the United States “on its own soil in Washington.”
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The final report of the 9/11 Commission appeared to reference that memo. The commission concluded that the Counterterrorist Center did not go on to “analyze how an aircraft, hijacked or explosives-laden, might be used as a weapon.” Such an examination, it said, “would soon have spotlighted a critical constraint for the terrorists — finding a suicide operative able to fly large jet aircraft.”
Reports from the summer of 2001 detail murky intelligence about a potential plot to strike inside the U.S. At that point, the “system was blinking red,” as then-CIA Director George Tenet told the 9/11 Commission. One memo from July 24 said that “[redacted] indicates that an expected imminent Bin Ladin-sponsored terrorist operation has been postponed, but preparations for other near-term attacks may still be in train.”
Friday’s release included the infamous memo titled “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US” from August 2001, which was declassified in 2004 at the request of the 9/11 Commission. The memo said that FBI information “indicates 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.”
In its report, the 9/11 Commission said the August memo “was the 36th PDB item briefed so far that year that related to Bin Ladin or al Qaeda, and the first devoted to the possibility of an attack in the United States.” Friday’s release includes 18 items dated from the Bush administration before the attacks, meaning at least some of the PDB material from the lead-up remains secret.
A former senior intelligence official said numerous PDB items warning about the threat as far back 1996 and even earlier were not included in Friday’s disclosure, nor were a number of additional pieces from 2001.
The 9/11 Commission found that “[m]ost of the intelligence community recognized in the summer of 2001 that the number and severity of threat reports were unprecedented. Many officials told us that they knew something terrible was planned, and they were desperate to stop it.”
The final document included in the CIA’s release on Friday is dated Sept. 12, 2001, the day after planes smashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. The “situation report” described the latest intelligence surrounding bin Laden in the run-up to the attack, including details about his likely involvement.
“Mounting evidence indicates Sunni extremists in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf recently were aware Usama Bin Ladin-directed attacks were imminent,” the report said. “[Redacted] the existence of a probable operation was widely known among extremists in Afghanistan and speculated Bin Ladin may have relocated to Kabul to avoid conflict over his activities with the Taliban leadership in Kandahar.”
The memo said that bin Laden and the Taliban’s Omar “clashed over Bin Ladin’s determination to mount terrorist attacks” in August 2001.
“Bin Ladin told Mullah Omar he had operations in progress that would cause great damage to the US,” the memo said.
The report also said that “[a] Kandahar-based Arab yesterday said the attacks were the result of two years’ planning and were ‘the beginning of the wrath,’ [redacted] suggest the Capitol and the White House also may have been targets of the operations.”
The 9/11 Commission report determined that “failures of imagination, policy, capabilities, and management” contributed to the government’s inability to stop the 9/11 attacks before they happened, and that “the most important failure was one of imagination.”