The CIA has released 71 intelligence reports covering the months and years before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, shedding new light on what the agency told former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush about al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.
The disclosure, made on Friday as the United States marked 25 years since the attacks, contains 70 reports produced before 9/11 and another dated September 12, 2001. The documents include assessments prepared for the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), a report distributed to the president and senior administration officials.
Two of the documents had already been released as part of the investigation conducted by the 9/11 Commission, which Congress established to examine the circumstances surrounding the attacks. Most of the newly released material, however, contains redactions.
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.
The records illustrate how closely US intelligence had been monitoring bin Laden and his network’s ambitions to attack American interests before 9/11. The earliest document in the release is dated February 13, 1998, and raised concerns about bin Laden’s efforts to obtain chemical, biological and nuclear materials.
It said bin Laden and other Islamic extremists “met [redacted] and agreed to procure unspecified chemical, biological, and nuclear substances from open markets.” The assessment also stated that bin Laden “has legitimate companies, business relationships, and a financial empire that could assist his pursuit of” the weapons.
Several reports focused on bin Laden’s position in Afghanistan, where he and his fighters operated under Taliban protection. One October 1999 assessment described his connections to the country’s narcotics industry, stating that he had “made a substantial investment in 57 narcotics laboratories associated with” Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader.
The same report said bin Laden had recruited specialists “to develop more addictive drugs — possibly ecstasy or methamphetamine.” However, the 9/11 Commission later concluded there was “no reliable evidence that Bin Ladin was involved in or made his money through drug trafficking.”
Another February 1998 report documented a fatwa issued by bin Laden and others “calling for all Muslims to attack US interests and civilians worldwide until the US ‘retreats’ from Saudi Arabia and ‘Palestine.”
Warnings about the possibility of an attack on US soil also appeared in the intelligence. A September 10, 1998, memo stated that extremists “may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a US city”, while cautioning that the available intelligence “provides no conclusive information on Bin Ladin’s intentions for future attacks.”
The same assessment noted that bin Laden “said his preferred option is to strike the US on its own soil in Washington.”
The 9/11 Commission later referred to the memo in its investigation and found that the Counterterrorist Center did not subsequently “analyze how an aircraft, hijacked or explosives-laden, might be used as a weapon.” According to the commission, such an analysis “would soon have spotlighted a critical constraint for the terrorists — finding a suicide operative able to fly large jet aircraft.”
The newly released records also provide further insight into the intelligence warnings circulating during the months immediately preceding the attacks.
By the summer of 2001, US intelligence agencies were receiving information about a possible operation targeting the United States. Then-CIA Director George Tenet later described the situation to the 9/11 Commission by saying the “system was blinking red.”
A July 24 memo stated 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.”
The release also contains the widely known August 2001 PDB titled “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US”, which had previously been declassified in 2004 following a request from the 9/11 Commission.
That assessment cited FBI information showing “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.”
The 9/11 Commission determined that the August 2001 briefing 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 disclosure contains 18 PDB items from the Bush administration dating from before the attacks. The number indicates that additional intelligence material from the period remains classified.
A former senior intelligence official also said the release did not include several PDB items warning about the threat as far back as 1996 or earlier, as well as other intelligence from 2001.
The 9/11 Commission previously concluded 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 released by the CIA is dated September 12, 2001, one day after hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center and Pentagon and crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.
The situation report examined intelligence surrounding bin Laden in the period leading to the attacks and assessed evidence pointing to his possible 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 document also described tensions between bin Laden and Mullah Omar shortly before the attacks.
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 further recorded intelligence from Kandahar about the scope and planning of the attacks.
“[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’s final report ultimately attributed the failure to prevent the attacks to a combination of “failures of imagination, policy, capabilities, and management”, while identifying “the most important failure” as one of imagination.
