Washington — The CIA released 71 intelligence assessments Friday from the period before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, offering a fresh window into what the agency was telling Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda before the strikes that killed nearly 3,000 people.
The collection consists of analysis prepared for the President’s Daily Brief, the highly classified intelligence summary provided to the president and top national security officials. Released as the country observed ceremonies marking 25 years since the attacks, the set includes 70 pre-9/11 documents and one assessment from the following day. Two of the reports had already been disclosed during the 9/11 Commission’s investigation, which Congress created to examine the attacks.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe described the publication 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 files underscore how closely the CIA had been tracking bin Laden and his network’s stated desire to attack the United States in the years before 9/11. The assessments appeared in briefings delivered to Clinton and Bush, and nearly every document made public Friday contains redactions.
The oldest report in the release is dated Feb. 13, 1998. It stated that bin Laden and other Islamic extremists “met [redacted] and agreed to procure unspecified chemical, biological, and nuclear substances from open markets.” Analysts also wrote that bin Laden “has legitimate companies, business relationships, and a financial empire that could assist his pursuit of” such weapons.
At the time, bin Laden and his fighters were operating from Afghanistan under Taliban protection. Several reports explore why the Taliban sheltered him, while also describing what analysts viewed as his expanding connection to Afghanistan’s narcotics trade. An October 1999 assessment said bin Laden had “made a substantial investment in 57 narcotics laboratories associated with” Taliban leader Mullah Omar and had brought in specialists “to develop more addictive drugs — possibly ecstasy or methamphetamine.” The 9/11 Commission later concluded there was “no reliable evidence that Bin Ladin was involved in or made his money through drug trafficking.”
A separate assessment from February 1998 noted that bin Laden and others had issued a fatwa “calling for all Muslims to attack US interests and civilians worldwide until the US ‘retreats’ from Saudi Arabia and ‘Palestine.'”
In a Sept. 10, 1998, memo, analysts warned that extremists “may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a US city,” while cautioning that the intelligence then available “provides no conclusive information on Bin Ladin’s intentions for future attacks.” The same report said bin Laden “said his preferred option is to strike the US on its own soil in Washington.”
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The 9/11 Commission’s final report appeared to refer to that warning and found that the Counterterrorist Center did not later “analyze how an aircraft, hijacked or explosives-laden, might be used as a weapon.” Such an analysis, the commission said, “would soon have spotlighted a critical constraint for the terrorists — finding a suicide operative able to fly large jet aircraft.”
By the summer of 2001, the reports reflected uncertain but increasingly urgent intelligence about a possible attack inside the United States. Then-CIA Director George Tenet later told the 9/11 Commission that the “system was blinking red.” A July 24 memo 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.”
Among the documents released Friday was the well-known August 2001 memo titled “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US,” which was declassified in 2004 after the 9/11 Commission requested it. The briefing said FBI reporting “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.”
