WASHINGTON, September 15 — Newly declassified CIA documents show US intelligence officials were discussing the possibility that al-Qaeda “may fly an explosive airplane into a US city” three years before the September 11, 2001 attacks. The agency released 71 daily presidential briefs spanning from early 1998 to the day after the attacks. The release came on Friday, the 25th anniversary of the hijacked planes being crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.
Of the 71 documents published, 69 had never been seen by the public. Many remain heavily redacted.
What the briefs said
One briefing document, dated 10 September 1998, reported that Osama Bin Laden’s preferred location for a strike was within the US, with Washington a prime target. The group, a CIA analyst wrote, “may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a US city.” Another document, dated 12 September 2001, said the plot’s existence was “widely known” in extremist circles. President’s Daily Briefs are among the most secretive intelligence analyses in the US government and typically remain classified for 40 or 50 years after publication.
The briefs were created during both the Clinton and Bush administrations and show increasing alarm over the al-Qaeda network and its leader.
The agency’s response
CIA Director John Ratcliffe said in a statement: “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.” The documents echo the assessment of the official commission that reviewed the attacks that US intelligence repeatedly warned of a potential attack but had few details or sense of the scale of what was coming.
The 9/11 Commission’s 2004 report noted US intelligence believed al-Qaeda was considering using an airplane in the attack, but it was never clear that the warning reached then-President Bill Clinton. Bin Laden and al-Qaeda were already well known to the US intelligence community in 1998.
In August that year, they attacked US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people and prompting the US to strike targets in Afghanistan and Sudan with cruise missiles. One document written on 28 August 1998 — 21 days after the embassy attacks and eight days after the US retaliation — warned that the network remained a threat. The briefs span the Clinton and Bush administrations and reflect the intelligence community’s growing focus on al-Qaeda and Bin Laden in the years before the 2001 attacks.
What remains to be seen is how much of the still-redacted material is released, and whether the fuller record adds to the commission’s finding that the warnings never translated into a clear picture of what was coming.
