Tucked into a Sept. 10, 1998, intelligence report sent to President Bill Clinton’s White House was a warning that, more than a quarter-century later, reads with striking prescience. A CIA analyst wrote that Al Qaeda “may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a U.S. city.”
The warning is among 69 presidential intelligence briefs released by the CIA on Friday, on the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The documents, covering the period from Feb. 13, 1998, to Sept. 12, 2001, detail what the agency knew, or believed it knew, about Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda before and immediately after the attacks.
The release represents the CIA’s largest focused disclosure on the Sept. 11 attacks, according to agency officials. Presidential intelligence briefs are among the agency’s most closely guarded records. The CIA normally waits about 40 years before releasing such material, partly to protect intelligence sources and to minimise potential tensions with allies. The decision to release these documents earlier provides an unusually detailed view of the warnings that reached the highest levels of the US government.
The New York Times, in reporting on the release, noted that the documents do not appear to contain major new revelations. They remain redacted to protect sources. Yet their significance lies elsewhere: they provide a clearer picture of what intelligence officials were telling Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush during the years before the attacks, as well as what the CIA reported to the White House in the early morning hours of Sept. 12.
Taken together, the documents reinforce the central findings of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States and its 2004 report. US intelligence agencies repeatedly warned of the threat posed by Al Qaeda, but failed to understand the scale and nature of the attack the organisation was preparing.
John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, said the documents were released to honour those killed on Sept. 11 and the CIA officers who subsequently lost their lives. “Twenty-five years ago, the 9/11 attacks struck a blow to our nation, but they did not break us,” Mr. Ratcliffe said. “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 newly released material shows that warnings about an attack inside the United States were not confined to a single moment. A July 1998 document, presented to Mr. Clinton five weeks before Al Qaeda attacked two US embassies in Africa, outlined the group’s intention to attack America. It closely tracked the warning repeated years later in the Aug. 6, 2001, presidential briefing that was eventually released under pressure from the 9/11 Commission.
The 1998 assessment acknowledged the weakness of its sourcing. It cited four “questionable sources”, while nevertheless concluding that Al Qaeda’s ambitions to strike the United States were “plausible”, given Bin Laden’s comments. The intelligence therefore contained both a warning and an indication of uncertainty.
That tension runs throughout the newly released material. In an Aug. 3, 1999, document, the CIA considered whether some of the intelligence being collected about Al Qaeda might itself be deliberate deception. The agency noted that numerous potential targets were appearing in its reporting and that a high incidence of Bin Ladin-related walk-ins raised the possibility of “a deliberate effort to mislead us.”
The commission later highlighted similar concerns within the intelligence community. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had also considered the possibility that Al Qaeda was spreading misinformation about its plans.
For intelligence analysts, the difficulty was not simply identifying a threat but determining which fragments represented a coherent operation. CIA analysts said before Sept. 11 that terrorist threats were not a primary focus of intelligence collection. Reporting on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda was limited, human-source collection was “not fantastic”, and overall intelligence on the organisation was described as spotty.
A relatively small group of analysts worked on terrorism. The attention devoted to the threat was nothing like the priority it would become on Sept. 12, 2001. The result was a steady stream of warnings that were serious but often frustratingly vague.
The Sept. 10, 1998, warning about an explosive-packed aircraft illustrates the problem. Although the possibility was recorded, it did not reappear prominently in subsequent warnings to the White House. Individual pieces of information surfaced, disappeared and were replaced by other possible threats. CIA analysts said it was rare for the agency to follow the complete arc of a threat or plot.
There was also concern about “warning fatigue”. As the CIA produced more presidential-level reports on Al Qaeda, officials worried that repeated warnings could lose their impact. The problem was therefore not simply whether warnings existed, but how policymakers could distinguish the most consequential signals from a growing volume of uncertain information.
By 2001, the alarms had become louder. The National Archives released the commission’s summary of the presidential intelligence reports, which noted that in mid-April 2001 the reports “began sounding especially loud alarms about possible attacks”. Yet the sourcing remained sufficiently unreliable to complicate the interpretation of those warnings.
A July 24, 2001, presidential intelligence document described how an expected imminent Bin Ladin-sponsored terrorist operation had been postponed for the second time in two weeks, while preparations for other near-term attacks might still be under way. Suspicious activity involving individuals who had received a cryptic message the previous month was also recorded. At the time, the information was unclear. After the attacks, it assumed a different significance.
The final CIA document released before Sept. 11 came on Aug. 28, 2001. It maintained that Al Qaeda remained a serious threat but did not mention attacks on the US homeland or attacks involving planes. Instead, it referred to “assassination, kidnapping, the use of rockets, mortars and other longer-range weapons, as well as crude chemical or biological attacks.”
The contrast between the earlier warning about explosive-laden aircraft and the later presidential briefing captures the central difficulty revealed by the documents. The intelligence community possessed pieces of the picture, but the pieces did not form a sufficiently clear image of what was about to happen.
Both Mr. Bush and Mr. Clinton later told the commission that they understood the threat posed by Al Qaeda. But the commission concluded that “we do not believe they fully understood just how many people Al Qaeda might kill, and how soon it might do it.”
The failure, according to the commission, was also one of imagination. Intelligence officials could identify Al Qaeda’s hostility and its intention to attack the United States, but they struggled to conceive the scale and form of the operation.
The consequences were institutional as well as historical. Intelligence failures identified by the commission, including inadequate information sharing between the CIA and FBI, contributed to a sweeping reorganisation of the US national security system. The Department of Homeland Security was created, while the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was established to improve collaboration among the FBI, CIA and other intelligence agencies and to strengthen analytical standards.
The language of intelligence reporting also changed. The documents released by the CIA reflect an earlier era in which assessments of analysts’ “confidence level” were not routinely made explicit. Today, such assessments are used to distinguish the strength of evidence from the seriousness of a threat.
One document, however, offered a final observation that would prove significant nearly a decade later. The Aug. 28 report concluded that “inexperienced couriers or suicide bombers also make mistakes that expose plot details.”
The newly released files therefore do not overturn the established history of 9/11. Instead, they sharpen its most troubling question: how could an intelligence system repeatedly identify a determined enemy, receive warnings about attacks inside the United States and even record the possibility of an explosive-packed aircraft, yet still fail to comprehend the catastrophe approaching?
The answer contained in the documents is less dramatic than the discovery of a hidden warning or secret revelation. It is a record of fragmented intelligence, uncertain sources, competing possibilities, limited collection, warning fatigue and a failure to connect individual signals into a coherent picture. Twenty-five years after 9/11, the documents show how the problem was not that Washington heard nothing. It was that the warnings it heard did not become a clear understanding of what was coming.
