CIA declassifies intel warnings to White House prior to 9/11 attack

On September 10, 1998, a warning was included in President Bill Clinton's presidential intelligence brief: a group linked to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden "may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a US city." Regrettably, the plot never materialized, with four planes hijacked, two crashing into New York City's World Trade Center, one striking the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and the fourth crashing in a Pennsylvania field following a heroic passenger uprising.

On Friday, the CIA declassified and published over 100 pages of presidential daily briefing papers shared with Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush concerning the threat from al Qaeda and bin Laden as the 9/11 attacks approached. For the first time, the American public received a chilling glimpse of the information two presidents viewed but neglected to address.

The papers reveal a series of warnings over time, indicating bin Laden's intention to strike the United States or its overseas sites. Fragments of intelligence suggesting he aimed to attack a Washington shopping mall, obtain nuclear materials, launch chemical weapon attacks, or kidnap an American, whose name remains undisclosed, appear throughout the documents.

Despite not fundamentally altering historians' comprehension of what the US government knew before the attacks or how it faltered to anticipate them, the files do not change the intelligence community's perspective. A 2004 National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States report revealed that despite the intelligence community warning successive White Houses of the al Qaeda threat, it lacked the ability to predict or convey the gravity and urgency of those threats.

At the time, the CIA found itself in a period of profound uncertainty, as its primary purpose had shifted from battling the Soviet Union to determining its new focus. The unit responsible for tracking bin Laden, Alec Station, was modest, and intelligence analysts in different agencies frequently failed to connect the dots meaningfully.

Even so, the declassification still represents a historically significant and intriguing release from the CIA, which rigorously safeguards presidential daily brief materials as some of its most classified information.