Washington — The CIA on Friday released 71 intelligence reports from the months and years leading up to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, providing a new look at what the spy agency told two presidents about al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden before the deadly strikes.
The trove of documents includes assessments prepared by analysts for the President’s Daily Brief, which is distributed to the president and senior administration officials. The release, which coincided with ceremonies marking 25 years since the attacks, includes 70 documents from before the 2001 attacks and one report from the day after. Two of the documents had previously been made public during the course of the investigation by the 9/11 Commission, the body established by Congress to examine the attacks.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe said the disclosure was “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 new documents show the extent to which the CIA was aware of bin Laden and his followers’ determination to strike the U.S. in the years leading up to 9/11. The assessments were included in the PDB given to Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Nearly all the documents released Friday include redactions.
The earliest document was dated Feb. 13, 1998. It said that bin Laden and other Islamic extremists “met [redacted] and agreed to procure unspecified chemical, biological, and nuclear substances from open markets.” The report said that bin Laden “has legitimate companies, business relationships, and a financial empire that could assist his pursuit of” the weapons.
Bin Laden and his fighters were based in Afghanistan, under the protection of the Taliban. Several of the documents describe the Taliban’s motivations in harboring bin Laden, and detail bin Laden’s growing role in Afghanistan’s drug trade. An October 1999 report said he had “made a substantial investment in 57 narcotics laboratories associated with” Mullah Omar, the head of the Taliban, and had recruited experts “to develop more addictive drugs — possibly ecstasy or methamphetamine.” (The 9/11 Commission later found “no reliable evidence that Bin Ladin was involved in or made his money through drug trafficking.”)
Another report from February 1998 said 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.'”
A Sept. 10, 1998, memo warned that extremists “may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a US city,” while including the disclaimer that the available intelligence “provides no conclusive information on Bin Ladin’s intentions for future attacks.” The report noted that 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 included an apparent reference to that memo, and determined that the Counterterrorist Center did not subsequently “analyze how an aircraft, hijacked or explosives-laden, might be used as a weapon.” If it had, the commission found, it “would soon have spotlighted a critical constraint for the terrorists — finding a suicide operative able to fly large jet aircraft.”
Reports from the summer of 2001 detail murky intelligence about a potential plot to strike inside the U.S. At that point, the “system was blinking red,” as then-CIA Director George Tenet told the 9/11 Commission. One memo from July 24 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.”
Friday’s release included the infamous memo titled “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US” from August 2001, which was declassified in 2004 at the request of the 9/11 Commission. The memo said that FBI information “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.”
