The now-infamous warning to then-U.S. president Bill Clinton was tucked at the bottom of a presidential intelligence brief delivered on Sept. 10, 1998: A group associated with al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden “may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a U.S. city.” In the end, there were no explosives. Just four planes, two piloted into the World Trade Center in New York City, one into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and one intended for the U.S. Capitol that crash-landed in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers heroically fought back against the terrorists. The CIA on Friday declassified and released more than 100 pages of presidential daily briefing papers provided to former U.S. presidents Clinton and George W. Bush that dealt with the threat from al Qaeda and bin Laden in the run-up to 9/11, providing for the first time to the American public an eerie snapshot of the information two U.S. presidents saw but failed to act on. They show a drumbeat of warnings over the course of years that bin Laden was considering an attack in the United States or on American sites overseas. Fragments of intelligence suggesting he wanted to attack a shopping mall in Washington, acquire nuclear bomb materials, launch chemical weapons attacks or kidnap an American — whose name is redacted — flicker through the pages. The documents do not fundamentally change intelligence historians’ understanding of what the U.S. government knew before the attacks, or how it had failed so badly to predict them. A 2004 report by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States found that although the intelligence community had warned two successive White Houses of the threat from al Qaeda, it failed to adequately predict or communicate the scope and urgency of those threats. A silo’ed intelligence apparatus kept intelligence analysts at different agencies from putting the pieces together in a meaningful way. It was also a time of profound uncertainty for the CIA, scholars of the era say. The agency’s main raison d’être, the Soviet Union, had fallen, and it wasn’t entirely clear how the agency should reorient itself or what it should focus on. A running joke in Washington during the Clinton era was that a small plane that crashed on the White House lawn was the CIA director trying to get in touch with the president. The unit in the CIA responsible for tracking bin Laden — a small office called Alec Station — was small. “Even if one element of the agency is screaming about a threat, it’s still a pretty big organization,” noted Jeffrey Rogg, an intelligence community historian at the University of Texas in Austin. But the documents still represent a historically significant and fascinating release from the CIA, which closely guards presidential daily brief materials as some of its most sensitive classified material. A final warning from the CIA dated Aug. 6, 2001, was headlined: “Bin Ladin [sic] Determined To Strike In U.S.” It reported that al Qaeda members had resided in or travelled to the U.S. “for years” and that the group “apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks.” FBI information at the time indicated “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.” 70 full field “Bin Ladin related” investigations were underway in the U.S. at the time, the report said. But, it acknowledged, “we have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting,” including reporting from 1998 “saying that Bin Ladin wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft.” The final document in the release is dated 4 a.m. on the morning of Sept. 12. The report cites a “Kandahar-based Arab,” who said the attacks were the result of two years’ planning. They were, he said, “the beginning of the wrath.”
