Declassified CIA documents show clear warnings to presidents before 9/11

Newly declassified documents show the CIA repeatedly warned Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush that Osama bin Laden was determined to strike at the United States, as far back as three years before the 9/11 attacks. The high-level warnings lacked definitive information about precisely how or when the attacks might take place. But one intelligence report to the president in September 1998 came tantalizingly close to grasping what might be coming, stating that bin Laden’s supporters “may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a US city.” The same memo states that “intelligence provides no conclusive information on bin Ladin’s intentions for future attacks.” The document was one of dozens of formerly top-secret presidential briefings related to the 9/11 attacks released by the CIA on Friday, the 25th anniversary of deadly Al Qaeda terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people. The documents, posted on the CIA’s website, cover the period from February 1998 to Sept. 12, 2001. All are drawn from the daily intelligence briefings that were given by the CIA and other spy agencies to Clinton and his successor, Bush. In a statement, CIA Director John Ratcliffe called it “the single largest release of CIA analysis related to 9/11 ever.” “Americans can now see for themselves the intelligence leading up to this tragic day for our Nation,” Ratcliffe said in a post on X. The documents, which amount to more than 100 pages, show a steady stream of alarming but imprecise intelligence reports that bin Laden was preparing to attack the United States, either on U.S. soil or at embassies and U.S. military bases abroad. Many of them were heavily redacted. But the documents included no major new revelations, as previous inquiries by Congress and accounts by officials in government at the time had made clear that the intelligence agencies were aware of the growing threat from Al Qaeda. The September 1998 intelligence briefing about the possibility of using an explosive-laden plane to target an American city was written only weeks after bin Laden’s supporters bombed U.S. embassies in East Africa and after a failed attempt by the Clinton administration to kill the Al Qaeda leader with Tomahawk missile strikes in Afghanistan and Sudan. After the failed missile strikes on Aug. 20, 1998, an intelligence brief eight days later to the president concluded that bin Laden and other terrorist leaders based in Afghanistan “survived the US strikes and their communications network remains intact” and that training for militants had resumed at some camps. Other intelligence memos stated that bin Laden’s militants were training to hijack commercial airliners, experimenting with crude chemical or other unconventional weapons, doing dry runs to test U.S. airport security, plotting to take hostages and trafficking narcotics to fund terrorism plans. The intelligence reports to the White House also consistently found that bin Laden was in no danger of being expelled by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, even though some senior figures worried his plotting against the U.S. could put the Taliban in jeopardy. The “Taliban is not likely to give up bin Ladin for less than full diplomatic recognition and significant reconstruction aid,” said one intelligence memo from March 26, 2001. By Aug. 6, 2001, the intelligence community provided yet another bleak assessment to the president, titled: “bin Ladin determined to strike in US.” “Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate bin Ladin since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US,” the briefing states. The document drop came the same day that 9/11 widow Terry Strada broke with the long-standing tradition of keeping politics out of Sept. 11 remembrances and called on President Donald Trump to hold Saudi Arabia accountable for the attacks. “Tell the Saudis to stop lying,” said Strada, who lost her husband, Tom, during the attacks and raised their three children on her own. “Tell them if they want to be friends with the USA they cannot continue to deny all of this — all of the pain, all of the destruction that we have all been suffering through.” Trump was at the memorial ceremony at the Pentagon, but Vice President JD Vance was in lower Manhattan. So Strada directed her message at him. “Vice President Vance, thank you for being here today. Please carry that message back, stand with the families, stand with the survivors, stand with Americans, as my husband Tom said that is always the right thing to do,” Strada said. Fifteen of the Al Qaeda plane hijackers were Saudi nationals. And Strada is part of a coalition of 9/11 families that believes the Saudis were complicit in the attacks and has sued the country’s government. The Saudis deny that claim and are fighting the lawsuit in court. Strada, who is seeking information about two Saudi nationals in California the FBI gathered as part of “Operation Encore,” told NBC News last year that “because of this lawsuit we now know there was critical evidence in the hands of the FBI within days of the attacks.” “It was never properly analyzed or shared with the 9/11 Commission,” Strada said. The 9/11 Commission was an independent, bipartisan group created to investigate the Sept. 11 attacks. It concluded in a report released in 2004 that poor communication between the FBI and the CIA, a failure to “connect the dots” of intelligence about Al Qaeda suspects, as well as a “failure of imagination” within the U.S. national security apparatus, enabled the terrorists to pierce America’s defenses. The report led to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.