Unprecedented CIA Release Reveals Decades-Old Intelligence and Warnings Prior to 9/11 Attacks

Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, the CIA has released a series of presidential briefing documents showing what United States leaders had been told about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in the years before the plane hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people. CIA Director John Ratcliffe called the release of the documents “an act of exceptional transparency”. This marks the agency’s largest-ever release of presidential daily briefs, the classified intelligence summaries written for the president and his most senior officials.

The files cover the period from February 1998 to September 12, 2001 – the day after the deadly attacks on New York City and Washington, DC – and reveal how the CIA tracked bin Laden’s movements, his financing and his networks inside the US and abroad. In one briefing, an analyst warned that the group behind that year’s East Africa embassy bombings “may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a US city”. Another notes that some in bin Laden’s network had received hijack training, while others describe his hunt for materials to build a radioactive “dirty bomb”.

The documents add little new information about how the attacks were planned, but they do offer a clear paper trail of accumulating warnings. Seventy-one presidential daily briefs spanning 101 pages have been made public, beginning with a brief dated February 13, 1998, and concluding with a report dated September 12, 2001. Throughout these documents, analysts tracked bin Laden’s attempts to acquire chemical, biological, and radiological weapons, as well as the Taliban's refusal to give him up due to gratitude for his assistance during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan between December 1979 and February 1989.

The warnings intensified over time, particularly as George W Bush took over as president from Bill Clinton in 2001. Records show that US intelligence was aware as early as 1998 of the potential for aircraft to be used in attacks, noting bin Laden’s preference for striking Washington and the possibility of utilizing explosive-packed planes. While the newly released material raises questions about preparedness, it provides no evidence of government involvement or prior knowledge of the exact time, place, method, or targets of the plot, reinforcing the conclusion that agencies failed to assemble the pieces of the puzzle in time.