WASHINGTON — Tucked at the end of a Sept. 10, 1998, intelligence report sent to President Bill Clinton’s White House was a warning about al-Qaida that more than a quarter-century later seems prescient.
Al-Qaida, a CIA analyst wrote, “may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a U.S. city.”
On Friday, the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the CIA released 69 never-before-seen presidential intelligence briefs detailing what it had discovered about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida in the run-up to the day.
The release, according to agency officials, is their largest focused on the Sept. 11 attacks. The intelligence analyses that were sent directly to the president and senior policymakers are among the agency’s most closely guarded documents, and the CIA’s standard practice is to release them only after about 40 years, to ensure no sources are compromised and minimize any potential tension with allies.
The documents do not appear to contain major new revelations, and they remain redacted to obscure the sources of the information. But the briefings provide details of what the CIA was telling Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush in the months and years before the attacks, along with an intelligence report provided in the early morning hours of Sept. 12.
The documents released Friday reinforce the central findings of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States and its 2004 report: U.S. intelligence agencies warned about al-Qaida consistently but failed to understand the scale of the attack the group had in mind.
John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, said the documents were being released to honor the memory of those killed on Sept. 11, along with the CIA officers who subsequently gave their lives.
“Twenty-five years ago, the 9/11 attacks struck a blow to our nation, but they did not break us,” Ratcliffe said. “Generations of CIA officers have since dedicated their careers to securing justice for our fallen Americans and ensuring al-Qaida would never again harm our country.”
Still, the documents demonstrate that the CIA repeatedly brought to Bush and Clinton the threat posed by bin Laden to directly attack the United States.
In a briefing Thursday, CIA analysts said that before Sept. 11, terrorist threats were not a primary focus to collect intelligence on, and reporting on bin Laden and al-Qaida was limited. Reading the old reports, the analysts said, it was clear that the agency knew al-Qaida wanted to attack America. But what that would look like, intelligence officials said, was not clear, with a large amount of noise obscuring the clues.
Working through the newly released documents, dating from Feb. 13, 1998, to Sept. 12, 2001, various strands of threat intelligence rise to the surface and then disappear. The 1998 intelligence about the explosive-laden plane, for example, does not make another prominent appearance in the warnings given to the White House.
The CIA analysts said it was rare that the agency could follow the full story arc of a threat or plot. Various threats come and go from the agency’s warnings.
Part of the problem was finding ways to provide effective warnings, said a senior CIA official, who spoke on the condition that their name not be used, in keeping with the agency’s practice. As the CIA wrote more presidential-level reports on al-Qaida, there were concerns about “warning fatigue,” the CIA official said.
A senior CIA counterterrorism analyst said collection from human sources before the attacks was “not fantastic.” The overall collection on al-Qaida, CIA officials said, was spotty.
A small group of intelligence analysts worked on terrorism threats. But it was nothing like the priority it became on Sept. 12, 2001. As a result, there was a steady drumbeat of warnings, yet almost all were frustratingly vague.
The idea that the intelligence community was aware of plotting around explosive-laden planes in September 1998 has been known. The commission mentions a report circulating about al-Qaida’s interest in using an airplane with explosives aboard to attack the United States, but it did not say the report reached the president.
Bush and Clinton told the commission they understood the threat of al-Qaida, although the final report concluded that “we do not believe they fully understood just how many people al-Qaida might kill, and how soon it might do it.”
The CIA released one document from after the fact, a “situation report” for the president sent to the White House at 4 a.m. on Sept. 12. Such updates are supposed to be factual, with minimal analysis. And despite the gravity of what happened on that day 25 years ago, the analysts wrote in their usual detached style.
Before the attack, analysts wrote regularly about the threat, but the CIA officials acknowledged that their warnings did not capture the scope of what al-Qaida had in mind. That was in part because the reporting was not there. But the commission said this also resulted from a failure of imagination.
The senior CIA counterterrorism analyst said the agency since Sept. 11 had come a long way and was better at “thinking outside the box.” The lesson of Sept. 11, she said, was that intelligence agencies had to think more creatively.
Those intelligence failures, as well as the others identified by the commission such as a lack of information sharing between the CIA and FBI, led to a reorganization of the federal government’s national security structure. The Department of Homeland Security was created, bringing together various law enforcement agencies, as was the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which works to improve collaboration among the FBI, the CIA, and other spy agencies and set analytical standards.
The postattack reviews also changed how intelligence reports were written. The documents released Friday reflect the earlier era. Today, intelligence reports are peppered with assessments of analysts’ “confidence level,” how well-sourced a particular conclusion is. Although it is clear from the old reports that the CIA had high confidence in al-Qaida’s goal to strike the United States, and doubts about the specifics of various plots, that assessment was not made explicit for policymakers.
Two members of the commission were allowed to review the presidential daily briefs from the time leading up to the attacks, but the agency fought against distributing them more widely. Two briefs were released amid pressure from the commission and the public.
Jamie Gorelick, a commission member who reviewed the presidential daily briefs, said the summary of the documents that she co-wrote informed the commission’s work, although the commission was not allowed to release or quote the documents.
These presidential briefs “are consistent with the commission’s assessment of the preattack intelligence,” said Gorelick, who served as deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration.
Still, even if the underlying material has been well understood, the newly released documents are likely to be closely examined by historians of the intelligence agency.
A July 1998 document, given to Clinton five weeks before al-Qaida attacked two embassies in Africa, outlined the group’s intent to attack America. That document tracked the warning repeated years later in the Aug. 6, 2001, presidential briefing released by the government under pressure from the 9/11 Commission.
That 1998 report cited four “questionable sources” but said al-Qaida’s ambitions to strike the United States were “plausible,” given bin Laden’s comments.
A document from Aug. 3, 1999, discussed the possibility that the intelligence being collected on al-Qaida could be a deception. That document was generated in response to questions from senior Clinton administration officials. The analysis noted that because so many potential targets came up in intelligence collection, al-Qaida could have been engaged in “a deliberate effort to mislead us.”
“The diverse targets mentioned in the reporting, combined with a high incidence of Bin Ladin-related walk-ins, suggest a deliberate effort to mislead us,” the CIA wrote, using the government’s spelling for bin Laden.
The commission also highlighted the intelligence community’s worries about deception, noting that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had leaned into the theory that al-Qaida was spreading misinformation that it intended to attack.
A presidential intelligence document from July 24, 2001, appeared to describe the lull that the commission outlined in its report. The document reported that for the second time in two weeks, “an expected imminent Bin Ladin-sponsored terrorist operation has been postponed, but preparations for other near-term attacks may still be in train.”
The intelligence report noted suspicious activity among individuals who had received a cryptic message the previous month. At the time, the collection was fuzzy. After the fact, the report looks like a missed warning.
The last document release by the agency before the Sept. 11 attacks came on Aug. 28, 2001. That document in some ways read like a follow-up to the Aug. 6 report, potentially explaining why no attack had occurred despite the earlier warning.
The report insisted that al-Qaida remained a threat, though it made no mention of attacks on the homeland or attacks with planes. Instead, the presidential note mentioned “assassination, kidnapping, the use of rockets, mortars and other longer-range weapons, as well as crude chemical or biological attacks.”
The intelligence report also discussed how Qaida operations could be delayed or disrupted.
In a final note that foreshadowed how bin Laden would ultimately be found nearly a decade later, the Aug. 28 report concluded that “inexperienced couriers or suicide bombers also make mistakes that expose plot details.”
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
