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 is 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, a briefer warns 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.
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 paper trail of accumulating warnings. Seventy-one presidential daily briefs spanning the period from February 1998 to September 2001.
These are the highly classified intelligence summaries prepared for the president and the government’s most senior officials. The documents run to 101 pages, with the earliest, titled Terrorists seeking WMD capability, dated February 13, 1998. The last, Situation Report: Bin Laden’s Tracks, is dated September 12, 2001, the day after the attacks.
In between are briefs on the Taliban’s refusal to give bin Laden up, his hunt for chemical, biological and radiological weapons, his financing, and repeated warnings that he intended to strike inside the US. Many pages are redacted to protect sources. The briefs show that analysts were tracking bin Laden’s movements, the support system around him, his network inside the US and abroad, and how his operations were financed.
Some of the warnings laid out in the presidential briefs were strikingly specific. In September 1998, three years before the attacks, a briefer wrote that bin Laden’s “preferred option is to strike the US on its own soil in Washington”. Analysts also noted his interest in unconventional weapons: Chemical, biological, and radiological.
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