Several dozen presidential daily briefs detailing intelligence on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida before the September 11 attacks were declassified on Friday, the 25th anniversary of the hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people.
The files track Bin Laden’s movements, his support system, the financing of his operations, and his network inside the United States and abroad. CIA director John Ratcliffe called the release “an act of exceptional transparency” and said it was the agency’s single largest declassification of presidential daily briefs, the classified reports prepared for the government’s most senior leaders.
The documents span from a February 1998 file prepared for then president Bill Clinton, titled “Terrorists seeking WMD capability,” to a 12 September 2001 report in which a source said the attacks had been planned for two years and had also targeted the US Capitol.
An April 1998 document described the Taliban’s unwillingness to hand over Bin Laden, then regarded as their “guest” in Afghanistan, citing their “gratitude for his assistance during the Soviet occupation.” In July 1998, briefers called it “plausible that Bin Ladin places a high priority on conducting attacks in the United States” and noted his interest in chemical and biological agents.
Two months later, a briefer wrote that Bin Laden’s “preferred option is to strike the US on its own soil in Washington,” and that al-Qaida “may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a US city.” A December 1998 brief described conspirators evading security checks during a trial run at an unidentified New York airport, adding that some network members had received hijack training.
Other files detail Bin Laden’s pursuit of materials for “dirty bombs” and experiments to increase their energy output by June 1999. Briefs prepared for George W Bush in early 2001 focused in part on his “experimentation by crude means to make and deploy biological agents.”
A report from August 2001, a month before the attacks, cited “suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings,” including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York. It noted the FBI was conducting approximately 70 full field investigations across the United States it considered Bin Laden-related.
Many documents were redacted to conceal sources and identifying information, and did not appear to break new ground on the planning of the attacks. A bipartisan commission that investigated the attacks between 2002 and 2004 had earlier faulted a lack of information-sharing among agencies such as the CIA and FBI, leading to the creation of a director of national intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Center.
The White House pointed to a separate batch of documents released by the National Archives on Friday, including interviews with national security officials from the Clinton and Bush administrations produced by that commission.