CIA declassifies intel warnings to White House prior to 9/11 attack

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The now-infamous warning to then-President Bill Clinton was tucked at the bottom of a presidential intelligence brief delivered on September 10, 1998: A group associated with al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden “may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a US city.”

In the end, there were no explosives. Just four planes, two piloted into the World Trade Center in New York City, one into the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and one intended for the US Capitol that crash-landed in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers heroically fought back against the terrorists.

The CIA on Friday declassified and released more than 100 pages of presidential daily briefing papers provided to Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush that dealt with the threat from al Qaeda and bin Laden in the run-up to 9/11, providing for the first time to the American public an eerie snapshot of the information two presidents saw but failed to act on.

They show a drumbeat of warnings over the course of years that bin Laden was considering an attack in the United States or on American sites overseas. Fragments of intelligence suggesting he wanted to attack a shopping mall in Washington, acquire nuclear bomb materials, launch chemical weapons attacks or kidnap an American — whose name is redacted — flicker through the pages.

The documents do not fundamentally change intelligence historians’ understanding of what the US government knew before the attacks, or how it had failed so badly to predict them. A 2004 report by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States found that although the intelligence community had warned two successive White Houses of the threat from al Qaeda, it failed to adequately predict or communicate the scope and urgency of those threats. And a silo’ed intelligence apparatus kept intelligence analysts at different agencies from putting the pieces together in a meaningful way.

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It was also a time of profound uncertainty for the CIA, scholars of the era say. The agency’s main raison d’être, the Soviet Union, had fallen, and it wasn’t entirely clear how the agency should reorient itself or what it should focus on. A running joke in Washington during the Clinton era was that a small plane that crashed on the White House lawn was the CIA director trying to get in touch with the president. The unit in the CIA responsible for tracking bin Laden — a small office called Alec Station — was small.

“Even if one element of the agency is screaming about a threat, it’s still a pretty big organization,” noted Jeffrey Rogg, an intelligence community historian at the University of Texas in Austin.

But the documents still represent a historically significant and fascinating release from the CIA, which closely guards presidential daily brief materials as some of its most sensitive classified material.

A final warning from the CIA dated August 6, 2001, was headlined: “Bin Ladin [sic] Determined To Strike In US.” It reported that al Qaeda members had resided in or traveled to the US “for years” and that the group “apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks.”

And FBI information at the time indicated “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.”

70 full field “Bin Ladin related” investigations were underway in the US at the time, the report said.

But, it acknowledged, “we have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting,” including reporting from 1998 “saying that Bin Ladin wanted to hijack a US aircraft.”

The final document in the release is dated 4 a.m. on the morning of September 12.

The report cites a “Kandahar-based Arab,” who said the attacks were the result of two years’ planning. They were, he said, “the beginning of the wrath.”

马蒂·莱德汉德勒/美联社

1998 年 9 月 10 日，一份总统情报简报的末尾附上了当时的总统比尔·克林顿收到的那条臭名昭著的警告：与基地组织领导人奥萨马·本·拉登有关的一个组织“可能会驾驶装满炸药的飞机撞向美国城市”。

最终，没有发现任何爆炸物。只有四架飞机，两架撞向纽约市的世界贸易中心，一架撞向华盛顿特区的五角大楼，还有一架原计划撞向美国国会大厦，在乘客英勇抵抗恐怖分子后迫降在宾夕法尼亚州的一片田野里。

周五，中央情报局解密并公布了100多页总统每日简报文件，这些文件是提供给克林顿总统和乔治·W·布什总统的，内容涉及9·11事件前夕基地组织和本·拉登的威胁。这些文件首次向美国公众展现了两位总统所看到但未能采取行动的信息的惊人真相。

这些资料显示，多年来不断有警告表明，本·拉登正在考虑在美国境内或海外袭击美国目标。零星的情报显示，他曾计划袭击华盛顿的一家购物中心、获取核弹材料、发动化学武器袭击或绑架一名美国人（姓名已被隐去）。

这些文件并未从根本上改变情报史学家对美国政府在袭击发生前掌握的信息，以及其为何未能准确预测袭击的理解。美国国家恐怖袭击调查委员会2004年的一份报告指出，尽管情报界曾先后向两届白宫发出基地组织威胁的警告，但却未能充分预测或传达这些威胁的范围和紧迫性。此外，各自为政的情报机构也使得不同机构的情报分析人员无法有效地整合信息。

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研究那个时代的学者指出，对于中央情报局而言，那也是一个充满深刻不确定性的时期。该机构存在的主要理由——苏联——已经解体，中央情报局应该如何重新定位，以及应该将工作重点放在哪里，都并不完全明朗。克林顿执政时期，华盛顿流传着一个笑话：一架坠毁在白宫草坪上的小型飞机，是中央情报局局长试图联系总统的。负责追踪本·拉登的中央情报局部门——一个名为“亚历克站”的小办公室——规模也很小。

“即使该机构的某个部门大声疾呼存在威胁，它仍然是一个相当大的组织，”德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校的情报界历史学家杰弗里·罗格指出。

但这些文件仍然代表着中央情报局历史上一次意义重大且引人入胜的泄密事件，因为中央情报局对总统每日简报材料等最敏感的机密材料严加保管。

2001年8月6日，中央情报局发出最后警告，标题为：“本·拉登决心袭击美国”。报告称，基地组织成员“多年来”一直居住在美国或前往美国，而且该组织“显然维持着一个可能有助于发动袭击的支持结构”。

当时的联邦调查局信息显示，“该国出现了与劫机或其他类型袭击的准备工作相一致的可疑活动模式，包括最近对纽约联邦建筑物的监视”。

报告称，当时美国正在进行 70 项与本·拉登有关的全面调查。

但该机构承认，“我们无法证实一些耸人听闻的威胁报道”，包括 1998 年的报道“称本·拉登想要劫持一架美国飞机”。

此次发布的最后一份文件日期为9月12日凌晨4点。

报告援引一位“居住在坎大哈的阿拉伯人”的话说，这些袭击是经过两年策划的结果。他说，这些袭击是“愤怒的开始”。