Chilling CIA Docs Show The Warnings About A Terror Plot That Preceded 9/11

The U.S. received more detailed warnings about Osama bin Laden before the 9/11 attacks than previously known — warnings that began under the Clinton administration roughly three years before the tragedy — according to 101 pages of intelligence memos declassified by the CIA on Friday.

The CIA declassified 71 intelligence memos about bin Laden, the Taliban and Afghanistan’s opium trade spanning the presidential administrations of both Clinton and former President George W. Bush.

You can read them here.

Presidential Daily Briefs (PDB) are delivered to the Commander in Chief and a handful of other senior officials and summarize the half dozen or so most pressing intelligence matters of the day.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe called it “the single largest release of CIA analysis related to 9/11 ever” in a statement.

“In an act of exceptional transparency, we honor the memory of those we lost on that tragic Tuesday by releasing 71 declassified products,” Ratcliffe said.

They date back to before the October 1998 arrest of four men linked to bin Laden involved in bombing the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.

Specific threats about a plane hijacking began appearing as early as December 1998 under Clinton via a PDB titled “Bin Ladin Preparing To Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks.”

“Reporting suggests Bin Ladin and his allies are preparing for attacks in the US, including an aircraft hijacking,” it reads. “Two members of the operational team had evaded security checks during a recent trial run at an unidentified New York airport. … Some members of the Bin Ladin network have received hijack training.”

The news comes on the heels of biting criticism from family members of 9/11 victims of three former presidents to their faces for a lack of transparency about the role of Saudi Arabia in the attacks.

Twenty-five years after losing her husband on 9/11, at a New York City memorial attended by Clinton, Bush, former President Barack Obama and Vice President JD Vance, Terry Strada said that “for 25 years, administration after administration, including leaders in front of us here today, chose to protect the Saudis instead of standing with the 9/11 families.”

No details that could satisfy Strada’s plea are included in the CIA’s release.

News that Bush had received a PDB on Aug. 6, 2001, titled “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US” generated national controversy after CBS News received a leaked copy in May 2004. CIA Director George Tenet resigned the next month.

The 9/11 Commission Report in 2004 found that it wasn’t the only warning. Bin Laden had routinely appeared in PDBs under Clinton and Bush, including 40 from Jan. 20 to the day before the attack.

Now Americans can read some of these PDBs for themselves. It’s not clear whether the new release includes all of the PDBs examined by the commission.

“Bin Ladin and his associates also agreed to expand narcotics exports to Europe and the US using legitimate businesses as conduits,” a February 1998 PDB reads.

“Bin Ladin at his May press conference talked about ‘bringing the war home to ‘America,’ possibly a call for attacks in the US,” a June 1998 PDB reads. “REDACTED claimed Bin Ladin was planning an attack in the US or Saudi Arabia REDACTED June, but we have no information indicating that Bin Ladin has a terrorist network in the US.”

In the spring and summer before the attacks of fall 2001, more PDBs warned of a forthcoming terror plot, including a possible plane hijacking.

When the U.S. government captured a terrorist in May 2001, he tipped off the CIA to a plot involving Bin Laden and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (ElJ) to “force the release of ‘blind sheik’ Umar ‘Abd al-Rahman and other US-held prisoners” with plans to “hijack an aircraft or storm a US Embassy,” echoing several earlier reports.

In a July 2001 PDB titled “One Bin Ladin Operation Delayed, Others Continue,” the CIA reported that “suspicious activity continued late last week among individuals who in June had received a cryptic message praising their struggle against a well-armed foe and bidding them farewell.”

Among the policy recommendations in the 9/11 Commission Report to ensure an event like 9/11 never happened again: more transparency into the inner workings of the intelligence community.

Ireland Owens contributed to this report.