Declassified 9/11 briefs show repeated US warnings on bin Laden threats

Newyork,UPDATED: Sep 12, 2026 03:24 IST

Several dozen declassified US presidential briefing documents released on Friday, the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, show the intelligence gathered by American officials on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida before the hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people and reshaped US national security.

The documents show how security analysts tracked bin Laden's movements, support system and financing, while also flagging possible threats to US targets. They cover briefings prepared for senior leaders from 1998 to September 12, 2001, and include references to possible hijackings, attacks inside the United States and bin Laden's interest in chemical, biological and radiological weapons.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe described the release as "an act of exceptional transparency" and said it was the agency's largest-ever release of declassified presidential daily briefs, the highly classified reports prepared by the US intelligence community for the government's top leaders.

The records range from a February 1998 file prepared for then President Bill Clinton, titled "Terrorists seeking WMD capability", which mentioned bin Laden and other Islamic extremists, to a September 12, 2001, report citing a source who said the attacks had been planned for two years and had also targeted the US Capitol.

An April 1998 document said the Taliban were unwilling to hand over bin Laden, then seen as their "guest" in Afghanistan. It said their "gratitude for his assistance during the Soviet occupation" was making them "reluctant to alienate him by monitoring or controlling his activities".

In July 1998, briefers said it was "plausible that Bin Ladin places a high priority on conducting attacks in the United States" and noted his "interest in conducting attacks with 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".

Possible hijackings were also discussed in December 1998, when a briefer said conspirators "had evaded security checks during a recent trial run at an unidentified New York airport" and that "some members of the Bin Ladin network have received hijack training". Other documents said bin Laden was trying to obtain materials for "dirty bombs", with intelligence officials saying by June 1999 his operatives had carried out experiments with explosives to "increase their energy output".

About two years before the attacks, intelligence officials believed bin Laden appeared to be misleading the Taliban about his unwillingness to launch an unprovoked attack on the US. Briefs prepared for President George W Bush in early 2001 focused in part on bin Laden's "experimentation by crude means to make and deploy biological agents".

A report a month before the attacks said bin Laden remained committed "to conduct terrorist attacks in the US" and noted that the 1998 al-Qaida attacks on US embassies "demonstrate that he prepares operations years in advance and is not deterred by setbacks". In August 2001, officials also referred to "suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York", adding that the FBI was "conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Ladin-related".

Many of the documents were redacted to hide the names of sources and other identifying details. They did not appear to reveal any major new findings on the planning of the attacks or on how US officials understood the events as they unfolded.

After the attacks, a bipartisan commission pointed to poor information-sharing between agencies such as the CIA and FBI, and its recommendations led to changes including a centralised director of national intelligence and the Counterterrorism Centre, which analyses domestic and foreign terrorism information across government branches. Asked about Friday's release, the White House also pointed to a separate batch of documents issued by the Archives, including interviews with national security officials from the Clinton and Bush administrations that were produced by the commission that investigated the attacks between 2002 and 2004.

In sum, the declassified briefings set out the extent of US intelligence tracking of bin Laden and al-Qaida before September 11, including repeated warnings about attacks inside the country, while offering no major new account of how the plot was carried out.

With PTI Inputs

- Ends