The Trump administration on Friday declassified more than 100 pages of presidential daily briefs from the months before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
The documents, which span from February 1998 through September 2001, cover the final stretch of President Bill Clinton’s second term and the first eight months of George W. Bush’s presidency. They reveal that U.S. Intelligence had tracked Osama bin Laden’s threats against American targets for more than three years before hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
By May 1998, analysts already knew bin Laden had called for an attack inside the United States. That warning sharpened two months later. “We have received four reports from highly questionable sources suggesting Usama Bin Ladin is making plans to conduct an attack in the United States,” a July 1998 brief states. The same document noted a critical blind spot: “We have little information on Bin Ladin’s operatives in the US.”
Analysts at the time weighed specific scenarios. Bin Laden was reportedly considering an attack on a Washington, D.C. Shopping mall or a kidnapping plot, though the intended target’s name was redacted in the released pages. The documents also show persistent anxiety about bin Laden’s potential acquisition of weapons of mass destruction. Officials investigated whether he had obtained a nuclear weapon, possibly from Russia, before concluding he had not. Still, they warned in February 1999 that “If Bin Ladin succeeded in buying a chemical or biological weapon, his past behavior and statements indicate he would have no reservations about using it and he would begin searching for a suitable target.”
The earliest reference to aircraft hijacking appears in December 1998. “Bin Ladin and his allies are preparing for attacks in the US, including an aircraft hijacking to obtain the release” of Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the so-called “blind sheik,” and several associates, one brief reads. Abdel-Rahman, a blind Egyptian cleric, was serving a life sentence in North Carolina for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He died in federal prison in February 2017.
The December 1998 document included an alarming operational detail. “The same source late last month said that Bin Ladin might implement plans to hijack a US aircraft before the beginning of Ramadan on 20 December and that two members of the operational team had evaded security checks during a recent trial run at an unidentified New York airport.” The brief added a caveat: “Some members of the Bin Ladin network have received hijack training, according to various sources, but no group directly tied to Bin Ladin’s al-Qa’ida organization has ever carried out an aircraft hijacking.”
By March 2000, intelligence pointed toward symbolic targets. Analysts flagged concern that bin Laden might strike highly visible landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower. Throughout this period, the documents show, officials struggled to pin down whether bin Laden planned to hit domestic American targets or U.S. Interests abroad.
The most famous warning came in August 2001, one month before the attacks. A brief titled “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US” told Bush that “After US missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, Bin Ladin told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington.” It noted that an FBI investigation “indicates 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.”
The declassified pages arrive as the nation approaches the 25th anniversary of the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.
The release follows years of pressure from survivors’ families and lawmakers who have pushed for greater transparency about Saudi Arabian connections to the hijackers and what the government knew beforehand. Previous document dumps have included FBI reports on Saudi nationals’ contacts with the hijackers, though many pages remain redacted. The presidential daily briefs released Friday are themselves heavily redacted, with numerous names and operational details blacked out.
The 9/11 Commission, which issued its final report in 2004, found that while intelligence agencies had gathered fragments of warning, they failed to connect the dots that might have disrupted the plot. The newly declassified briefs offer a granular look at those fragments as they appeared to the sitting presidents.
The documents were released through the National Archives and Records Administration.