CIA releases 71 declassified documents showing pre-9/11 bin Laden warnings

Release reignites Washington responsibility dispute over missed attack

The Central Intelligence Agency made public 71 partially redacted documents on September 11, 2026 to mark the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Sixty-nine of the documents had not previously been released, and the tranche spans presidential intelligence briefings written between February 13, 1998 and September 12, 2001. The declassified papers do not change the broad understanding of how the United States failed to prevent the worst terrorist attack on American soil, but they add granular detail to a series of warnings that often reached presidents without the specifics needed to disrupt al Qaeda’s planning.

Among the newly released documents is a September 10, 1998 President’s Daily Brief titled “Bin Laden’s Location and Intentions,” written almost exactly three years before the September 11 attacks. The document warned then-President Bill Clinton’s team that bin Laden planned to strike the United States with an “explosive-laden plane” flown into an American city, though it offered no conclusive intelligence on how or where al Qaeda might strike and noted only that the terrorist leader’s eyes were trained on Washington, D.C.

The 9/11 Commission’s 2004 study described the 1998 document as a threat report but did not disclose that it had been written as part of the President’s Daily Brief, the highly classified intelligence summary delivered each day to the commander in chief and a small circle of top national security advisers. A spokesman for Clinton did not respond to requests for comment on whether the former president read the document or was briefed on its contents.

The President’s Daily Brief documents in the new tranche span a period during which bin Laden was already a known adversary. In 2001 alone, intelligence about bin Laden and his plot was included in at least 18 different PDBs, seven of which were delivered in July and August of that year. A previously released paper from August 6, 2001, titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US,” didn’t contain specifics about the attack but referenced a 1998 intelligence document about al Qaeda seeking to hijack a plane and noted that bin Laden “prepares operations years in advance.”

Other documents in the tranche include a July 3, 1998 entry that flagged reports from “highly questionable sources” that bin Laden was planning attacks on the United States and called such a strike “plausible”; an October 14, 2000 entry, three months before Clinton left office, that showed bin Laden was “committed to striking U.S. targets” even though Washington “cannot pinpoint targets or timing”; and a July 24, 2001 memo describing the delay of an “expected imminent” terrorist operation backed by bin Laden. “Preparations for other near-term attacks may still be in train,” that document warned.

A CIA analyst said counterterrorism was not a national priority before the 2001 attacks, and the agency did not systematically collect intelligence about what bin Laden or al Qaeda specifically intended to do. Information about bin Laden’s network that did arrive was often spotty and unreliable, the analyst said, and analysts worried about raising alarms too often without supporting specifics. Policymakers would ask how they could act without details of a plot, the analyst said.

The CIA had been tracking bin Laden in earnest after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, current and former intelligence officials said. George Tenet, who served as CIA director under both Clinton and Bush, was personally obsessed with bin Laden and with thwarting al Qaeda, the officials said. But the agency’s counterterrorism resources and personnel were not robust enough to properly track and disrupt his plans, the officials said. Bin Laden was behind the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania as well as the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen.

Morell, a former acting CIA director in the Obama administration who briefed Bush on al Qaeda-related intelligence in the days before the attacks, said the documents would bolster the agency’s case that its warnings did not produce the necessary response. “The documents released by the CIA today demonstrate what I have always believed, that the CIA provided long and loud strategic warnings about the threat that bin Laden posed to the United States,” Morell said. “The CIA was not able to get inside the 9/11 plot and disrupt it, like it did so often after 9/11,” he added. “But it is also true that policymakers in two administrations did not respond effectively to the strategic warning.”

CIA Director John Ratcliffe described the now-public intelligence as part of “the single largest release of CIA analysis related to 9/11 ever” and called the declassification “an act of exceptional transparency” intended to commemorate the lives lost in the attacks and the CIA officers killed during the ensuing war on terrorism. The CIA shared five of the redacted documents with The Wall Street Journal a day before their public release.

The tranche is likely to reignite a decadeslong dispute between the U.S. intelligence community and policymakers over who bore responsibility for missing the attack. The 9/11 Commission, which reviewed the now-declassified memos, spread the blame across multiple corners of Washington, concluding there was a lack of imagination about what bin Laden might do and inadequate intelligence sharing among multiple national-security agencies.