Declassified 9/11 CIA briefs show plot also targeted US Capitol

Briefs detail hijack training and bin Laden misleading Taliban on US attacks

A September 12, 2001 presidential daily brief included in the CIA’s release indicates the September 11 hijackings had been planned for two years and had also targeted the US Capitol, The Guardian reported. The Capitol detail is among the additional details that emerged in the dozens of declassified presidential daily briefs the agency published on Friday, the 25th anniversary of the attacks.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe proclaimed the release “an act of exceptional transparency” and said the documents were the agency’s single largest release of declassified presidential daily briefs — the highly classified briefings prepared by the nation’s intelligence community for the government’s most senior leaders.

The materials range from a February 1998 brief prepared for then-President Bill Clinton titled “Terrorists seeking WMD capability,” which mentioned bin Laden and other Islamic extremists, to the September 12, 2001 report referencing the planned two-year plot. According to The Guardian, the documents span the years and months leading up to the hijackings and illustrate security analysts’ tracking of bin Laden’s movements and support system, their understanding of his network in the United States and other countries and how his operations were financed, and concerns about possible threats to US targets, in the period before the attacks.

An April 1998 document described the Taliban’s unwillingness to hand over bin Laden, who at the time was seen as their “guest” in Afghanistan. The brief noted the Taliban’s “gratitude for his assistance during the Soviet occupation” was making them “reluctant to alienate him by monitoring or controlling his activities.”

Three months later, in July 1998, briefers called it “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.” By September 1998, 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.”

Potential hijackings were discussed as early as December 1998, when a briefer described how 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.”

About two years before the attacks, intelligence officials were aware that bin Laden appeared to be misleading the Taliban about his reluctance to launch an unprovoked attack on the US, according to The Guardian’s reading of the declassified material.

Other documents detail bin Laden’s pursuit of materials for making “dirty bombs,” or conventional weapons infused with radioactive material. By June 1999, according to intelligence officials, his operatives had conducted experiments with explosives to “increase their energy output.” 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.”

About a month before the attacks, an August 2001 report indicated bin Laden’s commitment “to conduct terrorist attacks in the US,” noting that the 1998 al-Qaida attacks on US embassies “demonstrate that he prepares operations years in advance and is not deterred by setbacks.” The same brief referenced “suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York,” and said 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 conceal sources’ names and other identifying information. The Guardian reported that the materials did not appear to break new ground on the planning of the attacks or on US officials’ understanding of how they had unfolded.

In the years immediately after the attacks, a bipartisan commission highlighted a lack of information-sharing among agencies such as the CIA and FBI and issued recommendations that yielded new positions, including a director of national intelligence, as well as the National Counterterrorism Center, which analyzes domestic and foreign terrorism information across different government branches. The commission operated from 2002 to 2004.

Asked for comment on the release, the White House noted the publication of another batch of documents by the National Archives, also on Friday. That batch, including interviews with national security officials in the Clinton and Bush administrations, was a product of the 9/11 commission that investigated the attacks.