CIA Releases 71 Declassified 9/11 Warning Documents, Including 1998 Memo on 'Explosive-Packed Airplane' Plot

Twenty-five years after hijacked planes hit the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, the CIA has released the paper trail showing just how early the warnings started.

On Friday, the agency declassified 71 President's Daily Briefs covering February 1998 through September 12, 2001. CIA Director John Ratcliffe called it "the single largest release of CIA analysis related to 9/11 ever," saying in a statement it was done "in an act of exceptional transparency" to honor those killed. Sixty-nine of the 71 documents had never been seen by the public, according to the BBC.

The 1998 Warning

The most striking document is dated September 10, 1998, titled "Bin Laden's Location and Intentions." It states bin Laden's network "may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a US city," with Washington listed as his "preferred option" for a strike on American soil, according to the BBC and Times Now.

That warning came three years before 9/11, just weeks after al-Qaeda bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7, 1998, killing 224 people, and after the Clinton administration retaliated with cruise missile strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan on August 20, 1998. A separate brief dated August 28, 1998, eight days after those strikes, warned bin Laden's network "survived the US strikes and their communications network remains intact," and that militant training had resumed, NBC News reported.

According to the Epoch Times, the 9/11 Commission's 2004 report had already described this specific threat report as the most prominent pre-9/11 mention of a plot to fly explosives-laden aircraft into a U.S. city. The commission traced it to a source who walked into a U.S. consulate in East Asia, and noted the information, along with a separate claim that Libyan operatives wanted to crash a plane into the World Trade Center, could never be corroborated.

A Trail of Fragments, Not a Blueprint

Other documents in the release show the intelligence community piecing together scattered, often unconfirmed leads for years without ever landing on the actual plot. A December 4, 1998 memo said bin Laden's network was preparing U.S. attacks, including hijacking a plane to demand the release of an Egyptian extremist held in a North Carolina prison for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, according to the Epoch Times. Officials wrote that some of bin Laden's associates had received hijack training, but stressed that no group tied to al-Qaeda had "ever carried out an aircraft hijacking" up to that point.

By October 2000, a brief told Clinton that bin Laden was "committed to striking U.S. targets" but that the CIA still couldn't pin down where or when, per the Daily Wire. On July 24, 2001, less than two months before the attacks, a report to President Bush said an expected bin Laden operation had been postponed, while cautioning that other attack preparations could still be moving forward. The now-famous August 6, 2001 brief, "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US," was already public before this release. Friday's documents place it inside a much longer chain of warnings rather than an isolated red flag.

Only one document in the batch comes after the attacks: a brief sent to the White House at 4 a.m. on September 12, 2001, less than 20 hours after the first plane hit. It said "mounting evidence" showed extremists in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf were aware the attack was coming, and that the plot had been "widely known" in extremist circles beforehand, according to the BBC.

NBC News was the most direct in noting what this release does not do: it contains "no major new revelations," and the underlying picture—that the CIA warned both the Clinton and Bush White Houses repeatedly, without ever nailing down specifics—was already established by the 9/11 Commission and prior congressional inquiries. NBC also flagged a line from the same September 1998 memo warning about the explosive-laden plane: intelligence at the time "provides no conclusive information on bin Ladin's intentions for future attacks." That caveat matters. The warning was real, but so was the uncertainty around it.

Right-leaning outlets, including the Epoch Times and Daily Wire, framed the documents as evidence the government had years of specific runway to act and didn't. That's a fair read of the paper trail. But it's also fair to note, as the documents themselves show, that analysts were working from fragmented, sometimes unreliable tips and had no way to distinguish this specific plot from dozens of other uncorroborated threat streams flooding in during the same period. Both things are true at once: the CIA connected some of the right dots on paper, and neither administration turned that paper into a policy that stopped 19 hijackers from boarding four planes on September 11, 2001.

The redactions are still heavy, protecting sources and methods a quarter-century later. Whatever remains classified in the CIA's post-9/11 files, including how the agency responded internally in the years right after the attacks, has not been addressed in this release. No timeline for further declassification has been announced.