As Americans marked the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks Friday, a major release of previously classified intelligence records offered new insight into the warnings U.S. presidents received about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in the years before nearly 3,000 people were killed.
The CIA released 71 intelligence documents connected to the threat posed by bin Laden, including 69 that had not previously been made public in declassified form.
I have just been informed there will be tranche of 9/11 files declassified today.
— Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (@RepLuna) September 11, 2026
The records span the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations and show that senior U.S. officials repeatedly received warnings that bin Laden intended to strike American targets — including reports years before 9/11 discussing the possibility of using aircraft in an attack inside the United States. The release represents the largest public disclosure to date of CIA presidential intelligence analysis directly related to the period leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks.
Among the most striking documents is a President’s Daily Brief from Sept. 10, 1998 — almost exactly three years before 9/11 — discussing intelligence that bin Laden might attempt an attack in the United States using an aircraft loaded with explosives. The intelligence did not identify a specific city, date or operational plan, and the underlying reporting was not sufficient to expose the eventual 9/11 plot.
BREAKING: Newly declassified CIA documents show that U.S. intelligence agencies knew as early as 1998 that Bin Laden planned to hijack American aircraft.
“Bin Ladin might implement plans to hijack a US aircraft,” a December 4, 1998 CIA memorandum stated. “[T]wo members of the… pic.twitter.com/citBLuwxRV
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) September 11, 2026
Still, the newly available records demonstrate that the possibility of an aviation-related terrorist attack inside the United States had entered the intelligence stream long before hijacked passenger jets struck the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
Other intelligence available at the time pointed in similar directions. A congressional investigation later found that U.S. intelligence received information in August 1998 concerning a possible plan to fly an explosives-laden aircraft into the World Trade Center. The following month, officials received reporting that a future bin Laden operation might involve flying an aircraft containing explosives into a U.S. airport. Those reports were fragmentary and did not describe the specific plan that al-Qaeda ultimately carried out.
The newly released material nevertheless adds substantially to the public record concerning just how frequently bin Laden appeared in highly classified intelligence delivered to presidents and their senior advisers. According to the 9/11 Commission, President Bush received more than 40 President’s Daily Brief items concerning bin Laden between his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2001, and the attacks on Sept. 11.
Concern intensified dramatically during the spring and summer of 2001 as intelligence agencies detected what officials later described as an extraordinary increase in warnings of an impending al-Qaeda operation. Seven of the newly released presidential briefs from July and August 2001 dealt with the growing terrorist threat, according to reporting on the documents.
One intelligence assessment prepared for senior officials in early July warned that bin Laden was expected to launch a major terrorist attack against U.S. or Israeli interests within weeks and that preparations had already been made.
The warning predicted an attack intended to cause mass casualties but did not identify where or precisely how it would occur. The most famous pre-9/11 warning remains the Aug. 6, 2001, President’s Daily Brief titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.” That document was declassified years ago and became a central focus of the 9/11 Commission investigation.
According to the commission, the briefing summarized bin Laden’s longstanding desire to attack inside the United States, discussed previous intelligence involving possible airplane hijackings and noted indications that al-Qaeda maintained a support structure inside the country.
President Bush later told the commission that he viewed the document primarily as historical background rather than a warning about a specific imminent operation. The commission ultimately concluded that the intelligence community had recognized al-Qaeda as a serious threat but had failed to assemble the available pieces into a sufficiently clear picture of the specific danger developing inside the United States.
The commission famously described the problem as a failure of imagination as well as a breakdown in information sharing among the CIA, FBI and other agencies. The newly released files do not establish that American officials knew about the specific Sept. 11 plot and chose not to stop it.
Instead, they provide a fuller picture of a government receiving repeated but often imprecise warnings about a terrorist organization whose exact operational plans remained hidden. CIA officials have emphasized that distinction.
The agency had identified bin Laden and al-Qaeda as a strategic threat, and then-CIA Director George Tenet repeatedly warned senior policymakers about the organization. But intelligence officers never penetrated the 9/11 operation deeply enough to learn the date, targets, participants and methods necessary to disrupt it.
The documents also shed new light on the debate over whether counterterrorism received sufficient attention during both the Clinton and Bush administrations. By December 1998, Tenet had told senior CIA officials that the agency was effectively “at war” with bin Laden.
Yet intelligence and law-enforcement agencies still struggled with limited resources, bureaucratic divisions and restrictions on how information could be shared between criminal investigators and intelligence personnel. Those shortcomings became especially consequential in 2001.
The CIA knew that future hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar had attended an al-Qaeda meeting in Malaysia in January 2000, but the FBI was not promptly informed that the men had entered the United States. And in August 2001, FBI agents in Minnesota arrested Zacarias Moussaoui after employees at a flight school became suspicious of his interest in learning to operate a commercial aircraft.
Those developments were not connected into a single national warning before Sept. 11. The 9/11 Commission found that agencies possessed pieces of the puzzle but failed to recognize how they fit together. The release also comes amid renewed demands from families of 9/11 victims for additional declassification.
