CIA documents released to mark the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks show that Osama bin Laden was considered a potential threat to Britain years before the attacks that changed the course of modern history.
The newly declassified material includes intelligence assessments from the late 1990s in which US officials described indications that bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda network were considering attacks against the United States and its allies, including the United Kingdom. The documents do not identify a specific British target or establish a firm timetable for an attack, but they show that the possibility of an operation on British soil was already part of US intelligence assessments before 9/11.
One briefing dated August 28, 1998, titled “Bin Ladin Terrorist Network Still a Threat”, was prepared shortly after US cruise missile strikes against Al-Qaeda-linked targets in Sudan and Afghanistan. According to the assessment, bin Laden was considering further attacks even as the strikes were taking place.
“Hours before the US missile strikes, Bin Laden was looking at options for further attacks against the US as well as the UK,” the document stated, while noting that he had not identified precise targets or timing.
The same assessment said bin Laden had identified a US embassy in an unnamed country as a possible target. It also reported that an individual had been authorised by bin Laden to investigate potential attacks inside the United States.
Another intelligence assessment produced later in 1998 carried the title “Significant Near-Term Threat of Bin Ladin Attacks”. It described what US officials regarded as strong indications that bin Laden wanted to strike the United States and allied countries within their own territories.
“We have strong indications that he would like to attack the US and allies such as the UK and Israel on their own soil,” the assessment said. It added that if bin Laden believed such targets were too heavily protected, his network could instead seek to attack US and allied interests elsewhere.
The documents also provide a glimpse into the difficulties facing American intelligence agencies as they attempted to understand an increasingly dangerous organisation. An August 1999 assessment, for example, examined the effect of arrests on Al-Qaeda’s operations and said the organisation’s capabilities had been weakened by the detention of key operatives.
That document also referred to bin Laden’s anger over the arrests of senior members of his network, including a procurement officer and the head of his organisation in the UK.
Taken together, the assessments show that US intelligence had identified bin Laden’s network as a serious international threat well before the September 11 attacks. They also show the limits of what agencies knew at the time. Some of the assessments were based on what officials described as “sparse, vague, and imperfect information”, making it difficult to determine which threats were imminent and which remained possibilities being considered by the organisation.
Among the concerns was the possibility that Al-Qaeda could use aircraft in an attack. One assessment raised the prospect that a group “may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a US city”, an indication of the kinds of scenarios being considered by intelligence analysts before the events of September 11.
On September 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda operatives hijacked four commercial passenger aircraft. Two were deliberately flown into the World Trade Center towers in New York, a third struck the Pentagon in Virginia, and a fourth crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers attempted to regain control of the aircraft. Nearly 3,000 people were killed.
The newly released collection contains 71 partially redacted briefing notes, including two documents that had already been made public. The material covers intelligence assessments produced before the attacks as well as information gathered during the immediate aftermath.
For the CIA, the release is intended to provide a clearer picture of how its analysts’ understanding of Al-Qaeda developed during the years leading up to 9/11 and in the first day after the attacks.
The documents do not show that US intelligence knew in advance exactly how the September 11 operation would unfold. Instead, they reveal a more complicated picture: warnings about bin Laden’s ambitions and the possibility of attacks on American and allied territory were present years before 9/11, but the available intelligence did not provide the precise target, timing and operational details needed to predict the attack.
The references to Britain are particularly significant because they demonstrate that the UK was already being considered within US assessments of the threat posed by bin Laden’s network before the attacks on New York and Washington. They also underline how Al-Qaeda had evolved into a transnational organisation whose ambitions extended beyond the United States and into the territory of its allies.
A quarter of a century after September 11, the declassified material offers another look at the intelligence picture that existed before the attacks. It is a record not simply of warnings that were received, but also of the uncertainty surrounding them and the challenge of determining which threats would ultimately become reality.
