A CIA analyst wrote in 1998 that Al Qaeda ‘may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a U.S. city,’ and the warning sat unheeded for three years

A warning that Al Qaeda ‘may fly an explosive-packed airplane’ into a United States city was sitting in a presidential intelligence report as early as September 10, 1998, more than three years before the September 11, 2001, attacks. The detail is contained in one of 69 never-before-seen presidential intelligence briefs released by the CIA on the 25th anniversary of the attacks. The documents detail what the agency knew about Osama bin Laden and his organization in the years leading up to 2001, and they represent the largest release of such records focused on that period.

These kinds of presidential briefings are typically kept sealed for about 40 years to protect intelligence sources and avoid diplomatic tension. CIA Director John Ratcliffe said the agency chose to release them now to honor the memory of those killed in the attacks and the CIA officers who died in the years since. “Twenty-five years ago, the 9/11 attacks struck a blow to our nation, but they did not break us,” Ratcliffe said, adding that generations of CIA officers have worked to secure justice for the victims and ensure Al Qaeda could not strike the country again.

The documents do not contain major new revelations, but they show how consistently the CIA was flagging the threat posed by bin Laden to Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Analysts have pointed out that terrorist threats were not the primary focus of data collection before September 11, and the reporting was often spotty. There was enough noise in the intelligence picture that it was difficult at the time to discern the true scope of what Al Qaeda intended to do.

The warnings kept surfacing and then simply disappearing

Individual threats would appear in the briefings and then vanish without follow-up. A senior CIA official has said the agency was genuinely worried about warning fatigue as the volume of Al Qaeda-related reporting increased over time, and one senior counterterrorism analyst noted that human intelligence collection before the attacks was not strong. Terrorism did not become the country’s top intelligence priority until September 12, 2001, and until then, the warnings tended to be frustratingly vague.

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States concluded in its 2004 report that this amounted to a failure of imagination rather than a lack of raw information. The documents also reveal how much analysts worried about deliberate deception. In an August 3, 1999, brief, analysts questioned whether the intelligence reaching them was part of a calculated effort to mislead the United States, writing that the range of targets mentioned and the high number of bin Laden-related walk-ins suggested a deliberate effort to throw them off.

That fear of misinformation recurred throughout the period covered by the briefs. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was among the officials who leaned toward the theory that Al Qaeda was feeding U.S. intelligence false information to keep the government off balance.

A July 24, 2001, document described a lull in activity in which an expected, imminent operation appeared to have been postponed, and the underlying data at the time was described as fuzzy. By the time the final pre-attack report was issued on August 28, 2001, the focus had shifted to threats involving kidnapping, rockets or chemical attacks, with no mention of hijacked planes being used as weapons.

The intelligence failures that preceded the attacks eventually reshaped the U.S. national security structure, leading to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Both agencies were designed to improve interagency collaboration and set stricter analytical standards going forward. A senior counterterrorism analyst has said the intelligence community has come a long way since then and is now far more deliberate about considering threats that fall outside conventional expectations.

The push to release these particular records came from the Public Interest Declassification Board, which has advocated for making the President’s Daily Briefing summaries and related memorandums public. In a June 30, 2026, letter to President Trump, the board argued that the 25th anniversary was an important moment to review and release high-priority records tied to the attacks. The anniversary has also renewed attention on the attacks’ lasting toll, including continued reporting on 9/11-related illness deaths among first responders and survivors in the years since.

The documents released on the anniversary are consistent with the earlier findings of the 9/11 Commission.