On the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, CIA Director John Ratcliffe released 71 President’s Daily Brief documents spanning from February 1998 through the morning of September 12, 2001. This is the largest public dump of 9/11-related presidential intelligence the Agency has ever made.
The collection, which includes more than 100 pages of heavily redacted documents, was framed by Ratcliffe as “an act of exceptional transparency” and “consistent with President Donald Trump’s historic transparency initiative.”
Ratcliffe continued: “25 years ago, the 9/11 attacks struck a blow to our Nation, but they did not break us. Generations of CIA officers have since dedicated their careers to securing justice for our fallen Americans and ensuring al-Qa’ida would never again harm our country. In the years that followed, numerous CIA officers made the ultimate sacrifice in the Global War on Terror. We honor their memory and service through our commitment to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat those who wish to cause us harm.”
— CIA Director John Ratcliffe (@CIADirector) July 17, 2026
The collection includes alarming titles such as:
- “Bin Ladin Preparing To Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks”
- “Reports That Bin Ladin is Planning Attacks Inside the US”
- “Potential Targets for Anti-US Attacks by Bin Ladin”
- “Bin Ladin Pursuing Unconventional Weapons”
- “Snapshot of Recent Usama Bin Ladin-Related Anti-US Terrorist Threats”
- “Bin Ladin Operations Are Expert and Flexible”
Americans already knew the August 6, 2001 brief delivered to President George W. Bush while he was at the ranch in Crawford: “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.”
That memo said al-Qaeda members had lived in or traveled to the United States “for years,” that the network “apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks,” and that FBI information showed “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings.”
It was leaked in 2002, formally declassified for the 9/11 Commission in 2004, and has been a political football ever since.
What Friday’s release makes unavoidable is that the warning to Bush was not a one-off. It sat on top of years of briefings that started under Bill Clinton, including a September 10, 1998 item that said bin Laden’s preferred option was to strike the United States on its own soil, with Washington a prime target, and that the group “may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a US city.”
A December 4, 1998 brief, titled “Bin Ladin Preparing To Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks,” went further. Reporting, the CIA wrote, suggested bin Laden and his allies “are preparing for attacks in the US, including an aircraft hijacking.”
Two members of an operational team had already “evaded security checks during a recent trial run at an unidentified New York airport.” Some in the network had received hijack training.
That is three years before the towers fell. The briefs kept coming, WMD shopping, chemical and biological experimentation, kidnapping plots, Washington mall talk, and, in the summer of 2001, a drumbeat that something was coming even if the exact date and method were not nailed down.
The 9/11 Commission itself later counted dozens of bin Laden/al-Qaeda items in the PDBs in 2001 alone. Friday’s dump includes 18 Bush-era items before the attacks and a 4 a.m. September 12, 2001 product.
Mainstream outlets note the papers do not contain a single smoking-gun “they will hijack four airliners on this Tuesday” line. They do show a government that was told, repeatedly, that bin Laden wanted the war brought home.
Last September, TGP reported newly declassified FBI/CIA files showing two Saudi government employees, Mutaeb al-Sudairy and Adel al-Sadhan, on U.S. soil as early as December 1998, filming Washington landmarks later treated as al-Qaeda targets and operating in the same Southern California support network later tied to the hijackers.
Former FBI counterintelligence chief William Evanina said the pair “may have served as an advance team.” The 1998 airplane language in Friday’s PDBs lands in the same year those Saudis first appear in the American record.
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