US Officials Warned About bin Laden Planning to Hijack Plane Years Before 9/11: Declassified Docs

U.S. intelligence officials warned that Osama bin Laden intended to take over a plane, fill it with explosives, and possibly fly it into an American city, according to declassified documents released on Sept. 11.

In a Sept. 10, 1998, memorandum prepared by what is now the National Counterterrorism Center titled “Bin Ladin’s Location and Intentions,” officials wrote that bin Laden had spoken about his preferred option being to strike inside the United States in Washington.

“[Redacted] the same group responsible for the bombings in Africa may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a US city,” the document stated.

The document had never been made public before, although it was described in the 9/11 Commission’s 2004 report. The commission said that it was the most prominent “threat report” to mention a possible plot to fly explosives-laden aircraft into a U.S. city and that the intelligence originated from a source who walked into a U.S. Consulate in East Asia.

That information, as well as claims that a group of Libyans hoped to crash a plane into the World Trade Center, could not be corroborated, according to the commission.

Other intelligence documents released Friday also mentioned the prospect of bin Laden hijacking airplanes.

One dated December 1998 said that there was reporting suggesting bin Laden and his allies “are preparing for attacks in the US,” including hijacking aircraft to obtain the release of extremists, such as an Egyptian terrorist who was serving life in prison in a facility in North Carolina for conspiracy linked to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

Some of bin Laden’s network had “received hijack training,” officials wrote, but no group directly tied to bin Laden’s al Qaeda had “ever carried out an aircraft hijacking.”

A third document, from Aug. 6, 2001, said that bin Laden was “determined to strike in US,” and that al Qaeda members, some of them U.S. citizens, had been living in or traveling to the United States for years. The group “apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks,” it said.

Officials wrote that they had been unable to confirm some reports, such as the claim bin Laden wanted to hijack aircraft to obtain the release of U.S.-held extremists, but that the FBI had acquired information that “indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.”

Bin Laden helped plan the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which involved Islamic terrorists hijacking planes and ramming them into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Virginia.

The commission concluded that failures leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks included government agencies not understanding how grave the threat was from extremists who want to rid the world of “religious and political pluralism, the plebiscite, and equal rights for women” and not adjusting policies, plans, and practices to deter or defeat the extremists.

The newly released documents were among 71 U.S. intelligence community products sent to the teams of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush in the years leading up to the attacks.

“In an act of exceptional transparency, we honor the memory of those we lost on that tragic Tuesday by releasing 71 declassified products—the single largest release of CIA analysis related to 9/11 ever,” CIA Director John Ratcliffe said in a statement.

He said that the CIA has a commitment “to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat those who wish to cause us harm.”