In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., by the al-Qaeda terrorist group, a number of investigations were conducted to determine what intelligence may have existed before the attacks and whether this information was ignored by authorities.
Clinton era report[edit]
In December 1998, the CIA's Counterterrorist Center reported to President Bill Clinton that al-Qaeda was preparing for attacks in the U.S. that might include hijacking aircraft.[1][2]
April 2001 Massoud speech[edit]
Another warning came from Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, in April 2001 in a speech before the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium, in which he asked for humanitarian aid for the people of Afghanistan. Massoud told the parliament that his intelligence agents had gained limited knowledge about a large-scale terrorist attack on U.S. soil being imminent. Massoud was assassinated by al-Qaeda two days before the 9/11 attacks on September 9, 2001.[3]
British intelligence[edit]
In the book MI6: Life and Death in the British Secret Service, Gordon Corera says that Britain's spy chiefs had known a terrorist attack was coming. Later, Richard Dearlove said that "the fact that a large-scale terrorist event occurred was not a surprise," and that "the fear was that it would be an attack against American interests probably not in the mainland". Eliza Manningham-Buller recalled that "we had prior intelligence that summer of Al-Qaeda planning a major attack" but that "we didn't know, nor did the Americans, where it was going to take place."[4]
Nebulous reports had coagulated and then dissipated over the summer; in June 2001, British and American intelligence held one of their joint summits, according to Richard Dearlove "the primary topic of discussion was a major terrorist event," and that a routine meeting "turned into something not routine...there was an increase in chatter [intercepted communications], an increase in indicators." That month, the British passed on details that a senior Al Qaeda figure was planning car-bomb attacks against US targets in Saudi Arabia in the coming weeks, but the attack did not happen. A British report from 6 July 2001 read: "the most likely location for such an attack on western interests by UBL (Usama Bin Laden) and those that share his agenda is the Gulf States or the wider middle east." A JIC report that month said that attacks were in their final stage of preparation.[5]
Israeli intelligence[edit]
On 23 August 2001, the Mossad gave the CIA a list of 19 names of suspects living in the US who were believed to be mounting an attack. Only four of the names are known — Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid al-Mihdhar, and Nawaf al-Hazmi — and it is not known if the list had 19 names by coincidence or if it had all the hijackers who would partake in the attacks.[6]
Algerian intelligence[edit]
The head of the Algerian state intelligence service DRS, General Mohamed Mediène, known as 'Toufik', had close ties with his counterparts in the US intelligence community, having been received at the Pentagon and CIA headquarters.
A few days before the attacks of 11 September 2001, he went on a confidential mission to the US. With his American interlocutors, he spoke of an imminent large-scale attack against the United States based on a secret memo sent on September 6, 2001 by Smaïn Lamari, the number two in the DRS at the time.
Shortly after the attacks, only two civilian planes were authorized to take off: the one carrying members of the Saudi royal family and people close to Bin Laden, and the one bringing Toufik to Algiers.[7][8]
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