The US intelligence community was told in 1998 that Arab terrorists were planning to fly a bomb-laden aircraft into the World Trade Center, but the FBI and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) did not take the threat seriously, a congressional investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks has found.
The August 1998 intelligence report from the CIA was just one of a series of warnings that the US received in the years leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks that were detailed at a congressional hearing on Wednesday.
The existence of the 1998 intelligence report was disclosed in a presentation by the committee's staff director, Eleanor Hill.
The report concluded that there was evidence of a dangerous and growing interest by al-Qaeda and related groups in launching high-profile attacks inside the US years before the attacks on the trade center and the Pentagon.
The congressional report was the first disclosure that there was specific intelligence about terrorist plans to crash airplanes into the trade center, though officials said that those planes did not appear to be connected to the Sept. 11 attack.
But while the joint committee made public several intelligence reports that had been received in the years before Sept. 11 that related to al-Qaeda's intentions to launch a domestic attack inside the US and its interest in using aircraft for terrorist operations, Hill emphasized that the joint committee has still not found a "smoking gun" that could have helped prevent the attacks on New York and Washington.
"People have said there was no smoking gun," said Hill. "But there was still a lot out there that was never pulled together."
In fact, between 1998 and last summer, the CIA, the FBI and other agencies repeatedly received reports of al-Qaeda's interest in attacking Washington and New York, either with airplanes or other weapons. The threat level grew so high that by December 1998 the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, issued a "declaration of war" on al-Qaeda, in a memorandum circulated in the intelligence community. Yet, Hill said, the intelligence community failed to adequately follow up on the declaration, and by Sept. 10 last year the FBI still had only one analyst assigned full time to al-Qaeda.
The 1998 intelligence report about the trade center concerned supposed plans by a group of unidentified Arabs, who the US now believes had ties to al-Qaeda, to fly an explosives-laden plane from a foreign country into the trade center. The congressional committee did not identify the foreign country. US intelligence officials said Wednesday that, despite the close similarities between the two, they do not believe that the 1998 report related to a plot that later evolved into the Sept. 11 attacks.
Still, the congressional panel criticized the way in which the intelligence was handled, particularly by the FBI and FAA. The committee said that the FBI's New York office "took no action on the information, filing the communication in the office's bombing repository file." The FAA, meanwhile, "found the plot highly unlikely," because of the state of the unidentified foreign country's aviation program.
The FAA discounted the intelligence report based on the views of the FBI, officials said.
"We did review the technical aspects of the information, but any decisions about whether it was credible was based on an FBI determination," the spokesperson said.
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