9/11 Report Says Agencies Received Credible Clues

Hill Panel to Release Findings Today

The U.S. intelligence community received a surprising number of credible reports of a likely terrorist attack prior to Sept. 11, including some threats to domestic targets, according to a congressional report to be unveiled today.

The preliminary findings of the staff of the Senate-House intelligence panel investigating the Sept. 11 strikes also show that some intelligence analysts had focused on the possibility that terrorists might use "airplanes as weapons" in the attacks, a congressional official said yesterday.

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice said in mid-May that prior to the attacks, analysts did not seriously consider the use of planes as bombs and therefore were surprised by the method of attack on Sept. 11. "All this reporting about hijacking was about traditional hijacking," Rice said at a May briefing on what President Bush knew before the attacks.

The 30-page unclassified report also will "raise serious questions" about whether the U.S. government shared enough information with the public about what it knew to be a grave threat from Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist network, the official said.

After reading and analyzing hundreds of thousands of pages of documents from the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other government agencies, "you start thinking: Did anyone really explain to the public how serious this stuff was? . . . Did the American people really realize the strength of the threat out there?"

The committee report, the first official examination of how much intelligence agencies knew about the terror threat to the United States prior to Sept. 11, contains no single piece of information that could have been used to thwart the strikes that killed 3,000 people in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania, the official said.

But while the committee staff found no information that revealed the exact date, time and place of the attack, the official said there were numerous credible reports of possible domestic attacks and suggested that some may have been played down because the intelligence agencies were too focused on threats to U.S. interests overseas.

"There was reporting on [the possibility of] domestic attacks, even though a lot of people were focused overseas," the official said.

The official said that even in the summer of 2001, when intelligence officials were describing a dangerous spike in threats against the United States, the seriousness of the threat from bin Laden may not have been uniformly recognized.

"At least some part of our intelligence community recognized what [was] out there," the official said. But "there are issues about information sharing with the intelligence community and between the intelligence community and the rest of the federal government."

The official noted that it is not the intelligence community's responsibility to warn the public about threats. Asked if White House officials, who would make the call on a public warning, were cooperating with the panel, the official deferred. "We've had discussions and requests," the official said. "They've answered some questions and some, maybe not."

On Aug. 6, 2001, President Bush received a daily intelligence briefing that covered bin Laden's use of hijacking as a method of terror. Following disclosure of the briefing in the media this spring, Rice held a news conference in which she made it clear that the intelligence community had not seriously focused on the possibility that alQaeda would think to use planes as flying bombs.

"I will say that, again, hijacking before 9/11 and hijacking after 9/11 do mean two very, very different things," she said.The House and Senate formed a joint intelligence panel shortly after Sept. 11 to assess the performance of the $35 billion intelligence community and to recommend ways to repair and improve it.

The panel got off to a rocky start. Members could not agree on its scope and its first staff director was forced to resign. It delayed public hearings; the first one, in fact, is set for today.

A second public hearing is still in question. The panel is having a difficult time convincing intelligence officials to appear in open session while the U.S. war on terrorism continues.

"There are people who don't want to do public hearings on this at all," the official said.

Today's meeting will not delve into the extensive information the panel has collected on the hijackers and to what extent U.S. intelligence agencies were monitoring any of them. That will be the subject of a future hearing.

The panel has met 10 times in closed sessions. The staff has culled through 400,000 documents from the various intelligence agencies and found roughly 70,000 pages it considered relevant to the investigation.

A working group at the CIA was set up to streamline the normal declassification process.

While hundreds of documents have been declassified, the official said there continue to be active disagreements between the panel staff and intelligence agencies over declassifying more.

Many members of Congress, concerned that the panel would not meet its October deadline, have called for an independent and more thorough probe into what many of them have called the largest intelligence failure since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.