Memo Cited Fears of Attacks in U.S.

The White House took the extraordinary step Saturday of releasing a top-secret intelligence briefing President Bush received five weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, declassifying a document that contained no specific warning of the looming strikes in New York and the Pentagon but provided fresh information that Al Qaeda was bent on hitting targets in the United States.

The 1 1/2-page document cited intelligence on Al Qaeda dating to the mid-1990s. But it concluded with two items that pointed to possible domestic threats just months before Bush got the Aug. 6, 2001, briefing.

One passage warned that the FBI had observed “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.”

Another noted that the CIA and FBI were investigating a call to the U.S. Embassy in the United Arab Emirates in May of that year “saying that a group of Bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives.”

Senior White House officials who discussed the Aug. 6 briefing in a conference call with reporters late Saturday said neither of those contemporaneous cases had been shown to have any connection to the Sept. 11 plot. They also said an FBI investigation of the suspected surveillance of the buildings in New York centered on two Yemeni citizens who were observed taking pictures of federal structures, and that the bureau later determined they were simply tourists.

Still, the disclosure of these details seemed to undercut claims by national security advisor Condoleezza Rice and other administration officials that the briefing contained no fresh intelligence, did not represent a warning, and instead was merely a compendium of historical information about Al Qaeda’s intentions.

Many details about the document -- including its ominous title, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” -- had already leaked out in press reports in recent days or were revealed during Rice’s appearance last week before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

Even so, the public release of the briefing is in many ways unprecedented. Similar documents from other administrations have been declassified, but years after the presidents they were prepared for left office.

The Al Qaeda material released Saturday -- just 17 sentences in all -- was one section of a daily intelligence briefing that also covered other subjects. The contents of the other sections were not released. Intelligence officials have said a typical daily briefing runs 10 to 20 pages, with supporting material.

Five fragments of the document release Saturday were blotted out -- only a few words in each case. The White House officials said the markings were required to obscure the names of foreign intelligence services cited as sources in the document.

One of the senior White House officials who discussed the document said its declassification “should clear up the myth out there” that Bush was briefed on information that pointed specifically to the Sept. 11 plot.

“This PDB contains no warning of the attacks of Sept. 11,” the official said, referring to the acronym for president’s daily brief, the daily intelligence digest delivered by the CIA to the White House.

“It was not prompted by new threat information,” the official said. Most of its contents were a “review of information already available.” And the two items that were of fresh concern at the time “were being pursued aggressively by the appropriate agencies.”

But as much as White House officials would like for the issue to be put to rest, a review of the document, and the reaction of analysts and experts, suggested that was unlikely to happen.

“There’s enough substance in there to support a charge that the Bush team should have taken more decisive action,” said Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political analyst. However, Sabato said, “there’s also support for what Rice said -- a lack of specifics and not much to hang your hat on.

“My guess is, the real effect is that it will give ammunition to both sides, and continue the increasing partisanship of this commission and therefore the American people on this subject,” Sabato said.

The Aug. 6 PDB has been the subject of speculation and scrutiny for nearly two years, since it was first disclosed that Bush had received a briefing the month before the attacks that mentioned the possibility that Al Qaeda might attempt to hijack aircraft. The briefing followed a spring and summer in which there had been a tremendous spike in intelligence reporting warning that Al Qaeda was planning spectacular attacks against the United States.

Rice and other officials have said the bulk of that reporting focused on targets overseas, and that the Aug. 6 briefing was put together by the CIA in response to questions from Bush about Al Qaeda threats inside the United States. Bush received the Aug. 6 briefing while he was on a monthlong vacation at his ranch near Crawford, Texas.

The document itself consists of a series of intelligence assessments and is stripped of fuller discussion and detail that would be found in more comprehensive intelligence reports. At the bottom of the first page are the words, “For the President Only,” although the PDB is also usually shared with a handful of other senior officials inside the White House.

The memo starts with a simple summary: “Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Bin Ladin since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US.”

It went on to say Osama bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate against Washington for U.S. missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, when the U.S. was responding to Al Qaeda bombings of American embassies in East Africa.

The millennium plot, which targeted Los Angeles International Airport, among other sites, “may have been part of Bin Ladin’s first serious attempt” to strike inside the United States, it said.

It noted that “al-Qa’ida members -- including some who are US citizens -- have resided in or traveled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks.”

The CIA acknowledged it had been unable to corroborate “more sensational threat reporting,” including indications from an unnamed foreign intelligence service that Bin Laden “wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of ‘Blind Shaykh’ Umar Abd al-Rahman and other US-held extremists.”

The document concluded with the items on the surveillance of buildings in New York and the call to the U.S. Embassy in the United Arab Emirates. It noted that “the FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Ladin-related.”

The call to the embassy in the United Arab Emirates was fielded on May 15, 2001, the White House officials said. The caller “did not say where or when the attacks might occur,” one official said, adding that phone call tips to embassies are routine and “not particularly alarming.”

White House officials sought to show that the administration took the embassy call seriously, saying the National Security Council’s counterterrorism group met two days later to discuss the tip. The group included representatives from the CIA, FBI, State Department, Defense Department and others, the officials said. The information was also shared with the U.S. Customs Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

But the officials did not say whether Bush or Rice did anything to follow up on that threat or others, and could not point to any other high-level White House action beyond that May 17 meeting.

The officials said the Yemenis were observed conducting “surveillance” of federal buildings in New York in the spring of that year. They said it was a significant concern because it came around the same time that four defendants in the East Africa bombing case were convicted in New York in May, and there had been warnings that Bin Laden might seek to retaliate.

The activity of the Yemenis “was checked out subsequently by the FBI and determined to be activity that was tourist-related,” one of the White House officials said, adding it was “people simply taking pictures of buildings in New York.” He did not provide further details, or say when the FBI had reached that determination, although it appeared the bureau had not done so before the Aug. 6 briefing.

The revelations stoked fresh criticism that Bush should have responded more forcefully to the domestic threats.

The PDB “is a provocative piece of information and warrants further exploration as to what was done following the receipt of this information to enhance our domestic security,” Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democrat on the Sept. 11 commission, told Associated Press.

Former White House counterterrorism official Richard Clarke has also been sharply critical of Bush, saying the president ignored the terrorist threat during his eight months in office before the Sept. 11 attacks. The Aug. 6 briefing was delivered at a time when key information that might have helped uncover the plot was bottled up in the CIA and FBI.

The CIA knew that two Al Qaeda operatives, who went on to live in San Diego and become part of the hijacking team, had entered the country a year earlier, yet failed to notify the FBI or put them on government watch lists until just weeks before the attacks.

In July, an FBI agent in Phoenix warned that terrorists were training in U.S. flight schools, and a month later the bureau arrested Zacarias Moussaoui, who had enrolled in flight school in Minnesota.

The CIA and FBI have been harshly criticized for failing to capitalize on this information. But Clarke has said Bush and Rice are also to blame for failing to order the FBI or CIA to scour their field stations for every available clue.

White House officials said they could not discuss Bush’s reaction to the Aug. 6 briefing, or say whether the president had followed up on the threats presented. They asserted, however, that the administration was “at battle stations” during the months before the attacks, with various agencies, including the State Department and the CIA, ordering their overseas posts to high alert.

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Times staff writer Edwin Chen in Crawford, Texas, contributed to this report.