Osama Bin Laden wanted to attack Britain years before 9/11, top secret document reveals
Newly declassified CIA documents show that Osama Bin Laden was considering attacks on Britain as early as 1998, three years before the 9/11 attacks. The papers, released by CIA director John Ratcliffe to mark the atrocity's 25th anniversary, form part of a wider trove of President's Daily Brief material that reveals how US intelligence analysts gradually built up their understanding of al Qaeda's threat to the West despite limited and imperfect information.
The 71 declassified briefings include a memo from late 1998 stating there were "strong indications" Bin Laden wanted to strike the US and allies, including the UK and Israel, on their own soil, alongside an earlier note referencing possible UK targets following US missile strikes on al Qaeda bases. Other files describe Bin Laden's anger over the 1999 arrest of two London-based operatives and identify Britain as a recruiting ground for jihadist fighters. The final briefing, dated the day after 9/11, noted the attacks had reportedly been planned for two years and detailed the resulting disruption to UK and Belgian airspace; the attacks themselves killed nearly 3,000 people, including 67 British citizens.
- CIA files show Bin Laden eyed UK attacks as early as 1998
- Papers released for 9/11's 25th anniversary by CIA chief Ratcliffe
- Britain also named as an al Qaeda recruiting ground pre-9/11
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Osama Bin Laden was the founder and leader of al Qaeda, the militant Islamist network responsible for the 11 September 2001 attacks in the United States, in which hijacked planes were used to destroy the World Trade Center and strike the Pentagon, killing nearly 3,000 people. In the years before 9/11, US intelligence agencies were piecing together evidence about al Qaeda's ambitions and capabilities, often from fragmentary sources. Much of this analysis was recorded in the President's Daily Brief, a highly classified intelligence summary prepared for the US president.
The documents at the centre of this story are a batch of those briefings, declassified by the CIA and released to mark the 25th anniversary of the attacks. They cover the period from 1998, when Bin Laden was already under scrutiny following al Qaeda's bombings of US embassies in Africa, through to the day after the 2001 attacks. Britain features in them because the United States tracked concerns about threats to allied countries, not only to itself, and because London had already become a base for some individuals linked to jihadist networks.
This matters because it adds detail to the historical record of how much was known, and when, about the threat al Qaeda posed to the West before 9/11, including to the UK specifically. Sixty-seven British citizens were among those killed in the attacks, so any evidence about early warning signs concerning Britain is of particular public interest there.