The Book the Argument Was About: Reading the President's Daily Briefs on 9/11
On the 25th anniversary, the CIA released 71 President's Daily Briefs — the documents everyone argued about for 25 years without being allowed to read. We read them. The analysts were right about almost everything except the one thing that would have stopped it.
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Listen free: The Book the Argument Was About: Reading the President's Daily Briefs on 9/11
Every morning of every presidency, a small team of senior analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency finishes, before dawn, the most exclusive publication on Earth: the President's Daily Brief, a few pages of the government's best understanding of the threats facing the country, printed for an audience of one. Almost nothing from it is ever made public. It is the book the whole argument about what the government knew is secretly an argument about — and for twenty-five years, the argument about September eleventh has been, at its root, an argument about what was in that book. On September eleventh of this year, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attacks, the CIA did something it has never done: it opened the book. Seventy-one President's Daily Brief products, the agency's single largest release of analysis related to nine eleven ever, more than a hundred pages of the analysts' own words from the years before and the morning after the attacks. The same day, the National Archives released the seven-thousand-word summary the nine eleven Commission compiled after reading every brief that mentioned al-Qa'ida, and the Commission's long-sealed interview records with the officials who received the warnings.
We have spent the days since reading the documents — the actual pages, all seventy-one of them, not the legends about them. This is what they say.
The first thing the collection teaches is that the titles alone are an alarm rising for three years. In February of nineteen ninety-eight, the book carries terrorists seeking weapons of mass destruction. By June: potential targets for anti-American attacks by Bin Ladin. On July third, nineteen ninety-eight — three years and two months before the attacks — the book tells the President, in plain type, that reports indicate Bin Ladin is planning attacks inside the United States. Four months later, on December fourth, nineteen ninety-eight, the book gets specific in a way that stops the heart: a memorandum titled Bin Ladin Preparing To Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks. It reports that a senior member of an allied Egyptian group has completed planning for an operation in the United States, that a Bin Ladin operative would soon arrive to discuss options, perhaps including an aircraft hijacking — and then, in a sentence that reads twenty-eight years later like a message sent to the wrong decade, it reports that two members of the operational team had evaded security checks during a recent trial run at an unidentified New York airport. A trial run. At a New York airport. In December of nineteen ninety-eight — a date that will now live beside the better-known date in August of two thousand one, in every serious account of what the government knew.
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The memorandum is worth reading the way the analysts wrote it, because it shows what intelligence actually looks like from the inside: not prophecy, but fragments. A source reports a plot on hold. Another reports a hijack planned for the next couple of weeks, then before Ramadan. A Bin Ladin associate tells a colleague in Malaysia that they are in the ninth month of pregnancy. A supporter in Yemen tells his mother he is going into commerce and that his coming marriage will be a surprise — and the analysts note, in the flat prose of the book, that commerce and marriage are often codewords for terrorist attacks. This is what the raw material of warning is made of: overheard euphemisms, secondhand boasts, trial runs glimpsed and lost. The analysts assembled the fragments into a memorandum that said, with complete clarity, hijacking is coming, America is the target, and we do not know when or where. Every word of that was true. And no mechanism existed on Earth to convert those words into the one thing that would have mattered — a specific flight, a specific day, a specific name on a specific manifest.
Through nineteen ninety-nine and two thousand, the book does not quiet; it accumulates. The millennium plots are foiled in Jordan and at the Canadian border, and the book reports what the foiling revealed: refinements to Bin Ladin's methods, diverse groups planning anti-American attacks, the near-term threat undiminished. The USS Cole is bombed in October of two thousand, and the book spends the winter chasing the perpetrators back to the same network. The drug trafficking, the Levant support cells, the unconventional-weapons ambitions, the Taliban's refusal to surrender its guest — the file thickens month by month, and the picture it forms is of an intelligence service that understood its enemy as well as any intelligence service has ever understood anything: his goals, his methods, his patience, his determination, his infrastructure on three continents, his cells recruiting inside the United States itself. What it did not know was the thing that mattered.
Then came the summer of two thousand one, and the documents show the alarm going from chronic to acute. The officials who lived that summer describe the same sensation with a technical word: chatter — the background noise of intercepted fragments, mentions, movements, and euphemisms flowing through the collection channels on any given day, most of it meaningless, all of it requiring judgment. Chatter is the ocean the fish of real intelligence swims in, and that summer, by the director's own later account, the ocean was roaring: the volume of threat fragments reached levels none of the veterans had seen, and the briefs in this collection are its distilled surface. In May: a captured terrorist details a hostage plot. In June: snapshots of recent threats. On July eleventh, a three-page snapshot of Bin Ladin-related anti-American terrorist threats. On July twenty-fourth, a sentence that deserves to be read with September in mind: one Bin Ladin operation delayed, others continue. On July twenty-fifth, the book reminds the President of Bin Ladin's nineteen ninety-eight religious decree — the fatwa that declared killing Americans, civilian and military, an individual duty for every Muslim who could perform it. And then, on August sixth, the book produced the page that would become the most famous intelligence document in American history, the page that gave this entire release its meaning and its argument: the President's Daily Brief titled Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.
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The August sixth brief is both better and worse than its legend, and honesty requires both halves. Better, because the legend undersells it: it is not a vague cloud of menace but a compressed history of specific intent — clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicating that Bin Ladin had wanted to attack inside the United States since nineteen ninety-seven; his televised promise to follow the World Trade Center bomber and bring the fighting to America; the millennium airport plot that a Bin Ladin lieutenant encouraged and facilitated; the embassy bombings prepared years in advance; the cells, including American citizens, maintaining a support structure inside the country; a clandestine source reporting a New York cell recruiting Muslim-American youth. Worse, because the brief also contains the sentence that history would weaponize in both directions: we have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as the nineteen ninety-eight report that Bin Ladin wanted to hijack a US aircraft to free imprisoned extremists. Corroborate — to confirm a report from independent sources — is the discipline's whole standard, and here is the discipline applied faithfully: the analysts could not confirm the hijacking plot, so they labeled it unconfirmed. And then, in the very next sentence, the brief does the thing that makes it unbearable to read calmly: nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates 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. The analysts hedged the specific report and then told the President the pattern was real anyway. Seventy full field investigations, the brief notes, were underway across the country. The warning was in the book. The date, the place, and the flight numbers were not — because nobody had them.
On August twenty-eighth, two weeks before the attacks, the book's last pre-attack entry on the subject tells the President that Bin Ladin's operations are expert and flexible. And then the collection does something no argument about nine eleven has ever been able to include until now: it shows you the morning after. At zero four hundred Eastern Daylight Time on September twelfth, two thousand one, the situation report titled Bin Ladin's Tracks records the first day of the rest of American history. Mounting evidence indicates Sunni extremists in Afghanistan and the Gulf had known the attacks were imminent. Bin Ladin and Mullah Omar had clashed, weeks earlier, over his determination to mount them; Bin Ladin told Omar he had operations in progress that would cause great damage to the United States. A Kandahar-based Arab said the attacks were the result of two years of planning and were, in his words, the beginning of the wrath — and the report notes that the Capitol and the White House may also have been targets. In Kuwait, an individual gave thanks for the explosion in the Congress building. Mullah Omar was already moving his family out of Kandahar in anticipation of the American response. The Northern Alliance's overnight attacks on Kabul suggested they were eager to prove their leader's assassination, two days earlier, had not broken them. The world's markets were falling, the Petronas Towers were being evacuated, and NATO's council was convening in solidarity. The analysts wrote it all down, in order, four hundred hours into the new world, in the same flat voice they had used for three years of warnings.
So what do the documents prove? They prove, beyond any remaining serious dispute, that the intelligence community understood the threat — not in outline but in detail: the enemy's intent since nineteen ninety-seven, his hijacking ambitions since nineteen ninety-eight, his cells inside the country, his patience, his method of preparing operations for years, his resilience after every disruption. The system's collection worked. The analysts' picture was, in every essential element, correct. And the documents prove something harder: that being correct in general is not the same as being able to act in particular. The entire three-year file contains no date, no city, no target, no flight, no name attached to an operation — because collection this good still could not produce them, and without them, a warning is a weather report for a hurricane whose landfall coordinates no one knows. The machinery that would have fused the CIA's foreign intelligence with the FBI's domestic investigations — the famous wall between them, built for good reasons from abuses of an earlier era — meant the two halves of the picture lived in different buildings, measured against different standards, owned by different masters. And the machinery of reception meant the warnings arrived to a government six months into a transition, where the practices for moving from the book to action had not yet been built.
The strongest case against the fog reading — the case that this was actionable, that nine eleven was not a failure of imagination but of response — belongs to the counterterrorism officials who lived it, and it must be stated at the strength they state it. George Tenet, the CIA director, testified that the system was blinking red — that by the summer of two thousand one the threat reporting had reached a level of intensity he had never seen, and that he told anyone who would listen. Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism coordinator, had been warning for years and spent that summer, by his own account, with his hair on fire, begging for a cabinet-level meeting that took months to convene. On this reading, the August sixth brief was not a weather report; it was a pistol — a document explicitly commissioned by the President's own briefers in response to his question about Bin Ladin's intentions, containing enough pattern, history, and current FBI activity to justify dragging every agency into a room and shaking them until the fragments fused. The plot was disrupted dozens of times in its early stages, this case notes — the millennium plot, the Jordan plot, the Rome arrests — and each disruption came from exactly the kind of urgent, coordinated attention the summer of two thousand one never quite assembled. The documents, on this reading, do not describe an unavoidable failure. They describe an avoidable one, and they name the room where it happened.
And the strongest case on the other side is written in the same pages, in the two words the argument always returns to: specificity and hindsight. Every disrupted plot in the file was disrupted because the target was named — an airport, an embassy, a specific cell in a specific city. Nine eleven was not disrupted because the fragments never named it, and the file shows why: the hijackers were not new faces flashing across the screens; they were men already inside the country, legal entrants, careful, quiet, operating at a level of discipline the book itself called expert and flexible. To say the government should have connected the dots is to say it should have found, among seventy full field investigations and thousands of legal visitors, the nineteen men who looked exactly like everyone else — and connected them, in thirty-six days, to a plan no captured document described. The CIA's general warning was superb; the FBI's field investigations were real; and the fusion of the two, in the absence of the specifics, required a breakthrough that never came. Hindsight, the saying goes, is the only exact science, and it operates by starting from the answer and working backward to the dots that lead there. The analysts of two thousand one had to work forward, into fog, with fragments. They got the fog right. They never got the coordinates.
Three lines of evidence would disprove or sharpen the accounting the documents begin, and each is followable into the public record. First, the remaining redactions: the release is historic but not complete — lines and names are still blacked out of these very pages, and the Declassification Board itself says important questions remain and additional records warrant review; what those lines contain, when they are finally read, will either fill the last gaps or confirm that the gaps were never in the record at all. Second, the interview record: the Commission's sealed memoranda from the officials who received the warnings are now public alongside the briefs, and the divergence between what the book said and what the principals remember being told — already visible in the first readings — will be the scholarly battleground of the next decade. Third, the response test: the next time threat reporting of this intensity appears, the measure of what was learned will be mechanical, not rhetorical — how many days pass before the agencies are fused into one room with one picture and a named receiver for the alarm. The documents of twenty twenty-six do not close the argument of two thousand one. They give it, for the first time, a shared text to argue from.
It is worth saying precisely what this article has not claimed. It has not claimed anyone knew the date, the flights, or the targets; no document released says that, and this article says the opposite, repeatedly. It has not claimed the attacks were preventable with certainty; preventability is a judgment about a counterfactual, and the strongest versions of both sides are presented here. It has not claimed the analysts failed; their picture was correct in every essential element, and the article honors that correctness at length. It has not claimed the principals were indifferent; indifference is not documented anywhere in these pages, and the record shows people asking hard questions at the highest levels. And it has not litigated the conspiracy theories that have always surrounded this day; the documents themselves are the refutation, in both directions — the warnings were real, and so was the fog.
Which returns to the book, and the morning ritual, and the strange intimacy of a government talking to itself in a few pages before dawn. For twenty-five years, Americans argued about what was in those pages without being allowed to see them, and the argument filled the silence with everything from heroism to treason. Now the pages are on the table, and they are quieter than either pole promised: seventy-one products of smart, frightened, careful people watching a threat gather and writing down exactly what they knew, which was almost everything except the one thing that would have stopped it. The book did its job. The system around the book did not know how to do its own. The distance between those two sentences is where three thousand lives went, and it is the distance every future warning system will be measured against. That is not a satisfying conclusion, and the documents do not ask it to be. They only ask, now that they are finally public, to be read — slowly, precisely, without the legend in the way, and with the humility the fragments earned.
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