The CIA Released 71 Bin Laden Reports on the 25th Anniversary. One From September 1998 Warned Extremists 'May Fly an Explosive-Packed Airplane Into a US City.'

The Central Intelligence Agency marked the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on Friday by declassifying 71 intelligence reports on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, most of them written for the president in the three years before the planes hit. CIA Director John Ratcliffe called the batch "the single largest release of CIA analysis related to 9/11 ever." Seventy of the documents were produced before the attacks. The last one is dated Sept. 12, 2001. Only two of the 71 had been made public before, during the 9/11 Commission's investigation.

The earliest items show how quickly the agency's picture of bin Laden sharpened in 1998. A report dated Feb. 13 of that year assessed that bin Laden and allied extremists had "agreed to procure unspecified chemical, biological, and nuclear substances from open markets," and noted that his legitimate business ties could help him buy them. Eleven days later, on Feb. 24, the agency reported that bin Laden and his associates had issued a fatwa "calling for all Muslims to attack US interests and civilians worldwide," tying the call to grievances over Saudi Arabia and Palestine. An October 1999 report claimed bin Laden had "made a substantial investment in 57 narcotics laboratories" in Afghanistan and recruited experts to run them, an allegation the 9/11 Commission later said it could find no reliable evidence to support.

The document likely to draw the most scrutiny is dated Sept. 10, 1998. It warned that extremists "may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a US city" and noted bin Laden's stated preference to "strike the US on its own soil in Washington." The same report hedged that the intelligence "provides no conclusive information on Bin Ladin's intentions." Nearly three years later, on July 24, 2001, the agency told the president that an "expected imminent Bin Ladin-sponsored terrorist operation has been postponed" but that preparations for other near-term attacks were continuing.

Two weeks after that came the Aug. 6, 2001, President's Daily Brief item titled "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US," which was declassified in 2004 and is included again here. It cited FBI information pointing to "patterns of suspicious activity" in the United States "consistent with preparations for hijackings" and mentioned "recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York." It was the 36th PDB item that year dealing with bin Laden or al Qaeda.

The final report, written the day after the attacks, said "mounting evidence indicates Sunni extremists in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf recently were aware Usama Bin Ladin-directed attacks were imminent." It described an August 2001 dispute in which bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar "clashed over Bin Ladin's determination to mount terrorist attacks," with bin Laden telling Omar "he had operations in progress that would cause great damage to the US." It quoted a Kandahar-based Arab who said the attacks were the product of "two years' planning" and "the beginning of the wrath," and suggested the Capitol and the White House had been intended targets.

A former senior intelligence official told CBS News that many PDB items from 1996 and earlier, along with additional pieces from 2001, remain classified. The 9/11 Commission concluded in 2004 that "failures of imagination, policy, capabilities, and management" allowed the attacks to happen, and that "the most important failure was one of imagination." Ratcliffe said the release honored the nearly 3,000 people who died and reflected the agency's commitment to preventing another such attack.