France aware of 9/11-type threat months earlier

FRANCE’S foreign intelligence service learned as early as January 2001 that al-Qaida was preparing a hijacking plot likely to involve a US airplane, former intelligence officials said yesterday, confirming a report that also said the CIA received the warning.

Le Monde newspaper said it had obtained 328 pages of classified documents on Osama bin Laden’s terror network that were drawn up by the French spy service, the DGSE, between July 2000 and October 2001. The documents included a January 5, 2001, intelligence report warning that al-Qaida was at work on a hijacking plot.

Pierre-Antoine Lorenzi, the former chief of staff for the agency’s director at the time, said he remembered the note and that it mentioned only the vague outlines of a hijacking plot — nothing that foreshadowed the scale of the September 11 attacks.

“It wasn’t about a specific airline or a specific day, it was not a precise plot,” Lorenzi told The Associated Press. “It was a note that said, ‘They are preparing a plot to hijack an airplane, and they have cited several companies’.”

The French warning, part of which was published in Le Monde, detailed initial rumblings about the plot.

In early 2000 in Kabul, Afghanistan, bin Laden met with Taliban leaders and members of armed groups from Chechnya and discussed the possibility of hijacking a plane that would take off from Frankfurt, Germany, the note said, citing Uzbek intelligence.

Alain Chouet, a former top anti-terrorism official within the DGSE, said that an Afghan warlord from the Uzbek community who was fighting the Taliban at the time had sent men to infiltrate al-Qaida camps — and their information was passed down the chain to Western intelligence officials.