‘Global hints of threat came before Sept 11’

Clues filtering in from around the world since at least 1994 foreshadowed Osama bin Laden’s plans to attack the US, and intelligence information from Italy, Israel and elsewhere before September 11 warned that a terrorist strike might be imminent.

The White House acknowledged on Thursday that President Bush was briefed by the CIA on August 6 about an al Qaida hijacking threat. An earlier report by the Phoenix field office of the FBI that may never have reached the president’s desk warned that many Middle Eastern men were training at at least one US flight school.

The Bush administration said the information was not specific and there was no intelligence before September 11 that al Qaida planned to use commercial planes as vessels of destruction.

‘‘I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Centre, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile,’’ national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said on Thursday.

But warning signs that something like September 11 might be contemplated weren’t all recent and they came from different sources around the world.

In 1994, Algerian militants hijacked an Air France jetliner and killed three passengers before being captured during a stop in the French city of Marseilles.

It emerged that they had hoped to blow up the jet over the Eiffel Tower, debunking the notion that a suicidal airline attack on a prominent target was unthinkable before September 11.

Perhaps the first clue of a similar plot against the US emerged during the Clinton administration in 1995, when Philippine authorities arrested Ramzi Yousef and Abdul Hakim Murad after a chemical fire at their Manila apartment.

Under questioning, Murad admitted connections to bin Laden and spoke of a plot to dive-bomb a jetliner into the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. He also said Middle Eastern pilots were training at US flight schools in preparation for a plot to blow up 12 passenger jets over the Pacific Ocean.

The FBI was alerted at the time and interviewed flight school attendees, but it did not develop evidence that any of the Middle Easterners were plotting terrorism.

FBI and other law enforcement officials involved in the Murad investigation, who spoke earlier this year on condition of anonymity, said American authorities were focused mostly on the plot to blow up the planes because it was developed and imminent when Murad and Yousef were arrested.

The plan to use a plane as a weapon was largely discounted.

‘‘We shared that with the FBI,’’ said Robert Delfin, chief of intelligence command for the Philippine National Police. ‘‘They may have mislooked and didn’t appreciate the info coming from the Philippine police.’’

Yousef, considered the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing, and Murad were eventually convicted in the US and sentenced to life in prison.

Larry Johnson, deputy director of the State Department’s office of counterterrorism in 1989-93, criticised Rice for discounting the possibility that a September 11-type attack could have been foreseen.

‘‘She’s foolish in saying that. Intelligence analysts are paid to imagine the unimaginable. That information was in their files, and if they weren’t imagining it, that is a failure of intelligence and a failure of imagination,’’ he said.

Another clue to September 11 came as a result of the investigation of Murad and Yousef. That probe led the authorities to a radical Indonesian cleric, Riduan Isamuddin, who was living in Malaysia and was suspected of strong ties to al Qaida and other terrorist organisations.

The cleric, who goes by the name Hambali, was under surveillance in January 2000 when he met two future September 11 hijackers - Saudi nationals Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi - in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysian authorities have said.

Information from the surveillance was shared with US authorities, and the meeting took on new significance when another of the participants, an unidentified al Qaida operative from the Middle East, became wanted in connection with the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole.

The two Saudis’ connections to Hambali and the al Qaida operative wanted in the Cole investigation got them placed on a CIA terrorist watch list in August 2001.

Hambali was also linked to another alleged September 11 player, Zacarias Moussaoui, who is on trial in the US and faces the death penalty if convicted of conspiracy in the attacks.

Two of Hambali’s followers, Yazid Sufaat and his wife Sejahratul Dursina, are under arrest in Malaysia - Sufaat in connection with a plot to blow up the US Embassy in neighbouring Singapore and Dursina for allegedly providing Moussaoui with an employment letter that helped him get the US visa.

Moussaoui was arrested on a visa violation in August after raising suspicions during flight training in Minnesota.

French intelligence was aware of Moussaoui as early as 1999, when he was placed on a watch-list for alleged links to the Armed Islamic Group, which claimed responsibility for 1995 bombings in the Paris subway.

Whether that information was shared with US officials is unclear, and Moussaoui was granted a US visa to train as a pilot there.

In Egypt President Hosni Mubarak said his country passed information to Washington about a possible threat on President Bush’s life at the G8 summit in Genoa, Italy, following a June 13 video made by bin Laden.

Italy closed Genoa airspace and mounted a short-range, anti-aircraft battery at the airport during the July 20-22 summit, Deputy Premier Gianfranco Fini said.

A French-Algerian Djamel Beghal, 35, arrested in Dubai last July with a false passport revealed an al-Qaida plot to blow up US interests in Europe, including the American Embassy in Paris.

Beghal said he met bin Laden operatives at mosques in Britain, travelled to Afghanistan for weapons training at an al-Qaida camp, and met at bin Laden’s home with his top aide, Abu Zubaydah.

European authorities began looking into the plot on September 10.

Israeli intelligence services were aware several months before September 11 that bin Laden was planning a large-scale terror attack, but did not know what his targets would be, Israeli officials have said.

An Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Associated Press information was passed on to Washington, but denied Israel had any concrete intelligence that could have been used to prevent the attacks.

The final sign that something was afoot may have come September 9, when suspected bin Laden operatives posing as journalists assassinated General Ahmed Shah Massood, leader of Afghanistan’s anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, in a suicide attack at his headquarters.

US officials have speculated the killing was designed to deprive the northern alliance of its boldest and most experienced leader just days before attacks on New York and Washington that bin Laden must have known would prompt a US response against his Taliban hosts.