Clinton Says CIA Scrapped Pre-9/11 Bin Laden Operation, Reigniting Questions Over America’s Missed Chances

WASHINGTON — Former President Bill Clinton has reopened one of the most painful questions surrounding the September 11 attacks: Could the United States have stopped Osama bin Laden before nearly 3,000 Americans were killed?

In a new interview with WABC’s Cats Roundtable, Clinton said he had authorized the CIA to pursue the al Qaeda leader before 9/11, but an operation he believed could have succeeded was abandoned at the last minute because intelligence officials feared civilian casualties.

“I had authorized the CIA to try to take him out,” Clinton told host John Catsimatidis. Clinton said capturing bin Laden alive would have been preferable, but stopping him was the overriding objective.

Clinton recalled being angry over the decision, saying the CIA feared that a failed strike could kill innocent civilians. He said he did not second-guess the agency at the time, but now believes the operation “might well have succeeded.”

The comments arrive at an especially consequential moment. Just days earlier, the CIA released dozens of previously classified presidential intelligence briefs marking the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Those documents show that American officials had been tracking bin Laden's ambitions, capabilities and threats against the United States for years.

A July 1998 presidential briefing described it as plausible that bin Laden placed a high priority on attacking inside the United States. Two months later, intelligence warned that his preferred target could be Washington and raised the possibility that al Qaeda might fly an explosives-packed aircraft into an American city. By December 1998, intelligence was also discussing possible hijackings.

Those warnings did not provide the precise date, targets or operational details necessary to expose the 9/11 plot. But viewed alongside Clinton's latest account, they are likely to fuel renewed scrutiny over whether Washington's pre-9/11 counterterrorism system was too cautious, too fragmented or simply too slow to recognize the scale of the threat.

The historical record is more complicated than a single canceled CIA mission.

The bipartisan 9/11 Commission documented several attempts and proposed operations against bin Laden during Clinton's presidency. It found disagreements and confusion over how far presidential authorization extended, particularly over whether CIA assets were permitted to intentionally kill bin Laden or could use lethal force only during an attempted capture. Clinton administration officials told investigators that the president wanted bin Laden dead, while senior CIA officials said the authority they understood was more restrictive.

The commission also identified a particularly striking episode in May 1999, when intelligence sources repeatedly tracked bin Laden near Kandahar, Afghanistan.

One senior military officer described the opportunity to investigators as a “fat pitch” and expected cruise missiles to be launched. Instead, the order came to stand down. CIA personnel were told that doubts about the intelligence and fears of collateral damage contributed to the decision.

That episode illustrates the dilemma confronting officials at the time: act on intelligence that might be incomplete and risk killing civilians, or wait for greater certainty while a terrorist network continued to grow.

History ultimately provided a devastating answer about the danger posed by waiting.

Al Qaeda attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, hijacking four commercial aircraft and striking the World Trade Center and Pentagon while another plane crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back. Nearly 3,000 people were killed.

Clinton said that when he saw the second aircraft hit the World Trade Center, he immediately believed bin Laden was responsible. At the time, Clinton was in Australia and his daughter, Chelsea, was in Lower Manhattan.

Bin Laden would remain at large for almost another decade before U.S. forces killed him in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, Clinton's latest remarks do not settle the historical debate over who bears responsibility for the opportunities America missed. The 9/11 Commission itself described failures spanning intelligence collection, information sharing, policy and decision-making across multiple agencies and two presidential administrations.

But the renewed disclosures make one fact increasingly difficult to ignore: long before the Twin Towers fell, Washington knew Osama bin Laden wanted to bring terrorism directly onto American soil.

The United States was watching him.

On more than one occasion, it was close enough to consider pulling the trigger.

And history still carries the consequences of the moments when it did not.