Key August 2001 Bush Briefing to Be Made Public

WASHINGTON —  White House officials worked Friday on declassifying a top-secret intelligence briefing President Bush received a month before the Sept. 11 attacks, but said the document, which warned that Al Qaeda was “determined” to strike within the United States, would probably not be released publicly until early next week.

The White House’s decision to disclose the document represents a political gamble that its contents -- which officials have described as speculative and nonspecific -- will help quiet criticism that the White House had been warned of Al Qaeda’s intentions and failed to act.

The Bush administration is also calculating that whatever new details are revealed in the document will do less damage than perceptions that the White House is withholding information from the public.

But whatever the political impact, the release of the document would provide a rare glimpse of one of the most closely guarded documents on the planet. The so-called President’s Daily Brief, or PDB, is produced six days a week by the CIA and is ordinarily reserved exclusively for the eyes of the president and a few of his most senior advisors.

U.S. officials said the material the White House intends to declassify is only a portion of the Aug. 6, 2001, PDB. The full report covered an array of intelligence topics, but the section marked for declassification is a 1 1/2-page discussion of the domestic terrorist threat.

The Aug. 6 memo has been the subject of intense scrutiny since it became known two years ago that it mentioned the possibility that terrorists might try to hijack U.S. aircraft. It is also of interest because of its timing, coming just five weeks before the 2001 attacks amid an enormous spike in intelligence reporting that spring and summer warning that Al Qaeda was planning a spectacular strike.

White House officials have said all of that threat reporting pointed to attacks on targets overseas. But that claim came under question with the disclosure of new details from the PDB during a hearing held this week by the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.

In testimony, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice said the title of the document was “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.” Commissioners said the PDB, actually titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” also included information that the FBI, even during that summer, had detected suspicious activity “consistent with preparation for hijackings.”

Rice has insisted that the PDB was a collection of historical information, with no new threat reporting. But details that have surfaced so far contradict that characterization. The FBI warning about behavior consistent with preparations for hijacking was based on intelligence collected up until August, commissioners said. The presidential briefing also said Al Qaeda likely had sleeper cells in the United States.

Associated Press reported Friday that the PDB also included intelligence from May 2001 that Al Qaeda was trying to send operatives into the United States for an explosives attack.

The existence of that May intelligence warning was included in the final report issued last year by the joint congressional panel that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks, and it has long been speculated that the explosives plot was included in the PDB because of the way it was characterized in the congressional report.

The joint inquiry said the explosives plot was mentioned in August 2001 in “a closely held intelligence report for ... senior government officials.” Investigators on the joint inquiry said at the time that they were barred by the White House from disclosing what information was briefed to the president.

A U.S. official said Friday that a key passage in the congressional report was centered on the PDB. That passage included the explosives plot, as well as information that Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had wanted to execute attacks in the United States since as early as 1997 and that Al Qaeda maintained a “support structure” in the country, as well as uncorroborated information that Bin Laden wanted to hijack airplanes to gain the release of a U.S.-held extremist.

The 9/11 commission has unanimously called on the White House to declassify the rest of the document. The administration’s decision to release it is a major U-turn for a White House that first argued PDBs were too sensitive even for commissioners to see, and then allowed only two members of the panel to view the document under supervision.

“It underscores how arbitrary the classification policy has become,” said Steven Aftergood, an intelligence analyst at the Federation of American Scientists who is a critic of what he calls excessive classification by the government. Aftergood is the plaintiff in a lawsuit seeking to force the CIA to declassify its budgets from the 1950s.

White House officials declined to discuss the document in detail, or the process by which it is being reviewed. “There’s a legal process, and this procedure takes time,” said a senior administration official.

But current and former intelligence officials said the PDB is likely being scrubbed to make sure that its disclosure does not harm national security by exposing intelligence-collection methods or undermining relations with other nations.

“The No. 1 thing the intelligence community worries about is sources and methods,” said Jeffrey Smith, former general counsel at the CIA.

The White House and other agencies are likely examining the PDB “very carefully to see if there’s anything in that document that could blow a source or expose a method,” such as electronic surveillance or intercepts, Smith said.

PDBs are top-secret, the highest of three general categories of classification. The power to declassify information rests with the president and the heads of agencies responsible for the intelligence, mainly the CIA and the FBI.

A U.S. intelligence official said PDBs generally span 10 to 20 pages, covering seven or eight topics in newspaper-like digests. They tend to focus on crucial overseas developments, including terrorist threats, and often are very specific about how the information was collected. The official said the level of specificity about sources has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Although highly unusual, the release of information contained in PDBs is not unprecedented. Aftergood pointed to at least 10 PDBs from the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson that are now in the public domain and said that former CIA Director Robert M. Gates included portions of PDBs in his memoirs.

The White House said it would seek the declassification of the document shortly after former New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean, the chairman of the panel formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, asked Thursday that it be made public.

The Sept. 11 commission held a hearing Thursday to solicit testimony from Rice. Former President Clinton appeared before the commission in private later Thursday, and former Vice President Al Gore appeared before the panel Friday, also in private.

Times staff writer Maura Reynolds contributed to this report.