As noted above, almost immediately after September 11, reports emerged of Israeli warnings, in August, that major terrorist attacks were imminent. On September 16, 2001 the Daily Telegraph (London) reported that Israeli intelligence officials said that they —

"warned their counterparts in the United States last month that large-scale terrorist attacks on highly visible targets on the American mainland were imminent. . . . . . . (T)wo senior experts with Mossad, the Israeli military intelligence service, were sent to Washington in August to alert the CIA and FBI to the existence of a cell of as many of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation. They had no specific information about what was being planned but linked the plot to Osama bin Laden and told the Americans that there were strong grounds for suspecting Iraqi involvement." ¹⁰²

The Los Angeles Times reported on September 20, 2001 that a "high-ranking U.S. law enforcement official" confirmed that —

"FBI and CIA officials were advised in August that as many as 200 terrorists were slipping into the United States and planning 'a major assault on the United States . . . .' The advisory was passed on by the Mossad. . . . It cautioned that it had picked up indications of a 'large-scale target' in the United States and that Americans would be 'very vulnerable', the official said. It is not known whether US authorities thought the warning to be credible, or whether it contained enough details to allow counter-terrorism teams to come up with a response. But the official said the advisory linked the information 'back to Afghanistan and [exiled Saudi militant] Osama bin Laden.'" ¹⁰³

Fox News also reported on May 17, 2002 (and apparently also on September 14, 2001) ¹⁰⁴ that—

"based on its own intelligence, the Israeli government provided 'general' information to the United States in the second week of August that an al Qaeda attack was imminent."

Neither the Commission in its Final Report or in its Staff Statements nor the Joint Committee Report specifically mentions any such warning from the Israeli government. These Statements and Reports do, however, defer to our intelligence community's desire to safeguard and maintain the secrecy of its "sources and methods". These are likely to have included Israeli warnings and the Israelis' own sources. But in view of the dramatic questions raised by the Israeli Groups' activities in the United States in the months leading up to September 11, these sources and methods now need to be disclosed.

As shown in the tabular comparison in Exhibit E, the accounts of Mossad's warnings in August bear the unmistakable imprints of authenticity. Mossad's warnings were reported by the Daily Telegraph and others right after September 11, well over two years before the Joint Committee's report and the publication of the Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) of August 6, 2001. Yet they bear a remarkable similarity to both the Joint Committee's description of "all-source reporting" and the PDB's account of "clandestine, foreign government and media reports and recent FBI information." The key differences, as shown in Exhibit E, are Mossad's warning that (a) the attacks were imminent, (b) they were to take place on the U.S. mainland, and (c) 200 terrorists were in the United States to carry them out. Mossad also alone warned of "suspected Iraqi involvement," though this of course has never been established and is generally considered to be untrue.

That we did receive warnings of this general nature from Mossad seems more than likely. But the real issue, again, is, given the extensive surveillance by the Israeli Groups of U.S. Arab groups and, in all likelihood, of the future hijackers in their central bases of operation and elsewhere in the United States, were not the Israeli Groups, or some of their members, aware of what was going to happen in advance? Is this not dramatically shown by the behavior of the Israeli New Jersey Group the morning of September 11? And if so, did the Israeli government decide not to provide us with enough information to stop them?

As noted in the next section, the Israelis may have given us warning in late August 2001 of the presence in the United States of Khaled al Mihdhar and Nawaf al Hazmi, resulting in the CIA's having them placed on the State Department's Tipoff Watchlist. ¹⁰⁵ In either case, the CIA's and the Commission's explanation of how these two future hijackers came to be Watchlisted, which makes no mention of Israeli warnings, is highly confusing and, as we shall see, in the end difficult to believe. Even so, the Israeli warning as to the two men would have come too late, for we now know that they were then or soon hiding in an obscure motel in Maryland, from which they did not emerge until September 11. ¹⁰⁶

One television documentary cited above (which did not have access to or study in any detail the documents, lists, reports and other information set forth herein, or even any knowledge of the existence of the Israeli New Jersey Group), has put the relevant question bluntly, in the form of a question, an answer and a rhetorical question

"What about this question of advanced knowledge of what was going to happen on September 11? How clear are investigators that some Israeli agents may have known something?" "It's very explosive information, obviously, and there's a great deal of evidence that they say they have collected none of it necessarily conclusive. It's more when they put it all together. A bigger question, they say, is how could they not have known?" [Emphasis supplied.] ¹⁰⁷