Former intelligence officials confirmed to the Associated Press Monday a Le Monde newspaper report that France's foreign intelligent service had heard about an al Qaeda plot which was "likely to involve a US airplane." The French paper also reported that France informed the Central Intelligence Agency prior to the attacks on September 11, 2001, in which nearly 3,000 were killed.
However, it is uncertain whether the intelligence was alluding to the specific plot hatched on 9/11.
The DGSE external intelligence service wrote a total of nine reports between September 2000 and August 2001 on Al-Qaeda threats against the US and passed all of them on to the Central Intelligence Agency's Paris bureau, the French newspaper reported.
Le Monde based its report on 328 pages of classified documents leaked by DGSE sources, showing that Osama bin Laden's network had been infiltrated by foreign agents long before the September 2001 attacks.
In a file dated January 5, 2001, also seen by AFP, the DGSE said it had learned of a plan to hijack a plane bound for the United States from Frankfurt in Germany and take it to Kandahar in Afghanistan.
Le Monde said that file was passed onto the CIA in January of the same year.
"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 Sept. 11, 2001 attacks," the AP reports.
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