WASHINGTON -- Before the Sept. 11 attacks, intelligence agencies were aware that terrorists could use airplanes as weapons but had no specific warnings that terrorists were going to strike New York and Washington that day, a congressional official said Tuesday.
"We haven't found anything where some part of the government had the information about the where, when and how this attack was going to take place," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The House and Senate intelligence committees will provide details of the warnings when they hold their first public hearings Wednesday as part of their inquiry of intelligence failures before the attacks.
The official said agencies had a surge of intelligence about possible attacks, peaking in June 2001. Most of the information suggested the attacks would occur overseas, but the inquiry questions whether Americans were given enough information about the possibility of terror attacks in the United States.
The inquiry's preliminary findings, which will be presented at the hearing by staff director Eleanor Hill, doesn't offer conclusions about whether intelligence agencies should have been able to prevent the attacks based on the information in hand.
Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., a member of the House panel, said she doubts there is enough information to conclude that intelligence agencies could have prevented the attacks. Instead, she said, there were problems in intelligence gathering and sharing that agencies are now trying to resolve.
"We had inadequate tools to pull together all the clues," she said.
The top Republican on the Senate panel, Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., said some of the most troubling information seen by the committees have already been made public: the Phoenix memo, in which an FBI agent warned that U.S. flight schools may be training terrorist pilots, and the handling of the Zacarias Moussaoui case. Moussaoui was arrested on an immigration charge in August 2001. He has since been charged with conspiring in the attacks.
"Those two events alone could have changed Sept. 11. Would it have, we don't know," Shelby said.
The Bush administration has looked to the intelligence inquiry to provide the definitive report on problems leading up to the attack. But committee members have become frustrated by delays, blamed on the difficulties of declassifying information for public hearings and what they see as a lack of cooperation by the administration.
Public hearings were to begin in June but were repeatedly delayed; none has been scheduled beyond Wednesday. Congressional staff have said the administration has been reluctant to provide high-level officials as witnesses, including Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
With just weeks left in the congressional year and both intelligence committees likely to lose their senior members, momentum has grown in Congress for a separate, independent commission to look into the attacks.
"I'm afraid if we try to publish at the end of this session a definitive paper on what we found that there will be some things that we don't know because we hadn't had time to probe them and we have not had enough cooperation," Shelby said.
The White House has opposed an independent commission, saying it could lead to more leaks and tie up personnel needed to fight terrorism.
Relatives of Sept. 11 victims have been among the main advocates of the independent commission. Leaders of two groups of relatives, Stephen Push and Kristin Breitweiser, are to be the first witnesses at Wednesday's hearing.
In her report, Hill will look at what intelligence agencies knew about the likelihood of an attack against U.S. targets in 2001 and about the use of airplanes as weapons. At least two other plots involving airplanes are already known: a plan uncovered in the Philippines in 1995 to dive-bomb a jetliner into CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., and a 1994 plan by Algerian militants to blow up an Air France jetliner over the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
A future report will examine what the agencies knew about the 19 hijackers before the attacks.
"This is the beginning. This is not the whole picture," the official said.
Congressional staff members began looking at the attacks early this year. Staff have reviewed some 400,000 documents, about 60,000 to 70,000 of which were considered relevant to the investigation. They have also talked to almost 500 people. The two committees have held closed-door hearings since early June. UPDATED WIRE STORIES