The newspaper, which interviewed Mubarak on Sunday, said the Egyptian government has infiltrated many Islamic fundamentalist groups, including the organization of Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden.
Bin Laden is suspected by U.S. officials of having masterminded several operations against U.S. interests, including explosions at U.S. embassies in East Africa and the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington in which some 3,000 people died.
Mubarak told the Times, "We knew something was going to happen. We had good contact, We started to use them, to tell them 'You can stop this.'" The Egyptian president said the attempt could not be stopped because the Egyptians learned of it "one week before" Sept. 11 and "because the wheels were going on, we couldn't stop it -- one week or four days, a very short time."
According to the newspaper, an Egyptian intelligence official said, "There was information about some people planning an operation in the United States, against the United States, but you could not pinpoint where, how, when."
"We informed them [U.S. intelligence officials] about everything," Mubarak told the Times.
The Egyptian president said intelligence officials believed the attack would be on "an embassy, an airplane, something, the usual thing," and not an event as audacious as Sept. 11 turned out to be. He said he did not know how U.S. officials reacted to the warning.
However, the Times said a senior U.S. intelligence official said the CIA had not received any warning from Egypt in the days before Sept. 11.
The official told the newspaper: "The Egyptians gave us some threat information, earlier in 2001, of possible attacks against U.S. or Egyptian interests. There was nothing about hijackings, nothing about an attack inside the United States. It did not come in the days before 9-11."
The Times said Mubarak's assertion that his country had infiltrated bin Laden's network was a first for a foreign leader.
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