Secret documents detected, Britain supported plan to kill Osama bin Laden

Even though bin Laden had not achieved the fame he would gain after the September 2001 attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York and Pentagon, he was already on the FBI list, along with the ten most wanted terrorists.

He was thought to be behind co-ordinated attacks on US embassies in East Africa in 1998 and a suicide bombing at USS Cole in Aden in October 2000.

British politics is discovered in letters published by the National Archives in Kea. John Saweers, Blair's foreign affairs adviser, later head of MI6, wrote: “American people have no proof yet that bin Laden was responsible for the USS Cole attack. They will not take air strikes until they are safe, and that may happen only after January 20th (time when Bush became president)”.

Sabers says Britain would not like air strikes while Blair was visiting the Gulf in early January. He adds that British personnel in Pakistan may be vulnerable to retaliation.

“We're all in favour of hitting bin Laden, but we need a little notice and a chance to influence the times”.

The US had been following bin Laden since embassy attacks, its efforts, including a calibre missile attack on his training camps in Afghanistan, where the Taliban regime sheltered Al-Qaeda

In 2014 a tape recording appeared that Clinton spoke the day before the September 11 attacks on his refusal to find a chance to kill bin Laden in Afghanistan because it would have endangered the killing of hundreds of civilians. “

Following the September 11th attacks, the US offered a $25m reward for information leading to bin Laden's capture or death and led a coalition of international forces to overthrow the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

However, bin Laden survived until 2011 when, under the leadership of President Obama, the US Marine Seas took up a CIA-led raid on his home in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

A memo from October 2001, just before the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, reveals the efforts Britain made to make the US satisfied. A memorandum of the Foreign Office regarding Blair's draft message to the Afghan people, in which he spoke of the invasion dealing with justice and security, not revenge, pointed to a passage around “proposed” of al-Qaeda responsibility for September 11th.

Patrick Davies, the secretary of foreign affairs's private secretary, wrote that the US “is avoiding using the word "prove" because they are treating each answer as a matter of self-defence and do not think that they should be expected to produce evidence that would be set up in a court to justify their own actions”.

Archives also reveal some of the moment of the presidency's surrender from Clinton to Bush. Bob Zoellick, who was about to become a US business representative, had dined with Christopher Mayer, the British ambassador to Washington in January 2001.

The ambassador said Zoellick had spent most of his dinner giving advice on how to treat Bush.