The U.S. government received intelligence from Yemen before Christmas that warned of a terrorist plot involving "a Nigerian."

The New York Times has reported President Barack Obama was told of certain information that had been received about an attack, on Tuesday of last week at a meeting in Hawaii, where the president was spending Christmas.

The Yemeni intelligence, says an unnamed government official, pointed to an attack being planned by a division of al-Qaeda in the country.

Separately, the CIA confirmed it produced a report on Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian that tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines jet bound for Detroit last week. The report was initiated by information provided by the man's father, who had become concerned about his son's extremist views towards the United States. The report was forwarded to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, but was not examined in full detail.

"Had that information been shared, he might have been denied passage on the Northwest Airlines flight," the U.S. official was quoted by The New York Times as saying.

"We learned of Abdulmutallab in November, when his father came to the U.S. embassy in Nigeria and sought help in finding him. We did not have his name before then," a CIA spokesman confirmed Wednesday

"This agency, like others in our government, is reviewing all data to which it had access, not just what we ourselves may have collected, to determine if more could have been done to stop Abdulmutallab."