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Updated 3:00 pm ET --  Former CIA Director David Petraeus testified Friday before congressional intelligence panels telling members that he had believed from the outset that the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi was an act of terrorists.

NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell reported that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee said after hearing from Petraeus that Obama administration officials made a decision to hold back as classified information an explicit depiction of Benghazi incident as an act of terrorists -- therefore that description did not make it into the “talking points” that the administration prepared for officials when they went on TV talk shows and spoke to reporters.

Instead, the initial talking points focused on spontaneous reactions to an anti-Islamic video as a spark for the attack. Five days after attack, the administration dispatched U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to speak on the Sunday news shows to offer a preliminary explanation of the attack, which she attributed to an anti-Islamic video that was circulated on YouTube.

In the attack Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans – Glen Doherty, Tyrone Woods and Sean Smith – were killed.

Keeping as classified the determination that the Benghazi attack was the work of terrorists may have been done in order to help pursue those very same terrorists.

“There might have been two tracks happening all along: the public statements that were reflecting part of what they may have known” and the classified information that terrorists had been the ones attacking the consulate. “The real question is if they knew it was terrorism all along – was there too much suggestion that a video or demonstrations may have been involved?” said O’Donnell.

House Intelligence Committee member Peter King, R-N.Y., told reporters Friday after Petraeus testified that the initial “talking points” from the Obama administration to prepare officials for what they should say publicly in the first days after the attack had been changed to delete references to any al Qaida involvement in the event.

King said he and his colleagues now needed to hear testimony from officials in the State Department, the Defense Department “and also people at the White House – to see if anyone at the White House changed the talking points.”

King told reporters after Petraeus testified that “his testimony today was that from the start (immediately after Sept. 11) he had told us that this was a terrorist attack, that terrorism was involved from the start.”

But King said that he himself “had a very different recollection" of what Petraeus had told the panel in the initial aftermath of the attack. 

"The clear impression that we (members of the House Intelligence Committee) were given (in the initial days after the attack) was that the overwhelming amount of evidence was that it arose out of a spontaneous demonstration and it was not a terrorist attack,” King said. 

Rep. C.A. “Dutch” Ruppersberger of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts after hearing from Petraeus that “I can’t agree that there was entirely an intelligence failure” in the days leading up to the attack.

He said, “The intelligence community did put people in the area of Benghazi and in Libya generally. It was a hot spot, it was an area where you had to be on high alert – they did not pick up the actual attack itself. So we’re evaluating whether or not it was or was not an intelligence failure.”

“We had less than a handful of security there for the ambassador,” Rooney said. “First of all, I don’t know why the ambassador was there on 9/11 to begin with, but that’s a whole other story. Second we were relying really on local Libyan militia who – if there was anything coordinated about the two attacks, at the compound and at the annex, it is that there was a coordinated absence by the people who were supposed to be protecting us.” He said the Libyan militia “were nowhere to be found” when the assault occurred.