The National Security Agency (NSA) is revealing previously undisclosed details about its role in helping the U.S. government track down Osama bin Laden, the Al Qaeda founder and terrorist who orchestrated numerous deadly attacks on U.S. and Western targets, including the most notorious of September 11, 2001.
In a new podcast series called “No Such Podcast” that premiered this week, current and former senior NSA officials involved in the decade-long search for bin Laden after 9/11 describe how the top-secret operation unfolded before it culminated in the raid on a complex in Abbottabad, Pakistanwhere Bin Laden had fled to.
“I remember late-night meetings in the fall of 2001, sitting around a table and saying, ‘How do we find him?'” Jon Darby, former NSA director of operations, said, according to a transcript of the first episode released by the agency. “And one of the first theories was a courier, someone who would take care of him. But that was 2001.”
Darby described the operation as “ultra-compartmentalized,” with only 50 of the tens of thousands of NSA employees knowing about the operation until after the day of the Abbottabad raid.
“So the government had decided to do this special forces strike. So what’s the NSA’s role at that point? Our job is to make sure that there are no threats to those helicopters that are coming in and out,” Darby said, in an apparent allusion to the risk of intercepting the two Black Hawk helicopters that had secretly entered Pakistani airspace. “So we had people standing by, you know, to give all the signals and warnings about threats to those helicopters,” he said.
NSA helped Ukraine after Russian invasion
Natalie Laing, the NSA’s current director of operations who was also interviewed for the podcast, provided an overview of the basics of signals intelligence, the NSA’s core business, and described more recent examples of the agency’s role in informing U.S. policymakers, foreign partners, and the Ukrainian government about the threat posed by The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Signal intelligence is information about targets obtained from electronic signals and communications from those targets, such as phone calls, text messages, radio waves, and other things that create digital data.
“[W]“We collected those signals and we could see that Russia had plans and intentions to invade Ukraine before they actually invaded,” she said, adding that personnel from the US Cyber Command, which works closely with the NSA, were sent abroad to help Kiev strengthen its cyber defenses.
“Cyber Command was able to send a small team back into Ukraine before the invasion to help search the countries’ networks and identify activity that looked like Russian activity, so they could harden their networks from a cybersecurity perspective,” Laing said.
She also explained how signals intelligence gathered by the NSA helped the U.S. government trace the Chinese origins of a chemical used to synthesize fentanyl. The illicit flow of fentanyl into the country is seen by U.S. agencies as a national security threat.
US intelligence agencies pull back the curtain further
The NSA was once so secretive that its existence was kept a secret, but in recent years the NSA has attempted to reveal some of its secrets. operations and to share more cyber security information with non-governmental organizations and the public.
With the launch of its own podcast, the NSA joins other U.S. intelligence agencies including the CIA, which started a podcast called “The Langley Files” in 2022, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, which launched the podcast “Connections” in 2020 in an attempt to demystify some of their work, albeit through carefully choreographed, in-house productions.
Efforts to better shape the public narrative about the NSA’s activities follow the revelations by former contractor Edward Snowden of secret mass surveillance programs by the U.S. government, which caused a firestorm of controversy and which intelligence agencies acknowledged had caused lasting damage to the reputation of U.S. intelligence.
“Due to the sensitivity of this, we can’t talk about some of the work we do. But it’s time to tell more of the stories we can talk about, share more of that expertise, and celebrate these incredible public servants,” Sara Siegle, NSA’s director of strategic communications, said in a statement.
The NSA plans to release six more episodes on major podcast platforms through next month.
