The National Security Agency is revealing previously undisclosed details of its role in helping the U.S. government track down al-Qaeda founder and terrorist Osama bin Laden, who orchestrated numerous deadly attacks on U.S. and Western targets, most notorious of which was the September 11, 2001, attacks.
In a new podcast series that launched this week called “No Such Podcast,” current and former senior NSA officials involved in the search for bin Laden in the decade after 9/11 describe how the top-secret operation unfolded before it culminated on November 11, 2011. Raid on complex in Abbottabad, PakistanWhere Bin Laden fled.
“I remember having a meeting late at night in the fall of 2001, and we were sitting around the table and saying, ‘How are we going to find him?’” recalled John Darby, a former NSA operations director, according to a transcript of the first episode released by the NSA. “And one of the early theories was that there was a courier, someone who was going to take care of him. But that was in 2001.”
Darby described the operation as “highly granular,” with no more than 50 of the tens of thousands of NSA employees knowing about it until after the Abbottabad raid.
“So the government decided to go ahead with this special forces raid. So what is the NSA’s role at that point? Our job is to make sure that there is no threat to the helicopters coming in and going out,” Darby said, seemingly hinting at the risk that two Black Hawk helicopters that had sneaked into Pakistani airspace could be intercepted. “So we have people ready to provide indications and warnings that there is a threat to those helicopters,” he said.
NSA Supports Ukraine After Russian Invasion
In a podcast interview, Natalie Laing, the NSA’s current director of operations, provided an overview of the basics of signals intelligence—a core focus of the NSA—and provided recent examples of the NSA’s role in providing intelligence to U.S. policymakers, foreign partners, and the Ukrainian government about impending events. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Signals information is information obtained through electronic signals and communications originating from a subject, such as phone calls, text messages, radio waves, and other things that generate digital data.
“We collected those signals and we could tell that the Russians had a plan and intent to invade Ukraine before they invaded,” she said, adding that personnel from U.S. Cyber Command, which works closely with the NSA, were deployed overseas to help bolster Kiev’s cyber defenses.
“Even before the invasion, Cyber Command had a small team in Ukraine that was investigating the network and helping to pinpoint what appeared to be Russian activity, which allowed us to harden the network from a cybersecurity perspective,” Laing said.
She also described how signals intelligence collected by the NSA helped the U.S. government determine the origin of chemicals used to synthesize fentanyl, and how U.S. agencies view the illicit flow of these chemicals as a national security threat.
U.S. Intelligence Agencies Pull Back More Curtains
The NSA, once so secretive that its very existence was classified, has tried to reveal some of its secrets in recent years. operate And to share more Cyber Security Information With non-governmental organizations and the public.
The NSA joins other U.S. intelligence agencies in launching their own podcasts, including the CIA, which launched “The Langley Files” in 2022, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, which launched “Connections” in 2020, in an effort to demystify some of its work through carefully choreographed, in-house productions.
Efforts to better shape the public narrative surrounding NSA activities continued in 2013. Former contractor Edward Snowden’s disclosure The U.S. government’s secret mass surveillance programs have sparked a huge controversy that intelligence officials say has permanently damaged the reputation of the U.S. intelligence community.
“While we cannot discuss some of our work because of the sensitivity of the issues, this is a time when we must tell more stories, share more expertise, and highlight our great public servants,” Sarah Siegle, NSA’s director of strategic communications, said in a statement.
The NSA plans to release six more episodes on major podcast platforms by next month.