The National Security Agency (NSA) is revealing previously undisclosed details about its role in helping the U.S. government hunt for Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda founder and terrorist who orchestrated numerous deadly attacks against U.S. and Western targets, including, most notably, the September 11, 2001, attacks.
In a new podcast series called “No Such Podcast” that debuted this week, current and former NSA officials who were involved in the hunt for bin Laden for a decade after 9/11 describe how the highly secretive operation unfolded leading up to the 2011 attack. raid on compound in Abbottabad, Pakistanwhere Bin Laden had taken refuge.
“I remember late-night meetings in the fall of 2001, and we would sit around a table and wonder how we find him,” said Jon Darby, a former NSA director of operations, according to a transcript of the first episode released by the agency. “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 “ultra-compartmentalized,” with no more than 50 of the NSA’s tens of thousands of employees aware of the effort until after the day of the Abbottabad raid.
“So the government decided to launch this special forces raid. So what is the role of the NSA at this point? Our job is to make sure that there is no threat to the helicopters that are coming and going,” Darby said, apparently referring to the risk that the two Black Hawk helicopters that secretly entered Pakistani airspace could be intercepted. “So we had people ready to provide guidance and warnings if there was a threat 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 fundamentals of signals intelligence, the NSA’s primary focus, and described more recent examples of the agency’s role in informing U.S. policymakers, foreign partners, and the Ukrainian government about the impending Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Signals intelligence is information about targets obtained from electronic signals and communications from those targets, such as phone calls, text messages, radio waves, and other items that create digital data.
“[W]”We collected those signals and we could see that Russia had plans and intentions to invade Ukraine before they invaded,” she said, adding that personnel from U.S. Cyber Command, which works closely with the NSA, have been sent abroad to help kyiv strengthen its cyber defenses.
“Cyber Command was able to send, again, a small team into Ukraine before the invasion to help them look at their networks and flag activity that appeared to be Russian activity there, so they could shore up their networks from a cybersecurity perspective,” Laing said.
She also explained how intelligence gathered by the NSA helped the U.S. government determine the Chinese origins of a chemical used to synthesize fentanyl, whose illicit flow into the country has been deemed by U.S. agencies as a national security threat.
US intelligence agencies are still shedding light on the issue
Once so secretive that its very existence was classified, the NSA has sought in recent years to lift the veil on some of its activities. operations and to share more cybersecurity information with non-governmental entities and the public.
In launching its own podcast, the NSA joins other U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA, which launched a podcast, “The Langley Files,” in 2022, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, whose podcast “Connections” was released in 2020 in an effort to debunk some of their work, albeit through carefully choreographed in-house productions.
Efforts to better shape the public narrative surrounding NSA activities follow 2013 investigation Revelations by former entrepreneur Edward Snowden classified U.S. government mass surveillance programs, which sparked a firestorm of controversy that intelligence officials say has caused lasting damage to the reputation of the U.S. intelligence community.
“Because this is a sensitive topic, we can’t talk about some of our work, but it’s time to start telling more of the stories we can talk about, share more of that expertise, and shine a light on these incredible public servants,” Sara Siegle, the NSA’s chief strategic communications officer, said in a statement.
The NSA aims to release six additional episodes on major podcast platforms by next month.
