The National Security Agency is revealing aspects it has never before revealed about its role in helping the US government track down al Qaeda founder and terrorist Osama bin Laden, who masterminded numerous deadly attacks on US and Western targets, including the including the infamous September attacks. 11, 2001.
In the new Podcast series Called “No Such Podcast,” which debuted this week, current and former senior NSA officials who were involved in the decade-long hunt for bin Laden after 9/11 describe how the top-secret operation culminated in 2011. A raid on a compound in Abbottabad, PakistanWhere Bin Laden fled.
“I remember late-night meetings in the fall of 2001, us sitting around the table saying, ‘How are we going to find him?'” says former NSA operations director John Darby, according to a transcript of the first episode released. by agency. “And one of the early principles was a courier, somebody who would take care of it. But that was 2001.
Darby described the operation as “ultra-compartmentalized,” with more than 50 of the thousands of NSA employees aware of the effort until the day of the Abbottabad raid.
“So the government decided to conduct these special forces raids. So what is the NSA’s role then? Our job is to make sure that those helicopters that fly in and out are not a threat,” Darby said, in a clear indication of the threat posed by the two Black Hawk helicopters that secretly entered Pakistan’s airspace. “So we guys were ready, you know, ready to give any signals and warnings to those helicopters,” he said.
NSA helped Ukraine after the Russian invasion
Current NSA Director Natalie Laing, who was also interviewed for the podcast, offered an overview of the basics of signals intelligence, the NSA’s main focus, and described more recent examples of the agency’s role in informing US policymakers, foreign partners. And about the imminent Ukrainian government Russia invades Ukraine in 2022.
Signals intelligence is information about electronic signals and targets derived from them, such as phone calls, texts, radio waves, and other things that make up digital data.
“[W]He collected those signals and we were able to see that Russia had plans and intentions before it invaded Ukraine,” she said, adding that the U.S. Employees of Cyber Command, which works hand-in-hand with the NSA, were sent overseas. To help Kiev strengthen its cyber defenses.
“Cyber Command was able to send a small team to Ukraine prior to the invasion, again, to help them look at their network and point to some activity that appeared to be Russian activity there, so they could enhance their network from a cybersecurity perspective.” Lang said.
She also explained how the signals intelligence collected by the NSA could help the U.S. Helped the government determine the Chinese origin of a chemical used to synthesize fentanyl, the illicit flow of which US agencies consider a national security threat.
US intel agencies are pulling back the curtain further
Once its existence was classified as top secret, the NSA has sought to pull back the veil on some of it in recent years. performance And more to share Cyber Security Information with non-governmental organizations and the public.
In launching its own podcast, the NSA joins other American intelligence agencies—including the CIA, which launched the podcast, “The Langley Files,” in 2022, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, whose podcast “Connections” was presented in 2020 in an attempt to demystify some of his works, albeit through carefully choreographed, in-house productions.
Efforts to better shape the public narrative surrounding the NSA’s activities followed in 2013. Disclosures by former contractor Edward Snowden The classified U.S. government’s mass surveillance programs, which ignited a firestorm of controversy that intelligence officials admit, have permanently damaged the reputation of the American intelligence community.
“Because it’s sensitive, we can’t talk about some of our work, but it’s time to start telling more stories that we can talk about, share more of those skills and highlight these incredible public servants,” Sara said. Siegel, the NSA’s chief of strategic communications, said in a statement.
NSA aims to release six more episodes on major podcast platforms by next month.
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