Ahead of 9/11 commemorations, National Security Agency reveals details of its role in hunt for Osama bin Laden

The National Security Agency is revealing aspects it never disclosed before about its role in helping the U.S. government track down Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda founder and terrorist who orchestrated numerous deadly strikes on U.S. and Western targets including, most notoriously, the attacks of September 11, 2001.

In a new podcast series called “No Such Podcast” that debuted this week, current and former senior NSA officials who were involved in the decade-long search for bin Laden after 9/11 describe how the highly secretive operation unfolded before culminating in the 2011 raid on a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where Bin Laden had fled.

“I remember late night meetings in the fall of 2001, we’d sit around a table and say, ‘How do we find him?'” recounts Jon Darby, former NSA director of operations, according to a transcript of the first episode released by the agency.  “And one of the early theories was a courier, somebody that’s going to be taking care of him. But that was 2001.”

Darby described the operation as “ultra-compartmented,” with no more than 50 of the tens of thousands of NSA employees aware of the effort until after the day of the Abbottabad raid.

“So the government had decided to carry out this special forces raid. So what’s NSA’s role at that point? Our job is to make sure there are no threats to those choppers that are flying in and on the way out,” Darby said, in an apparent allusion to the risk that the two Black Hawk helicopters that had secretly entered Pakistan’s airspace could be intercepted. “So we had people poised, you know, ready to provide any indications and warning of threats to those helicopters,” he said.

NSA aided Ukraine after Russia’s invasion

Natalie Laing, the current director of operations at NSA who was also interviewed for the podcast, offered an overview of the fundamentals of signals intelligence, the NSA’s core focus, and described more recent examples of the agency’s role in informing U.S. policymakers, foreign partners, and the Ukrainian government about the imminence of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Signals intelligence is information about targets obtained from electronic signals and communications from those targets such as phone calls, texts, radio waves and other things that create digital data.

“[W]e collected those signals and we were able to see that Russia had the plans and intentions to invade Ukraine before they invaded,” she said, adding that personnel from U.S. Cyber Command, which works hand-in-glove with the NSA, were dispatched overseas to help Kyiv strengthen its cyber defenses.

“Cyber Command was able to send before the invasion, again, a small team over to Ukraine to help them look through their networks and point to some activity that seemed to be Russian activity there, so they could shore up their networks from a cybersecurity perspective,” Laing said.

She also explained how signals intelligence collected by NSA helped the U.S. government determine the Chinese origins of a chemical used to synthesize fentanyl, whose illicit influx into the country American agencies have deemed a national security threat.

U.S. intel agencies pulling back the curtain more

Once so secretive its very existence was classified, the NSA has sought in recent years to pull back the curtain on some of its operations and to share more cybersecurity information with non-government entities and the public.

In launching its own podcast, the NSA joins other American intelligence agencies – including the CIA, which started a podcast, “The Langley Files,” in 2022, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, whose podcast “Connections” was released in 2020 in an effort to demystify some of their work, albeit through carefully choreographed, in-house productions.

Efforts to better shape the public narrative surrounding the NSA’s activities follows the 2013 disclosures by former contractor Edward Snowden of classified U.S. government mass surveillance programs, which ignited a firestorm of controversy that intelligence officials have acknowledged did lasting damage to 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, sharing more of that expertise, and highlighting these incredible public servants,” Sara Siegle, NSA’s Chief of Strategic Communications, said in a statement.

The NSA aims to release six more episodes on major podcast platforms through next month.