nsa reveals details of 'locking up' bin laden
2024-09-21
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reference news reported on september 18on september 11, the washington post published an article titled "america's most secretive intelligence agency now has a podcast," written by ellen nakashima. excerpts from the article are as follows:
it was once nicknamed "the agency that doesn't exist" - a play on the initials nsa - and is so secretive that even the boulevards surrounding its headquarters have no exit signs.
yet the nsa is finally coming out of the shadows. the notoriously cautious intelligence agency just launched a podcast and is now willing to reveal details about its work that were once considered so sensitive that officials could only see them in paper reports.
in exclusive interviews with the washington post, former nsa officials detailed for the first time their role in the hunt for osama bin laden.
the general outlines of the manhunt have been glimpsed in movies, books, and countless articles, and most americans are aware of the roles played by the cia and military special operations forces, but few fully understand the nsa's important contribution.
"it's time for the nsa to get some credit," said jon darby, a retired nsa official who was responsible for finding new ways to track al-qaeda communications shortly after 9/11.
top linguists analyze call records
the nsa was the agency responsible for intercepting and analyzing al-qaeda calls. through this work, the agency identified a key associate of bin laden, a clue that ultimately led the cia to bin laden's hideout. crucially, the nsa discovered the courier's whereabouts in northwestern pakistan, and once it located him, it confirmed that he was still actively working for al-qaeda - which strengthened the intelligence community's determination to devote more resources to finding out who was living there.
darby told the washington post that the "nerve center" of the hunt for bin laden was the cia, but signals intelligence was absolutely critical to finding bin laden.
michael morell, then deputy director of the cia, once said, "finding bin laden was the result of a team effort."
the identification of the courier was a major breakthrough in the hunt, aided by a two-year nsa wiretapping operation. starting in late 2007, the cia told the nsa that it suspected an associate of bin laden, going by the alias abu ahmed al-kuwaiti, might be linked to the ahmed al-said family in kuwait.
a senior nsa analyst, whom darby calls bin laden's "chief hunter," put his team to work. they pored over the call logs. they tracked foreign numbers associated with the calls, linked them to other numbers, and monitored hundreds of calls. over two years, they circled people who might be members of ahmed sayyid's family, the now-retired nsa analyst recalled.
one man stood out: ibrahim ahmed saeed, a kuwaiti-born pakistani who spoke arabic and pashto and was a loner.
the nsa has a team of top linguists who can understand not only arabic and pashto, but also urdu and the target's special accent. "we carefully study their pronunciation of different vowels and the subtle accents in their speech," said the nsa analyst.
the analyst said ibrahim ahmed saeed only occasionally turned on his phone, mostly in busy urban areas or on highways in northwest pakistan. he never seemed to want to talk about himself or invite any relatives to visit, even during major religious holidays. "that aroused our suspicion," the analyst recalled.
the nsa matched its intercepted audio clips of ibrahim ahmed sayyid with that of the man using the alias abu ahmed quweiti. the lead analyst's team reanalyzed pre-9/11 material and determined that the two men had been in afghanistan at the same time.
by the end of 2009, they were convinced that ibrahim ahmed sayyid and quweiti were the same person. "we had found our man," the analyst recalled. at the time, they found that he was in northwest pakistan, but they didn't know exactly where.
intercept key information to determine the residential courtyard
by the summer of 2010, the nsa had tracked kuveti’s cellphone, and the cia had agents on the ground searching for him, in part by determining his location based on the strength of his cellphone signal. based on a tip from the nsa, the cia linked him to a white suzuki suv with a white rhino emblazoned on its spare tire cover.
that august, the national geospatial-intelligence agency, which analyzes drone and satellite imagery, used cellphone signal data provided by the nsa to discover a compound that stood out for its size and 18-foot-high walls. a cia agent followed kuveti’s drive from peshawar, pakistan, to the compound, following the nsa’s signals.
the key question now was whether the courier was still actively working for bin laden. in november of that year, a member of bin laden's team approached the senior nsa analyst. "i don't know if this is something you're interested in," the member said, describing a call between quweiti and a kuwaiti friend.
friends say, "we missed you. where have you been?"
kuveti’s answer was vague: “i am with my old companions again.”
the nsa has made another breakthrough: the intercepted information makes people believe that kuweiti is an active member of al-qaeda, and not a retired member.
"i remember saying to my colleagues at the time, 'this is a big deal,'" the analyst said.
on the day of the raid, the nsa's chief hunter was at the joint special operations command center in jalalabad, afghanistan, hunched over his laptop, staring into a special chat room that tracked all communications involving the agency in real time.
at fort meade, maryland, darby and several senior officials were in a makeshift nsa command center.
darby, then the nsa's chief of counterterrorism operations, had been working all sunday night. after the raid, he walked into an office where analysts had been working day and night for weeks. darby told them, "we got osama bin laden."
