Osama bin Laden was a SIGINT target. We did have some collection on him in the past using a satellite phone.

It has to be a requirement to go after that signal for some reason of national security.

We recognize that this was such a complex problem, that we weren't going to be able to do it by ourselves. In that story, this sensational, if it leaked, and he is in that compound, he could very well leave. And then it's going to take 10 to find him again.

Welcome to No Such podcast. My name is Christie Wix. I am one of your host, and this is my co-host.

Cam Potts.

We are joined today by the current Director of Operations here at NSA, Natalie Lange, and former Director of Operations, Mr. John Darby. Welcome. Thank you. Welcome to No Such podcast. Natalie, please introduce yourself.

Sure. So, Natalie Lange, as you said, I joined NSA 27 years ago from private industry. And so I have always been based in what's down to called the Director of Operations, which is responsible for our entire signals intelligence production cycle, which I believe we're going to talk about today. And so most of that time has been in operations, but I've also spent some time outside the building as one of our NSA representatives to the Pentagon, running one of our operational sites overseas, and also running our director that's responsible for all the external engagement outside of NSA. Okay.

John.

Well, thank you. It's a privilege to be here and be part of this conversation. I appreciate it. I have to say, as a former NSA, or anything I say or my personal views and not that of the agency. I worked for the intelligence community for 39 years. The majority of that time was with the MSA. As part of that intelligence community career, I had served overseas for a while. I've done a whole lot of different things, to include spending spending the better part of 10 years from 9/11 to 2011 working in the counterterrorism arena. My final four and a half years was as the Director of Operations.

Okay. Today, we're going to talk about an essay's Bread and Butter, Sigant or signals intelligence. What does that mean?

Let's start with the most basic definition, what is a signal? Because that underpins everything. In its basic form, a signal is a current or a pulse or a radio wave, something that transmits information and data between systems and between networks. Each signal, think of a phone call or a text or even communicating over the internet. These things create a digital footprint that we would call a signal. There are other digital footprints or signals we're interested in, like weapon signals, radars, missiles. So all of those are signals. Then if you take it and make it signals intelligence, or we shorten to Sigint, there are two very important qualifiers that make something Sigint, the first of which is the most important one, foreign. The second thing is there has to be a requirement. So from the President or the White House or the Director of National Intelligence, there has to be a requirement to go after that signal for some reason of national security and importance. As most basic, that's what the signal world is, and that's what signals intelligence is, that data that rides on the signal that we are interested in for national security purposes.

So Natalie, you mentioned making a phone call, making a text, or communicating over the internet. That reminds me of music. When someone records a song, they could be singing or playing some type of instrument. They record it, they press stop, and they go to play it on some type of device, you actually can see the waveform audio. You can see the sound. And so while it may not necessarily be communicating a hello or goodbye, a message is still being communicated, as we know the phrase, When words fail, music speaks. But be that recording music, making a phone call, sending a text, or communicating over the Internet, waves have the ability of interacting with the physical world. Within the context of intelligence, though, we have the ability of setting things up in the physical world to interact with waves. Tell us about foreign signals intelligence. What is it? What is the process, and why is it important to national security?

I mentioned two very important qualifiers, foreign, and we need a requirement. But foreign is still a very vast amount of signals. We need, you're correct, a very specific process to go through all this to determine what we want to collect, are we able to keep it, and then what do we do with it? Briefly, we call that the production cycle. There'd be five phases that I can briefly describe of what that cycle consists of. It starts with the target itself. We have what's called a National Intelligence Priority Framework, the NIPIF. We make an acronym for everything, so it's the NIPIF. That framework, though, what's most important to know about that is That's what drives where to start looking in that vast sea of waves that you describe. That targeting goes through this framework, and that's the start of the cycle. The second piece of the cycle then is we have these places around the world where we actually go and collect it. We gather those signals that we've been authorized to do and that we find of interest for national security. Once you collect it, though, you can imagine the volume, given how digital the world is, you can imagine the volume coming in.

We need to process that data. This is perhaps one of the most complicated and biggest tasks we do as part of that cycle. Processing it needs the experts who can come in and say, What makes this readable for an analyst? What makes this processable by our machines? Once that happens, we move into the analysis phase. We have a deep cadre of experts who say, Everything that's happened so far, I'm going to take that data that that produced from those original waves and signals and make some sense of it, not only based on individual target knowledge, but also based on what we know our national policymakers need, our military leaders need to do their jobs and keep the nation secure. The way that we inform those policymakers and military leaders is through the last step of the production cycle, which is reporting. I think we'll talk about this probably later in the podcast, but this has a very specific regime tied to it. But it's the most important way that we get our product out of the building. That's how we actually share the information in a very tailored and curated way as the end of that whole cycle that you described.

You share that information with other intelligence community partners, other agencies, even the private sector at times, depending on what the information is.

That's exactly right. I mentioned policymakers and military leaders. Those are top shelf because they are really making the decisions. But we absolutely share with multiple other partners in the government who are also looking to protect the United States with our allies, with our 5I partners, with many nations who are also looking to protect against joint threats. Then with industry, that is a big piece of our cyber security side. We have foreign intelligence and cyber security as our two basis of operations at NSA. It's very important to have that exchange with private industry when we see where malicious actors are in all of our systems when we see ransomware attacks or when we're not sure where there are no systems and we need to partner and share information to say, are we casting the net wide enough and making sure we're looking for them in the right ways at the right time? So yes, we share all that more.

Absolutely. That can restart the intelligence cycle once you share that information with industry or your partners.

That's exactly right. One of the biggest changes that we've seen in the last couple of years as part of our national security memorandum and our responsibilities there is that we can do bi-directional sharing. By we, I mean our cybersecurity directorate, we can do bi-directional sharing with industry. So that is the ability to ingest some of this data, not just collect it and put it out. Both are equally important.

Now, we talked about the steps of the intelligence cycle. How do you follow the rules? How do you stay compliant when you are following targets and collecting signals intelligence on these targets?

For every aspect of that production cycle that I went through, compliance is our number one focus that has to underpin everything we do at the agency, and it, in fact, does underpin everything we do at the agency. The bottom line, what we're looking for there is respect for the law. Obviously, we follow the law and our authorities, but also respect for privacy and Civil Liberties. At its most basic, that's what our compliance program is. But of course, it's more than that in day-to-day activities. There's the law. There are authorities that actually drive what we do, and we know them. We know them clearly. We apply them every day. But then there's ways to trust but verify. Every year, we test our analytic cadre to make sure they have the most recent and current understanding of the laws and authorities that govern us and of our policies, our internal NSA policies that we derive from laws and authorities.

And you even get tested.

And I get tested. So when I say analytic cadre, really anybody touching all of this sensitive information. And then in addition to the testing every year, we do auditing. So we have random checks and we have purposeful checks of we said we were compliant, were we really? So there's fail-safe methods there. And then finally, we have a very robust Overseer framework. So that starts in Congress. We have several committees that are solely focused on the intelligence community and how we conducting and lawfully conducting our missions. Then we also have a very specific body called the FISC. This stands for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. They oversee one of our most important and impactful authorities on national security and in keeping the nation safe, and that's called FISA. It's Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Then there's a specific section, 702 of that act, that really underpins so much that we do at the agency. It's such a key authority that we have a a specific court focused just on that authority to do all the things I just said, auditing and testing and overseeing. But that whole regime makes up what we say when we say compliance.

It sounds a simple thing to say, yes, we are compliant. We have a compliance program. It is matched with every step of that production cycle that I laid out.

With foreign signals intelligence, the process, and then being compliant every step of the way, I'd be curious to know what are some of the examples where SIGN has been used in the NSA mission?

I would offer three, very current, and let's start with Russia-Ukraine. Those signals that we've been talking about, we collected those signals and we were able to see that Russia had the plans and intentions to invade Ukraine before they invaded. We were able to take this SIGINT intelligence, contribute it to the whole of government, the US government's entire approach to deter and try to defeat Russian aggression in that space. As they also share the results of those signals with our close partner, United States Cyber Command. 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 cyber security perspective, even again, before the invasion. So that's the first one. Russia, Ukraine would be a current crisis. The second wide-end offer is China, and specifically, the People's Republic of China. So, Then these signals informed our understanding, the US government's understanding, of the Chinese origins of a chemical used to synthesize fentanyl, which is a clearly recognized national issue. This information was derived from the authority we talked about earlier, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, FISA.

This is important in our estimation because USAID plays a key role in keeping all communities in the US safe. Then finally, a third example, cybersecurity. Cigant helps us defend our nation's critical infrastructure to include our defense industrial base. And the NSA has used Cigant actually to identify multiple foreign ransomware attacks. That intelligence has helped us, the US government, to respond to, and actually, in some cases, to fully prevent significant attacks on US networks. One specific example is an Iranian attack in 2022. So SIGN enabled the US government to not only respond to that attack, also to recover the organization's information without paying the ransom and all of that within one week. Those are three examples I would offer of pretty current application of signals intelligence.

Ransomware attacks happen so often now to not have to pay a ransom and intercept that foreign intelligence. To to stop that attack or to intercede to make sure that these companies don't have to pay, and they're protected.

Their networks are protected. Agreed. Unfortunately, this is a common occurrence.

Yeah, you hear it all the time. It's always in the news. Exactly. Now, we're going to get into each of those steps once we talk about our feature story today. But, John, over to you. Let's talk about September 11th and how Osama bin Laden was one of the targets and the role you played in bringing him down.

Well, I'll start with who is bin Laden. So not everybody knows the whole story, and then go it from there. Osama bin Laden was the founder of Al Qaeda, the terrorist group. Started up organized shortly after the Soviets left Afghanistan. Al Qaeda is organization led by Osama bin Laden, launched a holy war against the West. And the US was their primary adversary in their mind. So they carried out a series of attacks through the '90s, actually attacked the World Trade Center, 1993, carry out an attack on US as coal in the late '90s, attacks on US embassies in Africa in August of '98, and then, of course, the big the 9/11 attack that we've all heard about, killed nearly 3,000 people here. So Osama bin Laden was a significant target for a while. Clearly, he was of interest. He was leading an organization that intend to inflict harm on the United States. We did have some inner collection on him in the past using a satellite phone. Unfortunately, that got published in the media that we were collecting him off that satellite phone. From that moment on, no more electronic communications from So we had to be creative how to get to him.

So let's take from 9/11 on. So at least everybody has a story. Those that remember 9/11, where were they? What was going on? My story is I slept through the whole thing because I was on a business trip down in Australia at the time. The way I figured, I probably fell asleep about the same time that the first plane hit the building, woke up the next morning, saw what had happened. I was grounded in Australia. All federal employees were told you had to stay where you were because we didn't know what else was going to happen. Were there going to be more plane attacks? We were, as a government, worried something else was going to happen. So I was basically stranded in Australia for a week. And I kept busy by helping our Australian partner agency. Natalie mentioned we partner with our Five Eyes agencies. Australia is one of those key partners. That's who I happened to be visiting on the business trip. So I was helping them, basically liaised with the MSA who was trying to figure out what to do and helping Australia figure out how they could help us. So stuck for a week or so in Australia, came back to the MSA on about the 20th or 21st, somewhere in there, walked into my office and I shared an office with my boss, and I walked in And he says, You have a new job as of right now.

Well, I'm on report up to the sixth floor to the counterterrorism organization. So okay, I went up to the head of the counterterrorism organization's office and said, I'm here. What am I supposed to do? And he basically said, You're going to be in charge of SIG and development for counterterrorism, and your job is to build an organization and figure out all the different ways that Al Qaeda communicates. Wow. So that's how I got in to the counterterrorism world directly. And then we started the SIGM development cycle. Natalie mentioned the process, the cycle. It all starts with developing a target, understanding who you're trying to collect on, and the different methodologies to get after that individual.

Yes. I was going to say, Tell us more about SIG and development as it relates to Laden. What did that process even look like? Paint the picture for us.

All right, so I'm going to break it into two pieces because there's overlap between the two. There's understanding how Al Qaeda communicates. Our number one mission, number one job, was to prevent another attack here in the United States. Of course. And it wasn't just Bin Laden. There are many other leaders in the Al Qaeda organization. We had to worry about that. So Let's start with that. Al Qaeda communications, how do we discover and disrupt terrorist plots, targeting the US or elsewhere. So we had leads. We could get leads from, let's say, materials that the 9/11 hijackers had used at FBI. We could get leads from other agencies and so on. We recognized that this was such a complex problem that we weren't going to be able to do it by ourselves. We were going to have to team with agencies, whether it be CIA or the military or others that could have leads and bits of information to feed us. We could provide bits of data information to them to help with their, let's say CIA's information to recruit assets within the Al Qaeda organization to get after, to discover these emerging evolving threats. So building teams.

And part of that was we actually They started a process to send NSA analysts down to work at CIA and to go overseas. And the team developed this dynamic, multiple agencies working together, whether it's an NSA headquarters, CIA headquarters or overseas, that team evolved into a really tight team. And if you fast forward after the Bin Laden takedown, if you sat down the core analyst from the different agencies, you'd be hard-pressed to say, Is that an NSA person or a CIA person? Because they were so tightly working and passing information back and forth as it developed. So back for the broader Al Qaeda mission, building that team. And I mentioned before Bin Laden, but this applied across all of Al Qaeda, trying to understand it. And what I like to say, it's operationalizing that relationship. It's one thing to just provide intelligence to somebody. But that is something I often said is we're not in this business to produce libraries. We're in this business to support operations. And what that means is building that relationship with these operational communities, whether it's the military who can do things, whether it's FBI who can do things within their authorities or CIA and others.

So building that team with the operational community was really critical in developing that mindset that we're not just pushing out intel. It's about to follow it to the next level. What are you going to do? How do you work with that agency to arrest that terrorist, for example? How Are you working with that agency to disrupt that plant? So that's the broader Al Qaeda mission. And there's similarities with, we look at Bin Laden himself. And I'll tell you, the fall of 2001, that's when we started really looking for Bin Laden. And I remember late night meetings in the fall of 2001, we'd sit around a table and say, How do we find him? And one of the early theories was a courier, somebody that's going to be taking care of him. But that was 2001. Okay. So over time, we're developing leads and lots of false leads. You run down rabbit holes, and this wouldn't pan out. But the analyst never gave up. And And you can imagine everybody had a good idea. But we say the good idea fairy keeps pushing out ideas. The analyst felt obligated to check them out. But still at the core, they're thinking, this courier route.

It could be probably the most valuable. But who is the courier? How do we find him? And things, how do we develop out that courier target? Of course. So with that team that had been developed. There were leads passed on. Here's a potential. This could be a potential for the courier. Ultimately, one thing led to another. Sigint, Human Intelligence, and honed us in on who turned out to be the courier and the caretaker for Bin Laden in Pakistan.

So, John, how did you pull all that intelligence together and pinpoint where Bin Laden was?

Well, it wasn't a huge amount of data. That's the thing. It's just bits and pieces. And I often use the analogy for Intel is like building a jigsaw puzzle, certainly. But it's a jigsaw puzzle with a twist. And what I mean by that, this particular In a particular jigsaw puzzle, you may have a few pieces on the table in front of you. You may have some on the carpet. The dog's eating some. Some are on the other side of the street, some are on the other side of town. Some are at the bottom of the ocean. Some don't exist. Your job as an intel analyst is to find as many of those pieces as you can by whatever methodology you can, working with partners or others. And then you've got to put together those pieces without a box top telling you how they go together. So it's really a mosaic of different data pieces being pulled together to present the likelihood that Bin Laden could very well be in that compound. And we didn't know for 100 % certainty until actually raid took place.

And that close collaboration is definitely the key here in being able to properly get to the answer. So we have the fall of 2001, and then you talk about the raid. How long did it take to find Bin Laden?

Ten years. Ten years. Nine and a half years or so. It went in fits and starts. Okay. That there was always the mission to find him. It It was hard. There was long periods where there weren't any leads. And then some things would pick up. Here's another lead. Let's run that down. And there were plenty of people that came to me at the time when I was the head of the analytic counterterrorism organization saying, why are you spending any resources on this? He's dead. You're not going to find him. And we said, no, if he is alive, we will find him. You know what you're discovering? We'll find him. That's not an option just to give up. So the analysts really were persistent running down all the different leads over a number of years. And things didn't really accelerate about the compound until late 2010 or so.

So it ramps up in 2010. I know talking about specific collection on Bin Laden is very sensitive. What can you tell us about that specific collection on Bin Laden that can be talked about?

Well, let's start with the first, when it became clear that there may be something to this. And this is fallish 2010. And one of the lead analysts came to me, said, Hey, this looks like a good lead, the best that we've had for years that actually may go somewhere. So at that point, figured, all right, this looks like a good lead. But at that point, it's a lead. We've had how many dozens of leads in the past, so we didn't really know how this would play out or not. Fast forward a couple of months, and we did I read in a couple of... This is an ultra-comparted operation. We read in a couple of technical folks into what we, when I say we, US government, we're trying to do and working closely with CIA and others. And they looked at, came up with some creative options to potentially get some collection. I really can't get into specifics about the specific collection operations that took place there, but suffice it to say that we were joined up with But certainly CIA and the other intel agencies to really get as complete a picture about what is going on in the compound.

There were two threads has been logged in that compound. The second thread is how do we support whatever the US is going to do about that compound.

When you talk about those being read into this specific compartment, what does that mean?

I'll back up into what does it mean by a compartment. Everybody that works at NSA has what we call a top secret special compartment, TSSI clearance. That's the baseline. But there are any number of additional clearances on top of that to include compartments for special projects, for example. Okay. So this was, and then Natalie and I both had numerous compartments over the years in special operations. This one was different. And what I mean by that is ultra-comparted. I mean, there was at one point I got a call from a very senior official at CIA who was telling me, you realize this is the most the top secret in the United States government right now? And I got it. So it's super secret. But really, just to demonstrate how secret this is. Think about how big NSA is. Tens of thousands of people. The day of the raid, there were no more than 50 people that knew what was going to be. We were very Very tight-lipped, I'm sure. Very tight-lipped and kept close tabs on who actually knew what was going on. Even updates, we handled that in hard copy. We weren't emailing anything around about it.

So it was, as I say, Natalie and I have been involved in a lot of compartment operations. I'll say this was the most compartment that I've ever been a part of. And it makes sense because we've been trying to find him for 10 years. And as story this sensational, if it leaked, and we knew Al Qaeda paid attention to the Western press, if it leaked, and he is in that compound, again, which we didn't know for sure, he could very well leave. And it was going to take 10 years to find him again? I don't know. So it was really critical to keep a lid on what the US government was doing.

So partnership sounds like basically the epitome of everything that you guys were working on and working with and human, SIGINT. Everybody just came together at the table to make sure this man was caught, that the people who lost loved ones, they deserve that justice. Let's pivot to you, Natalie. Talk to us about that processing of the sigant chain.

Sure. We talked in the beginning about the production cycle, but I covered that pretty high level. As you can imagine, there's a lot of connective tissue in between all those steps. One of the things you mentioned, processing. I'll anchor on that for a minute. One of the main things we need to do when we do that collection and processing is make this understandable for the folks that are going to be working this. That's intelligence analysts, that's language analysts. You might be looking at a signal or a big grouping of signals that are very complicated, highly technical or encrypted, or all three of those things. So it is our job to not only undo the complexity to get to the meat of the data so that the analyst can use that, but also we have to establish the right thresholds for how to go through that data. So there's a lot of discernment that goes on. So to use one very small but specific example, John was talking about the couriers as we were targeting UBO. If we were to go through all this collection and see anything that relates to that courier, obviously, that's something we would discern is of foreign intelligence value.

We will keep following up on that. If it was, for example, a signal that was right next to that one of a local taxi driver, okay, that's not something we would discern when you. That's one way that we start to parse out this collection so it's usable and meaningful because the volume is pretty significant. Now, it wasn't necessarily significant on UBL, but when they're working a bunch of other things, we need to make this discernible for them. We have to have thresholds built in throughout that process that say, is the foreignness still there? Is this it's interesting, but is it part of a requirement for us to work from national security perspective? So all of that needs to be worked in the process for every piece of that production cycle. Pair that with constant new technologies coming up, new means of transmitting data coming up. We need to stay on top of that. I'm We're not going to ask an analyst to stay on top of that. It's our job to stay on top of that technical environment so the analyst can do what those brains are so cultivated to do, which is get after those hard target problems like the UBL and many, many others.

So that's what processing really looks like at a high level.

Certainly. If you found something relevant to national security interests, or let's say it's a priority by the President, you dug a bit further into it, but it's nothing there, you stop?

That's correct. No need to pursue further. Okay.

Okay, so let's just say you have the right technology, you figured out the right signal complex. Talk about encryption and how that plays a role in signals intelligence.

I'll say two things to start with an encryption. One, at its most basic, it's our ability to secure communications and control access to sensitive data. That's the easy part. The hard part, it's very hard math that underlies this. So hard that I'm not qualified to explain to you the math, but what I can tell you is that there are very smart people that work this, and they enable computers to do some of this, because to do this in a reasonable amount of time to decrypt something, code break, we need a computer to do that, or maybe we need to do computer work for the entire thing. It's a simple thing to explain. It's a very hard and complex thing to unpack when you talk about encryption. You need very tailored, what we call stem or technical skills, along with very powerful computers And so it also needs to be a very wide team. So we talk about the crypto mathematicians, we talk about the computer scientists. It needs a very wide skill set that can actually come in and say, We know how to do this. Now, that said, there are still codes we can't break.

We try to do this every day, new codes. But NSA is the world leader in what we call cryptography. So it's everything that's wrapped around encryption. And so that is the ability to, of course, protect ourselves from adversaries who want to get past our to get to our sensitive national security data. But it also involves our world-class ability to break the codes of our adversaries or terrorist communications or malicious actors that we've seen. That ability at MSA is really world-class, and we're super proud of that talent.

Breaking cold, making cold. Exactly. Crypt analysis sounds quite amazing, almost like mathematical magic.

It is mathematical magic.

Yes, and it speaks to NSA being home to some of the nation's greatest and best mathematicians.

Correct. And we've been doing that magic, honestly, for 72 years now, even prior to World War II. I'm going to share a couple of examples that are declassified now that predate World War II and go past World War II. So everyone's familiar with D-Day, of course, spring of 1944. The UK and the US allies were planning a big invasion, as we all knew, but Germans were tracking this, as were the Japanese, for about a year. What they were not tracking is that we were reading their encrypted communications. We were reading exactly how all of their troops were set up on the beach heads there. We were reading what they shared with the Japanese as far as how strong or how not strong their defenses were there. Obviously D-Day still involved massive loss of life, but Advantage Allies for our ability to read those encrypted communications and know what we were facing. It definitely gave the competitive edge to the Allies that day without question. Then if you fast forward a little bit to after the war and the Cold War era, we were able to decrypt, so break the code in your terms, Cam, of Soviet, both espionage communications and diplomatic communications from 1952 to 1980.

Again, huge competitive advantage for our national security. Certainly. Then as part of our role for a combat support agency, Agency. In Vietnam, we were able to prepare the troops based on decrypting and breaking some code for the 1968 Tet offensive. So looking out for our troops in harm's way and again, being able to encrypt plans and intentions and share that as part of our military support role.

And we still do that today.

We still do that today. We are at our combat support agency.

So we talked about decryption. So once you get that intelligence, it's decrypted. It falls in the hands of crypt analysts. What happens after that? Does it start that intelligence cycle over again?

It does. But what really comes out is a very specific point here. When we talked about as part of the intelligence cycle, who's doing what? So that processing of what the language analysts are doing, what the intelligence analysts doing. So this is a lot of work that we put in place for them. So from a language analyst perspective, again, we want to get this into a readable form. But what then they have to do, it's not just the literal translation. This is, of course, foreign language, so we need to translate it. But we have to remember what we're asking the analyst to do. They can't ask any clarifying questions on this piece of information that came in. They just have to work with what they have. And so whether you're a language analyst or an intelligence analyst, we're saying take what's there. Yes, we have to do the literal translation, but then they have to apply all these years of analytic method training, knowledge of their target. And for language analysis, that sometimes, what's the sound of the voice? Have you ever heard this person talking to that person before? Why are they talking about it right now What do you think?

We need to report what's literally. We can't report things that aren't in those signals that we collect. But wrapping that expertise around is what's really critical. Us, of course, providing technology that enables that processing and the intelligence analysis and the language analysis to happen is a key piece of that whole production cycle.

That's amazing. I'm sure you've helped mitigate many threats, just disseminating products. Correct.

There's big readers for or or or or or or or or All right.

And now moving to, let's say, the last step in our second process, reporting. We can actually send directly to the President?

We can. Okay. And we do. And to many, many other people. So hourly, probably every minute, frankly, there are these second products, these second reports going out. So certainly, they go to the White House. They go to the National Security Council. They go to all of our national policymakers, senior military leaders, all of our allies, our customers in the US government, our partners in the US government. Very wide readership of reports. But what's behind the report might be a little bit... It might be good to unpack here. And so what's behind that is, first of all, there's a lot of information to synthesize. And so getting it out the door to the right person in the right time needs to be very crisp. It also needs to be very timely, of course, but it needs to adhere to what we call analytic integrity standards, AIS. There are very specific standards that cover what we can report and the structure we need to report it in. That includes, of course, no embellishment or opinion includes significant fact, first of all. But it also includes not mentioning or naming any of the sources or methods of how we got this data.

That is the most critical thing through all this to protect. We need to get that insight out there, but we We don't need to share in every report the source of that. The other thing that's good to know behind that whole report production chain is there are multiple sets of eyes on every report. Natalie Lange does not sit down, write a report, and pop it out the door. Multiple sets of eyes to make sure that I have been compliant in not naming sources, the integrity and the analytic standards are there, and it is the right formatting of the second data, which can be, frankly, very technical. So it needs to be the data and the reporting that that most closely matches some of those national security requirements we talked about in the very beginning. And so reporting encompasses everything in between, as you can imagine, many, many target sets going out. But I will tell you that this is our product, if you will. If we were a company, a private company, this is our product, and it is exquisite, and it is extremely impactful on the national security front.

Can I footstop something that about the reporting? Absolutely. We talked about target development and following leads and crypt analysis, and all that's really cool and difficult and hard to do. But none of it means anything without the reporting at the end. Absolutely. So that is, some people pooh-pooh and focus on the cool stuff. That reporting is absolutely essential. So saying this agency wouldn't live without the ability to turn all these leads into something that's usable for a policymaker or military commander and the like.

Absolutely. And John, let's talk about the operation. You've done it. What did it feel like the moment Osama bin Laden was taken down during that operation?

Let me back up a little bit to the day of the raid itself. So it was a Sunday out here, and I was here at Fort Mead and walking. I still remember to this day walking across the parking lot to come into the building that morning thinking this raid was going to take place and said, I really, really think he's there, but I don't know that I'd bet my annual salary on it. But the stakes were really high because there was not certainty that he was there. And even as the raid took place in the first helicopter, landed hard. And we were like, Oh, no, There's a situation, it's going to go bad. So anyway, Natalie mentioned earlier about NSA's role as a combat support agency. And NSA has sent folks out to Iraq and Afghanistan for a number for years to support military operations there. Our role, I mentioned that the two threads is Osama bin Laden there and the other, how do we support whatever the US government decides to do? So the government had decided to carry out this Special Forces raid. So what's the 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.

So we have people poised, ready to provide any indications and warnings of threats to those helicopters. Anyway, came in to work and NSA had a little command center set up, and there were about six or seven folks in the command center. And we had the audio feed from Adderall McRaven, who was the leader of the operation that was out in Afghanistan, who was relaying things via audio about as the operation is taking place because the assault team lead was relaying it back to him, and then he convey the audio link to many folks across the DC area and elsewhere about what was going on. So when he did say, HVT number one, it was spotted high value target. And I remember thinking, oh, my gosh, he really is there. And then shortly after, EKIA, enemy killed in action. I say, wow, it worked. And I just remember it felt very surreal as the operation was taking place. I was thinking this could be a really big deal. And then when it actually turned out it was him, it felt very surreal. But we knew it wasn't over because the team had to get out. That's right.

And I say his job still wasn't over. It was to make sure the choppers were going to get out of Pakistan in one piece.

You played a key role. You're able to talk about that now. You made history. What does that feel like?

I Well, it was just part of a bigger team. I mentioned not a lot of folks were cleared for the entire operation, but there were hundreds of folks across the NSA that were playing a role in providing, answering the question, is he there, providing the support during the operation itself. Many of those folks didn't know what the purpose was. They basically said, you need to do X, Y, and Z. And they did it because we're used to living in a world of secrets and protecting things. So I just happened to be fortunate enough to be in the job at the time that liaised with the other agencies at the senior levels and was there hearing things as it played out. It was an entire team that played that out. I will share a little personal story. The night of that raid, the President made a statement and I wound up staying at work all night, putting together briefings and emails to folks telling what had happened. And that Monday night, I got home, and my wife had put two and two together because I'd been out on a weekend. And I did call her up on Sunday night, woke her up and said, You may want to turn on the TV.

I'd see the president make a statement. But I came back in, and then she goes, Oh, wow, you must have played a part in this. And do you want a steak dinner or anything? Oh, steak dinner? Okay. And I said, All I wanted was a pizza. And then I sat down and it I really cried my eyes out. I mean, a total shoulder shaking, let it all out, just crying my guts out. And it was just such an emotional release. And even before that, the night after the raid had taken place, I actually walked up to one of the analytic shops that had been working around the clock for a couple of weeks and told them what had happened. This raid just took place. We got Osama bin Laden, and everybody in that office just started cheering and crying and you're hugging each other. And that was a pretty emotional time just to see that reaction. And there were other parts of the NSA enterprise that heard what had happened. And they were like, okay, check that box Let's move on to the next thing. It's very business-like, professional. Let's keep moving forward. So you had the whole range of emotions about it.

As you say, for me, it seemed very surreal from the outset that it actually happened all the way to that total emotional meltdown 24 hours later.

Certainly. I was going to ask what was the reaction because I know that there were many that didn't necessarily know what they were actually working on. They just provided the intelligence that they needed to and just went from there. But to hear the reaction of someone that actually was a part of this mission success and even just being at this table, being able to talk about it is amazing.

That's why we come to work here every day for that impact. Natalie, over to you. What do you remember about that day when Osama bin Laden was taken down? Can you reflect on what it means to you?

I completely agree with John's assessment of it being a surreal experience. But it was also a very impactful experience, both personally, professionally, for our nation, for those loved ones that died on 9/11, impactful for so many reasons. But those impactful things stick with you. I also remember it's a Sunday. The day of the week doesn't matter, but I remember that as well. Just to underscore, a big piece of what made this a success was how compartmented it was. I was serving at the time as the Chief of Operations for all of our analysis and reporting parts of that cycle we talked about. I didn't know about this rate until a couple of days before. I came in the day of to, of course, support from authorizations and operationally. But it just shows the intense collaboration and trying to keep this as tight as possible to protect the people and then protect the outcome happening, which, of course, did. I do remember us having a of this is what it's like to live through a very important moment of history, a very impactful moment of history. And so I certainly say those are some of my biggest memories from that day.

Absolutely. Sigan is out bread and butter. What does that look like today in today's society?

Let me say this. Here's what's changed, and here's what hasn't. Here's what hasn't changed. Our ability to impact in a positive way our nation's national security, to defend our nation, that has not changed. The tremendous talent from before World War II, before we existed, to when we started to exist in 1952, every day, I am a little gobsmacked at the talent that we have at this agency and the things they are able to do. So that's that talent and tenacity produces things like supporting the UBL read successfully and so many other intelligence outcomes for this nation and our allies. That absolutely has not changed. What else hasn't changed is we can't tell people about it, generally. So laboring at these really important things for our nation and our security, and you can't talk about them, yet what you know is amazing. It's just an interesting spot to be. But what has changed is, I'd say, how we do all of this work and the environment around us. If you look at how fast technology is developed and the pace that it changes today, the velocity and volume of information that has changed drastically. The way everything is interconnected outside of MSA, just from a digital innovation, digital world, it's all interconnected.

This has changed the way that we need to do compliance. We can't just say, Hey, what worked for compliance 30 years ago when we had analog signals, that is not going to work for today. We need to figure out to adapt our ability to maintain privacy and Civil Liberties along with all of these new interconnected technologies. So that has significantly changed over the course of our 72-year existence.

Can I add on one thing more about the talent, which is one of the big reasons why I've worked at NSA for so long was the skill and dedication and motivation of folks across NSA. It can be reflected in the persistence of the analyst in the Bin Laden operation. But as Natalie said, it applies across so many hundreds, if not thousands of other targets and operations ongoing every day. And I really, I reflect back on a comment that our former director, General Noxony, made at one point with a visitor. He said, If you want the impossible, come to NSA. And NSA, again and again, does things that folks say, Oh, my gosh, I didn't think that was possible. But, and I say, has come through, and it's the people that really... We've got all the computers and technology and all that, but all that is meaningless without the people underneath. It's just I felt really privileged to spend the time I did with the folks here at NSV.

Natalie, John, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for sharing your stories.

Thanks for having us. Thank you. Thank you.

This has been an amazing, amazing podcast episode. Again, I am Christie Wix, one of your hosts, and this is again... Cam Potts. Thank you for joining us for No Such Podcast.

Thanks for listening to this episode of No Such Podcast from the National Security Agency. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a review and make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss our next episode. For show transcripts and other information, please visit nsa. Gov/podcast.