For years, one of the people near the top of the NSA’s target list was Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, a native Yemeni suspected of belonging to al-Qaeda and of being one of the masterminds behind the attack on the USS Cole two years before. After listening to hours of tape recordings of his conversations, the small team assigned to locate al-Harethi was very familiar with the sound of his voice. But like most of the NSA’s targets, alHarethi knew that the United States was searching for him with an electronic dragnet, hoping to snag a brief satellite phone call and pinpoint his location. As a result he always carried with him up to half a dozen phones, each with multiple cards that could change the number. The NSA had a list of at least some of the numbers, and because he was a high-priority target, an alarm would go off if one of them was used.
On the afternoon of November 3, 2002, the alarm sounded, surprising one of the analysts on the team. “He knew this guy’s phone number and he [al-Harethi] hadn’t used it for a period of time—it was a satellite phone,” said one knowledgeable source. “Then it came up.” Using global positioning satellites, he was able to pinpoint al-Harethi in the Yemeni province of Mar’ib, a remote, sand-swept landscape controlled by well armed tribal chiefs and largely off-limits to Yemeni police. The analyst quickly contacted a CIA team based across the Red Sea in Djibouti. From the small country on the Horn of Africa, the CIA operated a battery of unmanned Predator drones, each armed with deadly Hellfire missiles. From there, the drones could easily reach anywhere in Yemen, where at least one was already on patrol. Thus, almost immediately the CIA in Djibouti began directing the Predator toward the target.
But the NSA analyst, eavesdropping on the satellite call in near real time, was disappointed. Having listened to tapes of al-Harethi’s voice many times over the years, he was convinced the person on the other end of the phone was not him. “This guy is listening and he realizes it’s not the guy,” said the source. “And all of a sudden he hears like a six-second conversation and it’s the guy, he’s in the backseat and he’s giving the driver directions and it was picked up over the phone, and the analyst was that good that he heard over all the other stuff. He said, ‘That’s him.’ But because they have to have a dual recognition, he called in the second guy, they played the tape, and they said, ‘It’s him.’ Forty minutes later a Hellfire missile hit that car. The Predator was already up doing surveillance. The CIA said to the Predator team, ‘Here’s the general location—from NSA—that we have the satellite phone, go find the damn car and get the guy.’ Those analysts get that good, they can recognize the voice. The CIA took credit for that because it was a CIA Predator that fired the shot that killed the guy. But the way they killed him was an NSA analyst listening.” The black all-terrain vehicle instantly burst into a ball of flames, killing all five of the occupants and leaving little more than charred metal and a sprawling oil stain on the desert sand.
). my favorite one right now is The Shadow Factory by James Bamford. my favorite part halfway through:
). the opening page from his first work:
looks promising
