The National Security Agency revealed new details on Thursday of its pivotal role in tracking the most wanted terrorist in American history: Osama bin Laden, including how it helped finger the courier who led to the al Qaeda leader’s hideout and how it helped protect the mission that finally hunted him down.

The agency is preparing to publish its history of the years it spent searching for the founding leader of the terror group behind the 9/11 attacks on a forthcoming podcast diving into the U.S. government’s secret efforts to intercept terrorist communications.

Details of the NSA’s work on the manhunt were shared early with The Washington Times, including the agency’s pursuit of the Saudi-born terrorist’s courier, its help in identifying bin Laden’s secret compound in Pakistan, and its supporting role in the daring Navy SEAL raid in May 2011 that killed him.

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Various accounts of the U.S. manhunt for bin Laden turned one of the Navy SEALs who participated into a bestselling author and transformed the work of a CIA intelligence analyst into the source for a Hollywood blockbuster. Much of the NSA’s toil in the mission against bin Laden remains shrouded in secrecy — including internally at the agency.

Of the tens of thousands of people working for the NSA, approximately 50 people knew ahead of time about the planned raid, said Jon Darby, former director of operations.

“This one was different,” Mr. Darby said on NSA’s forthcoming podcast. “And what I mean by that is: ultra-compartmented. 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?’”

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Mr. Darby recalls on the NSA’s upcoming “No Such Podcast” broadcast that he was thrust into the world of spying on al Qaeda’s communications while the nation was still processing the horror of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He said efforts to track bin Laden accelerated in the fall of 2001, according to a transcript shared with The Times.

U.S. forces in Afghanistan reportedly narrowly missed capturing the al Qaeda leader in fighting at Tora Bora in late 2001 and quickly lost track of his whereabouts.

“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,” Mr. Darby said. “But that was 2001.”

The NSA’s theory appears to have paid dividends. A detainee in North Africa first told American debriefers in 2002 about a courier for bin Laden, former acting CIA Director Michael Morell said at a George Mason University event in 2020.

The manhunt for bin Laden promoted a new working dynamic between the CIA and NSA. Mr. Darby said the NSA developed a process to send analysts to work at CIA, to share work at each agency’s headquarters, and to travel overseas.

Targeting Abbottabad

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Mr. Darby said a combination of signals and human intelligence led the U.S. government to a courier and caretaker for bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

U.S. government analysts had homed in on bin Laden’s suspected Pakistan compound by late 2010, Mr. Darby said. Together with other agencies, including the CIA, the NSA examined “some creative options” to collect more intelligence on those living in the compound to confirm his identity.

Mr. Darby declined on the podcast to share the U.S. government’s specific collection operations aimed at the compound.

The 2012 film “Zero Dark Thirty,” a dramatized version of the manhunt and raid, includes a scene depicting a U.S. official explaining in the White House different futile options for penetrating the compound. The official explains that the terrorist suspects at the compound don’t make phone calls and the U.S. government explored collection ideas involving a pinhole camera, hot-air balloons, tunnels, a vaccination program and collecting feces, among other schemes.

After the president approved a covert plan to raid the compound and capture or kill bin Laden, it was the NSA’s job to ensure the Afghanistan-based U.S. military helicopters ferrying Americans to and away from the compound faced no threats on their way into and out of Pakistan.

After years of searching for the terrorist, bin Laden was dead and the Americans returned home.

The hunt for bin Laden experienced many fits and starts. The 9/11 Commission blamed The Washington Times for a 1998 report referencing the terrorist’s communication as making it “much more difficult” for the NSA to intercept bin Laden’s conversations. The Times said in 2005 that the commission falsely singled out its reporting and cited many reports from other news outlets mentioning the same detail.

Mr. Darby said on the podcast that bin Laden’s use of electronic communications stopped after the media reported his satellite phone usage. Mr. Darby credited NSA personnel for not giving up the hunt.

“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? You know, he’s dead, you’re not going to find him,’” Mr. Darby said. “And, we said, ‘No, we will, if he is alive, we will find him. The U.S. government will find him. That’s not an option just to give up.”