Osama and his cell phone

This morning, Porter Goss (Director of the CIA) has an op-ed in the NY Times (behind the subscription wall) complaining that news leaks such as the leak of the NSA surveillance story, immeasurably harm national security. A high point of his piece is that the news stories about us tracking Osama's cell phone alerted him. Here's the offending graf:

Recently, I noticed renewed debate in the news media over press reports in 1998 that Osama bin Laden's satellite phone was being tracked by United States intelligence officials. In the recent debate, it was taken for granted that the original reports did not hurt our national security efforts, and any suggestions that they did cause damage were dismissed as urban myth. But the reality is that the revelation of the phone tracking was, without question, one of the most egregious examples of an unauthorized criminal disclosure of classified national defense information in recent years. It served no public interest. Ultimately, the bin Laden phone went silent.

In fact, it was Osama himself who leaked the story of the cell phone tracking to the press. And, here's the news story about it that Goss finds so offensive:

Osama bin Laden reportedly escaped capture by using his satellite cell phone. According to sources, bin Laden gave his phone to his Moroccan bodyguard during the 2001 battle of Tora Bora. Bin Laden assumed correctly that U.S. forces were monitoring his phone and would follow it during the battle. The bodyguard then used the phone while bin Laden escaped to Pakistan. The bodyguard was later captured and is currently being held at Guantanamo Bay.

It was Osama bragging about how he had duped the Americans that got this story into the news.

Here's what the Washington Post had to say about this last year.

President Bush asserted this week that the news media published a U.S. government leak in 1998 about Osama bin Laden's use of a satellite phone, alerting the al Qaeda leader to government monitoring and prompting him to abandon the device.

The story of the vicious leak that destroyed a valuable intelligence operation was first reported by a best-selling book, validated by the Sept. 11 commission and then repeated by the president.

But it appears to be an urban myth.

The al Qaeda leader's communication to aides via satellite phone had already been reported in 1996 -- and the source of the information was another government, the Taliban, which ruled Afghanistan at the time.

The second time a news organization reported on the satellite phone, the source was bin Laden himself.