Revising The Cell

From the paperback edition of The Cell, Pages 321-22: Deletions from the hardcover marked with brackets and additions in bold. Also, A paragraph break was added to the paperback edition after the words "might be an American."

[Just] Before the September 11 attacks, the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) had been monitoring communications [traffic] between suspected al Qaeda telephones around the world, noticing a distinct increase in traffic. There was a lot of "chatter" on the lines. Most of the conversations were in code. [Right after September 11, the traffic on those phone lines quickly dropped, since the] What's more, the CIA and NSA were by charter not supposed to spy on Americans on U.S. soil. That was the FBI's job. As a result, in almost every case, calls [from] between telephones in the United States and suspected al Qaeda phone numbers abroad were not monitored on the assumption that the U.S. party might be an American.

After September 11, [all that changed. A] an arrangement was [quickly] devised [so that] to allow the NSA and CIA [would] to intercept any call from a U.S. telephone line to a suspected al Qaeda telephone anywhere in the world. Instantly, a roving national security wiretap order would apply and the FBI [would] could monitor the call. In addition, fast response teams from the nearest FBI office would rush to the call's point of origin and try and observe the caller. Alarm bells started going off beginning in early March. The call level was high again, peaking to the same levels it had reached before September 11. If high levels of "chatter" signaled another attack, the FBI needed to know immediately who the al Qaeda operators here were. But when the fast response teams got to the phones the callers were always gone. Calls from New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, Boston and other cities, to numbers in Europe, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates were all made on pre-paid calling cards that were untraceable.