157 Of course, the liaison between the NSA and its allies was a two way street. In 2013, none of these other countries had a global network of geosynchronous sensors in outer space and under the ocean that could monitor signals from missile launching, submarine, military deployments, nuclear tests and other matters of strategic importance to them. Nor did these allies have the cipher-breaking capabilities of the array of NSA super computers. The NSA had assiduously built these means at a cost of over a half trillion dollars and employed tens of thousands of linguists who could translate almost any dialect or language of interest. Even though these allies had their own ciphers services and local capabilities they depended on NSA to provide them a large share of their signal intelligence. From the perspective of defending themselves from potential threats, the deal that these allies had with NSA was a mutually- advantageous. The NSA’s overseas intelligence gathering was not limited to adversary nations. With the exception of the Five-Eye allies, it gathered data that was deemed of importance by the President and Defense Department in friendly countries. These operations had been approved by every American President, and funded by every American Congress, since 1941. After all, even in the realm of allies, activities take place that run counter to American interests. The 911 conspiracy, for example, was hatched in Hamburg, Germany and financed in Dubai and Saudi Arabia. Nor were American allies unaware of the reach of the NSA. “Yes, my continental European friends, we have spied on you. And it is true we use computers to sort through data by using keywords,” former CIA Director James Woolsey wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2000, “Have you stopped to ask yourselves what we are looking for?” Whether or not it was appreciated by other countries, the global harvesting of communication intelligence by the NSA was hardly secret. As the NSA expanded further, it delega