The U.S. ability to pinpoint with airstrikes the operational hubs of the al Qaeda offshoot Khorasan Group in Syria and penetrate one of its bombing plots shows the importance of the much-maligned National Security Agency, defense analysts said Tuesday.

The Khorasan Group is an especially hard target because, unlike other al Qaeda spinoffs, it stays in the shadows and refrains from pronouncements on social media. Its goal is to design explosives that can defeat airport security and blow up an airliner, killing hundreds of people. Its prime target: the United States.

Intelligence reports indicated that the Khorasan Group was in the final stages of plans to execute major attacks against Western targets and potentially the U.S. homeland, Army Lt. Gen. William Mayville, director of operations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters Tuesday at the Pentagon.

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Defense analysts said that signals intelligence or Sigint the result of intercepted communications likely played a major role because developing spies in war-wracked Syria has been difficult at best and often results in unreliable information.

The NSA has weathered a barrage of criticism since last year, when rogue contractor Edward Snowden leaked to the news media reams of top-secret documents about how the Fort Meade, Maryland-based agency vacuums up mountains of phone and Internet data.

But U.S. airstrikes on the shadowy Khorasan Groups operational centers show that America cannot fight a war on terrorism without electronic eavesdropping, analysts said.

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Presumably, all available intelligence assets are being brought to bear on this mission, including signals intelligence, overhead reconnaissance and human intelligence [Humint], said Steven Aftergood, a national security director at the Federation of American Scientists. In the past, the kind of signals intelligence performed by NSA has been a strength for U.S. war fighters, while human sources have often been unreliable or hard to come by. In all likelihood, the same is true today.

With unprecedented assistance from the Arab nations of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, the U.S. conducted airstrikes Monday night against the Islamic State group and the Khorasan Group west of the Syrian city of Aleppo, hitting training camps, an explosives and munitions production facility, a communication building, and command and control facilities, according to a Pentagon statement.

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NSA scores victory in foiling Khorasan Group's U.S. terror plot