#3 Besoeker's link was to a DOD-only site. But the info behind the site is from a public source (LA Times) so I'll post some of it here.
The communications detected last year referred to apparent terrorist activity, the German and U.S. officials said in interviews. The German officials characterized the communications as specific and alarming.
American authorities passed the lead to German police, who conducted a painstaking investigation that led to the arrests of the three suspects. Police here suspected that militants were communicating with Pakistan from an Internet cafe, a frequent strategy to avoid detection, but they did not know which one. So they deployed surveillance teams at several dozen Internet cafes around the city, officials said.
The stakeouts paid off when police spotted a 28-year-old convert who was already known as an associate of Islamic militants and has been identified as Fritz Gelowicz.
Arrested this week with the two other suspects, Gelowicz was described Thursday by anti-terrorism officials as the lead figure in a group that learned bomb-making at an Al Qaeda-linked training camp in Pakistan last year. The third man jailed is a Turk who has been living in Germany.
On Thursday, police pressed their investigation of at least seven other suspects, including several who are believed to have left the country.
About 300 investigators worked round-the-clock for nine months to monitor the alleged plotters. Using sophisticated eavesdropping equipment of their own, the Germans watched and listened as the suspected cell coalesced and amassed a stash of bomb-making materials.
German authorities said they had focused on Gelowicz after he was briefly detained in January on suspicion of scouting a U.S. military barracks. But in reality, Gelowicz and his associates already had been identified as an urgent threat, thanks to the American intercepts last year, according to officials in Germany and the U.S.
"The U.S. counter-terrorism community supported efforts to draw links, to do intercepts and to monitor communications between Pakistan and Germany," a U.S. counter-terrorism official said.
The counter-terrorism official described the initial intercepts as "a key factor" that "helped build the case."
"It led to a very long period of surveillance, and the arrests." The official said the intercepts continued throughout the investigation.
This year, U.S. intelligence agents intercepted a key communication in which militant handlers in Pakistan asked for an update on the plot and pushed the suspects to move faster, German officials said.
At the start of the investigation, American intelligence also helped German police focus on the second convert, Daniel Schneider, a German official said.
U.S. intercepts detected the 22-year-old convert's e-mail communications with Pakistan and guided German police to him through a wireless signal he was pirating, officials said.
The suspects were simultaneously stealthy, brazen and reckless, officials said. The three evidently became aware of the constant surveillance and tried to thwart it, changing trains and dodging tails.
But when police this year confronted Schneider, and warned him that they knew what he was up to, he brushed them off, a German anti-terrorism official said. The trio plunged zealously ahead, the official said, apparently eager to die.
The three were unemployed; the two German natives collected welfare. Authorities said the trio claimed allegiance to the Islamic Jihad Union, an Uzbek group that in 2002 broke off from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, an Al Qaeda ally. The IJU ran the Pakistani camp where they trained and oversaw their alleged mission, officials said.
Unlike cases such as the London transportation bombings of 2005, in which the bombers communicated frequently with masterminds in Pakistan during the final weeks, the cell here was largely "self-contained and self-directed," the law enforcement official said. "They seemed to be running their own show."
(other) suspects include a Lebanese man who arrived in Germany on Monday after being deported from Pakistan, where he allegedly was en route to a terrorist training camp, officials said. The suspect was released after questioning this week but remained under investigation. Another man at large is Zafer S. a Turk believed to be in Turkey or Iraq.
Even if the missing suspects are arrested, prosecuting them might be difficult. It is not a crime in Germany to attend a foreign terrorist training camp.
Also troubling to officials was the presence of several suspects from Germany's vast Turkish community. In the past, Germans of Turkish origin have been far less likely to turn up in Islamic extremist networks than Pakistani Britons or young North Africans in France and its neighbors to the south.
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A tip-off from US intelligence helped to foil the terror bomb plot in Germany, it emerged yesterday. "The first piece of hard evidence on the bomb plot against American military and airbases in Germany was transmitted to the German authorities from American intelligence officials," Rolf Tophoven, director of the German institute for terrorist research and security policy, said.