Their high-profile status also made some of them targets of intelligence monitoring and threats.
And thus he was assigned to operational intelligence, monitoring the rail movements of German forces.
Military intelligence monitoring also detected the preparation of missile launching sites that could be directed at naval targets, he said.
Senior American and Saudi officials have been warning this week that global intelligence monitoring indicated that another attack was "imminent".
Both the American and British models have come to rely too much on technical intelligence, monitoring of electronic bits and pieces which rarely present a coherent picture.
Earlier this year, Mr. Saifi went on a shopping spree in northern Mali, gathering weapons, vehicles and recruits while American and Algerian intelligence monitored him with growing alarm.
During the cold war, he worked for air force intelligence, monitoring the communications of East Germany's infamous secret police, the Stasi.
"It soon became clear that the length of the list of controlled technologies outstripped our finite intelligence monitoring capabilities and resources," he said, then added, "We were wasting our time and resources tracking technologies you could buy at RadioShack".
The prince said intelligence monitoring had picked up almost as much chatter about an impending attack as was gathered before the three simultaneous bombings in Riyadh last week that officials have linked to Al Qaeda.
Intelligence monitoring of international communications has intensified, but investigators say connections to the "terrorist central" that Al Qaeda once represented no longer seem so important for some groups that identify with the cause but have their own skills and resources.
Some passengers were even being told to stay in their seats, without blankets or even books on their laps, for the last hour of their flight.Al-Qaeda's branch in Yemen quickly took the credit, hailing Mr Abdulmutallab as a "brother hero" for evading security screening and intelligence monitoring.
