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command element is Zero Alpha.

Dotcom wasn’t the easiest target. The darkest hours of night were no guarantee he would be sleeping. Indeed, on this occasion, he was out almost the entire night, spending hour after hour grinding out perfection, in his view, on an electronic dance album recorded at Roundhead Studios in central Auckland.

Unknown to Dotcom, he was tracked every minute of that night, and his life of relatively carefree luxury and wealth was in a terminal phase. There were about 80 police officers preparing for raids across Auckland, all timed to be completed about 7am and to coincide with action taken in seven other countries.

The movements of Dotcom, particularly, were of critical interest to police. He was carefully monitored overnight, not only by detectives specially trained in the art of physical tracking and surveillance, but also by one of New Zealand’s intelligence agencies.

The details were closely guarded, known to only a few involved in the raid, and would cause a sensation when discovered. Dotcom and his colleagues were also being tracked by the Government Communications Security Bureau, the New Zealand intelligence agency charged with acting as an early warning system for security threats from outside the country. As the police followed Dotcom by car through early morning Auckland to the recording studio, the spies also followed him, using electronic surveillance capabilities afforded through the international Five Eyes network. The intelligence “partnership” was led by the GCSB’s dominant US equivalent, the National Security Agency, and followed by its four second-tier partners in New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.

The operation was run from the North Shore Policing Centre, about 10 minutes drive from Dotcom’s mansion. There, in constant radio contact, were the FBI agents assigned to the case and assistant US attorney Jay Prahbu, chief of the cyber-crime unit. Hosting the important foreign visitors were Detective Inspector Grant Wormald and Anne Toohey, from the New Zealand government’s statutory legal advisor, the Crown Law Office.

They waited and watched as Dotcom finished recording, climbed into a car to return to the mansion and — just before the first bit of light brightened the sky — was whisked north to his home.

There, he settled down to do some work. In his private chambers on the second floor of the mansion is one long room in which he sleeps. It is easily 60 metres, from one end to the other, with two beds. One is his work bed and the other is for sleeping. They cost $120,000 each. For a man liberated by sleep, there is nothing he will not do to preserve the benefits.

Lying on the work bed, he had a bag to the side carrying identification

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