Jeffrey Speiser, a lawyer for Mr. Nacchio, declined to comment yesterday.

As part of his defense, Mr. Nacchio claimed that he had knowledge of top secret contracts with the N.S.A. and other government agencies that made the company’s financial prospects brighter than was publicly known. Prosecutors denied the claims.

At the time of the claimed meeting at the N.S.A.’s Fort Meade, Md., headquarters on Feb. 27, 2001, Mr. Nacchio was chairman of the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, whose members included top executives of most of the major communications companies. Like nearly every chief executive in the industry, he had been granted a security clearance to work with the government on secret projects.

In the court papers, Mr. Nacchio’s lawyers said he and James F. X. Payne, then Qwest’s head of government business, spoke with N.S.A. officials about the agency’s Groundbreaker project, in which the agency’s non-secret information technology would be contracted to private companies.

At the same meeting, N.S.A. officials made an additional proposal, whose exact nature is not made clear in the censored documents.

“The court has prohibited Mr. Nacchio from eliciting testimony regarding what also occurred at that meeting,” one of the documents states. Another passage says: “The court has also refused to allow Mr. Nacchio to demonstrate that the agency retaliated for this refusal by denying the Groundbreaker and perhaps other work to Qwest.”

Another document, a transcript of an interview that the F.B.I. conducted with Mr. Payne in 2006, stated that the N.S.A. pressed its request for months afterward. “Nacchio said it was a legal issue and that they could not do something their general counsel told them not to do,” Mr. Payne told the F.B.I. “Nacchio projected that he might do it if they could find a way to do it legally.”

Mr. Payne declined to comment.

In support of Mr. Nacchio’s accusations, his lawyers quoted from one of several lawsuits filed against telecommunications companies, accusing them of violating their customers’ privacy. That lawsuit, filed last year against several companies, asserts that seven months before the Sept. 11 attacks, at about the time of Mr. Nacchio’s meeting at the N.S.A., another phone company, AT&T, “began development of a center for monitoring long distance calls and Internet transmissions and other digital information for the exclusive use of the N.S.A.”

The lawsuit contends that the center would “give the N.S.A. direct, unlimited, unrestricted and unfettered access” to phone call information and Internet traffic on AT&T’s network.