On the Special Collection Service

April 12th, 2012

Image Credit: Cryptome
Over at The Week, I write about the Special Collection Service, a secret joint NSA-CIA signals intelligence organization. A snippet:

How exactly do these missions go down? Based on what we know, they look something like this: Special Collection Elements made up of two to five people rotate into U.S. embassies around the world, working undercover as Foreign Service officers or members of the Diplomatic Telecommunications Service. When State Department cover is impossible, the agents enter countries under the guise of businesspeople. Some U.S. embassies are known to house dedicated facilities for Special Collection Elements to use as bases of operations. In other situations, and when circumstances dictate, they work surreptitiously, assembling elaborate listening devices from discrete, seemingly everyday components. (Bamford reports one item previously used: An umbrella that expands into a parabolic antenna.)

Read the rest here.

Image Credit: Cryptome

If Israel Bombs Iran

March 19th, 2012

F-15I Raam Israeli Strike Eagle - xnir.comOver at The Week website, I look at what happens if Israel bombs Iran.

No sane person would wish for a unilateral Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities — but nor would a sane person wish for a nuclear Iran. Because of the number of potential targets in Iran, and the distance between them, a successful bombing operation would be transcendently difficult, if not impossible. But if intelligence suggested an impending, existential threat to Israel, it’s easy to imagine F-15I fighter jets planting GBU-28 bunker-busters in Iranian nuclear sites from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf. And if that happens, the real question becomes, what next?

Read the rest here.

Image Credit: xnir.com

Act of Valor: The Military’s Bid for an Authentic War Movie Pays Off

February 24th, 2012

Over at The Atlantic, I praise the film Act of Valor.

It is disingenuous to call Act of Valor a work of propaganda. The film, which opens nationwide this weekend, is neither hyper-patriotic nor prescriptive of what America should be doing around the world. Rather, it would seem to be a plain assertion of what we are already doing. Filmed with the cooperation of the U.S. Navy and starring actual SEALS who’ve seen war and will see war again, the production is an interesting experiment for the secretive U.S. Special Operations Command. Twenty-five years after its inception and 10 years into its hardest and most costly call to duty, here is an official stamp on how the special operations community wants to be recognized.

Read the rest here.

Image Credit: IATM LLC

10 Things You Didn’t Know About the President’s Secret Army

February 20th, 2012


Over at mental_floss, I write a few things you might not know about the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command — the President’s secret army.

2. When SEAL Team Six was established, there were only two SEAL teams.
In 1980, Richard Marcinko, commander of SEAL Team 2, was tasked with forming a new U.S. Navy counterterrorist unit. He named it SEAL Team Six to trick Soviet intelligence into believing the United States had at least three other commando units completely unaccounted for.

Read the rest here. (It’s my mental_floss debut!)

Image Credit: © Yslb Pak/Xinhua Press/Corbis

How U.S. Special Forces Infiltrated Pakistan

February 19th, 2012

Photo Credit: AP Photos

Over at The Atlantic, there’s an excerpt from The Command: Deep Inside the President’s Secret Army.

With Osama bin Laden dead, al-Qaeda’s capabilities severely diminished, and the United States scaling back operations in Afghanistan, what will President Barack Obama and his successors do with the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC)? A look at what they’ve already been doing outside of war zones gives us some hints.

In 2005, for example, a 7.6-magnitude earthquake killed 75,000 people in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. After four solid years of war in the region, the United States poured relief services into Pakistan as a show of solidarity with the nominal ally in the war on terror.
The U.S. intelligence community took advantage of the chaos to spread resources of its own into the country. Using valid U.S. passports and posing as construction and aid workers, dozens of Central Intelligence Agency operatives and contractors flooded in without the requisite background checks from the country’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. Al-Qaeda had reconstituted itself in the country’s tribal areas, largely because of the ISI’s benign neglect.
Read the rest here.

Then buy the book! ( Amazon | iBooks | Nook | Google )

Of note:

The Command: Deep Inside the President’s Secret Army

February 10th, 2012

The Command: Deep Inside the President's Secret Army

After Marc and I handed in the manuscript for our forthcoming exploration of the secrecy apparatus of the United States, our editor (the brilliant Eric Nelson at John Wiley & Sons) suggested that we revise and expand the section on the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command into a standalone work. I’m proud to present the result of our efforts: The Command: Deep Inside the President’s Secret Army.

Presently, it is available as an ebook single at:

About the book:

The U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) has proven to be the most lethal weapon in the president’s arsenal. Shrouded in secrecy, the Command has done more to degrade the capacity of terrorists to attack the United States than any other single entity. And counter-terrorism is only one of its many missions. Because of such high profile missions as Operation Neptune’s Spear, which resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden, JSOC has attracted the public’s attention. But Americans only know a fraction of the real story.

In The Command, Ambinder and Grady provide readers with a concise and comprehensive recent history of the special missions units that comprise the most effective weapon against terrorism ever conceived. For the first time, they reveal JSOC’s organizational chart and describe some of the secret technologies and methods that catalyze their intelligence and kinetic activities. They describe how JSOC migrated to the center of U.S. military operations, and how they fused intelligence and operations in such a way that proved crucial to beating back the Iraq insurgency. They also disclose previously unreported instances where JSOC’s activities may have skirted the law, and question the ability of Congress to oversee units that, by design, must operate with minimum interference.

With unprecedented access to senior commanders and team leaders, the authors also:

  • Put the bin Laden raid in the larger context of a transformed secret organization at its operational best.
  • Explore other secret missions ordered by the president (and the surprising countries in which JSOC operates).
  • Trace the growth of JSOC’s operational and support branches and chronicle the command’s mastery of the Washington inter-agency bureaucracy.
  • By Marc Ambinder, a contributing editor at the Atlantic, who has covered politics for CBS News and ABC News, and D.B. Grady, a correspondent for the Atlantic, and former U.S. Army paratrooper and a veteran of Afghanistan.

The Offensive Marketing of Modern Warfare 3

December 30th, 2011

Over at The Atlantic, I throw rocks at the marketing efforts for Modern Warfare 3.

There is a television advertisement for a video game called Modern Warfare 3 that is so base and strident that it’s hard to believe that it’s not deliberately offensive. It begins with two Hollywood buffoons in (for whatever reason) MultiCam taking heavy fire during an apparent New York City terrorist attack. The men calmly walk into a hailstorm of bullets, and return fire with rifles, pistols, and submachine guns. Most disturbing is that the depicted maelstrom seems designed to carefully hover in the uncanny zone. Clearly it’s not Black Hawk Down, but neither is it Starship Troopers. On some level—perhaps it’s the intensity of the actors—the commercial wants its action to be taken seriously.

Read the rest here.

Image Credit: Dual Shockers

The Biggest Little Diplomatic Crisis You’ve Never Heard Of

November 11th, 2011

Image Credit David Brown

Over at The Atlantic, I meddle in the affairs of Kiwis:

Next week, President Barack Obama and Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard are set to announce a new U.S. military presence at Robertson Barracks, an Australian base in Darwin. This will require a major expansion of the facility, and according to Mike Green, a former adviser to President George W. Bush, allow U.S. Marines “to be able to fly helicopters, drop out of planes and shoot at things.” Max Fisher has listed several reasons why this is a smart move for everyone involved, and the Obama administration deserves credit for anticipating distant threats in the region both obvious and abstruse. Australia is a stalwart ally of the United States, and has fought alongside U.S. troops in every major military campaign of modern times. Because of the UK-USA Agreement, the ANZUS Treaty, and fundamentally aligned goals in defense and foreign policy, setting up shop in Australia must have been as easy, diplomatically, as building a Walmart in Arkansas. The real question might be why it didn’t happen sooner, but that question is offset by the relief that it didn’t happen too late.

Read the rest here.

Is a Ghost War Really War?

October 21st, 2011

Image Credit: San Francisco Sentinel Over at The Atlantic, I throw rocks at Predator drones.

Humanity can be found and understood in the best and worst of war. But drones change the equation. It’s the worst kind of war, a frightening new enterprise that we’ve embraced, celebrate, and laugh about. But there’s something dishonorable about it. It’s the aerial equivalent of roadside IEDs. It’s the only kind of war America seems willing to fight anymore, and that is what we’re leaving behind in Afghanistan. To be clear, “fairness” should never be an objective of war. But almost by definition, this is not war. Once our soldiers leave the theater, all that will remain is a clinical and codified policy of assassination writ large, with virtually no public scrutiny. It won’t be front-page news when drones vaporize innocents, and it won’t be front-page news when drones vaporize al-Qaeda operatives, because we’ve got no skin in the game. It’s just robots hunting ghosts.

Read the rest here.

Image Credit: San Francisco Sentinel

In Praise of Bad Steve

October 6th, 2011

Steve Jobs

Over at The Atlantic, I talk about Steve Jobs.

Last year a former Apple employee related his favorite Steve Jobs story to me. I have no way of knowing if it is true, so take it for what it’s worth. I think it nicely captures the man who changed the world four times over. When engineers working on the very first iPod completed the prototype, they presented their work to Steve Jobs for his approval. Jobs played with the device, scrutinized it, weighed it in his hands, and promptly rejected it. It was too big.

The engineers explained that they had to reinvent inventing to create the iPod, and that it was simply impossible to make it any smaller. Jobs was quiet for a moment. Finally he stood, walked over to an aquarium, and dropped the iPod in the tank. After it touched bottom, bubbles floated to the top.

“Those are air bubbles,” he snapped. “That means there’s space in there. Make it smaller.”

Read the rest here.

Image Credit: Seattle Weekly

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