Best of SOF

by Susan Katz Keating The promise of Red Mercury infiltrated the underworld of gullible would-be tyrants, despots, and autocrats, sparking imaginations and a frenzy of deal-making. But what was this mysterious substance? It was the ultimate black market sensation. A substance so powerful it could transform even a lone terrorist …

by Susan Katz Keating “The Taliban are behind my door.” The whispered words came through the phone in the pitch of night, hours after Kabul fell on August 15, 2021. My friend “Hakim,” a man I had been trying from afar to help leave Afghanistan, called me from inside his …

by Elon Perry The Israeli commandos wrote their farewell letters to be delivered only in the event they were killed on the high-stakes operation. Then they boarded their flights to Uganda, for a rescue raid that stunned the world. Told by an Israeli commando who took part in the mission. …

by Gatimu Juma Publisher’s note: Gatimu Juma, who reports from the Horn of Africa, told me last June he was working on a story about the Al-Shabaab terror group. Nearly a year went by, and I couldn’t reach him. Finally he surfaced to tell me where he was all this …

Depressed over the April 30, 1975 fall of Saigon, this Army veteran went to see a new movie. by Jack Hawkins Released in Los Angeles in 1978, The Deer Hunter was already becoming a legendary film by the time it hit “flyover country” a few months later. I was between …

by Susan Katz Keating “There’s a certain sound…” The song stuck with him for years afterwards. He was being marched to his execution in the jungles of Vietnam, and had been ordered to carry a radio to pick up “Radio Hanoi,” but he secretly dialed in to a station that …

by Carl Hancocks For the past four years, the city of Agadez has been what could barely pass as home for a woman without a name. Nigerian, she fends for herself as a sex-worker, but that was not how she arrived in this place. Her story is that of a …

by Jonas Vesterberg It was back in 2016. I was at home in Los Angeles when I got a call from my agent in Stockholm. “I have a project but nobody here in Sweden wants to touch it. Maybe you could take a look?” I suppose I was known as …

by Cliff Wade Iraq, 2006 We found ourselves in the home of an Iraqi family during a massive clearing operation in an area characterized by terrain varying between urban landscape, farmland, palm groves, and small villages. We had been clearing routes of improvised explosive devices all morning. We had been …

Editor’s note: Longtime CIA covert operations officer James Parker Jr. often talked to me about his days in Southeast Asia, including the secret war in Laos. He told stories of another case officer and former Green Beret, George Washington Bacon III, who became a mercenary in Angola. Here is an …