Best of SOF

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 a former IDF commando. Sunday morning, 27 June 1976. …

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 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 …

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 …

COMMENTARY by Susan Katz Keating Is Vladimir Putin dead? Should we believe the “insider” who announced on Telegram that the Russian president died again, and that a fresh coup is underway in Moscow? Or should we trust the extraordinary denial from Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov that the report is an …

by Susan Katz Keating The Ninth Situation of War, when you must fight without delay, is Desperate Ground – Sun Tzu “Watson. Wake up. Woods. Everyone. Wake the hell up.” The sentinels raced through the lean-to, alerting the team with urgent news: the Taliban were at the wire. Hours earlier, Sgt. …

A Handful of Hard Men: The SAS and the Battle for Rhodesia    by Hannes Wessels Africa Unathorized With the collapse of colonialism and the European retreat from Africa the then colony of Southern Rhodesia refused to follow the political fashion of the time and succumb quietly. They decided to …

Christian Lambertsen and the Secret Story Behind Scuba From the archives of the CIA  Dr. Christian Lambertsen  The men and women of the Office of Strategic Services. (OSS) developed many spectacular devices for war-time use: exploding coal, invisible ink, tasteless poisons, miniature cameras and exotic knives. Some of these developments …