American Mercenaries Were Hired To Assassinate Politicians In The Middle East
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/mercenaries-assassination-us-yemen-uae-spear-golan-dahlan
“There was a targeted assassination program in
Yemen. I was running it. We did it.”
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/https://www.buzzfeednews.com/author/aramroston>
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/https://www.buzzfeednews.com/author/aramroston>Aram<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/https://www.buzzfeednews.com/author/aramroston>
Roston
BuzzFeed News Reporter - Posted on October 16, 2018, at 5:53 a.m. ET
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Cradling an AK-47 and sucking a lollipop, the
former American Green Beret bumped along in the
back of an armored SUV as it wound through the
darkened streets of Aden. Two other commandos on
the mission were former Navy SEALs. As elite US
special operations fighters, they had years of
specialized training by the US military to
protect America. But now they were working for a
different master: a private US company that had
been hired by the United Arab Emirates, a tiny
desert monarchy on the Persian Gulf.
On that night, December 29, 2015, their job was to carry out an assassination.
Their armed attack, described to BuzzFeed News by
two of its participants and corroborated by drone
surveillance footage, was the first operation in
a startling for-profit venture. For months in
war-torn Yemen, some of America’s most highly
trained soldiers worked on a mercenary mission of
murky legality to kill prominent clerics and Islamist political figures.
Their target that night: Anssaf Ali Mayo, the
local leader of the Islamist political party
Al-Islah. The UAE considers Al-Islah to be the
Yemeni branch of the worldwide Muslim
Brotherhood, which the UAE calls a terrorist
organization. Many experts insist that Al-Islah,
one of whose members won the
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/07/tawakkul-karman-profile>Nobel
Peace Prize, is no terror group. They say it's a
legitimate political party that threatens the UAE
not through violence but by speaking out against its ambitions in Yemen.
The mercenaries’ plan was to attach a bomb laced
with shrapnel to the door of Al-Islah’s
headquarters, located near a soccer stadium in
central Aden, a key Yemeni port city. The
explosion, one of the leaders of the expedition
explained, was supposed to “kill everybody in that office.”
When they arrived at 9:57 at night, all seemed
quiet. The men crept out of the SUV, guns at the
ready. One carried the explosive charge toward
the building. But just as he was about to reach
the door, another member of the team opened fire,
shooting back along the dimly lit street, and
their carefully designed plan went haywire.
Obtained by BuzzFeed News
Drone footage of the operation in Yemen to
assassinate a Yemeni leader of Al-Islah, an Islamist political party.
The operation against Mayo which was reported
at the time but until now was not known to have
been carried out by American mercenaries marked
a pivot point in the war in Yemen, a brutal
conflict that has seen children starved, villages
bombed, and epidemics of cholera roll through the
civilian population. The bombing was the first
salvo in a string of unsolved assassinations that
killed more than two dozen of the group’s leaders.
The company that hired the soldiers and carried
out the attack is Spear Operations Group,
incorporated in Delaware and founded by Abraham
Golan, a charismatic Hungarian Israeli security
contractor who lives outside of Pittsburgh. He
led the team’s strike against Mayo.
Got a tip? You can email t...@buzzfeed.com. To
learn how to reach us securely, go to
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/https://tips.buzzfeed.com/>tips.buzzfeed.com.
“There was a targeted assassination program in
Yemen,” he told BuzzFeed News. “I was running it.
We did it. It was sanctioned by the UAE within the coalition.”
The UAE and Saudi Arabia lead an alliance of nine
countries in Yemen, fighting what is largely a
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/un-probe-details-fallout-of-proxy-war-in-yemen-between-saudi-coalition-and-iran-/2018/01/11/3e3f9302-f644-11e7-9af7-a50bc3300042_story.html?utm_term=.c64bf6a1c93e>proxy
war against Iran. The US is helping the Saudi-UAE
side by
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/verabergengruen/khashoggi-congress-yemen-saudi-arabia-military-aid>providing
weapons, intelligence, and other support.
The press office of the UAE’s US Embassy, as well
as its US public affairs company,
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/https://www.odwyerpr.com/story/public/9954/2018-01-02/uae-extends-harbour-groups-10m-pact.html>Harbour
Group, did not respond to multiple phone calls and emails.
The revelations that a Middle East monarchy hired
Americans to carry out assassinations comes at a
moment when the world is focused on the alleged
murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi by
Saudi Arabia, an autocratic regime that has close
ties to both the US and the UAE. (The Saudi
Embassy in the US did not respond to a request
for comment. Riyadh
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/https://www.reuters.com/article/us-saudi-politics-dissident-minister/saudi-arabia-denies-allegations-regarding-murder-of-khashoggi-interior-minister-idUSKCN1MM2PM>has
denied it killed Khashoggi, though
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/16/middleeast/khashoggi-saudi-pompeo-intl/index.html>news
reports suggest it is
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/us/politics/trump-saudi-king-journalist-khashoggi.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage>considering
blaming his death on a botched interrogation.)
Golan said that during his company’s months-long
engagement in Yemen, his team was responsible for
a number of the war’s high-profile
assassinations, though he declined to specify
which ones. He argued that the US needs an
assassination program similar to the model he
deployed. “I just want there to be a debate,” he
said. “Maybe I’m a monster. Maybe I should be in
jail. Maybe I’m a bad guy. But I’m right.”
Spear Operations Group’s private assassination
mission marks the confluence of three
developments transforming the way war is conducted worldwide:
* Modern counterterrorism combat has shifted
away from traditional military objectives such
as destroying airfields, gun emplacements, or
barracks to killing specific individuals,
largely reshaping war into organized assassinations.
* War has become increasingly privatized,
with many nations outsourcing most military
support services to private contractors, leaving
frontline combat as virtually the only function
that the US and many other militaries have not
contracted out to for-profit ventures.
* The long US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
have relied heavily on elite special forces,
producing tens of thousands of highly trained
American commandos who can demand high
private-sector salaries for defense contracting or outright mercenary work.
With Spear Operations Group’s mission in Yemen,
these trends converged into a new and incendiary
business: militarized contract killing, carried
out by skilled American fighters.
Experts said it is almost inconceivable that the
United States would not have known that the UAE
whose military the US has trained and armed at
virtually every level had hired an American
company staffed by American veterans to conduct
an assassination program in a war it closely monitors.
One of the mercenaries, according to three
sources familiar with the operation, used to work
with the CIA’s “ground branch,” the agency’s
equivalent of the military’s special forces.
Another was a special forces sergeant in the
Maryland Army National Guard. And yet another,
according to four people who knew him, was still
in the Navy Reserve as a SEAL and had a
top-secret clearance. He was a veteran of SEAL
Team 6, or DEVGRU, the sources told BuzzFeed
News. The New York Times once described that
elite unit, famous for killing Osama bin Laden,
as a
“<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/world/asia/the-secret-history-of-seal-team-6.html>global
manhunting machine with limited outside oversight.”
“What vetting procedures are there to make sure
the guy you just smoked is really a bad guy?”
The CIA said it had no information about the
mercenary assassination program, and the Navy's
Special Warfare Command declined to comment. A
former CIA official who has worked in the UAE
initially told BuzzFeed News there was no way
that Americans would be allowed to participate in
such a program. But after checking, he called
back: “There were guys that were basically doing
what you said.” He was astonished, he said, by
what he learned: “What vetting procedures are
there to make sure the guy you just smoked is
really a bad guy?” The mercenaries, he said, were “almost like a murder squad.”
Whether Spear’s mercenary operation violates US
law is surprisingly unclear. On the one hand, US
law makes it illegal to
“<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-2015-title18/html/USCODE-2015-title18-partI-chap45-sec956.htm>conspire
to kill, kidnap, maim” someone in another
country. Companies that provide military services
to foreign nations are
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/https://www.pmddtc.state.gov/?id=ddtc_kb_article_page&sys_id=b9a933addb7c930044f9ff621f961932>supposed
to be regulated by the State Department, which
says it has never granted any company the
authority to supply combat troops or mercenaries to another country.
Yet, as BuzzFeed News has previously reported,
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/stephen-toumajan-general-us-uae-yemen-contractor>the
US doesn’t ban mercenaries. And with some
exceptions, it is perfectly legal to serve in
foreign militaries, whether one is motivated by
idealism or money. With no legal consequences,
Americans have served in the Israel Defense
Forces, the French Foreign Legion, and even a
militia fighting ISIS in Syria. Spear Operations
Group, according to three sources, arranged for
the UAE to give military rank to the Americans
involved in the mission, which might provide them legal cover.
Despite operating in a legal and political gray
zone, Golan heralds his brand of targeted
assassinations as a precision counterterrorism
strategy with fewer civilian casualties. But the
Mayo operation shows that this new form of
warfare carries many of the same old problems.
The commandos’ plans went awry, and the
intelligence proved flawed. And their strike was
far from surgical: The explosive they attached to
the door was designed to kill not one person but everyone in the office.
Aside from moral objections, for-profit targeted
assassinations add new dilemmas to modern
warfare. Private mercenaries operate outside the
US military’s chain of command, so if they make
mistakes or commit war crimes, there is no clear
system for holding them accountable. If the
mercenaries had killed a civilian in the street,
who would have even investigated?
The Mayo mission exposes an even more central
problem: the choice of targets. Golan insists
that he killed only terrorists identified by the
government of the UAE, an ally of the US. But who
is a terrorist and who is a politician? What is a
new form of warfare and what is just
old-fashioned murder for hire? Who has the right
to choose who lives and who dies not only in
the wars of a secretive monarchy like the UAE,
but also those of a democracy such as the US?
BuzzFeed News has pieced together the inside
story of the company’s attack on Al-Islah’s
headquarters, revealing what mercenary warfare
looks like now and what it could become.
Provided to BuzzFeed News
Left to right: Isaac Gilmore, Mohammed Dahlan, and Abraham Golan.
The deal that brought American mercenaries to the
streets of Aden was hashed out over a lunch in
Abu Dhabi, at an Italian restaurant in the
officers’ club of a UAE military base. Golan and
a chiseled former US Navy SEAL named Isaac
Gilmore had flown in from the US to make their
pitch. It did not, as Gilmore recalled, begin well.
Their host was Mohammed Dahlan, the fearsome
former security chief for the Palestinian
Authority. In a well-tailored suit, he eyed his
mercenary guests coldly and told Golan that in
another context they’d be trying to kill each other.
Indeed, they made an unlikely pair. Golan, who
says he was born in Hungary to Jewish parents,
maintains long-standing connections in Israel for
his security business, according to several
sources, and he says he lived there for several
years. Golan once partied in London with former
Mossad chief Danny Yatom, according to a 2008
Mother Jones article, and his specialty was
“<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/11/kurdistan-k-street-2/>providing
security for energy clients in Africa.” One of
his contracts, according to three sources, was to
protect ships drilling in Nigeria’s offshore oil
fields from sabotage and terrorism.
Said Khatib / AFP / Getty Images
Mohammed Dahlan on a video conference last year.
Golan, who sports a full beard and smokes
Marlboro Red cigarettes, radiates enthusiasm. A
good salesman is how one former CIA official
described him. Golan himself, who is well-read
and often cites philosophers and novelists,
quotes André Malraux: “Man is not what he thinks he is but what he hides.”
Golan says he was educated in France, joined the
French Foreign Legion, and has traveled around
the world, often fighting or carrying out
security contracts. In Belgrade, he says, he got
to know the infamous paramilitary fighter and
gangster eljko Ra natovi , better known as Arkan,
who was assassinated in 2001. “I have a lot of
respect for Arkan,” he told BuzzFeed News.
BuzzFeed News was unable to verify parts of
Golan’s biography, including his military
service, but Gilmore and another US special
operations veteran who has been with him in the
field said it’s clear he has soldiering
experience. He is considered competent, ruthless,
and calculating, said the former CIA official.
He’s “prone to exaggeration,” said another former
CIA officer, but “for crazy shit he’s the kind of guy you hire.”
"For crazy shit he’s the kind of guy you hire.”
Dahlan, who did not respond to multiple messages
sent through associates, grew up in a refugee
camp in Gaza, and during the 1980s intifada he
became a major political player. In the ’90s he
was named the Palestinian Authority’s head of
security in Gaza, overseeing a
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/15/magazine/15HAMAS-t.html>harsh
crackdown on Hamas in 1995 and 1996. He later met
President George W. Bush and developed strong
ties to the CIA, meeting the agency’s director,
George Tenet, several times. Dahlan was once
touted as a possible leader of the Palestinian
Authority, but in 2007 he fell from grace,
accused by the Palestinian Authority of
corruption and by Hamas of cooperating with the CIA and Israel.
A man without a country, he fled to the UAE.
There he
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/https://www.ft.com/content/e943240e-a21d-11e4-aba2-00144feab7de>reportedly
remade himself as a
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/https://www.jpost.com/Blogs/A-Mid-East-Journal/The-controversial-Mohammed-Dahlan-463624>key
adviser to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al
Nahyan, or MBZ, known as the true ruler of Abu
Dhabi. The former CIA officer who knows Dahlan
said, “The UAE took him in as their pit bull.”
Now, over lunch in the officers’ club, the pit
bull challenged his visitors to tell him what was
so special about fighters from America. Why were
they any better than Emirati soldiers?
Golan replied with bravado. Wanting Dahlan to
know that he could shoot, train, run, and fight
better than anyone in the UAE’s military, Golan
said: Give me your best man and I’ll beat him. Anyone.
The Palestinian gestured to an attentive young
female aide sitting nearby. She’s my best man, Dahlan said.
The joke released the tension, and the men
settled down. Get the spaghetti, recommended Dahlan.
Taehoon Kim for BuzzFeed News; Courtesy Abraham Golan
Left: Gilmore. Right: Golan.
The UAE, with vast wealth but only about 1
million citizens, relies on migrant workers from
all over the world to do everything from cleaning
its toilets to teaching its university students.
Its military is no different, paying lavish sums
to eager US defense companies and former
generals. The US Department of Defense has
approved at least
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/https://www.ciponline.org/images/uploads/actions/Bill_Hartung_UAE_Arms_Report_92117.docx.pdf>$27
billion in arms sales and defense services to the UAE since 2009.
Retired US Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal once
signed up to sit on the board of a UAE military
company. Former Navy SEAL and Vice Admiral Robert
Harward runs the UAE division of Lockheed Martin.
The security executive Erik Prince, now entangled
in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation
into Russian election interference, set up shop
there for a time, helping the UAE hire Colombian mercenaries.
And as BuzzFeed News reported earlier this year,
the country embeds foreigners in its military and
gave the rank of major general to an American
lieutenant colonel, Stephen Toumajan,
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/stephen-toumajan-general-us-uae-yemen-contractor>placing
him in command of a branch of its armed forces.
The US draws the line at combat; it does not hire
mercenaries to carry out attacks. But that line can get blurry.
The UAE is hardly alone in using defense
contractors; in fact, it is the US that helped
pioneer the worldwide move toward privatizing the
military. The Pentagon pays companies to carry
out many traditional functions, from feeding
soldiers to maintaining weapons to guarding convoys.
The US draws the line at combat; it does not hire
mercenaries to carry out attacks or engage
directly in warfare. But that line can get
blurry. Private firms
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&tab=core&id=6247a35a5d9816a4b5e4f067b8758ecc&_cview=0>provide
heavily armed security details to protect
diplomats in war zones or intelligence officers
in the field. Such contractors can engage in
firefights, as they did in Benghazi, Libya, when
two contractors died in 2012 defending a CIA
post. But, officially, the mission was protection, not warfare.
Outside the US, hiring mercenaries to conduct
combat missions is rare, though it has happened.
In Nigeria, a strike force reportedly led by
longtime South African mercenary Eeben Barlow
moved successfully
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/nigeria/11596210/South-African-mercenaries-secret-war-on-Boko-Haram.html>against
the Islamist militant group Boko Haram in 2015. A
company Barlow founded, Executive Outcomes, was
credited with
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/https://www.nytimes.com/1999/02/04/opinion/saving-sierra-leone-at-a-price.html>crushing
the bloody RUF rebel
force<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/https://www.nytimes.com/1999/02/04/opinion/saving-sierra-leone-at-a-price.html>
in war-torn Sierra Leone in the 1990s.
BuzzFeed News
But over spaghetti with Dahlan, Golan and Gilmore
were offering an extraordinary form of mercenary
service. This was not providing security details,
nor was it even traditional military fighting or
counterinsurgency warfare. It was, both Golan and
Gilmore say, targeted killing.
Gilmore said he doesn’t remember anyone using the
word “assassinations” specifically. But it was
clear from that first meeting, he said, that this
was not about capturing or detaining Al-Islah’s
leadership. “It was very specific that we were
targeting,” said Gilmore. Golan said he was
explicitly told to help “disrupt and destruct”
Al-Islah, which he calls a “political branch of a terrorist organization.”
He and Gilmore promised they could pull together
a team with the right skillset, and quickly.
In the weeks after that lunch, they settled on
terms. The team would receive $1.5 million a
month, Golan and Gilmore told BuzzFeed News.
They’d earn bonuses for successful kills Golan
and Gilmore declined to say how much but they
would carry out their first operation at half
price to prove what they could do. Later, Spear
would also train UAE soldiers in commando tactics.
Golan and Gilmore had another condition: They
wanted to be incorporated into the UAE Armed
Forces. And they wanted their weapons and their
target list to come from uniformed military
officers. That was “for juridical reasons,” Golan
said. “Because if the shit hits the fan,” he
explained, the UAE uniform and dog tags would
mark “the difference between a mercenary and a military man.”
Dahlan and the UAE government signed off on the
deal, Golan and Gilmore said, and Spear Operations Group got to work.
Courtesy Abraham Golan
Standing in front of a UAE military plane are
Gilmore (middle left), Golan (middle right), and
two soldiers on their mercenary team.
Back in the US, Golan and Gilmore started
rounding up ex-soldiers for the first,
proof-of-concept job. Spear Operations Group is a
small company nothing like the security
behemoths such as Garda World Security or
Constellis but it had a huge supply of talent to choose from.
A little-known consequence of the war on terror,
and in particular the 17 combined years of US
warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, is that the
number of special operations forces has more than
doubled since 9/11, from 33,000 to 70,000. That’s
a vast pool of crack soldiers selected, trained,
and combat-tested by the most elite units of the
US military, such as the Navy SEALs and Army
Rangers. Some special operations reservists are
known to engage in for-profit soldiering, said a
high-level SEAL officer who asked not to be
named. “I know a number of them who do this sort
of thing,” he said. If the soldiers are not on
active duty, he added, they are not obligated to report what they’re doing.
But the options for special operations veterans
and reservists aren’t what they were in the early
years of the Iraq War. Private security work,
mostly protecting US government officials in
hostile environments, lacks the excitement of
actual combat and is more “like driving Miss
Daisy with an M4” rifle, as one former contractor
put it. It also doesn’t pay what it used to.
While starting rates for elite veterans on
high-end security jobs used to be $700 or $800 a
day, contractors said, now those rates have
dropped to about $500 a day. Golan and Gilmore
said they were offering their American fighters
$25,000 a month about $830 a day plus
bonuses, a generous sum in almost any market.
Still, the Yemen gig crossed into uncharted
territory, and some of the best soldiers
declined. “It was still gray enough,” Gilmore
said, “that a lot of guys were like, ‘Ah, I’m good.’ ”
Gilmore himself said he has an imperfect record.
During a live-fire training mission he led, back
in his Navy days, he says he accidentally shot
another SEAL. Gilmore said that’s what prompted
him to leave the Navy, in 2011. His last major
job before joining Spear was
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/montalvo-spirits-appoints-isaac-gilmore-as-chief-business-development-officer-otcqb-tqla-1917210.htm>as
an executive at an artisanal Tequila company.
That stain on his military career, he said, is
also what prompted him to take the risk with
Spear: He was an outsider, he wasn’t in the
reserves, and he didn’t have a pension to worry about.
By the end of 2015, Golan, who led the operation,
and Gilmore had cobbled together a team of a
dozen men. Three were American special ops
veterans, and most of the rest were former French
Foreign Legionnaires, who were cheaper: only
about $10,000 per month, as Gilmore remembers it,
less than half of what he and Golan said they
budgeted for their American counterparts.
They gathered at a hotel near Teterboro Airport
in New Jersey. They were dressed in an assortment
of military fatigues, some in camouflage, some in
black. Some were bearded and muscled, others tattooed and wiry.
When it was time to go, they convinced the hotel
staff to give them the US flag flying outside,
Gilmore said. In a makeshift ceremony, they
folded it up into a small triangle and took it with them.
They also packed a few weeks’ worth of military
“meals ready to eat,” body armor, communications
gear, and medical equipment. Gilmore said he
brought a utility knife with a special crimping
tool to prepare the blasting caps on explosives.
The team was sure to stock up on whiskey, too
three cases of Basil Hayden’s since it would be
impossible to get any alcohol in Yemen, let alone the good stuff.
On December 15, they boarded a chartered
Gulfstream G550. Once airborne, Gilmore walked to
the cockpit and told the pilots that there was a
slight change to their flight plan. After
refueling in Scotland, they wouldn’t be flying to
Abu Dhabi’s main commercial airport but to a UAE military base in the desert.
Obtained by BuzzFeed News
Left: Business cards for Spear Operations Group; Right: Gilmore's dog tags
From that base, the mercenaries took a UAE Air
Force transport plane to another base in Assab,
Eritrea. During that flight, Gilmore recalled, a
uniformed Emirati officer briefed them and handed
them a hit list 23 cards with 23 names and 23
faces. Each card featured rudimentary
intelligence: the person’s role in Yemeni
politics, for example, or grid coordinates for a residence or two.
Gilmore said some were members of Al-Islah, some
were clerics, and some were out-and-out
terrorists but he conceded he couldn’t be sure.
BuzzFeed News has obtained one of the target
cards. On it is a man’s name, photograph,
telephone number, and other information. At the
top right is the insignia of the UAE Presidential Guard.
Obtained by BuzzFeed News
Conspicuously absent is why anyone wanted him
dead, or even what group he was associated with.
The man could not be reached for comment, and it
is not known if he is alive or dead.
Assassinations have historically played a limited
part in US warfare and foreign policy. In 1945,
“Wild Bill” Donovan, the director of the CIA’s
predecessor agency, the OSS, was handed a
finalized plan to deploy kill teams across Europe
to attack Nazi leaders such as Hitler, Himmler,
and Goering, as well as SS officers with a rank
of major or above, according to
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/https://www.amazon.com/Wild-Bill-Donovan-Spymaster-Espionage/dp/1416567445/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1539032910&sr=1-1>a
biography of Donovan by Douglas Waller. But the
OSS chief got queasy about the “wholesale
assassination” project and canceled it.
During the Cold War, the CIA played a role in
plots to assassinate foreign leaders, such as
Patrice Lumumba of the Democratic Republic of
Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic,
and Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam. Later in the
Vietnam War, the US launched the Phoenix program,
in which the CIA often teamed up with US military
units to “neutralize” or, critics say,
assassinate Viet Cong leaders. Even so,
targeted killings were not a central pillar of US
military strategy in Vietnam. And after Congress
exposed CIA activities in the 1970s, the US
banned assassinations of foreign leaders.
Then came the war on terror.
Under President George W. Bush, the CIA and the
military used drones to kill terrorists, and the
CIA developed covert assassination capabilities.
President Barack Obama halted the agency’s secret
assassination program but drastically ramped up
the use of drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen,
Afghanistan, and Somalia. Soon the CIA and the
military were using the aircraft piloted
remotely using video monitors to kill people
whose names the US didn’t even know, through
“signature strikes” based solely on a target’s
associations and activities. President Donald
Trump has further loosened the rules for drone strikes.
But while private contractors often maintain the
drones and sometimes even pilot them, there is
one action they reportedly cannot take: Only a
uniformed officer can push the button that fires
the drone’s missile and kills the target.
With organized assassinations having become a
routine part of war in the region, the UAE
developed its own appetite. The country had begun
to flex more military muscle, and by 2015 it had
become a major player in the war in Yemen. It
quickly targeted Al-Islah, an Islamist political
party that won
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/uaes-ulterior-motives-yemen>more
than 20% of the vote in Yemen’s most recent
parliamentary election, held in 2003.
Elisabeth Kendall, an expert on Yemen at the
University of Oxford, points out that unlike
al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups, which try to
seize power through violence, Al-Islah
participates in the political process. But, she
said, the US rationale for drone strikes has
legitimized other countries’ pursuit of their own
assassinations: “The whole very watery, vague
notion of a war on terror has left the door wide
open to any regime saying, ‘This is all a war on terror.’ ”
At the top of the deck of targets they got from
the UAE, Gilmore and Golan said, was Mayo,
Al-Islah’s leader in Aden. Mayo had close-cropped
hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and a wisp of goatee
to go with his mustache. He had spoken out
against US drone strikes in Yemen,
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/in-yemen-us-airstrikes-breed-anger-and-sympathy-for-al-qaeda/2012/05/29/gJQAUmKI0U_story_2.html>telling
the Washington Post in 2012 that rather than
stopping al-Qaeda they had instead fueled its growth.
Asked about the ethics and legality of killing
unarmed Al-Islah political leaders, as opposed to
armed terrorists, Golan responded, “I think this
dichotomy is a purely intellectual dichotomy.”
Got a tip? You can email t...@buzzfeed.com. To
learn how to reach us securely, go to
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/https://tips.buzzfeed.com/>tips.buzzfeed.com.
Golan said he models his assassination business
on Israel’s targeted killing program, which has
been underway since the country was founded, and
which, despite some high-profile errors and
embarrassments, he claims is done properly. He
argues there are some terrorist enemies so
dangerous and implacable and so difficult to
arrest that assassination is the best solution.
He insists his team is not a murder squad. As
evidence, Golan recounted how, as their mission
continued, the UAE provided names with no
affiliation to Al-Islah or any group, terrorist
or otherwise. Golan said he declined to pursue
those individuals, a claim that could not be verified.
The people Spear did target, he and Gilmore said,
were legitimate because they were selected by the
government of the UAE, an ally of the United
States that was engaged in a military action
supported by the US. Gilmore said that he and
Golan told the UAE they would never act against
US interests. And Golan claimed that, based on
his military experience, he could tell if a
target was a terrorist after just a week or two of surveillance.
Still, Gilmore acknowledged that some of the
targets may have been people who merely fell out
of favor with the ruling family. Referring to the
country’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed,
Gilmore said, “There is the possibility that the
target would be someone who MBZ doesn’t like.
We’d try to make sure that didn’t happen.”
Obtained by BuzzFeed News
When they reached Aden, the mercenaries were
issued weapons. They were surprised at the low
quality shitty Chinese assault rifles and RPGs,
according to Gilmore and Golan.
At some point, they also received their official
designation in the Emirati military. Golan was
named a colonel and Gilmore a lieutenant colonel,
a heady “promotion” for a man who had been
discharged from the Navy as a petty officer.
Gilmore still has his UAE dog tag, a rectangle of
white gold imprinted with his blood type,
AB-negative. His name is in English on one side and in Arabic on the other.
Using sources handed to them by the UAE’s
intelligence network, Gilmore said, the team
established Mayo’s daily life pattern the home
he lived in, the mosque he prayed at, the businesses he frequented.
Christmas passed with the mercenaries sharing
their whiskey and plotting how exactly they
should kill Mayo. A raid, a bomb, a sniper? “We
had five or six courses of action to go after him,” Gilmore said.
Christmas passed with the mercenaries sharing
their whiskey and plotting how exactly they should kill Mayo.
After some quick surveillance of the Al-Islah
headquarters, they decided on explosives. Gilmore
said he drew the mission plan out on the floor of
the tent, with a black Sharpie. It showed the
angles of approach, the attack, and, most important, the escape route.
After he briefed his colleagues, Gilmore took out
his knife, cut through the tough tent fabric, and
burned the mission plan. “I don’t want any of
that with my handwriting on it floating around,” he said.
Two days later, Gilmore recalled, they got the
word that Mayo was in his office for a large meeting.
Golan gathered with Gilmore, another ex-SEAL, and
a former Delta Force soldier, for the mission.
They had left behind their wallets and all
identifying information, and they wore an
assortment of motley uniforms Gilmore said he
wore a baseball hat and Salomon Speedcross
trail-running shoes, with a chest rig full of
spare ammunition magazines. All held AK-47s, and
one had the bomb loaded with shrapnel.
Gilmore, Golan, and two others climbed into an
armored SUV with a plainclothes Emirati soldier
at the wheel. The French Foreign Legion soldiers
were in another SUV, which would stop a short
distance from the attack site, ready to rush in
should the Americans get into a jam. The gates of
their base opened and they pulled out onto the nighttime streets of Aden.
Provided to BuzzFeed News
Golan with a member of his mercenary team.
It’s unclear exactly what went wrong.
Right before the mercenary reached the front
door, carrying the explosive charge meant to kill
Mayo, one of his fellow fighters at the back of
the SUV opened fire, shooting along the backstreet.
There was a drone high overhead, and the video,
obtained by BuzzFeed News, shows gunfire but not
what the American is shooting at. The drone video
doesn’t show anyone shooting back at the mercenaries.
Gilmore said he himself fired at someone on the
street, but his gun jammed. He said he wasn’t
sure who was firing at them. In any case, the
mercenary carrying the explosive to the building
carried on despite the commotion around him for
a full 20 seconds, the video shows.
To make their escape, the mercenaries ran into
UAE military vehicles. Then suddenly there was an
explosion the bomb on the door followed by a
second, bigger one. The second explosion was the
mercenaries’ SUV. Gilmore and Golan say they
booby-trapped it to disguise the source of the
bomb, confuse Al-Islah, and add to the destruction.
The team returned to base without something they
all knew they needed. US special operations
forces call it positive identification, or “PID”
proof that Mayo was dead. A photo, for example, or DNA.
“That caused some problems with Dahlan,” Gilmore recalled.
Obtained by BuzzFeed News
Still, Mayo seemed to have vanished. He rarely
posted on his
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/https://www.facebook.com/anssafaden>Facebook
page, and for a time, Gilmore and Golan said, he wasn’t seen in public.
Yet Al-Islah didn’t announce his death, as it
would when other members got assassinated. The
reason, a spokesperson for Al-Islah said in a
phone interview, is that Mayo is alive he had
left the building 10 minutes before the attack
and as of July was living in Saudi Arabia. No
one, the spokesperson said, died in the mercenaries’ assault.
Mayo seems to have reemerged in Yemeni politics.
In May he was nominated to a post by the
president of Yemen, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi,
according to Charles Schmitz, a specialist on the
Middle East and Yemen at Towson University in
Maryland. Schmitz said he found a recent photo of
Mayo
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/http://almasdaronline.com/article/98549>standing
in a group with the UN envoy to Yemen.
Golan maintains that, at the very least, Mayo was
neutralized for a time. “For me it’s a success,”
he said, “as long as the guy disappeared.”
Nasser Awad / Reuters
Soldiers from the United Arab Emirates stand
guard as military equipment is unloaded from a
UAE military plane at the airport in Aden, Aug. 12, 2015.
Even though it failed to kill Mayo, the
mercenaries’ bomb attack seems to have ushered in
a new phase in the UAE’s war against Al-Islah.
“It was the exclamation point that set the tone
that Al-Islah was now going to be targeted,” said Schmitz.
The Al-Islah spokesperson who spoke to BuzzFeed
News recited the date by memory: December 29,
2015. “It was the first attack,” he said.
As 2016 progressed, those watching the
deteriorating situation in Yemen began to notice
that members of Al-Islah, and other clerics in
Aden, were dropping dead at an alarming pace. “It
does appear to be a targeted campaign,” said
Gregory Johnsen of the Arabia Foundation, who in
2016 served on a UN panel investigating the Yemen
war. “There have been 25 to 30 assassinations,”
he said, though a few appear to be the work of
ISIS. (Johnsen used to
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/https://www.buzzfeed.com/gregorydjohnsen/how-i-escaped-a-kidnapping-attempt-in-yemen>write
for BuzzFeed News.)
“There is a widespread belief on the ground,”
said Kendall, the University of Oxford expert,
“that the UAE is behind the assassination of Al-Islah officials and activists.”
Golan said his team killed several of the dead
but refused to give an exact number or names.
When BuzzFeed News read Gilmore the names of some
of the dead, he nodded in recognition at two of
them “I could probably recognize their faces”
and said they were among the team’s targets. But
he said he hadn’t been involved in killing them.
Golan said his team killed several of the dead
but refused to give an exact number or names. But
after their first semi-botched mission, the mercenaries rebooted.
They got rid of the French Foreign Legionnaires,
replacing them with Americans. The Emiratis also
provided them with better weapons and better
equipment, Golan and Gilmore said: C4 explosives,
pistols fitted with silencers, and high-end
American-made M4 rifles. They were also outfitted
with motorbikes they could use to scoot through
Aden’s traffic and affix magnetized bombs to
cars. All the equipment, they said, came from the UAE military.
Gilmore stayed on for only a short time. He said
he left Spear in April 2016. He and Golan
declined to say why, but Gilmore said he wishes
he had been more aggressive in Yemen. “If I could
do it over again we would have been less
risk-averse,” he said. “We could have done some
amazing things although we also could have done
some amazing things and all ended up in jail.”
One new member of the team, hired in early 2016,
was the veteran of SEAL Team 6, Daniel Corbett,
according to three sources and confirmed by
photos. Corbett was a superb soldier, say those
who know him, and had served multiple combat
tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was still in
the reserves, so the US military could deploy him
at any moment; he collected a government salary;
and he was supposed to report for monthly drills.
And yet he was in Yemen on a private contract to
work for a foreign military. It is unclear if he
himself was involved in missions to assassinate anyone.
In a mysterious development,
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/daniel-corbett-navy-seal-jail-serbia-mercenary-yemen>Corbett
is currently in jail in Serbia, where he is being
investigated for illegal handgun possession. The
American veteran has been held there since
February 2018. Corbett could not be reached, and
his lawyer did not respond to calls seeking comment.
As they went about their work in Yemen, the
mercenaries stayed in huts, sleeping in cots.
Some carried distinctive weapons for potential
close-in fighting. One, according to photographs,
carried two knives on his belt that he could draw
cross-handed. Another carried a small tomahawk.
The team began to develop what Gilmore called
“esprit de corps.” They flew a makeshift flag
featuring a skull and crossed swords a kind of
Jolly Roger on a black background and painted
that emblem onto their military vehicles and their living quarters.
Much about the Spear mercenary team remains
unknown, and some who participated made clear
they have no desire to shed light on what went
down. Asked if he’d been deployed in the Yemen
mission, one of the Americans replied, “If I was,
you know I can’t discuss it.” The former Green
Beret who was sucking a lollipop during the
mission sent BuzzFeed News a text message: “A big
story for you could be a tragic story for the
cast of characters; especially if they are good
men doing what was right but not necessarily legal.”
For his part, Gilmore said he “would have
preferred that this stay off the radar.” But he
decided to speak to BuzzFeed News because “once
this comes out there’s no way that I’m going to
stay out of it, so I’d prefer to own it. And I’m
not going to try to hide from what I did.”
“It’s still,” he said, “some variety of the future of warfare.”
Gilmore is out of the mercenary business. He has
since found himself in another gray-zone line of
work, albeit one that’s far less dangerous. He
said he’s with a California company that plans to
make cannabis oil for vaporizers.
----------
Jules Darmanin in Paris contributed reporting to this story.
--
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Please consider seriously the reason why these elite institutions are not discussed in the mainstream press despite the immense financial and political power they wield?
There are sick and evil occultists running the Western World. They are power mad lunatics like something from a kids cartoon with their fingers on the nuclear button! Armageddon is closer than you thought. Only God can save our souls from their clutches, at least that's my considered opinion - Tony
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