It was 5:09 a.m. when their Toyota Land Cruiser plunged off a bridge in the West African country of Mali. For about two seconds, the SUV sailed through the air, pirouetting 180 degrees as it plunged 70 feet, crashing into the Niger River.
Three of the dead were American commandos. The driver, a captain nicknamed “Whiskey Dan,” was the leader of a shadowy team of operatives never profiled in the media and rarely mentioned even in government publications. One of the passengers was from an even more secretive unit whose work is often integral to Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which conducts clandestine kill-and-capture missions overseas. Three of the others weren’t military personnel at all or even Americans. They were Moroccan women alternately described as barmaids or "prostitutes."
Nick Turse wrote skillfully about Vietnam in "Kill Anything That Moves," and in recent years has made his own "pivot toward" Africa, rooting out all he can about clandestine ops in AFRICOM for TomDispatch.com.
His latest is "Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa."
TS
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