London, England. Wembley Stadium. July 13th, 1985. Live aid. 1.9 billion people watching across 110 countries. The largest television audience in history. Queen had just finished their legendary 20inut set at 6:41 p.m. A performance so electric that backstage artists were calling it the greatest live performance ever captured on film. Freddy Mercury walked off…
Bangkok, Thailand. Raja Mangala National Stadium. August 24th, 1993. Dangerous World Tour. 60,000 people packed into the stadium. Millions more watching via satellite broadcast across Asia. Michael Jackson was 3 minutes and 52 seconds into black or white when something happened in the VIP section that would stop the entire show. Elizabeth Taylor, Michael’s closest…
Staff Sergeant Derek Malone found the British operator sitting on an ammunition crate behind the forward operating bases motorpool, eating something that looked like it had been scraped off the bottom of a dumpster in East London. The smell hit him first, a combination of cold curry, something vaguely resembling meat, and what might have…
The folder arrived at Camp Pendleton on a Tuesday morning in late September 2003, wrapped in the standard Manila cover that marked it as routine intelligence traffic. Lieutenant Colonel Brad Mat pulled it from his inbox without particular interest, expecting another update on insurgent movement patterns in Western Iraq or a request for additional UAV…
In 1941, a 25-year-old Scottish officer named David Sterling was lying in a hospital bed in Cairo with a back injury from a botched parachute jump. He had no authority, no official support, and no reason to believe anyone would listen to what he was about to propose. But Sterling had an idea that would…
Sometime around 2002, on a forward operating base in Afghanistan, an American sergeant issued an order that no one in his unit had ever heard before. Clear your weapons. Not because the base was under attack, not because a dignitary was arriving, not because of a safety drill, because a small group of British soldiers…
Four men with equipment worth,00 produced more actionable intelligence in 72 hours than a $40 million signals intelligence operation had generated in 5 months. Colonel Marcus Stafford, United States Army intelligence, read that sentence three times in the classified afteraction report before setting the document down on his desk at Bagram Air Base. The date…
In late 2001, a small group of Australian soldiers landed at a dusty forward operating base in southern Afghanistan, 90 kilometers southwest of Kandahar. The base was called Camp Rhino, and it was the first tow hold the Americans had won in the entire country. These were not regular soldiers. They were operators from the…
The British Special Air Service selection lasts 21 days. The Australian version runs the same length, but in conditions that make the Welsh Bon beacons feel like a training exercise. In 2012, a British exchange officer named Ashworth arrived at Campbell Barracks in Swanborn, Western Australia, with 17 years of special operations experience and complete…
It was the most insulting phrase an American officer could hear from an ally. In September 1967, a decorated US Army Lieutenant Colonel walked into the intelligence section at the first Australian task force headquarters in Nuidat and requested access to operational reports from recent SAS patrols in Fuaktui province. He had flown in from…
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