I began this project sure in the knowledge that researching and writing a book about a secret organization that controlled other secret organizations was going to be a challenge, and so it proved.
U.S. Special Operations Command—Joint Special Operations Command’s administrative higher headquarters—declined to assist in the project, other than to answer the occasional question. Several people who figure prominently in the events described in this book declined requests to be interviewed. Relentless Strike, the first full-length history of JSOC, is therefore built on two foundations.
The first of these consists of interviews I did arrange with scores of sources, most of whom spoke “on background,” meaning I could only identify them in a generic way, as in “a senior SEAL Team 6 source,” rather than by name. The fact that many of my sources held several different positions during the period covered by the book complicated matters further when it came to attribution. In most cases, I used an attribution (for instance, “Delta operator”) that applied to the position the source held during the events being discussed. This meant that sometimes the same individual might be referred to by different attributions in different chapters. However, a small number of individuals insisted that I refer to them by the same phrase (for instance, “retired special operations officer”) throughout the book.
The second foundation upon which the book rests consists of published works by other writers. No book about JSOC could or should be written in a literary vacuum. As the endnotes indicate, this book stands on the shoulders of scores of others that have touched on the command in whole or in part. Several deserve specific mention. The first of these is Steven Emerson’s Secret Warriors, which I found to be the most useful single volume about the covert operations of the 1980s. (At the outset I intended for my book to concentrate on JSOC’s post–September 11 history, but I soon realized that an extensive discussion of the first two decades of the command’s existence would be necessary in order to provide readers with the context necessary to frame the events that occurred later.) For the chapters dealing with the creation of JSOC’s fearsome industrial-scale killing machine in Iraq, I relied heavily on three books: Task Force Black, by Mark Urban, which, while focusing on British special operations forces, contained a wealth of information about the overall JSOC campaign; The Endgame, by Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor, a masterful narrative of America’s war in Iraq, laced with telling details about the role played by JSOC; and My Share of the Task, by retired General Stanley McChrystal, who commanded JSOC during those critical years. The latter was one of several first-person accounts upon which I leaned for particular chapters. Others include Kill bin Laden, by Dalton Fury (the nom de plume of Delta officer Tom Greer), about the failure to get Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora, and No Easy Day, by Mark Owen (the pen name of SEAL Team 6 operator Matt Bissonnette) with Kevin Maurer, about the May 2011 mission that killed Osama bin Laden.
To the individuals at the heart of each of these foundations—the sources who agreed to be interviewed by me, and the authors whose work preceded mine—I am profoundly grateful.