Summary:
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He said that American commandos fought in at least 13 African countries between 2013 and 2017.
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There were at least 10 unreported attacks on American forces in West Africa alone between 2015 and 2017.
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Three and a half years later, in 2016, I finally got some of the information I had asked for through the Freedom of Information Act.
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Using leaked classified papers, I revealed the existence of a covert network of National Security Agency listening sites in Ethiopia as well as a network of African drone bases crucial to US murder plans on the continent.
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Anthony Falvo left that month for overseas service (literally ending up in the public affairs office of the USS Gerald Ford). Since Falvo’s time, the public affairs staff at AFRICOM has changed, but John Manley, who is the Deputy Director of Public Affairs and a true professional, is always there when I have questions that are hard to answer.
What are the American forces doing in Africa? It’s a mystery that’s shrouded in mystique, restrained by secrecy, and hogtied by bureaucracy. Or at least it would be if the Pentagon had its way.
I started tracking the expansion of American military bases and logistical capabilities on that continent ten years ago as part of TomDispatch’s attempt to find the answer to that question. I also speculated that much more might be happening covertly. I said, “Keep an eye on Africa.” “The American military there will be in the news for years to come.”
When the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) didn’t answer my simple questions honestly, I knew I had a story. The response from the command to the piece also let me know that I had a new rhythm.
Soon after publication, AFRICOM sent my editor, Tom Engelhardt, a letter of protest in an effort to cast doubt on my findings. (In a subsequent post, I provided point-by-point responses.) The leaders said that even though the US only had one tiny base there and didn’t do much on that continent, it was open and honest about what it did. At that link, Col. Tom Davis, the command’s director of public affairs, wrote: “I would encourage you and those who have an interest in what we do to review our website, www.AFRICOM.mil, and a new Defense Department Special Web Report on U.S. Africa Command at this link: http://www.defense.gov/home/features/2012/0712 AFRICOM/.
Ten years later, the link is no longer active, Davis works at Tucson, Arizona’s Pima Community College, and I’m still keeping an eye on AFRICOM.
In fact, I told the public about an investigation by AFRICOM into an attack in Nigeria that killed more than 160 civilians a few months ago. This was the first time that this investigation had been made public. I was able to get a previously secret 2017 paper from Africa Command that asked for an investigation into the “US-Nigerian” operation. This was never made public or even brought up in Congress.
Since then, AFRICOM has consistently refused to say anything important about the strike or the investigation that followed. It won’t even say if it will give relevant papers to members of Congress. Last month, a group of congressmen from the newly formed Protection of Civilians in Conflict Caucus used my story to demand that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin release records about the attack and answer important questions. The Pentagon has not spoken up so far.
Present problem
Has AFRICOM since been as transparent as Davis argued so long ago? Is its website the go-to resource for details on US military operations there? Did its activities there continue to be few and unimportant? Or was I right all along?
A Milder, More Peaceful Combatant Command
AFRICOM was always supposed to be “a different kind of command”: less strict and more Peace Corps, according to its initial leader, General William Ward. In 2007, Theresa Whelan, who was the deputy assistant secretary of defense for African affairs, said, “AFRICOM’s focus is on preventing war, not fighting it.”
A wide variety of actions were being carried out by “small teams” of American people in support of American security objectives, Gen. Carter Ham, Ward’s replacement, told the House Armed Services Committee in 2012. Years later, retired Army Brigadier General Don Bolduc, who led Special Operations Command Africa from 2013 to 2017 and worked at AFRICOM from 2013 to 2015, would explain more about the “engagements.” He said that American commandos fought in at least 13 African countries between 2013 and 2017. These countries were Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Somalia, South Sudan, and Tunisia. He went on to say that in at least six of them, US soldiers died or were seriously hurt.
There were at least 10 unreported attacks on American forces in West Africa alone between 2015 and 2017. In reality, AFRICOM still won’t admit that US Marines fought Al Qaeda members in Tunisia a month after the January 2017 Nigerian airstrike. In April of that year, it was said that a US commando killed a warlord from Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army in the Central African Republic. The next month, Kyle Milliken, a 38-year-old Navy SEAL, was killed and two other Americans were hurt in a raid on a militant camp in Somalia the next month while on an advise, assist, and accompany mission. A Navy SEAL is said to have shot and killed a man outside an ISIS-flag-flying compound in Cameroon the same year. And in October, after ISIS fighters assaulted US forces in Niger, killing four and injuring two more, AFRICOM was finally compelled to give up the lie that US troops weren’t at war on the continent. After speaking with Pentagon officials about the incident, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, then a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, remarked, “We don’t know exactly where we are in the world, militarily, and what we’re doing.”
In reality, I would help reveal in the 2010s that the US had done at least 36 specific operations and activities in Africa, more than in any other part of the world, including the Middle East. Eight of them were called “127e” programs, which is the name of the budget provision that lets Special Operations staff take the place of foreign military units in counterterrorism operations. More recently, I wrote about 11 of these proxy programs that were used in Africa. One was in Tunisia and had the codename “Obsidian Tower,” which the Pentagon never acknowledged. Another was in Cameroon and involved a military unit that was known for being violent and was linked to horrible crimes.
As part of the fight against the Islamist militant group Al-Shabaab, US commandos worked on five of the 127 projects in Somalia. They trained, equipped, and supervised forces from Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, and Uganda. Army Special Forces soldier Alex Conrad, 26, was murdered in an attack on a small US military base in Somalia in 2018.
Such outposts have been an issue between AFRICOM and myself for a long time. In the first post I made for TomDispatch in July 2012, I said, “The U.S. keeps a shocking number of sites in Africa.” Col. Davis rejected it. He said, “Other than our base at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, we don’t have any military bases in Africa.” He said that I turned in the piece before AFRICOM could give me more information about outposts. We would have given the information asked if he had waited, which could have helped his story make more sense.
In May, I started requesting information. In June and July, I called back with further inquiries, and (as requested) I wrote them down. My approaching deadline was brought up when I followed up on the 9th, and I was informed that AFRICOM headquarters might have some answers for me on the 10th. Both that day and the eleventh passed. On July 12, TomDispatch formally released the article. I sent Davis a letter saying, “I sincerely argue that a vibrant free press cannot be held hostage, waiting for information that may never come.”
Davis was actually out of the office when I checked back, but AFRICOM spokesman Eric Elliott sent me an email in August saying, “Let me see what I can send you in response to your request for a complete list of facilities.”
Then AFRICOM was silent for several weeks. A follow-up email sent in late October received no response. A different one at the beginning of November got a response from spokesperson Dave Hecht, who said he was taking care of the request and would give an update by the end of the week. You won’t be surprised to find that he didn’t, I’m sure. I therefore followed up once more. He finally responded on November 16th, saying, “All inquiries now have answers.” Before I release it, the boss merely needs to review it. I intend to deliver them to you by mid-week. Do I possess them? How do you feel?
Hecht finally answered in December, saying, “All of your questions have been answered, but they are still being checked over before they can be sent out.” I’m hoping to send everything your way this week. Did he? Hah!
I had some of my queries answered in January 2013, but nothing regarding those bases. Hecht had also vanished by that point, so I was left dealing with Benjamin Benson, the Chief of Media Engagement for AFRICOM. He told me that Public Affairs couldn’t answer my questions and that I should make a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request instead.
To recap, Benson suggested I restart after six months. And I did it in good faith. Three and a half years later, in 2016, I finally got some of the information I had asked for through the Freedom of Information Act. It was a single page of meaningless information about (you guessed it!) Camp Lemonnier, which had been partially blacked out.
Years would pass while I looked into the basis Davis insisted didn’t exist. I found out about a secret network of National Security Agency listening sites in Ethiopia and a network of African drone bases that are important to US plans to kill people on the continent by using papers that had been leaked. Using papers that had been kept secret before, I repeatedly revealed a much larger network of US sites all over Africa. I used open-source information that didn’t get much attention to show what was going on at a drone base in Cameroon that was set up and used by Americans. This helped bring to light the fact that local troops there had killed and tortured people. I also drew attention to the $100 million drone base being built in Niger, the previously unreported outpost in Mali that appears to have been taken over by militants following a coup there in 2012 by a US-trained officer, the expansion of a shadowy drone base in the Horn of Africa and its role in lethal strikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the hundreds of drone strikes from Libya to Somalia and the resulting civilian casualties, and the stumbling, failing US war
When you’re receiving a lot of criticism, you know you’re on target (s)
In the years that followed, a procession of AFRICOM press representatives came and went, responding in a style that was already well-known. In October 2017, its chief of public affairs, Lt. Commander Anthony Falvo, informed me, “Nick, we’re not going to respond to any of your queries.” I questioned him about his belief that AFRICOM didn’t have to respond to any questions from the press in general or just mine. No, he said, “only you.” “We truly don’t think of you as a legitimate journalist.” Finally, he hung up.
I unintentionally found myself being led inside the AFRICOM public affairs office that month. When I tried to hang up the phone, a staff member put me on speakerphone by accident. Suddenly, I could hear everyone’s conversations, from small talk to loud tantrums. And it wasn’t pretty, I assure you. I found out, for example, that at least some press officers seemed to have a very low opinion of some of their African colleagues, even though the command kept saying that its employees had the utmost respect for their local counterparts. Falvo once asked if there was any “fresh intelligence” about what the military was doing in Niger after the ambush in 2017 that killed those four American soldiers. Someone in the workplace retorted, “You can’t say Nigerian and intelligence in the same phrase.” I made the scandalous details public after hearing laughter. Anthony Falvo left that month for overseas service (literally ending up in the public affairs office of the USS Gerald Ford).
Since Falvo’s time, the public affairs staff at AFRICOM has changed, but John Manley, who is the Deputy Director of Public Affairs and a true professional, is always there when I have questions that are hard to answer. He claims that this is untrue, but I’m sure it won’t come as a surprise to you to find that he answered my questions for this piece.
I asked AFRICOM if their defer-and-deny method was the best way to tell the American public after Col. Tom Davis, who departed AFRICOM to join Special Operations Command (where, in a private email, he labelled me a “turkey”), failed to respond to my requests for an interview. According to Manley, “We are not going to comment on practices and procedures in existence ten years ago or offer opinions on individuals who worked in the office at that time.”
Manley told me that it was his job to answer all questions from the media in a timely, accurate, and clear way. Yes, I am the reporter who has been waiting since 2012 for news about the US bases. Given AFRICOM’s ongoing failures to combat terrorism and advance stability in nations like Burkina Faso, Libya, and Somalia, perhaps that is not a very long time by AFRICOM standards.
Manley deserves a lot of credit, though. He does offer answers, even though sometimes they appear so unbelievable that I find it hard to believe he said them with a straight face, and he is not shy nor frightened to speak. He agreed to further discuss his responses, but I didn’t think that badgering him would help either of us, so I’ll just let his last response stand as a digital memorial to my ten-year association with AFRICOM. When I asked him if the public affairs office had always been as open, honest, and helpful with my questions, he gave me the perfect ending to my ten-year dance with U.S. Africa Command: “Yes.”
Analysis by: Advocacy Unified Network
