Behind the mystery unit that blasted into Maduro’s military complex
You’ve probably seen one. He was completely unremarkable; you didn’t look at him twice. He could have been the guy browsing electrical supply behind you at Home Depot, wearing a faded baseball cap and a pair of sturdy work boots. But he may have spent last Tuesday night fast-roping onto a moving train or breaching a compound in a place not shown on any maps.
He’s part of an elite group widely known as 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment–Delta (1st SFOD–D), or more commonly, Delta Force. They are the ghosts of American foreign policy, silent operators who take up more space in fiction than reality, members of a unit so secretive that entire books have dissected information as basic as its real name.
There’s a direct line from Washington to its North Carolina office. When a problem is too messy for a diplomat and too delicate for a tank, the president picks up a very specific phone. This is what happened at 10:46 p.m. on Friday night, when President Trump signed off on Operation Absolute Resolve.
Here’s a look behind the heavy curtains shrouding the mysterious unit that blasted into Nicolas Maduro’s Fuerte Tiuna military complex in Caracas, an exploration of how the concept for the force sprang from the brain of a maverick army colonel, and how it became one of the most lethal assets in the US arsenal.
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