The Activity's story begins with the abortive attempt to rescue the American hostages from Iran in 1980. Now journalist Michael Smith gets inside this clandestine military team to expose their explosive history and secrets. 'The Activity,' as it became known to insiders, has achieved near-mythical status, even among the world's Special Operations elite. Army Special Operations unit has been running covert missions all over the world, from leading death squads to the hideout of drug baron Pablo Escobar to assassinating key al Qaeda members, including Iraqi leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and, in one of their greatest missions, capturing Saddam Hussein. A superbly researched and written account of the special operations that we know of.A top-secret U.S.

It’s hard to put Killer Elite down once you start reading it will educate, amaze and excite you, mainly because you’ve heard about most of these missions before – just not in this much detail.' 'The author writes compellingly and has clearly done his homework. They are a shadowy body, but Michael Smith tells their story with style and authority.' The Americans have ‘the Activity’, a top-secret special operations unit forming and re-forming itself under code-names such as Torn Victor. 'Smith lives up to his reputation as an expert in his field.' 'Well written and authoritatively sourced, Killer Elite is the first detailed account of a special operations unit that Smith regards as America’s most effective' Certainly there was enough material out there to make a start on the research for the book and to enable me to contact a number of interviewees, some of whom would be likely to link me up with others. But after talking to contacts in the US, I realised that it might just be possible. I was initially doubtful that there would be enough material available.

I was subsequently asked if I would be willing to write a book on the Activity, as it was known among special operations insiders. It has now been brought right up to date with details of operations against Islamic State in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.ĭuring the 2003 Iraq War, I wrote an article on a little known US special operations intelligence unit which had at one time gone by the name the Intelligence Support Activity but by then was said to be hiding under the covername Gray Fox. This was the book that revealed the astonishing history of America’s most secret special operations team and the way it was directing drone strikes to kill al-Qa’eda and other terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Yemen and Somalia.

Killer Elite by Michael Smith