How Kash Patel Bungled a SEAL Team Six Hostage Rescue

“You could’ve gotten these guys killed!” a Pentagon official screamed at Patel.

YEARS BEFORE DONALD TRUMP NAMED HIM TO RUN THE FBI, Kash Patel was a prosecutor in the Obama Justice Department assigned to work with Delta Force and SEAL Team Six.

He told Vanity Fair that his job was to advise the elite operators as they went after “the global rack and stack of bad guys, determined the order, established find/fix/finish options, and then executed.”

This is the official US government photo Kash Patel approved for himself.

A self-described “deep state” wrecking ball, Patel is fond of saying things like this that have made him a favorite of Trump’s MAGA base. However, during the first Trump administration, Patel’s actions revealed him as a bombastic fool who put SEAL Team Six in harm’s way through his ineptitude.

On October 30, 2020, President Trump signed off on a mission to have SEAL Team Six rescue Philip Walton, a 27-year-old American who gunmen had abducted from his farm in the West African nation of Niger, near the border with Nigeria. The kidnappers had hustled Walton across the border to Nigeria and were demanding a $1 million ransom.

In their book Only I Can Fix It, journalists Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker reported that the plan called for the SEALs to parachute into northern Nigeria and move three miles on foot to reach the compound where Walton was being held.

Secretary of Defense Mark Esper had signed off on the plan with one or two questions: Did we have permission to fly over Nigeria?

Patel, then the senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council, assured the Pentagon that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “got the airspace cleared.”

A few hours later, the Pentagon learned that Patel was wrong: Nigeria had not given permission.

This was a huge mistake. By that point, the aircraft carrying the SEALs were only fifteen miles away from the Nigerian border.

The Air Force planes were swiftly rerouted, circling the skies for an hour while State Department officials worked frantically to obtain clearances to cross the border.

As Esper recalled in his memoir, A Sacred Oath, “By the time Mike [Pompeo] and I spoke an hour later, he still didn’t have the okay from the remaining country. He also didn’t know where Patel received his information. Pompeo never spoke with him.”

“How did we receive the bad information in the first place?” Pompeo wondered.

Esper said his team “suspected Patel made the approval story up, but they didn’t have all the facts.”

With time ticking away, Esper got on the phone with the White House to decide whether to send the SEALs into foreign airspace without prior authorization or abort the mission and risk losing the hostage. Suddenly, the Situation Room broke into the call. The State Department had come through. “The overflight rights we requested were approved.”

Esper gave the mission the green light, although he worried the delay could be costly. “I was concerned that being packed in an aircraft burning holes in the sky for an extra hour or so would wear on the special operators, that it might affect their readiness somehow,” he wrote. “Putting them through that uncertainty and additional wait was unfair, and it was a failure on our part in D.C. to get it right the first time.”

He needn’t have worried. Walton was successfully rescued on October 31; six of the seven captors were killed, and none of the SEALs were injured.

But the Pentagon was still furious at Patel. Tony Tata, the Pentagon official to whom Patel had given the green light, confronted Patel in a rage.

“You could’ve gotten these guys killed!” Tata shouted at Patel, according to a report in The Atlantic. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

Patel’s response was: “If nobody got hurt, who the fuck cares?”

Is this the kind of person we want running the FBI? ###

This piece by SpyTalk Contributing Editor Seth Hettena first appeared on his own Substack page, The Ice Man.