was no way that Americans would be allowed to participate in such a program. But after checking, he called back: ‘There were guys that were basically doing what you said.’ He was astonished, he said, by what he learned.… The mercenaries, he said, were ‘almost like a murder squad.’”
In an eerie echo of the October 2018 assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, killed because of his opposition to MBS (see chapter 9), Spear Operations Group mercenary Isaac Gilmore concedes that on occasion “there is the possibility that the target [the UAE asked his team to kill]” was not a valid target but just someone “MBZ doesn’t like.”477
Between 2009 and 2018, the United States government approves at least $27 billion in arms sales and defense services to the United Arab Emirates, according to a 2018 BuzzFeed News article.478 But “the UAE is hardly alone in using defense contractors,” the digital media outlet writes. “In fact, it is the US that helped pioneer the worldwide move toward privatizing the military. The Pentagon pays companies to carry out many traditional functions, from feeding soldiers to maintaining weapons to guarding convoys. The US draws the line at combat; it does not hire mercenaries to carry out attacks or engage directly in warfare.”479 Even so, Pentagon protocols implicitly facilitate freelancing by U.S. veterans; according to a high-level Navy SEAL officer who speaks to BuzzFeed News, “If the soldiers [who wish to work as for-profit mercenaries abroad] are not on active duty … they are not obligated to report what they’re doing.”480 Because, as of 2018, the pay scale for in-demand, well-trained military veterans on security details begins at $500 a day, whereas Abraham Golan is in 2015 offering $830 a day—or $25,000 per month—to members of his murder squads, it may be easier for some veterans to put aside their qualms and sign on to legally dubious work details abroad.481 Nevertheless, Golan business associate and former Navy SEAL Isaac Gilmore tells BuzzFeed News that “a lot” of the elite American ex-soldiers Golan approaches about working in Yemen turn him down.482
During the December 2015 operation in Yemen that is the subject of the BuzzFeed News investigative report on Golan and his crew, Gilmore admits to a reporter that he didn’t know which of his twenty-three UAE-identified Yemeni targets were politicians, which were religious figures, and which were alleged terrorists.483 The deck of playing cards from which Gilmore is working, supplied to him and his peers on Golan’s squad by an Emirati military officer, gives no information about why the targeted individual is designated for assassination.484
With respect to U.S. policy on the use of manned wetwork operations overseas, it is clear from recent American political history that the Saudis and Emiratis would have every reason to support a Republican presidential candidate over a Democratic one. Whereas, as BuzzFeed News notes in 2018, “under President George W. Bush … the CIA developed covert assassination capabilities” that went beyond drone strikes, “President Barack Obama halted the agency’s secret assassination program” while ramping up the use of drones.485 As the Saudis and Emiratis lack the drone capabilities of the United States, the more acceptable targeted assassinations conducted by mercenaries are to a given U.S. presidential administration, the easier it is, presumably, for the Saudis and Emiratis to recruit former U.S. special forces personnel either experienced in such actions or willing to engage in them despite a lack of experience.486 BuzzFeed News notes that “President Donald Trump has further loosened the rules for drone strikes” compared to those established under President Obama, underscoring that Trump’s attitude toward the killing of foreign nationals in targeted strikes is more permissive than his predecessor’s.487
According to Elisabeth Kendall, an expert on Yemen who works at Oxford, those individuals on Abraham Golan’s hit list who are members of the Al-Islah political party in Yemen work through the political process, not—like al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups in the region—through violence.488 This commitment to the political process led Al-Islah to receive more than 20 percent of the vote in Yemen in the most recent (2018) elections.489 Asked about the distinction between killing unarmed Al-Islah politicians and armed terrorists, Golan tells BuzzFeed News that to him, the divide between the two groups is “a purely intellectual dichotomy.”490
Al-Islah is a Sunni Islamist party whose chief political rival in Yemen is the Houthis. Al-Islah accuses the Houthis of being an Iranian proxy, while the Houthis contend that during the 2011 Yemeni uprising that led to the overthrow of then-president Ali