There have long been reports of American black ops in Europe, but the full extent of these shadow missions are only now becoming clear. Because recently, some of them have been declassified or widely leaked to the media. From the depths of the Cold War to the modern conflict in Ukraine, I dug through these congressional testimonies and newly declassified CIA documents so you don't have to end up on a watch list. In this iceberg format video, we're going to start with the crazy missions and then get into the absolutely buck wild, insane ones. The way American special operations work is each of the seven groups have their own region that they specialize in. 10th group has specialized in the defense of Europe since they were created in 1952. Their original mission was to conduct partisan warfare deep behind enemy lines if the Soviet Union ever invaded into Western Europe. Because of this unique mission set, they're unlike any other special forces unit. They were given fake identities and cover stories to hide their true background, the kind of trade craft you'd normally see in a CIA officer. They were required to learn Russian, get really into European culture, and start smoking sigs. By 2021, US special forces were present in 33 out of 44 European countries. A full 11% of the special forces were deployed to Europe, many of them 10th group guys. General Clark, the former chief of US special operations command, said our soft have partnered with European allies since before 2014 focused on building resistance networks. But that is not just in the Baltics. That's through the rest of Europe. When General Clark was saying the rest of Europe, I think he was possibly hinting at a place called Ukraine, where we're only just now starting to learn the true extent of American clandestine missions. In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea and started arming separatist movements inside Ukraine. A lot of people don't know this, but in response, the 10th group US special forces sent 150 man-sized company on the ground inside Ukraine. And they weren't just there to party in Eastern Europe and drink the forbidden absent. No, we'll see. They had a big tactical impact. When I was researching this episode, trying to find information on US Black Ops missions in Europe, I noticed something annoying. The search engine prioritized paid results to the point where I had to skip to freaking page three to find anything genuinely useful. That's the initial reason why I reached out to FreeSpoke to sponsor this episode and they agreed. Free spoke prioritizes relevant information. They also provide unbiased search results, giving me a rating of each publication's leaning, whether it's left, right, or center. They're not prioritizing some hidden agenda. Look, I'm always typing into the internet looking up stuff on bomb CIA kill teams. That 100% has put me on some type of government watch list. But not anymore because unlike big tech, FreeSpoke respects your privacy, so your browsing history is private and you're not getting bombarded with targeted ads. It even gives me the power to search through independent media sources like podcasts. Freepoke is giving my viewers 25% off your annual subscription by using my promo code cappy 25, which gets you 25% off your annual subscription. The link is in the description under the video. That's cappy 25 to get 25% off. Start using a search engine that helps promote independent media voices like my own and will save you an enormous amount of time on research and work. In February 2022, US special forces 10th group was actually on the ground in Ukraine in the capital city of Kev. They were training their Ukrainian counterparts in how to use sensitive items like Javelin and Stinger missiles to defend themselves. They actually helped train them on new reconnaissance and attack drone tactics. And according to SOCOM themselves, they helped train ultimately 27,000 Ukrainian soldiers. These SF guys were probably thinking to themselves, like most training events, that a Russian attack was never going to really happen and they were wasting their time. But for the first time ever, the meme nothing ever happens was wrong. Because that's when US Colonel Lucas Van Antwerp got word from his higherups that there was solid intelligence Russia was going to actually invade. He was ordered to get American troops and officials out of the country fast to avoid direct contact with incoming Russian soldiers because that could lead to World War II. Colonel von Antworp was tasked with quickly racing to evacuate, closed the American embassy in the capital. They destroyed sensitive materials and blew up communication devices. They blew up computer servers to prevent them from falling into Russian troops' hands if Keev were to fall. It was a full-on smash room. This is exactly the kind of politically sensitive diplomatic mission that the 10th group was trained for. Two months later, another Western special operations mission took place on Ukrainian soil, the details of which were only just recently revealed last month. In April 2022, a convoy of unmarked military vehicles drove through the tight city streets of Kev. The convoy picked up two Ukrainian men who were in plain clothes and they looked unassuming, but behind that they were two of Ukraine's highest ranking top military generals. Heavily armed British special forces wearing regular non-uniform clothing provided security for this convoy in Kev. That means that SAS commandos were only a few clicks away from where Russian positions were at the time. They drove 400 miles west to Poland across the border. Once there, these two Ukrainian generals jumped on a cargo plane and flew to US Army European Command in Germany. When they arrived, they met American CIA officers. They worked closely together to plan a campaign against Russian forces. The details and extent of this cooperation were not fully known until now because this mission was one of the most closely guarded secrets of the entire war in Ukraine. The top American general in charge of this black op was a man named General Donahghue. Donahghue was already a legend in the clandestine world. He fought alongside CIA hit teams in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria. This guy's the real life Jack Ryan or Reacher, whichever you're more into sexually. His job was to create a team cenamed Task Force Dragon. For the next 3 years, this Task Force Dragon, their assignment was to guide Ukrainian missiles and artillery onto Russian targets. If that doesn't shock you, it should. Because officially and publicly, American intelligence aid was limited to not providing any information that could quote unquote reasonably lead to lethal consequences. US intelligence called the Russian locations points of interest instead of calling them targets so as to be less provocative. That's maybe the most classic Pentagon speak I've ever heard in my life. Sir, look at this fascinating point of interest that I found where where an entire Russian platoon is assembling in the open in that uh tree line over there. Would be a real shame if something happened to them, sir. The United States military's goal was to help Ukraine defend itself because they wanted to offset that major numerical advantage held by Russian troops. And there were numerous examples revealed by US officials just recently that spoke to the Times that American satellite networks identified Russian officers location, their hideout, and then Ukraine sent a missile blowing that target up. Sorry, I meant point of interest. Blowing that point of interest up. American commanders in Europe provided coordinates that were sent on a secure computer network that even displayed what priority the points of interest were. It was like a government sanctioned hit list. General Donny who would reportedly say to his Ukrainian counterparts, "Don't worry about how we found out. Just trust when you shoot it will hit and you'll like the results. And if you don't like the results, tell us. We'll make it better." End quote. That's the kind of white glove service I would kill for. And they were killing for. The US intelligence was even on a small unit level where General Donnu would reportedly tell Ukrainian infantry units which houses they were empty in front of them that they were cleared to go up in advance to. It was basically the first war done remotely through Zoom. This would be the perfect place for a VPN advertisement. Don't want the Kremlin knowing you're sending targeting data to Ukraine? Use code cappy for 10% off your military grade VPN. But on the real, how were they getting such spicy intel? It's likely has something to do with the presence of Western special forces that were on the ground in Ukraine. This is now undisputed common knowledge because of an April 2023 leak which showed that 14 US special forces were in Ukraine, which is about the size of one A team detachment. This was part of a wider intelligence leak done by a US Air National Guard soldier in a Discord channel. Look, if there's any Chinese or Russian Air National Guard troops that want to leak intelligence to me, feel free to do it on our Discord server. But that airman was later sentenced to 15 years for leaking those documents. What the documents didn't confirm was the location of where those Green Berets were in Ukraine, although officials later claimed it was at the embassy in Kev. However, just in March 2025, the Times revealed that for the past three years, the US government authorized numerous clandestine operations, including dispatching American military advisers with authorization to travel close to the front lines, which probably shouldn't surprise us because Chinese military advisers are reportedly also going near the front line, too. It's a big learning experience for everyone. It's a nice old field trip. Everyone's gooning right now in this proxy war being right on the absolute edge. We know Russian FSB has been operating deep in Western Europe on sabotage missions. Doesn't really surprise me that both sides, which are nuclear powers, are using this kind of alternative third option that's easy for them for plausible deniability and to deny it even happened. The Russians intercepted and publicly released communications in 2024 between highlevel German government and military officials. In those recordings, they were talking about British special forces on the ground in Ukraine helping to operate storm shadow cruise missiles. Everyone lost their when they heard about this. The UK prime minister at the time confirmed part of this story when he said that a small number of British army personnel supporting the armed forces of Ukraine were there, but that they didn't have any plans for a large-scale deployment. And quote, he didn't go as far as to say that they were helping with missile strikes. The American intelligence leak showed that 50 British commandos were on the ground in Ukraine, enough for a storm shadow party. When I was in Kev, I heard rumors of British and French special forces operating close to the front early in the war during the invasion. My fixer, my guide, told me a story of how he saw French soldiers advising defensive positions when the Russians were closing in on Keev. At the time, I thought it was just rumor, hearsay, he said, she said. But these new reports verify some of these details. I think that's part of the fascinating thing about clandestine missions in Europe and on this continent. Cuz unlike in the Middle East, the Pacific, or Africa, US soldiers who are stationed somewhere in Europe live a relatively familiar life in a city that probably isn't that different from the city they grew up and back home, except there's a lot more 80s music playing in the cafes, but other than that, it's not that exotic. The next US Black Opia officers recently disclosed the network of 12 bases that they built and funded in Ukraine. And I'm not going to bury the lead here, guys. This is absolutely as insane as it sounds and I was blown away when I read about it. These bases were equipped by the CIA and created close to the front lines. This way they could intercept Russian communications and monitor the spy satellites passing overhead. The story from earlier you remember about the targeting team in Europe, the Dragon targeting team. I think a lot of their information came from this network that we're going to talk about. They would send coordinates for missile strikes and track Russian troop movements from here. These were located deep in the forest in the region of Donetsk and their entrances were hidden underground. In them, a whole team of Ukrainian intelligence soldiers worked away and they first were stood up in 2014 by the CIA right after Russia annexed Crimea. They were designed to prevent future actions like that from taking place or at least to mitigate them. I know a lot of it sounds like tinfoil hat conspiracy plots, but it comes straight from the lips of the CIA officers themselves. I don't know why I said lips. It sounded like like I'm thinking about kissing the CIA. I'm not. This is information that they passed on publicly to the New York Times, which tells us that they likely wanted the Russians to know this information because they don't care if I know it. These outposts near the Russian border were used as staging areas for infiltration missions inside Russia by Ukraine. You remember how the embassy was evacuated by US special forces? Yeah. At that same time, the CIA officers were the only Americans authorized to stay on post at these remote bases while the Russian invasion took place. According to Ivon Bakenov, former head of the SBU. He said, quote, "Without them, there would have been no way for us to resist the Russians or beat them." End quote. Starting in 2016, the CIA helped to train an elite team of Ukrainian commandos called Unit 2245. The US government gave strict orders to not kill any Russians with their training. So, of course, the Ukrainians immediately started killing Russians with their training. They blew up Arson Pavlov. He was a soldier in the occupied Dongk region, an officer, and they killed him with a bomb. They used a remotec controlled unmanned shoulderfired rocket launcher to kill a Russianbacked commander in another occupied territory. We saw several assassinations inside Moscow for instance. And when the CIA heard about this, they bugged out because they were worried it would mean retaliation from Russia. This led to the Ukrainian leader of the unit being fired. And the Russians returned with a car bomb that killed the 2245's commander, Colonel Chapploff. killed him on his way to sea and meet with his CIA counterparts. If I put on my regular infantryman thinking cap, here's how I would break down the geopolitical situation that special forces are facing in Europe. After World War II, the US pumped Europe full of cash and security guarantees to rebuild it into a wall of friendly democracies. During the Cold War, they kept their defense budgets up. But once the Soviet Union threat faded, a lot of them hit the brakes on spending. The main fear has always been the same, getting steamrolled from the east and handed to government that they didn't vote for. That's why so many countries sprinted to join NATO in the 1990s. Nobody wanted to end up back under Moscow's boot. But from the Russians point of view, NATO creeping around closer and closer looked like a threat from their perspective. So they claim they're just pushing back. And now here we are again on the edge watching tanks and borders like it's 1985 all over again. So for the next story, let's go back to where it all started in the Cold War when the US and Soviet Union were waging a secret undercover war against one another around the world. This is a story of Operation Valuable, which was the CIA's first ever paramilitary operation that I know of in 1949, just 2 years after their creation. It took place in the small nation of Albania in southern Europe, which had suffered greatly under Nazi occupation in World War II and was now governed by a Sovietbacked Enver Hoa. Together with the British, MI6, Italian, and Greek intelligence services, the CIA planned to gather hundreds of Albanians that have been scattered across Europe during World War II, train them in guerrilla warfare techniques, and then infiltrate them into Albania to sew discord and build a popular resistance front against the dictator's rule. NATO was concerned the Soviets were secretly building a submarine base and that Albania could be used against NATO forces in the event of a full invasion of Europe. According to the Italian naval intelligence, the Albanian dictator was unpopular and the people were looking to rebel anyways. At a minimum, the operation aimed to create so much conflict within Albania that the Soviet construction there would be halted and they wouldn't be able to send aid to other communist groups in neighboring countries. But the grand prize was to overthrow the entire regime. The top secret operation created the template for some of the tinfoil hat government toppling that we recognize today. The first recruits for the operation started training in July 1949 on the island of Malta. In the first set of nine, they landed on the Albanian coastline using a Greek fishing boat. The group split into two teams and moved to link up with resistance groups near the city of Laura, but they didn't get very far before Albanian security forces discovered one of the teams. Three were killed in the gun battle and the fifth team member went a while abandoning the mission. The second team was more successful, completing their assignment and sneaking across the Greek border to safety. Despite this setback, the planners at the CIA and MI6 kept sending teams of trained insurgents for more than 2 years, often accompanied in person by commandos from the intelligence agencies. Over 7,500 Albanian operatives and 2,500 US or British officers participated in Operation Valuable over the course of its 5-year lifespan. But most of these infiltrations failed before making it past their landing zone because government security forces intercepted the teams or they were turned into double agents within the resistance cells that they were supposed to meet. The planners tried everything. Seaborn landings, parachute insertions, CIA piloted cargo planes, infiltration by land. Yet nothing seemed to get past the tight grip of the security forces. It seemed a little bit sus. Operation Valuable agents had a tough time finding anyone within the country willing to aid an insurgency against them. No revolt came to pass and the agents suffered heavy losses in shootouts or arrests with the security forces in the police in Albania. 300 CIA and MI6 were killed or captured over the course of this mission. As it turns out, one of the big reasons that the Albanian security forces were so suspiciously good at their job was they had help from the inside. MI6 liaison Kim Philby was a secret Soviet spy that was recruited by the KGB back in 1934. Philby is actually one of the most infamous Soviet spies of the entire Cold War. He used this position in Washington to pass along secret info from both the US and UK to the Soviets for decades and he wasn't uncovered until 1963. As for Operation Valuable, the infiltration teams were betrayed before ever getting foot in Albania thanks to this double agent. It ensured that the Albanian government was always a step ahead. While the operation failed in bringing down the fall of the communist government in Albania, CIA officers still managed to gather some intelligence from behind the Iron Curtain. While both the CIA as an institution and individual officers gained crucial experience that would lead to much more success throughout the Cold War later. But this next story is actually terrifying to think that it was given the go-ahead by several top military officers. I first learned about this story of Operation Greenlight from one of the hosts from the podcast Teamhouse, Jack Murphy, and his book We Defy. I got a lot of this research from that source, so I highly recommend you grab it online. Full credit to Jack. In 1983, a US special forces team pulled up to an airfield in Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina. They were greeted by two men in black suits. They looked like feds who had no flags or identifying patches. They were fully redacted. It was some top secret spooky secret squirrel type shed. This is when things got weird though because three more trucks pulled up with a whole heavily armed security team carrying a special piece of equipment. The SF team recognized the device immediately. They knew it intimately. These guys had trained on it obsessively for months, knowing its details by heart. It was the 60 lb special atomic demolition unit or a euphemism for a backpacksiz tactical nuclear device, the Satum. When detonated, it exploded a 02 kiloton, which is a much smaller explosive than other nuclear devices, but that's like saying it's only a little terribly powerful. The Green Berets noticed there was no inert sticker on it like the ones that they had trained on. It appeared to be a live nuclear weapon. There was no time to nope out of there. They were given orders by men in black suits to load up their parachutes and prepare to drop behind enemy lines. They got in a cargo plane with the nuke and took off. Once airborne and 3 hours into their trip, they were given orders to blow up a strategic location, a piece of infrastructure in Cuba. Their target was a dam, one of the country's largest hydroelect electric dams in Cuba. The aircraft pulled off a combat maneuver flying 500 ft above the ground to avoid enemy radar. The team jumped out of the aircraft once they were near their target, I mean point of interest. And once they got there, they were strapped to a literal nuclear device. This means that one of the soldiers was falling towards the Earth at terminal velocity at one point with a nuke and only some strings and cloth parachuting, preventing the world's worst ever burn-in. Once they safely landed on the ground, they started to move toward the coordinates of their target dam. They set the timer, which was a preset for 60 minutes. That's about how long you want to cook your nuke. However, they expected to remain with the bomb for as long as possible to make sure that they weren't discovered. No thank you. I'm not going down with the ship. None of this was made easier by the fact that the bomb's fuses weren't accurate because the creators of the bomb designed it in a rush to miniaturize the nuke. And this tech from the 1960s meant that the fuse could be off by several minutes. We're not microwaving a burrito here. We need more precision when it comes to nuclear weapons than few minutes give or take. The backpack nukes fuse was based on pure vibes. Before the team could worry about any of that though, that's when out of nowhere, headlights came out from these vehicles and an officer came out and started shouting, "Endex, endex, endex." Which, if you've ever been on a training mission before, you know that means mission over. This notional event has ended. That's like the safe word in the military. Endex is how you just you stop playing around. It turns out the whole mission was taking place in America, New Mexico, not in Cuba. It's at that moment I would ask for 50% PTSD rating. This was a government sanctioned gaslight operation to fool these special forces operators into thinking it was a realworld event. A bunch of lab techs and officers came out and asked these troops a bunch of questions. This was Operation Greenlight, which was an actual US military plan from 1962 to 1986. and many of their targets were in Europe behind Soviet lines. Steven Bush was part of the 10th group's green light team and he said that the dams were a big target for them that they plan to hit military industry capacity train yards and mountain passes and these targets that they chose tell us a lot and it was designed to slow down a Soviet assault. It's likely these questions from the suits that they were asking, they were trying to gauge if the 10th group soldiers were actually had the discipline to go through with these orders. There was a lot of questions about whether or not when push came to shove, if troops would actually arm the device and take it off given its consequences. NATO forces consider themselves to be so numerically overpowered in the region that their plan was to go full Fallout 4. or on the fold the gap. The US military created 300 of these nuke backpacks to be used throughout the world. And the part that's really wild to me is that their plans, a lot of them didn't even have an exfiltration part to it. And that wasn't even out of being lazy. What it meant was that it was assumed to be a one-way trip. Probably when I was a private in the army, sometimes I felt expendable, but I thought Green Berets weren't tossed aside like that. To add to the trauma response, these assignments were kept secret for decades, and the guys weren't even allowed to tell their families and their wives about what their job was. Thankfully, these weapons were never used, and some of the Green Berets that were interviewed on it thought that it was just a psychological operation to scare the Soviets, and the US military never seriously considered using this tactic. But now that we've been all the way down the rabbit hole, let's do the one that you've all been waiting for, Operation Gladadio. This one has the most controversy and conspiracy theories surrounding it. Operation Gladadio was a top secret strategy developed by European countries with the United States CIA and NATO allies during the 1940s and through the Cold War. These were the staybehind forces. Staybehind forces were covert operators who lived seemingly normal lives in key strategic regions. But if war broke out and friendly forces were overrun, these sleeper cells would activate and spring into action, grabbing bombs and weapons from pre-planned caches stashed around Europe. It only became public knowledge in 1990 when the Italian prime minister officially acknowledged that there was a secret staybehind force that was cenamed Gladadio in Italy. This then sparked investigations in France, Germany, Belgium, and many other European countries that revealed similar staybehind networks. Different NATO countries had their own teams and Operation Gladadio was originally just the code name for the Italian contingent, but that name stuck and Gladadio now refers to the whole network. Basically, these disclosures fueled these wild theories over whether these secret units had interfered in domestic politics or if they were involved in false flag operations. US Army Field Manual 30-31B is one of the main pieces of evidence provided for this. The document was leaked to a Turkish newspaper in 1975. Originally, it outlines a strategy of conducting attacks that would then be blamed on left-wing Soviet aligned groups to then justify government crackdowns against them. The US government said that this document was a hoax that had been contrived and created by the Soviet intelligence agencies and leaked to Turkey. During the Cold War, these kind of staybehind networks were seen by the public as resistance groups. against the threat of the Soviet invasion. But absent that threat, after the Cold War, it was seen as an overreach from intelligence agencies that had gone a mock. None of these claims have been definitively proven, as far as I know. Although, from what I could tell, it seems like there certainly were criminal organizations at the very least that found and used some of these old NATO caches for their own nefarious purposes. Since the 1990s, hundreds of these weapon caches with explosive and firearms have been discovered and dismantled around Europe. On one hand, Operation Gladadio was a cold war era insurance policy against the Soviet Union. On the other hand, it serves as a case study in how secrecy can erode public trust. To this day, the full extent of Gladadio's activities remains shrouded in mystery. I can only imagine what we'll find out about how Russians and Western countries, what their intelligence agencies were doing 20 years from now when we have access to the archives. Maybe those are just really I feel like scratching the surface of Black Ops in Europe. If you want us to do another on this, if you like this format, hit the like button and subscribe to let us know and we'll do more of these in the future. For more content, you can go to cappyarmmy.com where you can find our Patreon there to support true independent journalism or sign up for our pepper box to get my exclusive weekly combat footage analysis show that's completely uncensored. I'm your everyday infantryman, Chris Cappy. Thank you guys so much for watching. Ending this transmission