Sean Naylor

Believed to be the only journalist to have flown with JSOC's 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment in both training and combat, author Sean Naylor's sources in the special operations community are unparalleled in their breadth and depth. Naylr's 2005 book Not a Good Day to Die, with its groundbreaking coverage of JSOC's Advance Force Operations in Afghanistan was so detailed that U.S. Special Operations Command, JSOC's higher headquarters, ordered an investigation into how the information was leaked. It was also selected for the official reading lists of the Chief of Naval Operations and the Air Force Chief of Staff.

That was far from the only time that Naylor's coverage of JSOC has provoked the powers that be into action. In late 2001 his mention of the role that Task Force Orange and JSOC's secret helicopter unit, Flight Concepts Division, might be playing along the Afghan border prompted a request from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Army Times to not publish those paragraphs from the newspaper edition of Naylor's story on the Web. And in late 2006 his article about JSOC's hunt for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi - the first to detail the extensive JSOC role in Iraq - led to an FBI investigation into the alleged leak of classified information.