THE LEGEND OF CHIEF SHANNON KENT
Chief Shannon Kent was a Navy cryptologist who worked with what the article calls the most secret unit in the Joint Special Operations Command often going- she supported Delta and Seal Team 6 (or whatever they call themselves today) and even went on raids with them to do on-site interrogations. In short, she was a bad ass.
Kent’s kind eyes and friendly demeanor aren’t exactly what the average person thinks of when asked to describe a seasoned special operator hunting down ISIS though. And maybe that’s an advantage when assigned to the most secret, oft-rumored unit in the shadowy Joint Special Operations Command. She was used to working alone or in small teams, almost always clandestinely, but sometimes covertly and under cover. And she was damn good at her job.
Kent’s team wasn’t on a routine patrol that day, as the Department of Defense later claimed. And they weren’t out for a leisurely lunch at a popular kebab restaurant frequented by Americans, as many news outlets reported. Kent was responsible for finding ISIS cells and their leaders, fixing their location in time and space, and then providing that intelligence to her peers at Delta Force and SEAL Team 6 or to pilots who would perform kinetic strikes with GPS-guided missiles.
“This wasn’t the ‘going out to lunch’ crowd,” said her husband, Joe Kent, also a former special operator.
Without warning, a blast tore through the nearby restaurant they were passing. Shannon Kent was only a few feet away. Video footage would later show a man with a suicide vest walk into the restaurant moments earlier.According to the U.S. Navy, cryptologic warfare “encompasses signals intelligence (SIGINT), cyberspace operations, and electronic warfare (EW) operations in order to deliver effects through sea, air, land, space, and cyber domains at all levels of war.” For some sailors in the career field, that means sitting behind a desk in a room with no windows and no cell phones allowed, decrypting secret communications or translating documents written in a foreign language.
Although Kent was perfectly capable of performing that aspect of the job, she found herself in a more “hands on” niche. She was technically proficient in the tools of the trade, but also spoke seven languages fluently and was tactically capable. Maybe most important, she was seemingly fearless.
After joining the Navy in December 2003 and completing approximately two years of training to become qualified as a cryptologic technician, Kent volunteered as a Navy Individual Augmentee (IA) to Iraq. Because of her specialized skill set, she soon found herself assigned to a special operations task force in Balad, Iraq, working to find high value targets (HVTs). That wasn’t enough though. According to Joe Kent, “She wanted to get her boots on the ground and get her hands dirty.”
She was tasked out to Baghdad toward the end of her first deployment, where she worked with a small, secretive unit of Iraqi intelligence operatives who, according to “Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command” by Sean Naylor, worked directly with U.S. special operators to go where most Americans couldn’t to perform human intelligence gathering missions and close-target reconnaissance. They were called “The Mohawks.” The job was dangerous, and those who were caught faced torture, death, and being dumped in the streets.
This is where the legend surrounding Kent began. It was 2007, and very few special operations personnel were willing or able to go speak to Iraqis out in the city in a low-visibility capacity. So Kent taught herself human intelligence techniques and, already fluent in the language, would go out and develop targets for the task force. Like most of Kent’s career, much of her work with the Mohawks was and is classified — and it likely won’t see the light of day for at least 13 more years. But the citation for her Joint Service Commendation Medal received on that deployment notes that she “contributed directly to the capture of hundreds of enemy insurgents and severely degraded enemy combat capability.”
Read the entire article at the link.As her reputation grew, she started going out on raids with American special operators. Having a female on target for a high-level HVT raid was almost unheard of at the time, but she played a pivotal role by conducting on-target interrogations that led to follow-on targets. It’s not an understatement to say that the JSOC task force in-country at the time was more effective (and deadly) because of her efforts, and her performance directly led to initiatives that resulted in a broader implementation of females in Special Operations Forces (SOF) for years to come.
Unbeknownst to Kent, this is also where she met her future husband, Joe Kent, for the first time. Joe Kent was assigned to 5th Special Forces Group in Baghdad at the time. “She was a woman in SOF before there were women in SOF,” Joe Kent said. ”She became infamous among the Baghdad SOF community.” At one point they crossed paths in Baghdad due to a mutual connection with Iraqi special forces, but it wasn’t until 2013 that they discovered each other in a romantic way.