From Selection to the Unit: Bob Porras on a Career in Special Operations

In January 1991, eight British SAS soldiers entered Iraq on a secret mission that ended in disaster, leaving three dead, four captured, and one escaping across the desert. Their story became legendary through bestselling books describing fierce firefights, extraordinary endurance, and brutal captivity. But years later, an investigation challenged some of the most dramatic claims, raising questions about whether the patrol encountered the enemy forces described in the original accounts. This crossover between Stories of Special Forces Operators and World Unexplained investigates the mission, the contradictory narratives, and the enduring mystery of what really happened behind enemy lines.

A British naval force approached one of the Atlantic’s most notorious pirates in November 1718. Lieutenant Robert Maynard used concealment and surprise during the final confrontation. This episode examines the historical operation and the role of deception in defeating Blackbeard.

In April 1980, the United States launched a classified mission deep into Iran to rescue 53 American hostages held in Tehran, bringing together elite troops, aircraft, and months of careful planning. The rescue force never made it to the hostages — the operation collapsed at a remote desert staging site before the assault phase even began. This episode breaks down how that failure exposed critical gaps in coordination between America's special operations branches at the time. We trace how the disaster at Desert One became the catalyst for a complete overhaul of how the U.S. plans, trains, and executes joint special operations today.

Operating inside Moscow during the Cold War presented extraordinary dangers for American intelligence officers and their Soviet sources. One of the CIA’s most valuable sources was Adolf Tolkachev, a Soviet engineer who provided extensive information about military technology. His espionage required secret communications, clandestine meetings and constant concern about Soviet counterintelligence. Eventually, the operation collapsed and Tolkachev was arrested. His story demonstrates both the extraordinary value and extraordinary vulnerability of human intelligence.

In 1976, more than 100 hostages sat thousands of miles from Israel at Uganda's Entebbe Airport, and Israeli planners had almost nothing working in their favor — crushing distance, thin intelligence, no element of surprise to count on, and the constant threat that hostages would be killed before any rescue force arrived. This episode breaks down how Israeli special operations forces built a raid capable of closing that gap and executing a complex assault on foreign soil in under two hours. We examine the planning, deception, and precision execution that turned an almost impossible scenario into a successful extraction. Entebbe remains one of the most studied long-range hostage-rescue operations in modern military history, and we unpack exactly why.