Hired Killers
Two US special ops veterans have admitted their roles in a for-profit assassination program. Now they may have to answer in court.
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About a year ago, I spoke with Dale Comstock about a fight that never happened.
Comstock, a retired Army master sergeant and Delta Force veteran, had been scheduled to fight a Navy SEAL Team Six officer in what was billed as the ultimate special ops showdown—Delta vs. SEAL Team Six—in a no-holds-barred mixed martial arts bout in Virginia Beach in 1996. The fight was called off when his opponent, now-retired Admiral Tim Szymanski, failed the pre-fight medical exam after he contracted mat herpes.
Comstock was funny and very forthcoming. He had a lot of stories.
I wish I had asked him about Yemen.
A federal lawsuit unsealed last week in San Diego revealed that Comstock is one of three defendants accused of carrying out a targeted assassination program in Yemen on behalf of the United Arab Emirates.
The plaintiff is Anssaf Ali Mayo, a member of Yemen’s House of Representatives and chairman of the al-Islah party in Aden, who survived an assassination attempt. The UAE views al-Islah as the Yemeni branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which it designated a terrorist organization in 2014. Critics dispute that. Tawakkol Karman, a senior member of Al-Islah, was awarded the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize for her nonviolent struggle for women’s rights and democracy.
The complaint, filed by the Center for Justice and Accountability, names Comstock alongside Abraham Golan, the Israeli-Hungarian founder of Spear Operations Group, and Isaac Gilmore, a former Navy SEAL who served as Spear’s chief operating officer.
Comstock, Gilmore, and Golan did not respond to messages left seeking comment.
According to the complaint, the UAE paid Delaware-based Spear $1.5 million per month “plus bonuses for successful assassinations.” Comstock collected $40,000 upfront, paid in cash at Golan’s home in the tony San Diego suburb of Rancho Santa Fe, plus $40,000 a month to serve as head of the targeted assassination program.
In December 2015, the Spear team received an “initial kill list” from UAE officials featuring 23 cards, each with a name and a picture. The targets were spread across three countries, including two in Africa that Comstock declined to name. Mayo’s card was at the top of the deck.
All three men have admitted their roles publicly. “There was a targeted assassination program in Yemen. I was running it. We did it,” Golan told journalist Aram Roston.
Roston’s 2018 BuzzFeed News investigation reported that the deal was brokered over lunch at an Italian restaurant in the officers’ club of a UAE military base in Abu Dhabi. Their host was Mohammed Dahlan, the former Palestinian Authority Gaza security chief who went into exile after he was accused of corruption.
Comstock was upset that his cover had been blown and was convinced Gilmore had been the source. His bigger concern, it seemed, was missing out on the publicity, and he made up for it with multiple podcast interviews and an on-camera interview with the BBC. For years, he has traded on the Yemen operation as part of his “American Badass” brand.
In 2022, he posted a photo on Instagram from the Yemen operation, writing with typical braggadocio: “A few years ago I joined a small Strike Team (legionnaires, Israelis, Moroccan…) and travelled around the world to destroy men that opposed freedom and killed with impunity.” He added: “The money was good, the women were adequate, the enemy were ubiquitous, and the memories are plentiful.”
The operation to kill Mayo was held together with scavenged parts and bravado, according to a detailed account Comstock gave The Team House podcast. The Spear team spent weeks developing their first target, scraping information off the Internet and bribing Emiratis for intelligence. Mayo never slept in the same place twice.
The UAE wanted plausible deniability and tried to stay hands-off, which frustrated Comstock. The weapons they were issued were, in Comstock’s words, “garbage”—PKM machine guns with no links, a DShK heavy machine gun with no tripod, and aging AK-47s. They cobbled together their kit for the mission. “We were making it up as we go,” he said.
On the night of December 29, 2015, they got word that Mayo was in the al-Islah party headquarters in Aden. Five men went on the mission: Comstock, Golan, Gilmore, and another unidentified former SEAL, with an Emirati major at the wheel of an up-armored Toyota Land Cruiser. When the vehicle stopped at the target location, a shootout erupted. The driver was hit in the leg.
The plan was to blow up the building. Comstock had improvised an IED that he called “the mother of all Claymores.” It was an ammo can packed with C-4 plastic explosive and armor plating. Amid the chaos, he ran up solo to the building, set the charge, and ran. The bomb detonated, destroying much of the building. A second explosion followed, destroying their Land Cruiser to cover their tracks.
The target, however, wasn’t there. According to the complaint, Mayo had been warned and fled the building minutes before the explosion. He has lived in exile in Saudi Arabia ever since, separated from his wife and children.
Golan and Comstock said the team did successfully carry out several high-profile assassinations in Yemen.
According to the complaint, Golan and Gilmore were commissioned as officers in the Emirati Armed Forces “under the erroneous belief that doing so would shield them from legal liability for their other unlawful actions.” Golan was named a colonel and Gilmore a lieutenant colonel, quite a leap for an enlisted SEAL who had been discharged from the Navy in 2011, allegedly for accidentally shooting a teammate during a training exercise. Comstock said he got a promotion, too.
The complaint alleges war crimes, attempted extrajudicial killing, and persecution as a crime against humanity under the Alien Tort Statute, as well as assault and battery under California law. It seeks compensatory and punitive damages and an injunction ordering the defendants to stop targeting Mayo.
“Spear tried to assassinate me 10 years ago,” Mayo said in a statement released by the CJA. “I survived but have been forced to live in exile, separated from my family. The US government has a responsibility to ensure Spear and its operatives are brought to justice.”
Despite the public admissions from Comstock and Gilmore, the US Department of Justice has never charged anyone under the War Crimes Act or the federal conspiracy statute that the complaint argues Spear’s activities violated.
Not every Spear operator escaped legal consequences. Daniel Corbett, a former SEAL Team Six operative who joined Spear in 2016, was later arrested in Belgrade in 2018 on weapons charges after accompanying Golan on a trip to Serbia. The Serbian press reported that Corbett was there to kill Aleksandar Vučić, the president. According to Corbett, speaking on the Mike Drop podcast, he had been sent there to gather compromising information on a terrorism suspect, dirt that could be used to pressure him to stop funding terrorism. Corbett spent 18 months in a Serbian jail before a court acquitted him of all charges, citing a lack of evidence. His lawyer was gunned down in the street before the verdict. That crime remains unsolved.
For Golan, Comstock, and Gilmore, the Mayo lawsuit may be the first legal consequence for what they've spent years bragging about.
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Imperial mercenaries