Sofrep – by Blake MilesSome of you may have already seen this article making its rounds on the interwebs. In it, claims are made that Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Special Agent Daniel P. Love of the recent Bundy Ranch versus BLM debacle is/was an Army Special Forces soldier (Green Beret).
Special Agent Love earned a position of primary antagonist in the eyes of much of the country. This was a due to a secretly recorded conversation between reporter Pete Santilli, from Guerilla Media, and Special Agent Love, which can be heard here:
For the record, anyone who has served more than a day on a Special Forces detachment would recognize quickly while listening to the ‘diplomacy’ recorded between Love and Santilli that it was not going well. Put simply, Love displayed a tone dripping with superiority, spiked with aggression, and wholly absent of the recognition that pissing off the locals is extremely unwise when you’re on the locals’ turf. These are things SF soldiers learn within a few hours of Unconventional Warfare training.
It should be noted that the vast majority of SF guys who I converse with are vehement supporters of the Constitution and see the recent incident in Nevada as foreboding and disturbing. I will let the readers decide for themselves what to think about the conversation, though at this point, you may be able to guess where my personal opinion lies in this matter.
Knowing all of this, it shouldn’t be hard to imagine that shortly after this claim was published, the Special Forces channels I’m active in got pretty spun up due to the having one of our own tied to the federal agency seen as overstepping their Constitutional authority.
Now, we’re not as fancy as the SEALs, so we don’t have an offline database like Don Shipley to verify claims of veracity. If we do, I’m pissed, because I don’t know about it and it would have saved me a tremendous amount of ass pain.
(Sidebar: Keep in mind, I’m not a journalist, but I could play one on T.V. without staying at a Holiday Inn the night before… and I know that double quotation marks actually mean ‘This is a verbatim quote’, not ‘this is roughly something I heard before I stopped paying attention and scribbled what I thought was said.’ Sorry… sidetracked. Too many bad experiences with journalists.)
Anyway, I reached out to the author of the article to discuss her claim. She stated that she got the information from a private source and believed firmly in the veracity of the claims. She also mentioned an article which I understood to be tied to the claims of her source, featuring the name of a Sergeant Daniel Love as the author.
At first, I did a double take, not comprehending what I was seeing. Then I realized that the Sergeant Love in this article was the Public Affairs soldier who was assigned to report on this specific story. He was assigned to 7th Special Forces Group (7th SFG) out of Fort Bragg. Public Affairs are the internal reporting mechanism within a unit ordered by the command to show all the great things their unit is doing (or sugar coat the not-so-great things that are being done).
With this knowledge in hand, I dug in a bit more to learn that this soldier working for 7th SFG has been with them since at least 2007 through to a minimum of mid-2011. This information is based on us.army.mil article searches including the name “Daniel Love.”
At the same time, Special Agent Daniel Love of the BLM was involved in a somewhat controversial incident in Utah that resulted in the suicide of a suspected artifact thief back in 2009. Given these two elements, the likelihood that Sgt. Daniel Love of 7th SFG was moonlighting in Utah as a federal agent borders a few notches beyond the absurd.
All that said, there is a possibility that Sergeant Love of 7th SFG could have separated from active duty to join one of the National Guard Special Forces units with the intention to attend Selection and the Qualification Course. At a minimum, he could have completed this around early 2013, if he got out in 2011 and went directly to Selection, and graduated the Qualification course without any recycles. Graduating without recycling is not unlikely, but going from PAO to National Guard Special Forces soldier to high-ranking federal agent in a mere two years is ridiculously unlikely.
In summation, my bullshit meter has pegged out and I’m 100% convinced that the 7th SFG Daniel Love is NOT the same Daniel Love of the Bundy Ranch circus in Nevada.
Is it possible that the ACTUAL Special Agent Daniel Love graduated the Special Forces Qualification Course in the past? Certainly. I am working on this with the author of the original article and with my sources in the Special Forces community in order to confirm or deny the status of this individual.
If I were a betting man, which I’m not unless it involves no-limit hold ‘em, I would place my bets on this guy just being some dude who managed to piss off half of the country because he never learned the same lessons that all team guys learn going through Robin Sage and deploying to other countries.
Stay tuned to SOFREP for updates on this matter!
(Featured Image Courtesy: The Salt Lake Tribune)
Blake Miles is a former Army Special Forces soldier who spent time at 1st Special Forces Group and 20th Special Forces Group between 2004 and 2008. He is currently the Director of Communications and Social Media for the Green Beret Foundation, a non-profit charity focused on supporting wounded and killed Special Forces soldiers and their families. Blake is currently pursuing a bachelors degree in Marketing. Twitter: @bmiles84
Read more: http://sofrep.com/34874/objection-blm-agent-special-forces/#ixzz30CCL4Qhm
Ok, my question is WHY does BLM have “special agents”? THEY’RE A LAND AGENCY, not some Law Enforcement Agency!
That’s like saying, I’m a “special agent” for a car insurance company. WTF? Are you gonna start arming car insurance companies now, too?
What? Just because it has “bureau” attached to its name, it grants itself the right to call everyone that works for them, “SPECIAL”?
Yea, they’re “special” all right. So special that only mentally sick, psychotic individuals would work for them.
or a sandwich artist at subway. lol
You could say I’m a “special agent” for a certain property owners association I do office work for… Like the term “collateral damage,” the term “special agent” conveys a definitely twisted meaning in a country that is doing all it can to destroy the English language (which also includes a certain blogger that gets posted here every now and then…his grammar is atrocious and he’s proud of it…isn’t one of the regulars though…)
Yep, like using the term, “Lockdown” and twisting the meaning of the it when something is NOT a lockdown.
What an arrogant, wormy, son-of-a-bitch. So typical of some scumbag federal asshats. I’ve heard guys like this before from the feds. I think they train them this way. There is no way this is the same SF guy. He sounds like he used to be FBI or IRS with the level of arrogance he’s demonstrating.
Seriously, stop spamming. We get your point already.