Frederick Forsyth says U.S. Government sponsored “Kill Lists” are real. He’s right.
Forsyth’s new thriller THE KILL LIST features an agency described this way in the book’s promotional materials: “In 
Virginia, there is an agency bearing the bland name of Technical Operations Support Activity, or TOSA. Its one mission is to track, find, and kill those so dangerous to the United States that they are on a short document known as the Kill List. TOSA actually exists. So does the Kill List.”
The novel is obviously fiction. But the story it tells is very close to the truth. I know this from personal experience.
Loose-Lipped Assassins
I once worked for another organization in Virginia with the innocuous name Management Logistics International, or 
MLI. After receiving our Top Secret security clearances, we traveled to foreign countries with Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) teams to conduct “crisis management training exercises.” But the JSOC guys would always disappear for a few days ….
We never knew officially what our JSOC team mates did between the time when they infiltrated and exfiltrated with us under diplomatic cover. But over the course of time, during hours of late night boozing in sleazy bars and clubs from Kingston to Quito, those tough Green Berets and Navy SEALs dropped some pretty broad hints. And it’s clear to me that their mission was pretty much the same as the TOSA described in Forsyth’s novel, which in reality does classified airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions for JSOC. However, the kind of operations detailed in THE KILL LIST are actually performed by one of the most secret units in the war against terrorism, so highly classified that it is known simply as “The Activity.”
The line between fact and fiction is often indistinguishable. The more unlikely, sometimes – the more likely to be true.
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