The United
States has intelligence operations, often run through the military,
throughout the African continent,
according to the Washington Post, which “pieced
together descriptions of the surveillance network by examining
references to it in unclassified military reports, U.S. government
contracting documents and
diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy
group. Further details were provided by interviews with American
and African officials, as well as military contractors.”

The operations are run largely out of African military bases and
small civilian airports, with refueling often occurring “on
isolated airstrips favored by African bush pilots, extending their
effective flight range by thousands of miles.” While some Predator
and Reaper drones are used (likely largely in Somalia), most of the
surveillance planes are manned and disguised as civilian aircraft,
and the Post reports a central hub of the operations in
Ougadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. America established its
presence there in 2007 for “medical evacuation and logistics
requirements.” Other bases are in Mauritania, Djibouti (where more
than 200 Marines are based for forward operations in the Middle
East), Uganda (where a hundred U.S. troops are hunting the war
criminal Joseph Kony), Ethiopia, Kenya and the Seychelles. The U.S.
hopes to expand its facilities there and open new ones
elsewhere.

The military admits to air strikes and raids
in Somalia (where the Islamist terror group al-Shabab briefly held
power in Mogadishu), but otherwise they say “they generally limit
their involvement to sharing intelligence with allied African
forces so they can attack terrorist camps on their own territory.”
A self-declared independent Islamist state in the north of Mali
that arose in the
wake of Western intervention in Libya, is one area of interest,
the growing threat of the Islamist terror group Boko Haram in
Nigeria another. The U.S. is interested in setting up a military
presence in South Sudan, too, to help hunt down Joseph Kony but
also to bring itself closer to the growing conflict between Sudan
and the recently independent South Sudan.

The Washington Post reports that “operations have
intensified in recent months, part of a growing shadow war against
al-Qaeda affiliates and other militant groups [on the continent]”,
and Army General Carter Ham, head of the U.S. Africa Command
(headquartered in Germany) told Congress the military wants to
expand its intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance operations
further on the continent. But, the Washington Post
warns:

The creeping U .S. military involvement in
long-simmering African conflicts, however, carries risks. Some
State Department officials have expressed reservations about the
militarization of U.S. foreign policy on the continent. They have
argued that most terrorist cells in Africa are pursuing local aims,
not global ones, and do not present a direct threat to the United
States.

Guerrilla groups on the African continent, generally, have
neither the means nor the desire to target the United States,
though enough intervention may change the desire and maybe even
eventually the means (still a lot of missing weapons
post-Libya)

The Post also relays the story of one private
contractor working for the U.S. in Africa being picked up by air
marshals on a Paris-to-Atlanta flight after saying he had dynamite
in his boots and laptop and “mumbling incoherently” about secret
operations in Africa. He was found not guilty by reason of
temporary insanity for the disruption.