After just a month on the job, Dave Cooper, president of the Navy SEAL Foundation, has been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation.
The action took place after U.S. News & World Report published an interview with Cooper on its website Nov. 14 that quotes him discussing SEAL missions, taking a swipe at the brass, and talking about a conflicted culture of secrecy and leaks that now surrounds high-profile operations.
Cooper, the top-ranking enlisted SEAL at Dam Neck Annex until his retirement last year, won't comment on his job status but will talk about the article, calling it "a gross misrepresentation of what I said."
U.S. News & World Report stands by its work. "The story is accurately reported," said Lucy Lyons, a spokeswoman for the digital publication. "We have no further comment."
The foundation, a nonprofit that assists SEALs and their families, isn't talking about what happened to Cooper. "It is not our policy to discuss personnel matters," Robin King, Cooper's boss, said in a statement.
Cooper was hired in October as part of a restructuring at the foundation, which is located on Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek. At the time, King called him "the perfect person to fill the role."
He came with unquestionable credibility - a 25-year career, dozens of dangerous deployments and a chest full of medals, including a Silver Star and six Bronze Stars. Cooper served as command master chief at Naval Special Warfare Development Group - the elite unit known to insiders as DEVGRU and to outsiders as SEAL Team 6, the name of its disbanded predecessor.
In an email exchange with The Virginian-Pilot, Cooper says he did the earlier interview as part of his new job's public relations responsibilities. He says the article was supposed to focus on the foundation - one of its public relations representatives sat beside him during the meeting - but the conversation wound up covering wider ground. He says he was told he'd have a chance to review and approve his quotes before publication, but that didn't happen.
"So I spoke casually and perhaps carelessly, or at least not as carefully as I should have, and certainly, at times, in jest," he said.
Cooper maintains that at least some of the remarks attributed to him "were not made by me at all."
The article quotes Cooper giving behind-the-scenes details that range from innocuous to more serious: Commandos did not barbecue before the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden's compound, as portrayed in the blockbuster, "Zero Dark Thirty"; leaks that exposed elements of the mission seemed inevitable, with too many people in the know, ready to breach the traditional code of silence.
Cooper did not dispute the article point by point, but he did take special exception to the way it characterized his reaction to "No Easy Day," a best-seller by Matt Bissonette, a former teammate who participated in the bin Laden raid. The article indicated that many in the SEAL community, including Cooper, don't condemn Bissonette for the tell-all because he merely beat senior officers to the punch.
"I flatly rejected Matt Bissonette's book," Cooper told The Pilot.
He blames the book, written under the pseudonym Mark Owen, for a deadly suicide attack on a special operations base in Afghanistan after the base was described in one of its chapters. The SEAL foundation turned down Bissonette's offer to funnel book profits its way.
Cooper says the past week has taught him a thing or two. When it comes to missions, even small revelations are "far sexier, far more sensational perhaps, than stories about the hardships our force faces and the purpose of the Navy SEAL Foundation."
Still, he says: "I'm always keen to point out that as leaders, we should not shy from our mistakes but learn from them, if not to improve ourselves, then the team. I own much of this article in that I was simply too glib, perhaps even too arrogant."
If the story costs his job, Cooper says, "that's fine."
The foundation will carry on and he will too, helping the cause "in whatever way I can."
