{"id":29957,"date":"2026-03-21T17:55:42","date_gmt":"2026-03-21T17:55:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/29957\/"},"modified":"2026-03-21T17:55:42","modified_gmt":"2026-03-21T17:55:42","slug":"in-his-resignation-letter-joe-kent-spoke-about-the-death-of-his-wife","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/29957\/","title":{"rendered":"In His Resignation Letter, Joe Kent Spoke About the Death of His Wife"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his resignation letter on Tuesday, Joe Kent, a top counterterrorism official, criticized the U.S.-Israeli war<\/a> against Iran. But he also mentioned his \u201cbeloved wife,\u201d a Navy linguist who was killed in a suicide bombing in Syria in January 2019.<\/p>\n

Chief Petty Officer Shannon Kent was 35.<\/p>\n

Chief Kent was assigned to Cryptologic Warfare Activity 66, a Navy unit that supports the National Security Agency and military special operations forces. She was supporting the latter at the time of her death.<\/p>\n

Mr. Kent, himself a retired Army special forces officer, recounted meeting his wife in a podcast interview<\/a> last year.<\/p>\n

They met \u201cfor 10 minutes in 2007,\u201d he recounted. \u201cI actually met her at the Baghdad \u2018ville,\u2019 the area where all the different intelligence agencies are.\u201d<\/p>\n

She was giving a targeting brief on \u201can Iranian militant.\u201d Mr. Kent said he chatted with her for five or 10 minutes and wanted to talk with her more, but they both had to get back to their jobs.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe war moved fast, and she moved on to a different location,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I didn\u2019t see her again for several years.\u201d<\/p>\n

She was a native New Yorker, he said, and joined the Navy after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. With a gift for languages \u2014 self-taught in Spanish and French, Mr. Kent said \u2014 she was sent to Monterey, Calif., to learn Iraqi-dialect Arabic.<\/p>\n

She soon found herself working with a SEAL task force, and tried out for a special reconnaissance team.<\/p>\n

In 2013, both found themselves going through a yearlong training course for a unit Mr. Kent would not name, saying it is \u201cstill one of the few units that not a lot is known about.\u201d<\/p>\n

She was also qualified in human intelligence operations, which involves recruiting and paying sources to act as spies on behalf of the United States.<\/p>\n

Her ability to speak Arabic in the Iraqi dialect made her invaluable to special operations missions, he said, because as a woman she could more easily speak with Iraqi women and find out what they knew about insurgent operations.<\/p>\n

After reconnecting on the first day of the selection course for that classified intelligence-collecting unit, Mr. Kent said that \u201cfrom that moment on, we were pretty much inseparable.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think we fell in love pretty quick,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

The two married after they completed their yearlong training course. She was stationed at Fort Meade in Maryland while Mr. Kent was working in the Washington, D.C., area. After the birth of their children, he said, the family relocated near Annapolis.<\/p>\n

Her first deployment after having children took her to Syria in late 2018, Mr. Kent said.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe was still working at the N.S.A., so she was still doing pretty vital stuff for the country,\u201d Mr. Kent said. \u201cBut she was the one staying at home up until her final deployment.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Jan. 16, 2019, Chief Kent was meeting with a source at a restaurant in Manbij, Syria, when a suicide bomber killed her and three other Americans<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Chief Kent was posthumously promoted<\/a> to senior chief.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe should have been out of Syria because Trump gave the order to get those guys out of there,\u201d Mr. Kent said on the \u201cShawn Ryan Show\u201d podcast. \u201cAnd then you have the administrative state dragging their heels and desperately trying to keep us in these conflicts.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his resignation letter, Mr. Kent cited what he said was Israel\u2019s influence over the Trump administration\u2019s policies. Some lawmakers called Mr. Kent\u2019s remarks on Israel antisemitic, and critics mentioned his support for conspiracy theories.<\/p>\n

Mr. Kent wrote that he \u201ccannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,\u201d adding, \u201cI cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

Early in her career, Chief Kent\u2019s language skills and easy manner had made her good at \u201ctactical questioning\u201d of people during missions. \u201cThat was her foot in the door,\u201d Mr. Kent said in an interview<\/a> shortly after her death.<\/p>\n

\u201cBack then I don\u2019t think SEALs were enthusiastic about talking to locals, and Shannon found a place where she could be of value, and she poured her heart and soul into it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In his resignation letter on Tuesday, Joe Kent, a top counterterrorism official, criticized the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":29958,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[34,14109,14108,14107,14111,14110,95,7582,7138],"class_list":{"0":"post-29957","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-syria","8":"tag-iran","9":"tag-joe-1980","10":"tag-kent","11":"tag-letters","12":"tag-national-security-agency","13":"tag-shannon-m","14":"tag-syria","15":"tag-united-states-defense-and-military-forces","16":"tag-united-states-navy"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116268454568281457","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29957"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29957\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29958"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}