Was an "intel dispatch" released to the public that told of a U.S. military special operation in which U.S. Navy SEALs boarded the cargo ship Ever Given? And did this mission discover heavy weapons as well as 1,366 dead and 1,245 people alive in the ship's cargo? No, that's not true: These claims come through a YouTube channel and from other conspiracy peddlers with no source given. There is no publicly available evidence that a military special operation like this has taken place. The narrator of a video -- Scott McKay, known as "Patriot Streetfighter" -- claims that this purported "intel dispatch" from a purported "Colonel S.J.D." was for immediate public release -- yet the information in the release, read from his phone, is confined to McKay's vlogging channels. Searches for specific details of this dispatch "for immediate public release" do not yield any public results.
The video is posted on several video hosting platforms and channels. The original is over an hour long, some posted versions only include the seven-minute segment about the ship Ever Given. One post (archived here) was published on Facebook on April 4, 2021, by "Kanly TV." The video was titled, "4.4.21 PATRIOT STREETFIGHTER POST ELECTION UPDATE 70: EVERGREEN UPDATE, CHURCH LEADERS CONTROLLED". The post was also captioned to promote a Facebook group, "Join X22 Group: https://fb.com/4268990963129893."
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Mon Apr 5 16:59:57 2021 UTC)
The U.S. Department of Defense has a searchable newsroom where official Defense Department statements and announcements are made available to the public and press at the defense.gov website. A search of the releases do not yield any results for the words "Evergreen" or "Ever Given." The Defense Department does not rely on private citizens to relay sensitive "intel dispatches" to the American public through YouTube videos.
This fact check is focused only on the claims regarding the Ever Given, a cargo ship recently refloated March 29, 2021 after being stuck in the Suez Canal for almost a week. On the uncut version of this video, that section falls just after the 26-minute point. Below is a portion of the video transcript as spoken by Scott McKay, in which he appears to mix in some Wikipedia entries about Russian military units:
I'm going to actually read some of the intel that I got. So it's direct, and I will translate what I have to but here is more specifics that I got on Evergreen.
Subject: Seizure of enemy surface vessels and submarines... and then of course also, that it's translated into... There's also sometimes it'll be part of it English, some might be a different language. It could be Sanskrit, it could be Russian, it could be -- it could be a lot of different things, and there's a reason why it's written that way, but basically there are these there are hijackings of these ships and submarines going on by the good guys.
Lead Stories chose the phrase "Seizure of enemy surface vessels and submarines" as a key phrase to try to locate the source of this 'intel dispatch.' A search of both DuckDuckGo and Google finds the only place where this exact chain of words exists online is the Wikipedia entry (and copies of that entry) for "Vympel," a Russian KGB special forces group mentioned in the purported dispatch. In the Wikipedia entry, immediately following this key phrase -- and just as McKay describes -- a Russian translation follows. The bullet-point list in the Wikipedia article, as footnoted, was derived from a Russian language paragraph in a 2011 ria.ru article about Vympel.
(Source: Wikipedia screenshot taken on Mon Apr 5 19:50:01 2021 UTC)
The narration continues, and again the text of the Wikipedia article on Vympel seems to have played a role in the terminology for the purported Russian special forces element of this boarding mission. From the narration:
Now here's what I got:
Notification was received, and it says: Commanding Officer Colonel S.J.D. authorizes team's mission statement release. So this was now authorized to release it - I'm bringing it to you.
Number Two -- Interdiction Mission -Operation Evergreen and joint special operation command action
Three -- Active Boarding Teams Given. So on these teams that were -- and this is obviously a joint operation -- U.S Navy SEALs DEVGRU -- of course you guys know what DEVGRU is, SEALs. Spetsgruppa 'A' -- and that appears to be Russian special operators director at 'A' of the FSB Special Purpose Center again that's their, I guess you'd call it their new KGB -- let's see, Spetsgruppa 'V' Team / KGB directorate 'V' or five vega group then the ... the next one the subset of the active boarding teams is our protection team and I'm gonna leave the number out because I don't know, when I say, when it says our protection team -- this is Overwatch. So I guess at some level it'll tell you who these people are to a degree and what they're capable of in terms of these types of operations. So our protection team 'xyz' infiltrated Evergreen already aboard coordinated strike interdiction mission so here's what it means:
Boarding Given: Boarding cranes were used. Access to Evergreen was given. Uploading completed.
Human intelligence:
Dead on arrival: Thirteen hundred and 66 souls
Alive on arrival: Twelve hundred and 45Therefore by the time they got there apparently there were thirteen hundred and 66 people that were dead on that ship.
Lead Stories found no search engine results for, "Interdiction Mission Operation Evergreen" or "Commanding Officer Colonel S.J.D." There are also no reports in print media or any other channels about special forces from the American or Russian military boarding the ship, or any reports of people, living or dead, discovered in the ship's cargo.
McKay's narrative includes mention of vaccines in the cargo, "heavy weapons" that were headed to 100 different drop-off points where they were to be used against the United States, Canada, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand. McKay also claimed there was some sort of "self destruct" nuclear weapon on the ship that did not detonate because "U.S. Space Force" jammed electronic signals to deactivate the nuclear weapon and run the ship aground. As with the details covered earlier, none of this is tied to any publicly available information or verified source.
