From ISIS to elephants: the tale of a unique anti-poaching force

Lt. Col. Faye Cuevas says the two decades she spent fighting terror networks was the perfect preparation for her current job: saving elephants in Kenya.

Intelligence missions, including the 2006 kidnapping of Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll, taught the US Air Force officer that classified intelligence is “only one piece of the puzzle.” She and other intelligence support officers learned to look for nontraditional clues when assessing the security of an area. It was in Africa, while working on a mission targeting the Lord’s Resistance Army, that she first started relying on the intuition of elephants. 

The presence of elephants, it turned out, was a surprisingly reliable indicator of an area’s safety. During migration, elephants follow paths etched in memory, but they adjust those routes to avoid areas that they sense may