Navy SEAL who wrote bestseller about Bin Laden raid forced to pay back £5m
Matt Bissonnette, who wrote the book No Easy Day under the pseudonym Mark Owen in 2012, will have four years to pay back the bulk of his royalties
AN ex-Navy SEAL who wrote a bestselling book about the killing Osama Bin Laden is being forced to pay more than £5 million for breaching non-disclosure agreements.
Matt Bissonnette was being sued by the US government but the case was dropped after he agreed to hand over his earnings from the book, his lawyer confirmed.
Bissonnette, who wrote the book No Easy Day under the pseudonym Mark Owen in 2012, will have four years to pay back the bulk of his royalties.
Additionally he has been given 30 days to pay back £76,000 from earnings he made from presentations using slides which were not government approved.
The payments were outlined in settlement documents filed in U.S. District Court in Virginia.
Department of Justice spokesperson Nicole Navas said in a statement: "Mr Bissonnette has agreed to pay the United States all of his past and future proceeds from the publication of 'No Easy Day.'"
Bissonnette's book sparked a US Justice Department probe amid claims the publication contained classified information.
During his time as a Navy SEAL he had signed a number of non-disclosure agreements as he had taken part in several highly secret operations.
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Under the agreement, Bissonnette said he would accept that he made a mistake by failing to submit the book for pre-publication review.
In exchange for the payments, the U.S. government has dismissed other liability claims and Ms Navas added that the agreement in no way discredited Bissonnette's military service.
Speaking to the Daily Beast the ex-SEAL said: "After the initial accusations of me leaking all that classified stuff... they found nothing.
"They were just upset with me and wanted to get me one way or another.
"For four years, they looked into every little thing. Now... one signature and it all goes away."
The US government had been accused of a double standard for targeting Bissonnette after US officials described the Bin Laden raid in great detail to Mark Boal, the screenwriter for "Zero Dark Thirty," directed by Kathryn Bigelow.
SEALs and other commando units are shrouded in secrecy and, traditionally at least, the special operators have frowned upon talking publicly about past missions.
Bissonnette has written a follow-up — also under the name Owen — detailing his journey as a member of SEAL Team Six. That book, “No Hero: the Evolution of a Navy SEAL,” did go through the proper channels and a few sections were redacted.
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