estonia
Map showing location of Estonia
A "secret" US Army Special Forces base has been operating in Estonia since 2014, an Estonian media reported after allegedly having access to the facility.

Although the presence of a NATO contingent in Estonia, a Baltic country on Russia's northwest border, was never a secret, the presence of US troops in an alleged secret base was apparently well-kept confidential information.

However, the "secret" of the site was uncovered by Estonian broadcaster ERR after one of its journalists simply analyzed the US Department of Defense's public records.

Local media have always tried to cover up the fact that Washington has a military base in the region by calling it "unspecified training facility and operations."

Report of the base

The network involuntarily denounced the "secrecy" of the site, as the US has never acknowledged military facilities in Estonia, where only UK NATO troops are officially deployed at the Tapa military base.

According to US Department of Defense documents, the $15.7 million allocated to the Estonian military base will be used to build a range of facilities, including barracks, weapons stores and a gun cleaning area.

After half a year of investigation, ERR journalists were able to enter the territory of this base, which supposedly accommodates a rotating US Special Forces regiment.

The base was established in 2014 after relations between neighboring Russia and the West began their downward spiral, according to US Army Colonel Kevin Stringer, quoted by the network.

Previous Reports

This is not the first time that "secret" American bases have been accidentally revealed to the public and their potential opponents by mere chance or lack of supervision.

In November 2017, a popular mobile fitness app called Strava published the map indicating the location of its most active users. To the surprise of many, some of the largest concentrations were not located in cities or sports centers, but in the middle of nowhere.

Since some of these clusters coincided with locations where there were US-based military bases, various media suggested that the app was being used by soldiers in their training sessions. Thus, many of the un-allocated concentrations could also belong to secret US bases.