Latest news with #mercenaries
New York Times
3 days ago
- Business
- New York Times
A Desperate Haiti Turns to Erik Prince, Trump Ally, in Fight Against Gangs
Erik Prince, a private military contractor and prominent supporter of President Trump, is working with Haiti's government to conduct lethal operations against gangs that are terrorizing the nation and threatening to take over its capital. Mr. Prince, the founder of Blackwater Worldwide, signed a contract to take on the criminal groups that have been killing civilians and seizing control of vast areas of territory, according to senior Haitian and American government officials and several other security experts familiar with Mr. Prince's work in Haiti. Haiti's government has hired American contractors, including Mr. Prince, in recent months to work on a secret task force to deploy drones meant to kill gang members, security experts said. Mr. Prince's team has been operating the drones since March, but the authorities have yet to announce the death or capture of a single high-value target. Security experts said Mr. Prince has also been scouting Haitian American military veterans to hire to send to Port-au-Prince and is expected to send up to 150 mercenaries to Haiti over the summer. He recently shipped a large cache of weapons to the country, two experts said. The Haitian government is awaiting the arrival of arms shipments and more personnel to step up its fight against the gangs. American officials said they were aware of Mr. Prince's work with Haiti's government. But the full terms of the Haitian government's arrangement with Mr. Prince, including how much it is paying him, are unknown. This article is based on interviews with a dozen people who follow Haiti closely. All but one spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss sensitive security matters publicly. The State Department, which has provided millions of dollars in funding to equip and train Haiti's National Police, said it is not paying Mr. Prince or his company for any work in Haiti. Mr. Prince declined to comment for this article. Blackwater no longer exists, but Mr. Prince owns other private military entities. The involvement of civilian contractors like Mr. Prince, a Trump donor who has a long and checkered history in the private security industry, marks a pivotal moment in Haiti. Its crisis has deepened since its last president was assassinated in 2021, and the government now appears willing to take desperate measures to secure control. Armed groups escalated the violence last year by uniting and taking over prisons, burning down police stations and attacking hospitals. About 1 million people have been forced to flee their homes and hundreds of thousands are living in shelters. Gangs have captured so much territory in recent months that U.N. officials have warned that the capital is in danger of falling under complete criminal control. The situation is dire enough that officials and civilians alike say they are eager for any overseas help, particularly after a $600 million international police mission started by the Biden administration and largely staffed by Kenyan police officers failed to receive adequate international personnel and money. With Haiti's undermanned and underequipped police force struggling to contain the gangs, the government is turning to private military contractors equipped with high-powered weapons, helicopters and sophisticated surveillance and attack drones to take on the well-armed gangs. At least one other American security company is working in Haiti, though details of its role are secret. Since drone attacks targeting gangs started in March, they have killed more than 200 people, according to Pierre Esperance, who runs a leading human rights organization in Port-au-Prince. After the U.S. occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq ended, security firms like those owned by Mr. Prince started seeing big streams of revenues dry up. Private military contractors are looking for new opportunities, and they see possibilities in Latin America. Before presidential elections in Ecuador this year, Mr. Prince toured the country with local police and promised to help security forces. The country has faced a wave of violence unleashed by gangs. Ecuadorean officials denied that they had signed any security deal with Mr. Prince. A person close to Mr. Prince said he hopes to expand the scope of his work in Haiti to include help with customs, transport, revenue collection and other government services that need to be restored for the country to stabilize. Rampant government corruption is a key reason Haiti's finances are in shambles. The Haitian prime minister's office and a presidential council, which was formed to run the country until presidential elections can be held, did not respond to several requests for comment. Mr. Prince, whose sister Betsy DeVos was Secretary of Education during Mr. Trump's first term, donated more than $250,000 to help elect Mr. Trump in 2016, according to campaign finance records. He was often cited as an informal 'adviser' to Mr. Trump's first transition to office, a description he denied. Days before Mr. Trump took office in 2017, the United Arab Emirates organized a meeting between Mr. Prince and a Russian close to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as part of an effort to set up a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and the incoming president, a meeting that later came under scrutiny. The House Intelligence Committee made a criminal referral to the Justice Department about Mr. Prince, saying he lied about the circumstances of the meeting, but no charges were ever filed. Mr. Prince has a decades-long history of military interventions overseas, some of which ended badly. Blackwater faced legal problems over its work for the U.S. military in places like Iraq, including an episode in 2007 in which its employees killed 17 civilians in Baghdad. (President Trump pardoned four Blackwater guards in 2020.) In 2011, Mr. Prince helped recruit and train an army of Colombian mercenaries for the United Arab Emirates to use in conflicts around the Middle East. In 2017, he proposed a plan to use contractors to take over Afghanistan. In 2020, The New York Times revealed that he had recruited former spies to help conservative activists infiltrate liberal groups in the United States. A year later, the United Nations accused him of violating an arms embargo in Libya, which he denied. 'My name has become click bait for people who like to weave conspiracy theories together,' Mr. Prince said in a 2021 interview with The Times. 'And if they throw my name in, it always attracts attention. And it's pretty damn sickening.' Haiti's experience with private military contractors goes back decades. When U.S. forces returned former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power in 1994 after he was ousted in a bloody military coup, he was accompanied by a private security team from the San Francisco-based Steele Foundation. In recent years, military contractors in Haiti have had a more tainted record. Colombian mercenaries hired by an American security firm were accused of taking part in the 2021 assassination of the last elected president, Jovenel Moïse. Rod Joseph, a Haitian American U.S. Army veteran who owns a Florida-based security officer training company, said he had been in talks with Mr. Prince to help supply personnel for his contract since late last year. Mr. Joseph, who trained Haitian police on the use of surveillance drones, said Mr. Prince gave him the impression that his plans were under the auspices of the U.S. government but then shifted to be directly under the purview of the Haitian government. He said Mr. Prince told him that he planned to send private soldiers from El Salvador to Haiti along with three helicopters to engage in attacks against the gangs. Mr. Joseph said he was uncomfortable with the idea of contractors working directly with the Haitian government, without any American oversight. 'We should be very worried, because if he's from the U.S. government, at least he can have the semblance of having to answer to Congress,' he said. 'If it's him, his contract, he doesn't owe anybody an explanation.' 'It's just another payday,' he added. Mr. Prince texted him a few days ago, Mr. Joseph said, seeking a list of Haitian American veterans to send to Haiti, but he declined to provide names unless Mr. Prince could provide more precise details of their mission and would allow Mr. Joseph to lead them. U.S. military contractors doing defense work overseas are required to obtain a license from the State Department, but those licenses are not public record. Mr. Prince has been trying to expand his portfolio and has traveled overseas in search of new business, said Sean McFate, a professor at the National Defense University and author of 'The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order.' Mr. Prince is viewed skeptically by other members of the private military industry, Mr. McFate said, because of his showy nature and the negative publicity he generates for a security industry that prides itself on a 'sense of professionalism.' 'It's always worth noting where Prince is going, because it's sort of a barometer of where he thinks Trump world might end up, and he wants to make a buck from it,' Mr. McFate said. But experts stress that Haitians are desperate for solutions — regardless of where they come from. 'The doors are open. All possibilities must be on the table,' Haiti's Minister of Economy and Finance, Alfred Métellus, told Le Nouvelliste, a Haitian newspaper, last month. 'We are looking for all Haitians, all foreigners who have expertise in this field and who want to support us, want to support the police and the army to unblock the situation.' Mr. Joseph said he worried that outsourcing the work of fighting gangs to private military contractors would not do anything to improve the skills of the Haitian police and military. 'When you do it this way, it's trouble,' he said. 'Every time you parachute knowledge in and parachute out, the locals will always be in need of that knowledge. If you don't have knowledge of security, you will just have a bunch of dead people.'
Japan Times
17-05-2025
- Politics
- Japan Times
Canberra slams Russian jailing of Australian who fought for Ukraine
Australia's government said Saturday it was "appalled" by a Russian-controlled court's 13-year penal colony sentence for an Australian man who was captured while fighting for Ukraine. Oscar Jenkins, a 33-year-old from Melbourne, was convicted of being a "mercenary in an armed conflict" by the court in Ukraine's Russian-occupied east Luhansk region, prosecutors said. The former biology teacher was ordered to serve his time in a "strict regime penal colony." "The Australian Government is appalled at the sham trial and 13-year sentence given to Australian man Oscar Jenkins," Foreign Minister Penny Wong said. The government has "made clear" to Moscow that Jenkins must be treated as a prisoner of war, as a serving member of the regular Ukraine army, she said in a statement. "Russia is obligated to treat him in accordance with international humanitarian law, including humane treatment," the foreign minister said. Australia had "serious concerns" for Jenkins, she said, and was working with partners including Ukraine and the International Committee of the Red Cross to press for his welfare and release. Russia and its eastern Ukrainian proxies consider foreigners traveling to fight in Ukraine as "mercenaries." This enables them to prosecute the fighters criminally, rather than treating them as captured prisoners of war with protections and rights under the Geneva Convention. Russia-installed prosecutors said Friday that Jenkins "took part in combat operations against Russian military personnel between March and December 2024." They posted a video showing Jenkins standing in a courtroom behind a glass cage, his hands behind his back and his expression despondent. Russian forces captured Jenkins in December 2024. That same month, he appeared in a video shared by a Russian military blogger showing him being roughly interrogated and slapped in the face. He was then believed to have been killed in captivity, until Russia confirmed he was alive. A later video showed him undergoing a medical examination, with his captors heard joking in the background that his blood pressure showed "he wasn't dead." Australia's government said it was providing consular support to Jenkins' family. Australia opposed the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, condemning it as illegal and immoral. Ties with Moscow had already been damaged by the July 2014 downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 by a Russian-made missile over eastern Ukraine, resulting in the deaths of 298 people aboard including 38 Australians.
Telegraph
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Death of the last maverick mercenary may herald something far worse for Africa
Simon Mann, the Old Etonian soldier of fortune who died last week at the age of 72, should have been the coda to the inglorious symphony of the white mercenary in Africa. So madcap, so incongruous was the 'Wonga Coup' he attempted to launch in Equatorial Guinea in 2004 that it seemed to belong to another era. Africa had moved on, old hands declared. Mann, poor fellow, had failed to read the winds of change. Yet far from being a holdover from the past, Mann has proved to be a harbinger of the present. Analysts reckon there are now more foreign mercenaries operating in Africa than ever before. The Russians, in the form of the Wagner Group, were the vanguard of the second wave, arriving in 2017. But others are following in ever greater numbers, Turks, Chinese and Romanians among them – perhaps soon even Americans, with Erik Prince, the founder of the infamous Blackwater mercenary group, reportedly offering Congo his services as part of a putative minerals deal with Donald Trump. Some are shadowy outfits, manned by ruthless racketeers, deployed to advance their states' geopolitical ambitions. Others lay claim to greater respectability. Blanching at the term 'mercenary', they call themselves private military contractors. Many play a vital role in protecting weak governments by training inexperienced national armies, guarding key installations and taking the lead in counterinsurgency operations against Islamist militants. Whatever their role, few of the new generation have the panache of the mercenaries of yesteryear who culminated with Mann. Their era began in the early Sixties, in the years when newly independent African states were struggling to find their feet. From Nigeria and Congo to Angola and the island states of the Indian Ocean, they were on hand – often with the blessing of Whitehall and the Quai d'Orsay – to support secessionist movements, prop up feeble governments or mount the occasional coup. Of Mann's forebears the two that most stand out were 'Mad Mike' Hoare, a stiff-lipped Anglo-Irishman and one-time accountant, and Bob Denard, the flamboyant Frenchman with whom he had an unspoken rivalry. Hoare, who bore a passing resemblance to Montgomery, led his motley fighters, the fabled Wild Geese, in defeating Congo's China-backed Simba rebels, who numbered Che Guevara in their ranks, and shoring up the breakaway province of Katanga. He and his 300 men recaptured Stanleyville, later to be renamed Kisangani, from the Simbas, freed 2,000 European hostages, most of them nuns and priests – and then dynamited the vaults of every bank in the city before drinking its taverns dry. It was a tale of derring-do worthy of Empire and made Hoare, who made his men attend church every Sunday, a hero on Fleet Street. Among those who lapped up his antics back home was the young Simon Mann, sitting in the back of a classroom plotting imaginary coups in his atlas. Hoare did much to romanticise the reputation of the white mercenary in black Africa. Yet the image belied a darker reality, too. Some of Hoare's men were German ex-Nazis who still wore the Iron Cross. Most had old-fashioned views on race. Hoare and his Wild Geese had no compunction about shedding blood, decorating their trucks with the heads of Simba warriors they had slain. Hoare, who died in 2020 at the age of 100, may have been a character but, if anything, Denard was even more swashbuckling. He had been in Katanga at the same time as Hoare, leading a unit called 'les affreux' ('the terrible ones'). He later changed sides, was shot in the head by a North Korean soldier, recovered under the care of a nurse and then married her. He reportedly had six other wives, some of them at the same time. After a failed attempt to seize power in Yemen and Benin, he turned his attention in 1977 to Comoros, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, launching the first of four coup attempts he made there. Leading just 50 men, equipped with sawn-off shotguns and two dozen cases of Dom Perignon champagne, he toppled the socialist president, who was shot dead 'while attempting to escape'. Denard effectively ran the country for the next decade as head of the presidential guard, a position he lost after the puppet president he installed was also shot mysteriously. Denard was acquitted of the killing but the mounting presidential body count did him no favours. Whatever their flaws, Mann grew up idolising such men. Like them, he would go on to find triumph and disaster on the world's poorest continent. He helped set up Executive Outcomes, which made a fortune protecting Angola's oil fields from rebel attack in the 1990s and was later involved with an offshoot, Sandline International, seeing action in diamond-rich Sierra Leone's civil war. But in an uncanny echo of his two heroes, Mann's mercenary career ended with a ludicrously injudicious coup attempt. In 1981, Hoare attempted to seize power in the Seychelles, flying economy into Victoria, the capital, with a group of mercenaries disguised as members of a beer appreciation society, The Ancient Order of Froth Blowers. Taking their cover too seriously, most of the men had overindulged on the flight. After starting a brawl in the arrivals hall, a customs officer found an AK-47 in one of their bags, prompting a gun battle that ended when Hoare and his men hijacked an Air India flight to get back to South Africa. The mercenaries drank all the champagne on board and were promptly arrested on arrival. In 1995, Denard's final attempt to take back power in Comoros similarly failed after he and his men drifted onto a beach in inflatable dinghies one moonless night only to find the French army waiting for them. Denard, who died in 2007, spent 10 months in a French prison, Mad Mike Hoare 33 months in a South African one. Mann, whose father and grandfather both captained England at cricket, did more time than both of them combined after a fantastical plot, allegedly concocted in 2004 in the hallowed surroundings of White's, the club in St James's, to overthrow Obiang Nguema, then, as now, the dictator of Equatorial Guinea. The conspiracy was ludicrously complicated, with Mann buying an old Boeing 727 to fly his mercenaries from South Africa to Equatorial Guinea, making a detour in Harare to pick up weapons. The plan was then to fly across the continent to meet an advance party already in Equatorial Guinea, storm the presidential palace and then install a little-known exile as the country's new leader. The problem for Mann was that the entire plot had been blown wide open even before his crew left South Africa. Mann and his team were promptly arrested on arrival in Zimbabwe, where he would serve four years before being transferred to complete a further 13 months in Equatorial Guinea's notorious Black Beach prison. Mann's outfit had neither the intelligence nor the infrastructure in place to succeed, notes Piers Pigou, a Johannesburg-based analyst who has long studied mercenary operations in Africa. 'It was a bit of a Heath Robinson operation,' he said. 'I think everyone was surprised that they ran such a leaky ship, which enabled the authorities in South Africa and therefore Zimbabwe and Equatorial Guinea to be prepared. I still look at that coup and wonder how on earth they think they could have succeeded.' Mann's failed coup seemed like a final hurrah for white mercenaries in Africa. It was certainly an anomaly. By the turn of the millennium, African economies were growing, democracy was on the rise and, though many countries remained chronically weak, conflict was on the wane. New breed of mercenary Alas, it was not to last. By 2017 a new breed of mercenary had begun to appear in Africa in the form of the Wagner Group, which offered armed services in exchange for access to natural resources – deals remarkably similar to the one Mann and his co-conspirators hoped to strike in Equatorial Guinea. Yevgeny Prigozhin, Wagner's founder, may have lacked the class of the those who ploughed the same furrows in earlier decades: he did not swill champagne like Denard or recite Shakespeare like Hoare. He did not even go to Eton. But, at least in some cases, Wagner was crudely effective. Hired by Faustin-Archange Touadera, the president of the Central African Republic, Wagner beat back the country's Islamist rebels, though it imposed a huge cost. To this day, the CAR remains virtually a Wagner colony, Mr Pigou says. Wagner was nominally dissolved following Prigozhin's death in a mysterious plane crash in 2023 weeks after he marched on Moscow in an attempted rebellion of his own. The outfit, now controlled more directly by the Russian state, continues to prop up half a dozen African governments, most of them military dictatorships, and has faced numerous accusations of perpetrating massacres and other abuses. Other state-linked mercenary outfits of varying quality have also appeared on the scene. Chinese private military groups operate in more than a dozen African states, mainly to protect China-run oil facilities, mines and infrastructure projects, guard logistics routes and protect Chinese nationals against the rising threat of kidnapping. Chinese mercenaries may be authorised by Beijing to carry and use weapons in Africa but, unlike Wagner, they do not directly prop up authoritarian regimes or intervene in internal politics. Other foreign groups are more overtly engaged in fighting. Last year, Sadat, a Turkish private military force with ties to the country's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, reportedly suffered casualties while engaging with Islamist insurgents in Niger. Sadat, which insists that it does not provide 'paramilitary or mercenary services', says its focus is on strategic consultancy, military training and protecting important economic facilities. Not all mercenary groups deliver on the bold promises they make. In 2022 the Congolese government hired 1,000 predominantly Romanian mercenaries, who became known as 'the Romeos', to defend eastern cities against the country's M23 rebels. But when the rebels advanced on Goma and Bukavu, the two biggest cities in the east, in January, the Romeos cut and ran, abandoning their weapons and vehicles as they fled for the safety of the UN peacekeeping base. Both cities swiftly fell and the mercenaries eventually surrendered to M23. Not all mercenaries are shadowy outfits Not all mercenaries are as rapacious as Wagner or as hapless as the Romeos. Indeed, says Mr Pigou, some do a lot more good than harm. In 2019, Filipe Nyusi, then the president of Mozambique, originally looked to Wagner to fight an Islamist insurgency in the north. After the jihadists humiliated the Russians, killing scores, Mr Nyusi turned instead to a rather different beast, the Dyck Advisory Group (DAG), led by Lionel Dyck, a colonel who served in the Rhodesian army. Dyck, who died last year, broadly fits the definition of a mercenary but he always insisted that his group followed the highest international standards governing private military contractors. As a result, it helped prevent countries like Mozambique, with weak indigenous armies, from slipping into chaos and bloodshed. By training Mozambique's police, it also strengthened the country's ability to defend itself in the future, he argued. While DAG has faced criticism in the past, including of carrying out attacks on civilians which it denies, it is a reminder, cautions Mr Pigou, that blanket, knee-jerk condemnation of mercenary activities in Africa is counterproductive. 'There's a cookie-cutter demonisation of the bloodthirsty white mercenary,' he said. 'There are elements of truth in this, but these narratives are predicated on cartoon characters that don't reflect the realities on the ground. 'They miss the kind of sober cost-benefit analysis of what they guys are able to achieve.'
New York Times
13-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Putin's Shadow Armies Have Set Their Sights Beyond Ukraine
When Russian troops attacked Ukraine in February 2022, top figures in the Kremlin thought that the country would quickly collapse. They had not prepared for a long war and the inevitable toll in treasure and blood that breaks families and endangers governments. But when Ukraine's defenders put up a formidable resistance, it became clear that Russia was going to need help. In the years leading up to the full-scale invasion, the Russian president Vladimir Putin had come to rely on private militaries, especially Yevgeny Prigozhin's Wagner Group. Battalions of mercenary soldiers could be used as a scalpel to fulfill foreign policy goals in places like Sudan and Syria, where Russia had an interest in resources like gold or could count on political support from autocratic leaders. Prigozhin, who had spent time in a Soviet prison cell in the 1980s before becoming a restaurateur and one of the Kremlin's preferred caterers in the 2000s, sourced many of his soldiers from Russia's jails. Those who went to the front had in some sense already been taken away. When the body bags came back, Putin and his generals figured, they would not get flak. For a long time, Wagner attracted little notice, but, as the journalist John Lechner writes in 'Death Is Our Business,' an excellent new book on Russia's private militaries, Ukraine would thrust Prigozhin and his army into the spotlight. Less than a month after the invasion, the ex-con got to work, eventually deploying some 50,000 men with call signs like 'Zombie' to win battles against Ukrainian forces. 'Almost immediately,' Lechner observes, 'he and Wagner Group were everywhere.' The use of mercenaries helped to hide the brutality of war from many Russians, and seemed like a good deal for Wagner's armed contractors too. Prigozhin promised convict-soldiers freedom and a decent salary in return for six months at the front. In reality, a Ukrainian soldier tells Lechner, they were used as a swarm of human 'meat' against Ukrainian defenses. Wagner boasted the sledgehammer as its symbol, a rune that denoted Russian power. But the group also used it as a tool of execution against deserters, inadvertently showcasing the brittleness of a regime that had to use fear to motivate even its mercenary soldiers to stay in the fight. The system was fragile in more ways than one. When Prigozhin started to enjoy success in eastern Ukraine, Russian military commanders began to see him as a threat and tried to rein him in. Prigozhin, never one to be outdone, turned his troops on Moscow, culminating in an abortive assault on the capital and a negotiated retreat. Two months later, his private jet was blown from the sky above Russia. 'Death Is Our Business' is not the only new book to chart Prigozhin's meteoric rise and fall. 'Putin's Sledgehammer,' by the international affairs expert Candace Rondeaux, places his life story within a wider view of Russian history. Her detailed analysis shows how the country's restructuring under Putin provided fertile soil for Prigozhin to graduate from woman-strangling street thug to catering star and mercenary prodigy. In the mess of gangsterism and 'shock therapy' capitalism that followed the fall of the Soviet Union, Prigozhin made a name for himself as a hot dog peddler. By the 2000s, he had nurtured ties with Putin and graduated to serving fine food to oligarchs and heads of state, including, in 2006, President George W. Bush. ('I survived,' Bush recently recalled.) In 2014, the year Putin's forces took Ukraine's Crimean peninsula and pro-Russian militias established breakaway states in eastern Ukraine, Prigozhin partnered with Dmitri 'Wagner' Utkin. (How they met is unclear, though Rondeaux floats connections made by Russia's military intelligence, where Utkin served.) They were an unlikely pair: Prigozhin had a Jewish father and Utkin was a neo-Nazi with an SS tattoo. The ex-con was looking to assist the separatist rebels across the border as a way of brown-nosing Putin, and Putin's generals were eager to use the new company to carry out arm's-length operations. Where Rondeaux offers broad analysis, Lechner blends beautiful first-person writing with granular reporting. An enviably talented linguist — he speaks Russian and Chechen as well as Sango, the lingua franca of the Central African Republic — the author interviewed more than 30 Wagner fighters and associates, as well as people who fought with and against the group across war zones in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. 'The bullets fly by so fast,' one Wagner soldier tells him near Bakhmut, 'you don't have a chance to lift your head.' Lechner's book is particularly good at focusing on the way Wagner became embroiled in foreign wars after the conflict in eastern Ukraine died down. It was in Syria, fighting with the forces of President Bashar al-Assad, that Prigozhin's men first filmed the sledgehammer execution of a Syrian deserter. The only time Wagner fighters engaged U.S. forces head-on, they suffered a humiliating defeat. In early 2018, a Wagner unit attempted a strike on a gas facility in Syria guarded by American and Kurdish soldiers and was almost wiped out. Prigozhin would blame Russian military command for not passing on warnings, but the fault just as likely lay inward; his outfit was as venal and shot through with corruption as his master's regime. Prigozhin was 'mercurial,' Lechner explains. 'The most successful in his orbit tended, over time, to be sycophants.' Western complacency, meanwhile, stoked Russian imperial ambition. Though rich in resources, Rondeaux notes, Russia still relies on the rest of the world to fuel its war machine. Wagner's operations in Africa burgeoned around the same time as their Syrian operation. In 2016, the French president François Hollande 'semi-jokingly' suggested that the Central African Republic's president go to the Russians for help putting down rebel groups. 'We actually used Hollande's statement,' Dmitri Syty, one of the brains behind Wagner's operation there, tells Lechner. 'Death Is Our Business' provides powerful descriptions of the lives that were upended by the mercenary deployments. Wagner is accused of massacring hundreds of civilians in Mali in 2022, and of carrying out mass killings alongside local militias in the Central African Republic. 'Their behavior mirrored the armed groups they ousted,' Lechner writes. As a Central African civil society activist whispers to Lechner, 'Russia is no different' from the sub-Saharan country's former colonial power, France. Both books are particularly interesting when they turn their focus toward Europe and the United States. In Rondeaux's words, the trans-Atlantic alliance does not 'have a game plan for countering Russia's growing influence across Africa.' Lechner, who was detained while reporting his book by officials from Mali's pro-Russian government, is even more critical. He notes that, whatever Wagner produced profit-wise, the sum would have 'paled in comparison to the $1 billion the E.U. paid Russia each month for oil and gas.' And, while Wagner was an effective boogeyman, mercenaries of all stripes have proliferated across the map of this century's conflicts, from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Yemen. 'The West was happy to leverage Wagner as shorthand for all the evils of a war economy,' Lechner writes. 'But the reality is that the world is filled with Prigozhins.' Lechner is right. When Wagner fell, others rose in its stead, although they were kept on a tighter leash by Russian military intelligence. In Ukraine, prisoners are still being used in combat and Russia maintains a tight lid on its casualty figures. Even if the war in Ukraine ends soon, as President Trump has promised, Moscow's mercenaries will still be at work dividing their African cake. Prigozhin may be dead, but his hammer is still a tool: It doesn't matter if he's around to swing it or not.
Daily Mail
10-05-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
The one subject I didn't dare raise with Simon Mann as we sat in his hellish African prison? That the despot he'd tried to overthrow was intent on eating his testicles! IAN GALLAGHER recalls his bizarre encounter with the roguish Old Etonian
When I first met Simon Mann he was inching across a dusty prison yard in leg irons and handcuffs. Not that his tortuous shuffle was due entirely to his shackles. He moved deliberately slowly, he later told me, the better to savour every precious gulp of fresh air, lest any one of them might be his last. It was March 2008 and I had flown from London to interview Britain's most famous soldier of fortune – who died suddenly aged 72 on Friday – in Africa's most infamous jail, Black Beach. In those days, the prison, on the tropical volcanic island of Bioko off the coast of Equatorial Guinea, was even more of a hellhole than Devil's Island, home to the fictional Papillon. Torture was rife, malaria and yellow fever endemic, cell floors were slippery with rats and sewage, and guards thought nothing of keeping inmates starved for days. Nobody much fancied Mann's chances of getting out alive. Caught red-handed leading a band of mercenaries on a mission to overthrow the country's murderous dictator, President Teodoro Obiang, Mann had already spent four years in a maximum-security jail in Zimbabwe where he was put through a mock execution and threatened with being fed alive to crocodiles. Ghastly enough, you might think. But things then took a turn for the worse. After losing an extradition battle, Mann was spirited across Africa to oil-rich Equatorial Guinea, sandwiched between Cameroon and Gabon – and delivered straight into the hands of Obiang, a despot of reputedly cannibalistic tendencies. Word had spread that he was intent on eating the Old Etonian's testicles and dragging his naked body through the streets. I once put this claim to Obiang, incidentally, during an interview in his presidential palace as he sat, flanked by bodyguards, on a throne beneath an almost life-size portrait of himself. He shook his head. 'I'm not a cannibal, I'm a humanitarian,' he protested. I decided not to press the point. On that morning in Black Beach jail, though, it seemed uncharitable to burden Mann with thoughts of cannibalism. He had enough on his plate, so to speak. After enjoying the sunshine in the prison yard, he appeared in the doorway of an air-conditioned courtroom, part of the jail complex, where I waited with Mail on Sunday photographer Keith Waldegrave. We had expected a pitiful wreck, yet here he was, a little fragile, but all smiles and playing the gracious host, just as if he was welcoming us to Sunday lunch at Inchmery, his 20-acre estate on the banks of the River Beaulieu in Hampshire. 'Welcome, welcome – so good of you to come,' beamed the former SAS troop commander turned mercenary. Charming and witty, he would remain upbeat throughout our interview. Even so, it was hard to reconcile his appearance, almost donnish but for his shackles and grey prison uniform, with his dogs-of-war exploits in Sierra Leone and Angola which made headlines worldwide. This was the man, after all, who intended to land here, this steamy West African outpost, in swashbuckling style, leading nearly 70 mercenaries on a plane loaded with guns and ammunition – had he not been arrested, that is, in Harare on March 7, 2004, when the plot unravelled spectacularly. 'Where do you want me,' he asked cheerfully. Prison guards led their star inmate to a chair in front of the dock. Behind him President Obiang glowered from a framed photograph hanging on the wall. Dispensing with small talk, Mann pushed his specs to the top of his nose with his handcuffs and announced: 'I do want to talk to you about this, absolutely. I think things have gone beyond the stage of telling tales out of school.' And so his extraordinary story unspooled. His mission, he said, was to replace Obiang with Severo Moto Nsa, an Equatoguinean opposition leader living in Madrid. Equatorial Guinea has the third-largest oil reserves in sub-Saharan Africa, making it a valuable prize. Along with shady tycoons, others said to be part of the murky affair included the disgraced peer Jeffrey Archer, politicians at the heart of the then New Labour government and Lady Thatcher's son, Mark, who was later arrested. Mann told me Sir Mark Thatcher, whom he described as 'a very naughty boy', was at the heart of the plot, claiming he was obsessed with how best to exploit commercial interests in Equatorial Guinea after the takeover. Mann would get a generous cut too, of course. And he outlined the role of London-based Lebanese oil tycoon Eli Calil, now dead, who counted British politicians including Peter Mandelson among his circle of influential friends. Calil and Sir Mark Thatcher, said Mann, 'have let me down very badly. It is these I feel most bitter about because of their intimate involvement in all this'. After his arrest in Zimbabwe Mann famously smuggled a letter to his wife from his Harare prison cell demanding 'a large splodge of wonga' from 'Smelly', 'Scratcher' and others to get him out. 'Smelly is Eli Calil,' confirmed Mann. 'It is the name my wife gave him. She is very good at assigning names to people. And yes, Thatcher was known as Scratcher.' But the 'wonga' was not forthcoming and, four years on, Mann's fury was still raw as he spoke that day. 'When you are on an expedition and get stuck half way up a mountain you don't expect the others on the expedition to take down their tents, roll up their sleeping bags and go back to London,' said Mann. 'That has made me fantastically angry. Those two should be here in shackles as well.' But while he spoke expansively about the coup plot, he clouded when it came to matters personal. Anxious not to upset his hosts, he made light of the conditions he endured and said he was being treated quite well. Even being denied access to the exercise yard was a source of mirth. 'It's OK,' he said, and getting up to move across the room, laughed: 'I just walk up and down my cell like this. No problem.' It was stiff-upper-lip in excelsis. Could we have expected anything less? The English public school system and his military training had taught Mann, a scion of the Watney Mann brewing family, all about resilience. But how did he stop himself going insane? Or losing hope? 'Ah, that's the secret,' he said wistfully. 'I've got seven children in England and I miss them desperately.' His wife had not visited, neither in Equatorial Guinea nor during his incarceration in Zimbabwe. 'I don't want her to, and have told her that. I don't want her to see me this way.' It was at this point in our interview that the minister of national security, Manuel Nguema Mba, who was observing from the back of the courtroom, decided it was time Mann was returned to his cell. 'The minister has much to do today,' said an aide. 'He is very busy at the moment.' Just how busy became clear later in the day when it emerged that police had apparently foiled another possible coup. A car shipped from Spain had been intercepted containing hidden guns and ammunition. It served as a reminder that covetous eyes were always focused on the former Spanish colony, dismissed on the world stage as an 'insignificant' microstate before the discovery of two vast oil fields transformed its fortunes. It was impossible not to feel desperately sorry for Mann, at heart a romantic adventurer, as he was led back to his life of solitary confinement. A few months later he was jailed for 34 years. Some cast Mann as a Wodehousian figure, a bumbling Bertie Wooster. But he was much smarter than that and managed to convince the Obiang regime that he could help snare the two men that they wanted to throw into Black Beach above all others – Thatcher and Calil. After only 15 months Mann was pardoned by the dictator he had tried to overthrow and returned to his family in England, where he was introduced to his infant son, Arthur, who had been born while he was in prison in Zimbabwe. Officially, the Equatorial Guinea regime freed Mann on compassionate grounds because of his need for medical treatment. Many observers felt the early release had been Mann's reward for his willingness to identify traitors inside the country who were in on the coup. I saw him again a year or so later at a party in London. Once again he laughed and joked about his ordeal. We spoke a few times afterwards, once when he sought advice on becoming a newspaper foreign correspondent. Clearly his experience had not dented his appetite for adventure. Yesterday I spoke to Jim Nally, writer and film director who assisted Mann with his memoirs. He said he tried 'every trick in the book' to get Mann to 'open up'. 'I felt that discussing his homecoming might help. He kept putting it off. He didn't want to 'do this' at home. We finally agreed to meet in the office of an old friend. 'We were led to an office with a large leather couch. It was the first time we hadn't sat at a table. Notebook, pen and tape recorder primed, I asked him to start with his journey back to the UK. He broke down. I've never seen a man weep for 90 minutes before. 'Head between knees, body convulsing with raw grief, he kept apologising. And asking if 'the chaps outside' could see. I reassured him that there were no other witnesses. 'Simon could justify everything except what his time away did to his wife and children. He swore me to secrecy about what happened that day – but deep down I think he'd want them to know.'
