Latest news with #ErikPrince
Fox News
23-06-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Erik Prince On What Comes Next After 400,000+ LBs of U.S. Bombs Rock Iran
Story #1: Following a major bombing run on three of Iran's nuclear facilities that included B-2 bombers dropping 30,000 lb. bunker buster bombs, Will breaks down if America was successful in its' mission. Story #2: Erik Prince, Host of 'Off Leash with Erik Prince' and Founder of private military company Blackwater joins Will to delve further into what American strikes on Iran mean for America, Iran, and Israel moving forward. Have we opened ourselves up to attacks foreign and domestic? Story #3: The Thunder are NBA champions! Will and The Crew ask if their youth movement guarantees a future dynasty as Oklahoma City is loaded with talent and draft picks? Tell Will what you thought about this podcast by emailing WillCainShow@ Subscribe to Will Cain Country on YouTube here: Watch Will Cain Country! Follow Will on X: @WillCain Learn more about your ad choices. Visit
Irish Times
02-06-2025
- Business
- Irish Times
A desperate Haiti turns to Erik Prince, Trump ally, in fight against gangs
Erik Prince, a private military contractor and prominent supporter of US president Donald Trump , is working with Haiti 's government to conduct lethal operations against gangs that are terrorising the nation and threatening to take over its capital. 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 US government officials and several other security experts familiar with Prince's work in Haiti. Haiti's government has hired US contractors, including Prince, in recent months to work on a secret taskforce to deploy drones meant to kill gang members, security experts said. 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 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. READ MORE The Haitian government is awaiting the arrival of arms shipments and more personnel to step up its fight against the gangs. Erik Prince during the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland, US, in 2023. Photograph: Al Drago/Bloomberg US officials said they were aware of Prince's work with Haiti's government. But the full terms of the Haitian government's arrangement with 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 authorised to discuss sensitive security matters publicly. The US state department, which has provided millions of dollars in funding to equip and train Haiti's National Police, said it was not paying Prince or his company for any work in Haiti. Prince declined to comment for this article. Blackwater no longer exists, but Prince owns other private military entities. The involvement of civilian contractors such as Prince, a Trump donor who has a long and chequered 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 one 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 United Nations 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. Members of the Kenya Multinational Security Support Mission Force in Haiti arrive at their base after a patrol in Port-au-Prince last September. Photograph: Adriana Zehbrauskas/The New York Times 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 US 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 organisation in Port-au-Prince. After the US occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq ended, security firms such as those owned by 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, Prince toured the country with local police and promised to help security forces. The country has faced a wave of violence unleashed by gangs. Erik Prince arrives at a press conference after an anti-crime operation in Guayaquil, Ecuador, in April 2025. Photograph: Gerardo Menoscal/AFP via Getty Images Ecuadorean officials denied that they had signed any security deal with Prince. A person close to 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 stabilise. Rampant government corruption is a key reason Haiti's finances are in a 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. Prince, whose sister Betsy DeVos was secretary of education during Trump's first term, donated more than $250,000 to help elect Trump in 2016, according to campaign finance records. He was often cited as an informal 'adviser' to Trump's first transition to office, a description he denied. [ Haiti paid France a costly ransom for independence. Some say it must be paid back Opens in new window ] Days before Trump took office in 2017, the United Arab Emirates organised a meeting between Prince and a Russian close to President Vladimir Putin of Russia as part of an effort to set up a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and the incoming US president, a meeting that later came under scrutiny. The House of Representatives intelligence committee made a criminal referral to the justice department about Prince, saying he had lied about the circumstances of the meeting, but no charges were ever filed. Prince has a decades-long history of military interventions overseas, some of which ended badly. Blackwater faced legal problems over its work for the US military in places such as Iraq, including an episode in 2007 in which its employees killed 17 civilians in Baghdad. (Trump pardoned four Blackwater guards in 2020.) In 2011, 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 clickbait for people who like to weave conspiracy theories together,' Prince said in a 2021 interview with the New York 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 US 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 a US security firm were accused of taking part in the 2021 assassination of the last elected president, Jovenel Moïse. Rod Joseph, a Haitian-American US Army veteran who owns a Florida-based security officer training company, said he had been in talks with Prince to help supply personnel for his contract since late last year. People at Lycée Marie Jeanne, a school in the Lavaud neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, that was turned into a camp for people escaping violence, last September. Photograph: Adriana Zehbrauskas/The New York Times Joseph, who trained Haitian police on the use of surveillance drones, said Prince gave him the impression that his plans were under the auspices of the US government but then shifted to be directly under the purview of the Haitian government. He said 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. 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 US 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 pay-day,' he added. Prince had texted him a few days earlier, Joseph said, seeking a list of Haitian-American veterans to send to Haiti, but he declined to provide names unless Prince could provide more precise details of their mission and would allow Joseph to lead them. US military contractors doing defence work overseas are required to obtain a license from the state department, but those licenses are not public record. Prince has been trying to expand his portfolio and has travelled 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. Prince is viewed sceptically by other members of the private military industry, 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,' 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.' 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.' − This article originally appeared in The New York Times
Fox News
29-05-2025
- General
- Fox News
Blackwater founder Erik Prince teams with Haitian government to fight gang violence
Private military contractor Erik Prince, the former Navy SEAL and founder of Blackwater Worldwide, is working with the Haitian government to fight the gangs terrorizing the Caribbean nation. Prince's role will be to advise the Haitian government and its undermanned and underequipped police force on how to take on the street gangs amid record levels of violence in which thousands of people have been killed, injured and abducted. "That goes beyond just the security question and extends to restoring essential government services, but obviously everything is founded on restoring security," the source said. Armed groups have taken over prisons, hospitals and swaths of territory, forcing people to flee their homes. In April 2024, thousands fled the capital of Port-au-Prince for rural regions because of escalating gang violence there. The Pentagon deferred questions by Fox News Digital to the Haitian government, which has also been contacted by Fox News Digital. Fox News Digital also reached out to Prince. While Blackwater no longer exists, Prince owns various private military entities, the New York Times reported. The State Department told Fox News Digital that the United States is not involved in any private security contract negotiations regarding Haiti and that Prince is not being paid by the U.S. government. Prince has been speaking with the Haitian government on how to fight well-armed gangs like Viv Ansanm and Gran Grif, which have been designated by the State Department as foreign terrorist organizations, and restore security and stability, the source said. A special task force to take on the gangs has been set up. That group will lead the effort with support from international partners and experts. So far, the task force has used drones. "While it may be true that no leaders have been taken out yet, a significant number of senior gang members have been killed or wounded," the source said. "For the first time, the police are starting to put real pressure on them, and their capabilities are growing. So we hope to see an improvement of the situation over the coming months." The key is to do it in a way that is precise and mitigates risks to civilians, the source added. Security experts told the New York Times that Prince has also been scouting to hire Haitian-American military veterans to send to Port-au-Prince. He is expected to send up to 150 mercenaries to Haiti over the summer and recently shipped a large cache of weapons to the country, two experts told the newspaper. Military contractors in Haiti have a checkered history. In 2021, Colombian mercenaries hired by an American security firm were accused of taking part in the assassination of former President Jovenel Moïse. Rod Joseph, a Haitian-American Army veteran who owns a Florida-based security officer training company, told the New York Times that he had been in talks with Prince to help supply personnel for his contract since late last year.
New York Times
28-05-2025
- 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.'
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.'
