Szymanski personified the Navy SEAL’s code of silence and moral drift after 9/11. Over two decades, the Navy kept promoting him despite battlefield decisions in Afghanistan that contributed to the deaths of a member of SEAL Team 6, an Air Force special operator, and five other American service members. The promotions seemingly overlooked Szymanski’s efforts to shield a SEAL Team 6 operator from repercussions for trying to behead a Taliban fighter; his protection and hiring of a senior enlisted SEAL after Team 6 blacklisted the operator for issuing orders to shoot unarmed Afghan men and for telling members of his unit that he wanted a Taliban “head on a platter”; and his aggressive politicking for the same SEAL to receive the nation’s highest military award, the Medal of Honor. Although Szymanski did not respond to my requests for comment, SEAL Team 6 and the larger Naval Special Warfare command defended his record by pointing out that all accusations of misconduct are investigated and that none of the allegations against Szymanski have ever been substantiated in an official, formal investigation.

But it is precisely this culture of impunity that has insulated Szymanski and other senior SEALs from accountability. Beyond all else, Szymanski built a career on loyalty to his fellow SEALs and protecting the military’s most famous brand. But if SEAL officers can cover up war crimes on their way to becoming admirals, why should any enlisted or lower-ranking SEAL officers follow the rules or adhere to the military’s most fundamental demand of its members, that they serve with good order and discipline?

After two decades of war with little accountability, the SEALs’ ship has run aground. War crimes, drug use, sexual assault on deployment, and homicide are just some of the charges against active-duty SEALs in recent years. In a span of two years, two SEAL Team 6 operators killed a Green Beret while deployed to Mali; a group of SEALs turned in their platoon chief, Eddie Gallagher, accusing him of an array of war crimes, including the stabbing death of an unarmed, injured Islamic State fighter; rampant drug use was discovered in an East Coast SEAL unit; and an entire SEAL platoon was sent home from a deployment to Iraq after military leaders learned that they’d been drinking excessively and one of operators was accused of sexual assault.

Gallagher’s case in particular became the public face of an internal culture war raging inside the SEALs. By the time Gallagher’s war crimes court-martial began, Naval Special Warfare Command’s lead officer, then-Rear Adm. Collin Green, wrote to his SEALs admitting that their community had “a problem.” Green left the command in 2020 after his efforts to hold Gallagher accountable were thwarted by former President Donald Trump.

One might argue that Szymanski’s retirement marked the end of a troubled period for the SEALs. His retirement will not, however, fix the problem Green highlighted when he noted: “We must now take a proactive approach to prevent the next breach of ethical and professional behavior in our formations, instead of continuing on our current consequence management approach.”

When Green stepped down as Naval Special Warfare commander, the Navy sought to replace him with an admiral who would clean up the SEAL teams, with a mandate from both the Navy’s civilian leadership and Congress. On September 11, 2020, Rear Adm. Hugh Wyman Howard III was sworn in as the new commanding officer for the 3,000-strong Navy SEALs.

In the years since he’d led SEAL Team 6 as a captain, Howard had served in the Pentagon, Joint Special Operations Command, and then a tour as the commanding officer of the Special Operations Command Central, which organizes special operations in the Middle East for the military’s Central Command. But as a Team 6 commander, Howard had a more dubious claim to fame: He had procured for his SEALs custom-made tomahawks, which some used to mutilate and desecrate enemy fighters killed on the battlefield. The two-star admiral — who had once shown off a bloodied hatchet after an operation and whose loyalty to the SEAL teams above all else had once led him to advise a peer to “protect the brand” at all costs — was given the task of holding the SEALs accountable. For SEALs old enough to have served during the height of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, Howard’s promotion to lead the elite unit was a clear case of the fox guarding the henhouse. His promotion, like those of Szymanski and Gallagher, suggested that the bad guys had already won the SEALs’ internal culture war.

The public has been given a different account of SEAL Team 6 and the larger Navy SEAL community. During a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last year, Howard testified that he had created an instruction program focused on preventing war crimes, an implicit acknowledgment of the SEALs’ troubling history. “It is a defining characteristic of our community that we value ownership and accountability for our actions,” Howard told senators. “We will be strong in character, strong in accountability, strong in moral and ethical foundations, and strong in leadership.” Howard’s efforts to fix the SEAL community’s problems also involved drastically reducing the size of the force and limiting the number of SEALs who serve overseas. The SEALs are “a team humble in triumph and fully accountable in failure,” Howard wrote to his command and then provided to a Washington Post columnist for a glowing paean to his leadership.

There is no moment more solemn in the life of a SEAL than when he receives his Trident. The American eagle pin, with its tripartite symbol, which combines an anchor, flintlock pistol, and trident, is affixed to the chest of each graduate of Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL school, known as BUD/S. It is worn only by those who have demonstrated the capacity to survive their training and operate at the highest level amid the most arduous conditions. Few designations are more coveted within the U.S. military. And few, if any, command as much respect.

For all the bravery of the Navy SEALs, they have shown a consistent lack of moral courage when it comes to facing the truth.

But the Trident embodies a contradiction central to the SEALs: We ask these men to do terrible things and to do so with the utmost honor. Like so many tasks assigned to the SEALs, this may seem impossible. But it is not. It requires exceptional men capable of exceptional courage — both physical and moral. Many of the SEALs I’ve spoken to in my decade reporting on the unit have demonstrated that. Unfortunately, the teams haven’t fulfilled this ideal. Instead, too many SEALs have taken an easier path, navigating this contradiction through lies, cover-ups, and silence. The Naval Special Warfare Command and SEAL Team 6 have enabled this — through willful blindness to misdeeds and the use of promotions and medals as a distraction, even for those whose conduct has been questioned by many of their peers.

The SEALs are not alone in this state of denial. The American public launders this uncomfortable truth through the hero myth of the SEAL. This mythology is perpetuated — and commodified — by the media, publishing, and Hollywood. We celebrate the SEALs’ acts of bravery and bask in their victories, but we fail to show the courage to confront the truth — and what it means for our nation each time the Trident is awarded to a new SEAL.

For all the bravery of the Navy SEALs, they have shown a consistent lack of moral courage when it comes to facing the truth. In the days and weeks after 9/11, the George W. Bush administration wrote a blank check for a military action that continues two decades later. In August 2021, President Joe Biden withdrew the last U.S. troops from Afghanistan, formally ending the war there 20 years after it began. But withdrawing the troops did not end American conflict abroad. Even as the Biden administration withdrew forces from Afghanistan, it made clear that it would shift some of those same resources to nearby countries so that the U.S. military could conduct “over-the-horizon” counterterrorism operations. “Our troops are not coming home,” Rep. Tom Malinowski, D-N.J., said at a congressional hearing shortly after the Afghanistan withdrawal. “We need to be honest about that. They are merely moving to other bases in the same region to conduct the same counterterrorism missions, including Afghanistan.”

The Afghanistan War represents only part of the endless war on terror. The political decision by the Bush administration to invade Iraq, topple Saddam Hussein’s regime, and occupy the country, for example, may represent America’s single worst foreign policy decision in its history. Each conflict generates the next. American forces will remain in Syria, Somalia, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Yemen, and the Philippines, where they will potentially be used to conduct lethal operations. The collective toll is not over. And for almost as long as these conflicts have been going on, we have been paying their price.

How do we weigh the SEALs’ mythic status against the corrupt and violent acts carried out — and covered up — by SEAL operators and leaders?

The American government has portrayed the SEALs as our mightiest warriors. The public has come to view them as the most heroic and brave among us. But the SEALs themselves, who have been marketed as the best of what the American military has to offer, know that they too are casualties of these conflicts. Some of their wounds occurred when bullets and bombs hit their bodies on battlefields. Many more lay deeper, developing night after night, deployment after deployment, year after year, when they were sent to kill those deemed America’s enemies. The psychological and physical tolls are significant. Nearly every operator who served in these wars exits the military with varying levels of measurable disability: hearing loss, brain injuries, scars, arthritis in their knees, back, and joints. Many more carry a kind of collective moral injury, a burden that all Americans must share.

Even those who have exploited their service for wealth and celebrity are conscious of these moral injuries. In 2014, after former SEAL Team 6 operator Robert O’Neill — who according to several former SEAL Team 6 members, including a former teammate on the raid, had publicly misrepresented himself as the man who killed Osama bin Laden — separated from the Navy and began a new public speaking career, he expressed concern for how his men would fare after finishing their service. “All of these guys have killed more people than any criminal in American history,” O’Neill once told me. “I worry about how they are going to handle getting out.”

No American service members have ever conducted as much war, in such a personal way, as those from SEAL Team 6 and the rest of the forces that make up special operations. There is no precedent in our history, and so we are collectively embarking on a journey whose destination is not clear. The indications so far are not promising.

How, then, do we weigh the SEALs’ mythic status against the corrupt and violent acts carried out — and covered up — by SEAL operators and leaders? There is oversight built into the structure of the Naval special forces and the military more broadly. The enlisted answer to officers; the officers answer to civilians; civilians answer to Congress; and Congress answers to American citizens. It is with ordinary American citizens, then, that the responsibility to hold the SEALs accountable ultimately rests.

There have been very few, if any, reform efforts, and the ones that may have happened have not been made public, a surprising outcome given all the books about leadership and character written by SEALs themselves. My reporting on SEALs has shown me just how entrenched the problems are, but I also know that change is possible, and what it might look like. The culture and code of silence and deceit can be eradicated, but it requires, ultimately, that the SEALs face what they already know to be true about what has occurred in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, and beyond, and those responsible admit that they betrayed their duty to their country.

One place to look for an accountability blueprint for addressing the SEALs’ transgressive code is in Australia. In November 2020, the Australian Defense Force released an inspector general’s report on alleged war crimes committed by Australia’s special forces in Afghanistan over 11 years, ending in 2016. The report detailed allegations of 39 unlawful killings as well as incidents of prisoner abuse. In most of the unjustified killings, the Afghan victim was unarmed, and most of the victims were in Australian custody when they were executed.

Nineteen Australian commandos were identified as being directly involved or complicit in war crimes. The report traced a culture of impunity, violations of the laws of war, and cover-ups. All the incidents involved the Special Air Service Regiment, the Australian equivalent of SEAL Team 6, or a sister special operations unit. The author, Maj. Gen. Paul Brereton, described one alleged war crime, which was redacted in the public version, as “possibly the most disgraceful episode in Australia’s military history.” The report was thorough and largely accepted as accurate by military brass and the public.

Nineteen Australian commandos were identified as being directly involved or complicit in war crimes.

The inquiry originated from a study conducted by a civilian sociologist, Dr. Samantha Crompvoets, who surveyed the Australian special forces community for the head of the command, Maj. Gen. Jeff Sengelman. Crompvoets looked at the sociology and cultural traits of special forces, conducting dozens of interviews with current and retired soldiers. In her study, the soldiers began to casually disclose witnessing or participating in war crimes, including murder and torture of detainees. After completing and submitting her report, Crompvoets shared what she’d heard in interviews with Sengelman, who was by then serving as the Australian army chief of staff. She understood that what she heard likely reflected just a small fraction of a larger problem. The inspector general’s report released in 2020 was the result of Crompvoets’s recommendation.

The Australian report placed responsibility for war crimes mainly with the enlisted soldiers at the tactical and battlefield level in the 2nd Commando Regiment, a special operations unit. But it also recognized that officers in Australia’s premier commando unit are too well trained not to understand how the unit’s ethos could end up creating a culture that enabled war crimes. The officers, the report said, “bear significant responsibility for contributing to the environment in which war crimes were committed, most notably those who embraced or fostered the ‘warrior culture’ and empowered, or did not restrain, the clique of noncommissioned officers who propagated it. That responsibility is to some extent shared by those who, in misconceived loyalty to their Regiment, or their mates, have not been prepared to ‘call out’ criminal conduct or, even to this day, decline to accept that it occurred in the face of incontrovertible evidence, or seek to offer obscure and unconvincing justifications and mitigations for it.”

The report recommended that the 19 commandos identified in the investigation, all of whom appeared to be enlisted, be referred for possible criminal prosecution for murder. In the fallout, 13 of the soldiers were issued notices that they were likely to be discharged. The report also recommended that the military revoke meritorious service awards that had been given at the conclusion of several of the deployments.

The report — and the fact that it was made public — were significant. News stories about some of the alleged war crimes also helped the public understand how broken their elite military commandos’ moral compasses had become. One video of an operation in Afghanistan showed an Australian soldier executing an unarmed and compliant Afghan man for no other reason than to kill. As shown in the video taken by a teammate on the mission, the shooting was an unambiguous murder.

There were few in Australia who defended the incident, but that didn’t equate to widespread support for the inspector general’s accountability recommendations. One of those recommendations was that unit be stripped of any collective military awards they’d received from any deployment during which war crimes were committed. The report did not suggest that most of the commandos, who had not behaved illegally or dishonorably, deserved to be punished along with those who did, but rather that the military could not in good conscience issue a unit an award for meritorious conduct when members of the unit had committed war crimes. Don’t punish the group for a few bad apples, the military and its public supporters argued in response. And in 2021, the Australian Defense Force rejected the recommendation.

Without Congress’s involvement, there is no chance of reform.

If replicated by the U.S. Department of Defense, a similar process would mean an independent investigation into Naval Special Warfare and SEAL Team 6, perhaps reporting the findings to congressional committees that oversee the military. Investigators would likely have to offer immunity to induce SEAL cooperation, and the investigation could serve as an informal truth-and-reconciliation commission for SEAL crimes. A final report would need to make substantial recommendations to both the Pentagon and Congress about potential consequences of the findings as well as reforms. What is certain is that without Congress’s involvement, either through oversight or administering the investigation itself, there is no chance of reform.

To date, the U.S. military has not chosen to follow the Australian example. In the fallout from the SEAL scandals, which were frequently and widely covered by the U.S. media, Congress required the Special Operations Command to conduct ethics training, accountability, and culture reviews in 2018 and 2019. In 2020, SOCOM determined that the recommendations from the previous studies had not been incorporated. That report, too, found that ethics were no problem in their units, including the Navy SEALs.

Days after Biden’s inauguration, the Defense Department’s inspector general announced in an internal department memo that the office would conduct a review of how the Special Operations Command had implemented the department’s Laws of War regulations and whether possible war crimes had been reported or investigated as required. The independent review covered special operations forces, such as the Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets, as well as the geographic command that oversees the areas where most special operations forces have fought since 9/11. Like the Obama administration when it dismantled the CIA’s torture program, the inspector general’s review sought to look forward rather than back. As a result, nothing changed.

In his first seven months as SEAL commander, Howard cut the number of SEAL platoons while expanding the number of men in each unit. The administrative move was meant to reduce the overall number of Navy SEALs in the hopes that by reducing quantity, the command could increase the quality of SEALs in the service. Howard does have his supporters. The military’s civilian leadership frequently praises him as a savvy, capable commanding officer. One former senior Pentagon official who worked with Howard described him as highly intelligent and hardworking, judgments that even his detractors share. “I don’t think there was anyone else in the SEAL officer corps who was better equipped to lead [Naval Special Warfare],” a former SEAL Team 6 officer told me.

All the same, it is unclear how committed Howard will be to reforming the force’s culture. A few months after he took over, after Biden won the 2020 presidential election, Howard set his sights on a different job. During the transition, Michèle Flournoy, the former under secretary of defense for policy in the Obama administration, became Biden’s leading candidate for defense secretary. Flournoy agreed to make Howard her military assistant, a position that would ensure him a third star. The move evaporated when Biden nominated Gen. Lloyd Austin instead. Howard has previously refused to respond to detailed questions about his career and conduct. Through an aide, he declined to speak to me for this article.

Howard’s ambition is legion in the teams. Last year, I interviewed a former special operator who served under Howard on more than one battlefield. The special operator told a story that one of Howard’s former peers had described years prior: Early in the war in Afghanistan, Howard led a successful assault mission, with the SEALs suffering no casualties and killing their targets. Afterward, while Howard briefed the operation, he got into a strenuous argument with an Air Force combat controller over who had killed one of the Afghan enemy fighters.

Their choice, according to Howard: Howard himself. He has told as many as will listen that he intends to be the first Navy SEAL president.

Given the promotions and career achievements of SEAL leaders like Howard who have failed to check the force’s excessive violence, there is reason to doubt that anything will change in the teams without significant pressure from Congress.

There is reason to be hopeful, however, about bringing an end to the SEAL code of silence and corruption. One distinctive Team 6 characteristic is that SEALs withhold virtually nothing among themselves. Their team room is their ultimate safe space, a place where honesty is not only consistent but also prevalent. It is from these SEALs that I gathered accounts of some of their teammates’ most damning crimes. These SEALs spoke because they were frustrated, disheartened, and disillusioned with Naval Special Warfare. They described the reality of what they did, saw, and knew while dedicating themselves to uphold American values and protect the Constitution. They represent the most patriotic among their peers precisely because they seek accountability and reform in their community.

Some will decry public accountability as a form of second-guessing our warriors, but nothing could be further from the truth. Democracy and freedom are founded on an informed public, vigorous public debate, and the accountability of our government institutions, which serve the nation. This is true whether it is the president who lies for political gain or an enlisted SEAL who lies for financial profit. If the American public truly cares about the fate of the men who have shouldered too much of our national burden — knowing what they did, what they went through, and how they continue to pay for their service — then it is critical that citizens demand accountability. Americans who celebrate the heroics of SEAL Team 6 must also understand the cost of their exploits.

This article was adapted from “Code Over Country: The Tragedy and Corruption of SEAL Team Six” by Matthew Cole, which will be published on February 22, 2022, by Bold Type Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. Copyright © 2022 by Matthew Cole. All rights reserved. 

The post How the Navy SEALs Failed America — and How They Can Change appeared first on The Intercept.

Federal prosecutors disclosed in a December sentencing memo that Nader had agreed months earlier to plead guilty to a single count of felony conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government by funneling millions in donations to Hillary Clinton’s campaign and concealing the funds’ foreign origin. Nader’s plea has not been previously reported.

A lawyer for Nader did not respond to a request for comment.

Nader conspired to hide the funds “out of a desire to lobby on behalf and advance the interests of his client, the government of the United Arab Emirates,” according to the prosecutors’ sentencing memo. Nader received the money for the illegal donations from the UAE government, the memo said. The filing marks the first time that the U.S. government has explicitly accused the UAE, a close ally, of illegally seeking to buy access to candidates during a presidential election.

Nader’s guilty plea opens a new window into the efforts of the United Arab Emirates and its de facto ruler, Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, known as MBZ, to influence the outcome of the 2016 election and shape subsequent U.S. policy in the Gulf. The government’s memo notes that Nader and Los Angeles businessperson Ahmad “Andy” Khawaja also sought to cultivate “key figures” in the Trump campaign and that Khawaja donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee. It is unclear where that money came from.

Prosecutors allege that, in total, Nader transferred nearly $5 million from his UAE-based business to Khawaja, the CEO of a Los Angeles-based payment processing company. The sentencing memo details Nader and Khawaja’s efforts to disguise the money as a mundane business contract between the two. Of that amount, more than $3.5 million came from the government of the UAE and was given to Democratic political committees working to elect Clinton, according to the U.S. government, which has accused Nader, Khawaja, and six others of working together to conceal the origin of those funds. Prosecutors have not publicly accounted for what happened to the remaining $1.4 million they say Nader transferred to Khawaja.

With Nader’s guilty plea, five of the eight men charged in the alleged conspiracy have pleaded guilty; two other defendants are scheduled to stand trial this year. Khawaja fled the U.S. after the indictment. The Associated Press reported in 2020 that he was being held in Lithuania, citing police officials there and a Lithuanian lawyer representing him.

Prosecutors are seeking a five-year sentence for Nader, asking that it not begin until after he completes the 10-year sentence he is currently serving for possessing child pornography and bringing a minor to the U.S. “for the purpose of engaging in criminal sexual activity.”

Prosecutors have alleged that Nader took his instructions from the UAE crown prince and that he regularly updated MBZ on his progress as he sought to get close to Clinton. At one point, Khawaja complained that Nader and the UAE had not yet sent money to cover the costs of a Clinton fundraiser he was organizing. Nader texted that he would send note “as per HH instruction,” using an abbreviation of “his highness,” an apparent reference to MBZ.

A few days later, Nader was preparing to meet with both Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton and asked an Emirati official, almost certainly MBZ, if they could meet before he departed. “[T]raveling on Sat morning to catch up with our Big Sister and her husband: I am seeing him on Sunday and her in [sic] Tuesday Sir! Would love to see you tomorrow at your convenience…for your guidance, instruction and blessing!”

Even as Nader poured donations into the effort to elect Clinton, he worked his way into the Trump campaign on behalf of his Gulf clients.

But even as Nader poured donations into the effort to elect Clinton, he worked his way into the Trump campaign on behalf of his Gulf clients. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election described Nader as a “senior advisor” to MBZ and said that he’d made “contacts” with both campaigns. Nader would later tell the FBI that he met with Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. several times in 2016, and the New York Times reported that Nader told Trump Jr. that both MBZ and Saudi Arabia’s crown prince were eager to help his father get elected. Nader advised the Gulf monarchs to “be on good terms” with both Clinton and Trump in the runup to the 2016 vote, he told the FBI.

After Trump won the presidency but before he was inaugurated, Nader unsuccessfully sought to arrange a meeting between Trump and MBZ, according to FBI interview notes. Instead, UAE officials arranged for MBZ to speak with top Trump campaign officials including Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, and retired Lieut. Gen. Michael Flynn in New York. A few weeks later, through Nader, the Emirati leader arranged for a top Trump donor, Erik Prince, to meet with Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, a state-sanctioned investment fund, at a resort in the Seychelles.

After Trump’s inauguration, Nader became a frequent visitor to the White House, according to the Times. Nader’s involvement with the Trump campaign and his role in the Seychelles meeting put him in the sights of Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Federal agents arrested Nader in June 2019 at John F. Kennedy International Airport after he got off a flight from the UAE and charged him with possessing a dozen images or videos of child pornography. Those charges were ultimately dismissed, but Nader was indicted on a separate child pornography possession charge and accused of flying a 14-year-old boy to the U.S. for sexual purposes. Nader pleaded guilty to both felony counts, which stemmed from activity that took place in 2012 and 2000, respectively, according to court documents, and was sentenced to 10 years in prison and lifetime supervision as a sex offender. Nader also spent a year in prison in the Czech Republic in 2003 for having sex with the same minor he flew to the U.S.

Nader isn’t the only American recently charged with helping the UAE influence U.S. policy. Last year, the Justice Department indicted Thomas Barrack, a wealthy businessperson and close friend and adviser of Trump, for secretly working as an agent of the UAE in an effort to help advance the country’s foreign policy aims. In a press release at the time of the indictment’s unsealing, the Justice Department described Barrack and two others as working to “provide intelligence” to the UAE government about the Trump campaign and later the administration. Barrack was also charged with obstruction of justice and lying to investigators. Also indicted in the scheme was a UAE national and associate of Barrack, Rashid Al-Malik, whose role was first reported by The Intercept in 2019.

In Barrack’s indictment, MBZ and senior UAE officials are described, though not by name, as directing and otherwise overseeing Barrack’s efforts to work with Trump to advance the UAE’s policy goals. Barrack, who pleaded not guilty to the charges, will face trial later this year.

The post UAE Adviser Illegally Funneled Foreign Cash Into Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Campaign appeared first on The Intercept.

Federal investigators last summer began probing Prince’s involvement in the attempted sale of Jordanian military helicopters and arms as part of the 2019 plan to help self-declared Libyan leader Khalifa Hifter overthrow the country’s United Nations-backed government, according to four of the people familiar with the investigation.

The FBI declined to comment.

In February, a U.N. investigation concluded that Prince and others violated the arms embargo on Libya, detailing parts of the secret effort to provide a team of mercenaries and aircraft for an assassination unit in support of Hifter. Prince has denied any involvement in the undertaking, dubbed Project Opus, and told the New York Times that he had never met or spoken to Hifter.

Matthew Schwartz, a lawyer for Prince, said that his client had nothing to do with the mercenary plot. “As Mr. Prince has said repeatedly, he had absolutely no involvement in any alleged military operation in Libya in 2019, and the report which insinuated otherwise was based on an incomplete investigation and relied on biased sources.”

In particular, FBI agents from the Washington Field Office have inquired into Prince’s role in creating and then trying to market a modified crop duster as a military aircraft for use in conflicts around the world. The airplanes were meant to be used in a larger effort to help the renegade Libyan military commander take control of Libya’s capital, Tripoli.

The Intercept detailed Prince’s repeated efforts to help move aircraft and other materiel from Jordan to Libya, which included arranging meetings with a member of then-President Donald Trump’s National Security Council, but Jordanian government officials stopped the deal. Prince worked with Jordanian royal Feisal ibn al-Hussein to arrange the sale and transfer of weapons, according to three people with knowledge of the arrangement. This summer, FBI agents sought to interview Feisal and several others who work with him, according to two people with knowledge of the FBI’s activities in Jordan. Feisal, through the Jordanian Embassy in Washington, previously denied that he had any involvement in the plot or any relationship with Prince.

The U.N. report traced the rapid sale and transfer of three aircraft owned or controlled by Prince to a close associate for use in the Libya plot. The planes included a modified crop duster Prince created while he was CEO of Frontier Services Group, the Chinese security and logistics company he founded. Only Prince “was in the position to approve the sale and/or transfer of all three aircraft to support the operation in such a short time frame,” according to the U.N. report. The U.N. also traced the planes’ transfer from Prince-controlled companies, including Frontier Services Group, to a mercenary firm based in the United Arab Emirates and connected to Prince. “One quick transfer could be explained,” the U.N. report stated, “but not three from different companies, all under the effective control or influence of one individual.” The U.N. is cooperating with the FBI investigation.

In April, two months after the U.N. documented the change in ownership of the Frontier Services Group planes, FSG announced that Prince had resigned from the company “due to his other business arrangements.” Schwartz, Prince’s attorney, said in an email that his client resigned over “disagreements with the management performance and direction of the company. Any suggestion that his resignation had anything to do with the UN Panel’s report is false.”

After the plan to transfer the aircraft to Libya and the larger mercenary effort fell apart, one of the planes was moved to Cyprus. Earlier this month, FBI agents traveled to the Mediterranean island to inspect a modified American-manufactured crop duster, according to a person with knowledge of the probe. The FBI inspection of the aircraft was previously reported by Kathimerini, a Cyprus-based news organization. The Intercept had earlier reported on Prince’s secret effort to develop crop dusters into military aircraft and market them for use in multiple wars.

Prince, the founder of Blackwater, is the brother of Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and was one of the former president’s most ardent supporters. The scion of a wealthy and politically connected family, Prince has courted controversy since the war in Iraq, when Blackwater won major contracts to support the U.S. occupation. Blackwater was banned from Iraq in 2007 following the Nisour Square massacre, in which its contractors killed 17 Iraqis and wounded 20 more. Prince later sold Blackwater and moved to the UAE, where he built a secret mercenary force for the de facto ruler of the federation of seven Arab Gulf states, Mohammed bin Zayed, known as MBZ.

During the Trump administration, Prince lobbied the White House to privatize the Afghanistan War as well as to create a secret intelligence unit for the president. Both proposals were rejected. Prince has denied that he advised the White House, but three people familiar with his role said that in recent years, Prince worked closely with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and MBZ, as the two negotiated policies in the Middle East and Africa. Kushner has denied working with Prince.

The FBI has been scrutinizing Prince’s global network of businesses and operations since at least 2020, according to three of the people familiar with the probe. During the Trump presidency, FBI agents sought witnesses and documents to help them understand Prince’s role in the Libya arms deal involving surplus military aircraft and weapons from the Jordanian military, according to the three sources with knowledge of the investigation.

More recently, the FBI sought permission from the British government to interview a U.K. army general who, while working as an adviser to Jordan’s king, investigated and ultimately helped stop the weapons sale and shipments to Libya, according to one of the people familiar with the FBI investigation. It is unclear if the U.K. approved the request or if the FBI has conducted the interview. The role of the British general, Alex MacIntosh, was disclosed by The Intercept in February.

“The Ministry of Defence cooperates fully with law enforcement bodies when engaged by them,” a spokesperson for the ministry told The Intercept via email. “Brigadier Macintosh is a respected British Army officer who served with distinction alongside the Jordanian Armed Forces during his time in post.”

The latest FBI inquiry is one of several government probes into Prince since his days running Blackwater. As part of his sale of that company, Prince negotiated a deferred prosecution agreement over weapons and export violations Blackwater committed while Prince was the sole executive overseeing the company. Blackwater paid nearly $50 million to settle charges as part of the agreement, but Prince was never personally charged with a crime.

After Prince established his Chinese company, FSG, the FBI investigated multiple mercenary proposals to countries in Africa and the Middle East. In 2015, the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation after Prince met with the Chinese intelligence service in an effort to open a bank account in China. That same year, after Prince secretly modified the two Thrush crop dusters and tried to sell them, American executives of FSG reported the possible export violation to the Justice Department.

During Trump’s first year in office, Prince again faced federal scrutiny, this time from special counsel Robert Mueller, who sought to understand Prince’s role at a January 2017 meeting in the Seychelles with a Russian banker and top Kremlin emissary. The meeting, which was arranged by an aide to MBZ, included discussions around Prince’s mercenary business ambitions in Libya and the Middle East, according to FBI documents. Prince also testified under oath to a congressional committee about the Seychelles meeting. FBI interview notes of Prince and MBZ’s aide show that Prince used his trip to try to pitch the UAE crown prince on both his mercenary ambitions in Libya and the use of his modified crop dusters as military aircraft.

After the Mueller report was released in 2019, both the House and Senate intelligence committees referred Prince for charges for possible false or misleading testimony in connection with their investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. None of the federal investigations has resulted in charges.

Ali Younes contributed reporting.

The post FBI Investigation of Failed Mercenary Plot Delves Into Role of Erik Prince appeared first on The Intercept.

Ahmad Massoud, son of the late Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, fled to Tajikistan shortly after the Taliban seized control of the Panjshir Valley on September 6, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official, a Pentagon consultant, and two former senior Afghan government officials. Massoud was joined a few days later by Amrullah Saleh, the former Afghan vice president and longtime intelligence chief, who left Afghanistan by helicopter, the senior U.S. official and two former Afghan officials said.

The retreat of the two key Afghan resistance figures contradicts public claims that they are still in Afghanistan and holding out against the Taliban and signals a remarkable shift in their fortunes: For the first time in decades, the United States government and the CIA do not appear to be backing them. Massoud and Saleh are both seeking military aid and equipment from the West, but the Biden administration is not supporting them and has given no indication of whether it will provide future assistance, according to the two former Afghan officials and a retired U.S. intelligence official.

On Wednesday, Massoud hired Washington lobbyist Robert Stryk. Massoud and Saleh have been embraced by prominent Republicans like Sen. Lindsey Graham, who is keen on the U.S. returning to Afghanistan.

Neither Massoud nor Saleh has been seen in public since the Taliban took Panjshir. Both come from the mountainous northeastern province, a perennial base of Afghan resistance, first against the Soviet Union and later the Taliban. Massoud is currently in a “safe house” in the Tajik capital of Dushanbe, according to a former senior Afghan government official who spoke with him last week, while Saleh is in a nearby location.

Saleh last tweeted on September 3, as the Taliban began encircling Panjshir. In an accompanying video, he dismissed reports that he had already fled Afghanistan as “totally baseless.” “The RESISTANCE is continuing and will continue,” Saleh tweeted. “I am here with my soil, for my soil & defending its dignity.”

On Monday, Ali Maisam Nazary, a spokesperson for Massoud, told The Intercept that Massoud “is inside Afghanistan … in an undisclosed location.” Saleh could not be reached for comment.

Saleh, who once worked as an aide to Ahmad Shah Massoud and served many years in senior positions in Afghanistan’s U.S.-backed government, tweeted last month that he was the legal successor to former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, citing Ghani’s decision to flee to the United Arab Emirates. “As per d constitution of Afg, in absence, escape, resignation or death of the President the FVP [First Vice President] becomes the caretaker President,” Saleh tweeted on August 16, the day after the Taliban seized control of Kabul. “I am currently inside my country & am the legitimate care taker President.”

In August, prominent Republicans like Graham and Rep. Mike Waltz called on the Biden administration to recognize Saleh and Massoud as the “legitimate government representatives” of Afghanistan. “We will be going back into Afghanistan,” Graham told the BBC earlier this month. “We’ll have to because the [terror] threat will be so large.”

“I want his voice out,” Graham said of Saleh in an interview with Politico last week. “I’m gonna go all in. [The Taliban are] holding our people hostage. They’re a terrorist group. They’re a radical Islamic jihadist group.” Graham also reportedly secured Saleh a slot on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show in August; Waltz managed to get Massoud booked on Fox News as well. On Tuesday, James Hewitt, a spokesperson for Waltz, reiterated the congressman’s call to recognize Saleh and Massoud as the legitimate representatives of Afghanistan, saying, “Yes, this is still his position,” and linking to a press release titled “Waltz, Graham Call on Biden to Recognize Opposition Forces in the Panjshir Valley.” Graham did not respond to requests for comment.

A growing number of Republican senators have also been urging Biden to designate the Taliban as a terrorist organization, with Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chair Marco Rubio introducing legislation that would do just that — a move that would likely doom diplomatic engagement with the new government.

The U.S. has long supported opposition groups in Afghanistan, going back to the CIA’s role in arming Afghan mujahideen to fight the Soviets under President Ronald Reagan. Ahmad Shah Massoud, a legendary resistance commander, received CIA funding under Reagan and subsequent U.S. administrations, as his militia ousted the Soviets from Kabul and later led the opposition to the Taliban. Massoud was assassinated by Al Qaeda operatives two days before the 9/11 attacks.

It is not clear whether Ahmad Massoud and his National Resistance Front will win the support of U.S. or other Western governments this time around. Prospects for the resistance appear grim, with the New York Times reporting last week that “combat had largely ceased” in Panjshir province and that “what resistance remained seemed confined to mountainous areas.”

Though Western intelligence agencies have not formally cooperated with Massoud, they reportedly have held informal meetings. There is also ample historical precedent for opposition groups fleeing to neighboring countries to plot their eventual return. This happened most recently in 2001, when the Taliban disappeared into Pakistan and Iran to regroup.

The post Afghan Resistance Leaders, Long Backed by CIA, Have Fled Following Taliban Takeover appeared first on The Intercept.

The mission to back Hifter ultimately failed, but a confidential U.N. report issued last week and first reported by the New York Times concluded that Prince, a former Navy SEAL, and his associates violated the U.N. arms embargo for Libya. For more than a year, The Intercept has been investigating the failed mercenary effort, dubbed Project Opus. This account is based on dozens of interviews, including with people involved in the ill-fated mission, as well as the U.N. report and other documents obtained exclusively by The Intercept. It includes a blow-by-blow account of how Prince and an associate sought to pressure the Jordanian government to aid the illicit mission, as well as previously unreported details about how the architects of Project Opus used Prince’s connections to the Trump administration to try to win support for their efforts in Libya.

The Intercept’s reporting shows that the push to aid Hifter continued even after Project Opus fell apart. In the summer of 2019, after their backdoor efforts failed to convince Jordan to approve the arms transfer, Prince called a member of Trump’s National Security Council to request a meeting; Prince asked the official to meet with Christiaan Durrant, Prince’s business associate and former employee. At the Army and Navy Club near the White House, with Prince sitting silently at his side, Durrant described the campaign to back Hifter and asked for U.S. support for their mercenary effort, the former NSC official told The Intercept. The upside, Durrant told the official, was that the U.S. help would limit Hifter’s reliance on the Russians, who were also supporting him in the war. The official, who asked not to be named because he feared professional reprisals for being publicly associated with Prince, balked. “It wasn’t something I wanted to be involved in,” he said.

In a statement, Prince’s lawyer, Matthew Schwartz, categorically denied the findings of the U.N. report and said he had asked the body to retract it. “Mr. Prince had no involvement in any alleged military operation in Libya in 2019, or at any other time,” the statement said. “He did not provide weapons, personnel, or military equipment to anyone in Libya.” Schwartz declined to respond to detailed questions from The Intercept, including about whether Prince lobbied Trump administration officials to support Hifter.

An attorney for Durrant, Vince Gordon, declined to answer detailed questions from The Intercept, instead providing a link to a statement in which Durrant acknowledged having set up a company called Opus, but said his work has never “involved any military operations or armed conflict. … We don’t breach sanctions; we don’t deliver military services, we don’t carry guns, and we are not mercenaries.” Durrant added: “I remain friends with Erik Prince and have no business or financial relationship with him.”

Many questions about Project Opus remain unanswered, including who paid for the operation, which allegedly cost $80 million, according to the U.N. report. It is also unclear what happened to that money after the mission failed, and whether its architects had help from other governments such as the United Arab Emirates, which has long supported Hifter.

The U.N. is continuing its investigation, and the FBI has been asking questions about Prince’s involvement in the Jordanian deal and his connections to the Libyan conflict. (“The FBI cannot confirm the existence of an investigation into Mr. Prince,” a spokesperson told The Intercept.) If the U.N. Sanctions Committee approves the report’s findings, Prince would face a travel ban and have his bank accounts frozen. At least four countries have opened criminal probes into the alleged Libya plot as a result of the U.N. investigation, according to a Western official.

The purpose of the mercenary mission was to provide Hifter with a “maritime interdiction capability … but also the capability to identify and strike land targets, and terminate and/or kidnap high-value targets,” the U.N. report concluded. The report, authored by an independent group of investigators who monitor sanction violations, known as the Panel of Experts, includes a PowerPoint presentation that outlines detailed plans for the mission.

The PowerPoint describes a so-called termination team, a hit squad composed of foreign mercenaries who would jump out of the helicopters to chase and kill their targets; it appears to be modeled on the secretive, elite U.S. Joint Special Operations Command. The PowerPoint lists 10 individuals as assassination targets, including commanders aligned with the U.N.-backed Tripoli government as well as two EU citizens.

A right-wing political donor whose sister, Betsy DeVos, served as Trump’s education secretary, Prince founded the private security company Blackwater. After the company’s contractors killed 17 Iraqis in Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, Prince changed its name and ultimately sold it in 2010. He later moved to the UAE and helped build a presidential guard for the royal family before being pushed out amid negative media exposure and questions about missing money. He established a small investment fund called Frontier Resource Group that was financed by his personal wealth and focused on natural resources in Africa. Simultaneously, he set up a Hong Kong-based logistics and security company, Frontier Services Group, whose largest investor is a powerful Chinese government-owned investment bank.

During the Obama administration, Prince tried and failed many times to intervene in Libya’s devastating civil war. “Erik Prince has been attempting to deploy a small-scale aviation and maritime private military capability into Libya since 2013,” the U.N. report states. “The scale, organization and systems proposed were all similar to those deployed on the private military operation Opus in eastern Libya.”

Prince’s relationship to Hifter dates back to at least 2015, according to the U.N. report. That year, the report notes, Prince supplied Hifter with a private jet. Over a three-week period in February 2015, Hifter flew the Frontier Services plane to Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE — the Sunni Arab coalition that supported his effort to take control of Libya. On the day Hifter returned from his tour, the eastern Libyan government nominated him as the leader of its military. Shortly afterward, Prince began offering plans to use a mercenary force in eastern Libya under the guise of stopping the flow of migrants to Europe. The plans went nowhere.

When Trump won the White House, Prince wasted no time in inserting himself into what would emerge as a new Middle Eastern coalition under a new president. In January 2017, he flew to the Seychelles to meet with Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince and de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates, known widely as MBZ. The crown prince would become a key player in the Trump administration’s evolving plans for the region. While Prince’s Seychelles trip has been probed for possible connections to the Trump-Russia scandal, there were other motives at play.

On the trip, Prince pitched MBZ on his private military ideas to support the UAE’s wars in Somalia, Yemen, and Libya. “Prince was like a kid at Christmas about his meeting with MBZ,” according to notes from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators, who interviewed Prince during the Trump-Russia investigation. “He could only focus on the presents under the tree.” After his appearance at MBZ’s private summit, Prince had what was then a secret meeting with Kirill Dmitriev, the powerful head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund. The meeting with Dmitriev was initially suspected to be a backchannel effort by Putin and Trump to lift U.S. sanctions on Russia. The investigators’ notes revealed that the subject was Prince’s mercenary ambitions in the Libyan conflict. When the secret summit was over, Prince tagged along with MBZ on his private jet back to the UAE. During the flight, Prince later told special counsel investigators, Prince discussed his “idea for using a modified crop duster as a counterinsurgency plane.”

Prince had made his way into the Trump White House’s inner circle, forging ties to the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner as Kushner sought to reshape U.S. policy in the Middle East, according to three people with knowledge of their relationship. Prince acted as a “shadow adviser” to Kushner, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with their relationship. “This is completely false,” wrote Jason Miller, a spokesperson for Kushner. “Mr. Prince in no way served as an advisor to Mr. Kushner in any capacity.”

At the same time, Prince was acting as an unofficial adviser to MBZ. A leading buyer of U.S. arms, the UAE regained its position as one of America’s closest allies during the Trump years, following a chill in relations under President Barack Obama, and expanded its influence and military involvement in the Gulf and Africa. Within a year of Trump taking office, the Gulf nation had taken the lead in supporting Hifter as the figure most likely to defeat the U.N.-recognized government in Libya and perhaps unify the fractured country. The UAE ramped up its support for Hifter and his forces, providing air defenses, drones, and jets, as well as paying for foreign mercenaries to fight alongside Hifter’s troops.

“Kushner and MBZ decided to let Erik have some contracts while they reordered the Gulf.”

Prince benefited from the warm relationship between Kushner and the UAE, a former senior U.S. intelligence officer who consults with Middle Eastern governments told The Intercept. The UAE, the former official said, wanted the Trump administration to let it help Hifter win control of Libya, while the UAE worked to realize Trump and Kushner’s vision of a realigned Middle East. The Abraham Accords, which the Trump administration touted as its signature foreign policy achievement, involved normalizing relations between Israel and a handful of Arab nations, including the UAE. “Kushner and MBZ decided to let Erik have some contracts while they reordered the Gulf,” the former intelligence officer told The Intercept.

“Mr. Kushner has no knowledge of Mr. Prince’s contracts,” Kushner’s spokesperson told The Intercept. “Mr. Kushner has not even spoken or communicated with Mr. Prince since 2017, and any assertion otherwise is complete nonsense.”

After Libya’s Arab Spring uprising shook the government of Col. Muammar Gaddafi, the U.S. and NATO allies helped overthrow him in 2011. The following three years, the country was largely stable, though political and geographic fissures and rivalries percolated. But when violent conflict between the U.N.-recognized Government of National Accord based in Tripoli and Hifter’s Libyan National Army in the country’s east broke out in 2014, thousands of civilians were killed and many more displaced. At least five countries began to provide military support to the warring parties, in violation of the U.N. arms embargo. Turkey has supported the GNA, while the UAE, Egypt, Russia, and Jordan have supported Hifter and the LNA. Thousands of foreign mercenaries flooded the country, and the war became one of the world’s most intractable conflicts.

Since civil war broke out in Libya, the U.S. has largely remained on the sidelines. Official U.S. policy has been to support the U.N.-led peace process, although Trump called Hifter in April 2019, after Hifter’s attack on Tripoli, to thank him for his counterterrorism efforts, according to news accounts at the time. The UAE has backed Hifter because it wants to quash any remnants of popular uprising and return the country to military dictatorship.

The political landscape created by Trump’s victory presented new opportunities for Prince to resume his push to support Hifter. The U.N. report, citing a confidential source, described an April 2019 meeting between Prince and Hifter in Cairo to discuss a planned mercenary intervention in Libya. In a statement, Prince’s lawyer said his client “has never met or spoken to Mr. Hiftar. This alleged meeting is fiction and never took place.” But two people with knowledge of Prince’s relationship with the Libyan commander confirmed to The Intercept that Prince does indeed know Hifter, and asserted that he has met with the Libyan strongman, along with one of Hifter’s sons. (In April 2019, the same month as the alleged meeting in Cairo with Hifter, the House Intelligence Committee formally sent the Justice Department a criminal referral on Prince, accusing him of making “materially false statements” to Congress in the Trump-Russia probe. Among the allegations made by the Intelligence Committee was that Prince tried to conceal from Congress the second meeting he had with Dmitriev in Seychelles about Libya.)

Project Opus was designed to leverage Prince’s connections to help Hifter gain the upper hand in Libya. The elaborate plan involved buying at least nine disused, U.S.-made military aircraft from the government of Jordan and airlifting them to the Libyan battlefield in June 2019. But there was an urgent problem: Jordanian officials were holding up the $80 million arms deal, which would have violated U.N. sanctions and possibly U.S. law.

Project Opus was designed to leverage Prince’s connections to help Hifter gain the upper hand in Libya.

On paper, the plan provided Hifter with a special operations force that could fly and kill at night in a bid to help the Libyan commander topple the GNA in Tripoli. Failing that, the paramilitary force could help Hifter resuscitate his military operation, which had stalled on the outskirts of the capital.

But Jordan’s leader, King Abdullah II, has ultimate authority to approve any deal for weapons from his small Middle Eastern nation. Prince knew the king well from the “war on terror” years, when Blackwater, Prince’s private security company, worked closely with the Jordanian government. Prince knew how Jordan’s levers of power worked and who could move them, so he contacted one of Abdullah’s personal advisers.

Prince asked the adviser to help an associate of Prince’s with what he described as a shipment of humanitarian aid. Abdullah knew about the shipment, Prince told the adviser, and it had been “cleared in Washington.” The adviser was troubled by Prince’s vagueness. “I didn’t know Prince as a humanitarian,” he later told The Intercept. Nonetheless, Prince told the king’s adviser that the associate would contact him.

Moments later, the adviser received a message on Signal from Durrant, a former Australian military pilot who had a long association with Prince. Durrant was using the screen name Gene Rynack, an alias that the U.N. report noted may have been a reference to Mel Gibson’s character in the film “Air America.”

Durrant, in the statement his lawyer provided, does not deny that he contacted Jordanian officials. But he portrayed Opus as a project aimed at supporting private companies and NGOs in war-torn Libya. “Through OPUS we provided engineering inspections and recommendations on the viability and value of several different aircraft. We were not involved in the sale of these aircraft beyond the inspection and viability recommendations,” Durrant asserted. “I was in Jordan as part of this project and held meetings with numerous Government officials.” But the texts Durrant sent the king’s adviser contradict those claims.

Those texts made it clear to the adviser that this was no humanitarian aid mission. Durrant asked Abdullah’s adviser to arrange for the Jordanian government to allow a scheduled first shipment of equipment and mercenaries to depart for Libya. Durrant briefly explained the situation: Nine U.S.-manufactured military helicopters, weapons, ammunition, and other equipment were headed to Libya, according to Durrant’s text messages, which were obtained by The Intercept. Durrant estimated that it would require 10 round-trip flights using a Jordanian military C-130 cargo plane to deliver everything, including the helicopters.

“We are paying J[ordan] for everything,” Durrant texted the adviser, including for the rental of the transport plane. Durrant then tried to coax the adviser to help by describing how beneficial the arms shipment would be for the kingdom. The Jordanians would “make money,” Durrant promised, “we are employing a lot of locals and #1” — a reference to the king, according to the adviser — “can take all the glory of [the] mission.”

Durrant then tried to reassure the king’s adviser, writing that “[r]eputation risk” had been assessed and promising, “we will hide/destroy any footprints.”

Durrant followed up with a phone call asking Abdullah’s adviser to keep the weapons deal secret, the adviser told The Intercept. Durrant said that although the Trump White House supported the mission and the CIA was aware of it, only Durrant and Prince knew all the details, according to the adviser.

The next day, Durrant sent a memo to the adviser outlining the status of the arms shipment as well as the planned military operation in Libya. Durrant called his group “Opus,” and the plan was as ambitious as it was unrealistic. Littered with military jargon, the memo, which was obtained by The Intercept and described in the U.N. report, listed the equipment and units headed to Benghazi. The helicopter gunships and weapons had been selected and inspected, the memo stated, and were ready to be packed up and sent across the Mediterranean into eastern Libya. The shipment would include surveillance airplanes that could be used to target people and enemy supply ships, as well as a drone. It also featured a unit to track and seize weapons smuggled via the Mediterranean by allies of the GNA, a cyber unit, and a medical evacuation plane. And it anticipated providing at least a dozen helicopters, including nine that Durrant intended to purchase from the Jordanian government. There would be a “marine strike group” with two armed boats that would be used to create a blockade, Durrant’s memo stated, forcing “enemy supply vessels” to dock in Benghazi, Hifter’s seat of power.

Now, with some of the shipment ready to move, Durrant and his team needed export licenses. “The team can be effective within 7 days if [the Jordanian government] supports with export of controlled items, including helicopters, air ammunition, ground weapons, ground ammunition and night vision,” according to the memo. Despite Durrant’s efforts and Prince’s outreach to the king’s adviser, the Jordanian military refused to sign off on the licenses.

Left/Top: A slide from a PowerPoint obtained by the U.N. It shows the purported assassination unit with seven helicopters Erik Prince tried to help move to eastern Libya. The plane shown at the upper left is listed as the “LASA T-Bird,” which was created by Prince. Right/Bottom: One of the two modified Thrush-510 “T-Bird” crop dusters Prince had manufactured as chair of Frontier Services Group. Images: Obtained by The Intercept

In Jordan, Prince’s intervention in a “humanitarian” shipment was raising more questions for Abdullah’s adviser. If the king knew about the shipment, as Prince had told the adviser, and if the White House and the CIA were on board, as Durrant had claimed, why would Prince ask for help from one of the king’s personal aides?

Prince’s outreach and Durrant’s memo made several people around King Abdullah uneasy, and the Jordanian monarch signed off on a quiet inquiry to get to the bottom of it, according to the royal adviser and a second person familiar with the investigation. One of Abdullah’s military advisers, an active-duty British general named Alex Macintosh, was put in charge. Macintosh had formerly served with the British SAS, an elite commando unit, and the king respected his judgment. 

Macintosh’s inquiry was brief, according to two people with knowledge of it. He met with Durrant, who was using a transparently fake alias and staying in an Amman hotel with what Macintosh later described as a motley-looking crew of Western mercenaries. Durrant told him he was buying nine helicopters from the Jordanian government — six MD530 Little Birds and three AH-1 Cobras — plus heavy weapons and ammunition. But Durrant didn’t have so-called end user certificates: internationally recognized paperwork that identifies where, to whom, and for what purpose arms are being transferred. This was the heart of the problem. With a U.N. arms embargo banning weapons shipments to Libya, it could not be listed as the destination for Durrant’s shipment. And because the aircraft were U.S.-made, their purchase would require preauthorization from the U.S. government, which had not been provided. The British general asked Durrant which country the end user certificates would list as the destination for the shipment. Durrant told Macintosh that they could declare the destination was Tunisia, Libya’s neighbor, or “anywhere else you find acceptable,” according to a Western official who discussed it with Macintosh. Macintosh declined to comment.

As Macintosh investigated, he made another discovery: The king’s brother, Prince Feisal Ibn Al-Hussein, had been involved in the attempt to sell the Jordanian aircraft and arms, according to the Jordanian royal adviser, who discussed the finding with Macintosh. Feisal’s role was confirmed by two other people with knowledge of the deal.

In a response provided by the Jordanian Embassy, Feisal said he had no involvement in the attempted weapons shipment nor any relationship with Prince. “The government will conduct a full, transparent investigation into all allegations related to this alleged operation,” according to the statement. “In relation to allegations that have recently appeared in press reports, we confirm that Jordan sold no planes to Libya.”

Jordanian Prince Feisal Ibn Al-Hussein, left, seen here in 2015 with Gen. Lloyd Austin, the current U.S. defense secretary. The men were inspecting 18-nation training exercises on Jordan’s border with Saudi Arabia.

The weapons sale had a certain logic. The Jordanian military had a stockpile of old U.S.-made attack helicopters donated more than a decade earlier by the U.S. and Israel to help bolster Jordan’s counterterrorism forces. But the helicopters were old and expensive to maintain, and Jordan ultimately had little use for them. Blackwater and Prince might have benefited most from the donated helicopters: Jordan’s military had hired the company in 2006 to train Jordanian special operations forces on how to use them. In Feisal’s capacity as a senior air force officer, he had worked with Prince and Blackwater on their training.

The king was told that Prince and Feisal were involved in the proposed weapons shipment, according to his adviser. By then, the CIA had learned that Prince and Durrant were claiming that the U.S. government had signed off on the deal. The CIA sent a message to Abdullah making clear the agency wanted him to stop the transfer, according to two people familiar with the CIA’s outreach, including a person with direct knowledge. The king agreed to shut it down. “You had Erik involved in a deal where [the Jordanian military] would have to issue fraudulent end-user certificates in an obvious violation of the U.N. arms embargo,” the adviser told The Intercept. “The king was advised that this could hurt future [legitimate] military sales.”

Despite Project Opus’s failure to get the helicopters and arms from Jordan to Libya, the mission to deliver a mercenary force to Hifter went forward. The mercenaries, led by a South African helicopter pilot, flew to Benghazi on June 25 or 26, according to the U.N. report and a person familiar with the operation. Durrant quickly purchased six replacement helicopters from South Africa for roughly $18 million and shipped them to Libya, according to the U.N. report. But the helicopters were old and unarmed, unlike the ones the contract had promised.

When Hifter learned that the Jordanian deal had failed and Durrant and his team had instead shipped six substandard helicopters, he flew into a rage and threatened the mercenaries, according to the U.N. report. Hifter sent the pilots back to their safe house under guard, according to a person with knowledge of the operation.

The mercenaries, concerned for their own safety given Hifter’s anger, decided to flee the country, according to the person with knowledge of the operation. On June 29, 2019, the team abandoned the six South African helicopters and escaped from a Benghazi harbor. They left for Malta on the same two rigid hull boats that Durrant had outlined in his memo, according to the U.N. report. The boats were supplied by another Prince business partner, a Maltese arms dealer. The trip took 36 hours after one of the two boats malfunctioned and had to be left behind. When they reached Malta, the mercenaries paid a fine for arriving without an entry visa and were released. Local media reported that they claimed to be civilian contractors who had fled Libya because the security situation on the ground was untenable.

Durrant claimed that the men were not mercenaries, instead portraying them as unarmed logistical personnel being sent in to support oil and gas companies. In the statement provided by his lawyer, Durrant claimed the men had entered the country “to setup a logistics centre in Libya. Within 48 hours they left due to security concerns. … Nothing happened and in no way were any sanctions breached.” Durrant denounced what he called the “politicization of the UN” through its investigation, claiming the investigators chose to use their “limited resources to pursue 20 unarmed personnel entering Libya for a 48 hour period yet thousands of armed mercenaries and seemingly limitless weapons are continually flowing into the country,” according to his statement.

Even after the Jordanian shipment failed to materialize and the mercenaries fled Libya, Prince and Durrant didn’t give up. Instead, they shifted their efforts to Washington. It was no secret that Prince advocated using mercenaries to support Hifter. From the early days of the Trump administration, he had pushed for a U.S.-backed, Gulf-funded private military force to enter Libya, according to Trump administration officials and documents. Before Hifter’s April 2019 offensive, Prince argued that his plan would end the ground war in Libya, stop terrorism, and make it easier to stabilize the country, according to a former Trump administration NSC official. “That’s just not something the U.S. government can do,” the former official said. “It sounds attractive and sexy because it sounds clean and easy, but it’s actually not, and [it’s] not legal.”

After the operation fell apart in June, Durrant continued to lobby members of the administration to revive the mission. One of those officials was Victoria Coates, then-NSC senior director for the Middle East and North Africa and one of the few Trump administration officials who had met Hifter. Coates knew that Durrant was a business associate of Prince’s; Durrant called Coates and told her he was supporting Hifter and wanted Washington’s backing. “I never met with Christiaan Durrant,” Coates told The Intercept. “After one or two phone calls, he made me feel uncomfortable.” Coates said she asked the White House switchboard to block future calls from Durrant.

When Durrant’s direct outreach failed, Prince contacted his friend on the NSC, one of Coates’s colleagues, for the meeting at the Army and Navy Club, which also led nowhere. Prince then reached out to yet another Trump administration official. This time, Prince asked the official to help connect Durrant with the CIA. The official spoke to The Intercept on the condition that they not be identified because they were not authorized to speak to the press. Durrant told the official that he was part of a military group working in Libya that included Americans and wanted CIA support. “He said ‘We’re with Hifter, we might be getting pushed out, and the Russians are coming in to support him,’” the official recalled Durrant telling him. “He kept it vague, but the bottom line was he said he was with Hifter,” and that if the CIA didn’t help, Hifter would turn to Russian mercenaries to try to break the stalemate. When the official passed Durrant’s message on to a CIA contact, the agency responded that it didn’t want to speak with Durrant and asked the official not to have further contact with him.

“The bottom line was he said he was with Hifter,” and that if the CIA didn’t help, Hifter would turn to Russian mercenaries to try to break the stalemate.

Durrant’s efforts to sway the Trump administration in his favor may have gone even further. In September 2019, Federal Advocates, a Washington lobbying firm, filed a disclosure with Congress after being hired by one of Durrant’s companies, Opus Capital Assets, which is based in the UAE. The initial filing described Opus as a “geopolitical national security firm” and declared that Federal Advocates had been paid $60,000 to lobby the Trump administration “on geopolitical issues in Africa.” Subsequent filings described Opus as an “oil and gas logistics services” entity, and Federal Advocates described its lobbying efforts as “providing educational background to the Administration.” Kevin Talley, one of the lobbyists, declined to comment on Opus or the contract.

The U.N.’s Panel of Experts opened an investigation in the summer of 2019. Its findings represent something akin to a grand jury indictment. The panel’s report was submitted to the U.N. Sanctions Committee, which will decide whether or not to approve its findings and designate Prince, Durrant, and others named in the report as weapons smugglers.

Prince’s lawyer denounced the U.N. investigators, claiming they did not give Prince sufficient chance to respond to the report’s allegations. “Given the astounding inaccuracies and falsehoods as reported in the media, and the absolute lack of due process or right to reply, we have requested that the Panel retract its report immediately,” he wrote. The U.N. report described multiple efforts to reach Prince and request his participation in the investigations, and said he never responded.

The panel’s investigators contacted most of the 20 foreign mercenaries detained in Malta and were also met with silence. Durrant’s lawyer, Gordon, told U.N. investigators that he represented Opus and those who fled Libya. Like the lobbying documents filed by Federal Advocates, Gordon claimed that Opus was an oil and gas logistics company; Gordon said that company personnel went to Libya for a commercial job, only to flee when it became too dangerous. The U.N. report described the oil and gas contract as a cover story to hide their true mission.

Investigators were able to slowly piece together the alleged mercenary plot after an African intelligence service tipped them off to fake export documents used to ship some of the replacement helicopters that were sent to Libya, according to a Western official familiar with the investigation. The U.N. panel obtained a copy of an $85 million contract for Opus to conduct a geological survey of Jordan. The document was “counterfeited with the deliberate intent to disguise the true purpose” and led back to companies in which Prince had an ownership interest, according to the U.N. report. (Gordon, Durrant’s lawyer, told The Intercept that Prince had no relationship with Opus.)

The contract was based on a real proposal from a geological survey company, Bridgeporth, whose logo adorns the bottom of each page of the document. In June 2019, when Project Opus was underway, Prince owned a significant share of Bridgeporth through his investment fund, FRG, which helped obscure Prince’s connection.“This is indicative of the complex multi-shells that Erik Dean Prince uses to disguise his control over, and benefits from, trading companies,” the U.N. report noted. After the U.N. inquired about the company’s possible role in the Libya operation, Prince changed his fund’s arrangement with Bridgeporth, making his continued investment less visible.

Prince’s ownership of Bridgeporth was another clue for the U.N. panel. It was not the first time Bridgeporth had been implicated in mercenary force proposals. In 2014, Prince created an assassination plan for Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistence Army in central Africa. The document, which was obtained by The Intercept, proposed using Bridgeporth and an oil and gas survey as the “cover” in the “kill or capture” mission.

U.N. investigators traced three aircraft that made their way to the Middle East in preparation for the operation in Libya. The planes, all three of which were owned or controlled by Prince, were hastily sold to Durrant within days of their intended arrival in Benghazi. The U.N. report found that only Prince “was in the position to approve the sale and/or transfer of all three aircraft to support the operation in such a short time frame,” adding: “One quick transfer could be explained, but not three from different companies, all under the effective control or influence of one individual.”

The Intercept has previously reported on Prince’s drive to weaponize crop duster planes. The scheme involved two prototypes, manufactured by a U.S. company, and secretly modified into paramilitary aircraft. Prince and his partners utilized a front company, called LASA, to help market the converted crop dusters; the name stood for Light Attack Surveillance Aircraft. It was the very type of modified crop duster Prince was discussing with MBZ on his private plane after the 2017 Seychelles meetings.

The U.N. investigation discovered that one of the two LASA T-Birds had been flown to Amman in June 2019 in preparation for the Hifter operation. It was one of two planes that never made it to Libya, after being grounded in Jordan.

The assassination unit PowerPoint that the U.N. obtained depicts Jordanian helicopters of the make that Opus wanted to provide to Hifter alongside an odd-looking airplane. It is shown in various illustrations flying over a map of northern Libya: gathering digital signals, supporting the assassination and strike teams, hunting some enemy — real or imagined. The document lists the aircraft as the “LASA T-Bird.” There are only two such planes in the world, both created by Prince.

The post Erik Prince and the Failed Plot to Arm a CIA Asset-Turned-Warlord in Libya appeared first on The Intercept.

Last week, news broke that Trump’s acting defense secretary, Christopher Miller, sent a letter to the CIA notifying the agency that the Pentagon would review the terms of its military support to CIA operations. News reports suggested that the Pentagon was planning to strip the CIA of its support for counterterrorism missions around the world almost immediately. Drones, elite soldiers, fuel, and medical evacuation of casualties, for example, would disappear almost overnight. CNN reported that the Pentagon was “planning to withdraw most support for CIA counter-terror missions by the beginning of next year.” The New York Times suggested that the purpose was to “make it difficult” for the CIA to conduct its covert war in Afghanistan as Trump reduces the number of U.S. troops there. ABC News described the decision as “unprecedented.” The cuts would leave CIA paramilitary officers to die should they suffer casualties, former officers told the press.

But interviews with six current and former national security officials, including some directly involved in the Pentagon’s review, suggest it is neither immediate nor controversial. Instead, the review serves as a coda for the Trump administration’s chaos — and as an unintentional gift to the incoming Biden administration.

Miller’s letter to CIA Director Gina Haspel informed her that the Pentagon would update a classified 2005 memorandum of understanding outlining the terms of Defense Department support to CIA missions. The Donald Rumsfeld-led Pentagon wrote the memo in the early years of what the George W. Bush administration called the global war on terror. In the immediate weeks and months after the September 11 attacks, the Pentagon discovered that it had neither the intelligence capability nor the nimbleness that the CIA showed in their quick deployment to Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda conceived of and trained for the attacks; the CIA needed special operations forces to buttress their tiny paramilitary division.

As the Pentagon and CIA footprints grew in war zones, defense officials grew concerned about how soldiers and resources slipped into CIA operations without the department’s notification. The two sides struck a deal and the memorandum of understanding was born. The memorandum was spearheaded by Stephen Cambone, then the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, and one of his top deputies, Lt. Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin, who coordinated their secret programs with the CIA, and then established an agreement where the Defense Department would share personnel and other military support to the agency. The purpose was to expedite and delegate the authority to pass Defense Department personnel and resources over to the agency. As part of the new framework, the Pentagon also outlined the terms of how special forces soldiers, for example, might be loaned to the CIA’s paramilitary division and deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq, where they would operate under the intelligence agency’s authorities. In the ensuing years, the CIA and the Pentagon developed a close working relationship on and off foreign battlefields as two consecutive administrations spent at least tens of billions of dollars on a secret ecosystem — tools, weapons, and people — for killing.

Fast forward to Donald Trump. He campaigned in 2016 on pulling out U.S. troops from the wars which began after 9/11 and later, as president, declared victory over the Islamic State. In 2018, the Pentagon, led by Defense Secretary James Mattis, published a new national defense strategy as a blueprint for a new era. Counterterrorism was no longer the country’s “primary concern.” The new strategy called long-term strategic competition with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran the top priorities.

But as with all things in the Trump administration, chaos reigned, and the tension between Trump’s policy-by-tweet and his national security officials, including those he once fawned over, caused constant confusion and internal conflict. Mattis resigned after Trump announced in December 2018 that the United States would unilaterally remove its forces from Syria, leaving America’s allies, the Kurds, vulnerable to slaughter by Turkish forces. Trump withdrew some troops but not for almost another year and under a new defense secretary, Mark Esper. The forces in Syria only moved to neighboring Iraq. By then, it was clear that Trump wanted to end America’s forever wars, not out of some secret humanitarianism or morality, but rather to save money and make U.S. foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, much more transactional.

Trump reportedly tried several times to pull troops out of Afghanistan but was said to have been blocked or slow-rolled by the national security establishment. After he lost the November election, Trump fired Esper because he was said to have resisted the move. As a result, Miller replaced Esper and quickly went about announcing that troops were indeed coming home. As almost an afterthought, Miller and the acting undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, also pushed to update the 2005 sharing agreement to fall in line with the change in national security policy, several defense officials told The Intercept. They said that fears of resource cuts to the CIA are unfounded overall.

“We could come out saying we’re going to do more [support for the CIA] because it’s more costly to go after Russia and China,” a senior defense official with knowledge of the review told The Intercept. “If you look at 10 years, it will probably be increased because it is more costly to do these things, and the risk is higher against the state actor. The only group that is hyperventilating about this are a small group of people who have become [counterterrorism] focused.”

A secondary justification for rewriting the agreement is to allow the Pentagon to answer a simple question that has plagued military officials for years: How much support do we provide to the CIA, and how is it used?

“We’ve been trying to get a handle on what is the totality of what we’re giving,” the Pentagon official said. “And nobody knew. We realized that we had lost track of how much was being given over the years. We have no idea, but it’s enormous, and that freaked people out because it’s like, holy shit, this has totally run away from us.”

For military officials, the support to the CIA has become just like any other part of the Pentagon’s self-licking ice cream cone: one with no end. The agreement has persisted for 15 years, even as national security priorities have changed. Two military officials who spoke with The Intercept said the Pentagon couldn’t answer congressional committees’ questions about how the CIA used the Pentagon’s resources. As a result, the new memo will insist that the CIA provide more information to the Pentagon on where and how their support, including forces, is used.

“If you want our huge amount of resources which we provide you — [and] it is a good partnership — you need to tell us what our people are being used for, on a real-time basis, so we can assess whether or not it is legal, whether or not it’s a good budgetary decision, whether it is a good use of resources,” the senior Pentagon official said. “We don’t have any of that.”

According to the senior Pentagon official involved in the review, the Pentagon is asking the CIA to use military support in the so-called great nation competition and use fewer resources in their counterterrorism efforts. It is all part of a more considerable effort to move the military’s resources away from hunting suspected Islamic militants worldwide and toward the now two-year-old focus on other global powers. The military is letting the CIA know that they are ending its forever wars in a strategic sense.

“[Director Haspel] wants out of the war on terror,” the senior Pentagon official continued. “She thinks that takes the CIA away from its core mission of going after Russia and China. And it’s 20 years later, and we had to do [that] at the time, it’s 20 years now, and a shift has to be made.”

A CIA spokesperson, asked whether Haspel indeed believed the war on terror had taken the agency away from its core mission, referred to a speech she gave in 2018. “Another strategic priority,” Haspel said at the time, “is to invest more heavily in collecting against the hardest issues. Our efforts against these difficult intelligence gaps have been overshadowed over the years by the intelligence community’s justifiably heavy emphasis on counterterrorism in the wake of 9/11. Groups such as the so-called Islamic State and Al Qaeda remain squarely in our sights, but we are sharpening our focus on nation-state adversaries.”

CIA counterterrorism veterans believe the review stems from Trump making a last-minute effort to punish the CIA for various offenses, but mostly because the agency concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help him become president. A retired senior intelligence official told The Intercept that a senior congressional aide on an intelligence committee asked the White House last week to explain Miller’s letter to the CIA. The retired official said the aide was told, “It’s because the president’s followers believe the agency played a role” in Trump’s election loss last month. The retired official said the White House acknowledged that the claim of CIA involvement in Trump’s election loss was unfounded, but the facts didn’t matter. The message from the White House, according to the retired official, was that “it matters what Trump’s supporters think, and they think that’s the case.”

Given Trump’s pettiness and thin-skinned demeanor, it may very well be that Trump ordered the Pentagon to take its toys away from the CIA, but it also doesn’t matter.

The senior Pentagon official involved in the review insisted that the review be completed and signed off by acting secretary Miller by January 5, 2021, the day before Congress will most likely certify the Electoral College victory for Joe Biden. A Pentagon spokesperson disputed that the memo would be finished by then.

Why do the review now, weeks before a new president takes office?

“Because nobody wants to do this,” the senior Pentagon official said. “It’s like ripping off a Band-Aid.”

While it is unusual to order a review so close to a new administration’s term, it is also ineffective. The senior Pentagon official refused to explain why January 5 was chosen as the date for completing the review. While it appears to be related to Congress’s certification of the Electoral College, several national security officials insist that the Pentagon cannot implement any changes reflected in the new memo before or shortly after President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration. So the review’s conclusions cannot be foisted on the incoming administration.

But it does provide Biden with an unintentional gift. By forcing the incoming administration to respond to the review shortly after taking power, Trump’s team provides Biden with an opportunity to quickly take stock of 20 years of lethal operations, both in direct view and secret — and make a decision to end an unwinnable war.

Somewhat predictably, the part of the national security state that sees a threat to its future missions or budget is portraying dire consequences. “It’s the head of the snake, going ‘Turn!’” a former senior military officer told The Intercept. “The tail never likes it.”

A lame-duck president agitating for a useful bureaucratic change as a parting shot at the deep state is the same delusional logic that came with much of Trump’s four years: occasionally doing the right thing for all the wrong reasons.

The post Trump to CIA: Say Goodbye to Your War on Terror appeared first on The Intercept.

Michael Goodboe, a 54-year-old former Navy SEAL who worked for the CIA’s paramilitary unit, died after succumbing to injuries from an improvised explosive device, according to the two sources. The two sources requested anonymity because of the sensitivity around the attack and because they were not authorized to disclose Goodboe’s death.

The attack that killed Goodboe was presumed to have been conducted by al-Shabab, an Al Qaeda-affiliated group engaged in a decadelong insurgency, though the details remain unclear. One of the people familiar with the attack said Goodboe was flown to Germany, where the U.S. has a military hospital, and later died of his injuries.

The CIA declined to comment. Goodboe’s family did not respond to requests for comment. The New York Times first reported the death but did not identify the CIA officer who was killed.

Goodboe, who was known as “Goody” to his colleagues and teammates, was formerly a member of the Navy’s elite SEAL Team 6, according to military records obtained by The Intercept and the two sources. Goodboe left the SEALs several years ago and joined the CIA’s paramilitary unit as a contractor, according to one of the sources who knew him.

Goodboe’s death comes as President Donald Trump has announced his intention to remove all of the roughly 700 U.S. military personnel from Somalia before leaving office in January. The U.S. has conducted covert and clandestine operations in Somalia for nearly two decades, and Trump’s expected order would not affect the CIA’s presence in the country.

The attack in Mogadishu occurred as al-Shabab has increased attacks against Somali counterterrorism forces who were trained by the U.S., including an attack this week that killed as many as six Somalis, according to local press reports. The group was formed after the 9/11 attacks with the intention of going after U.S. interests in East Africa.

U.S. Africa Command reported an increase in car bomb attacks by al-Shabab during the quarter ending on September 30, including in Mogadishu. In July, al-Shabab attempted to assassinate the chief of Somalia’s military using a car bomb in Mogadishu. In August, a car bomb attack by al-Shabab at Lido Beach in Mogadishu resulted in 25 casualties. On September 7, al-Shabab used a car bomb to attack U.S and Somali troops operating in the south of the country, killing three Somali personnel and wounding one U.S. military service member.

Last September, al-Shabab carried out an assault on a U.S. outpost, Baledogle Military Airfield, about 62 miles northwest of Mogadishu, injuring one American. On January 5, members of the group attacked a longtime American outpost at Manda Bay, Kenya, killing two American military contractors and a U.S. soldier.

In September, AFRICOM’s director of intelligence, Rear Adm. Heidi Berg, said there had been “a definitive shift” in al-Shabab’s focus on attacking U.S. interests in the region over the last couple months. In a press release that same month, al-Shabab vowed to “concentrate their military operations on the American crusaders in order to defend their religion, land and people.”

In 2017, Senior Chief Petty Officer Kyle Milliken, a SEAL Team 6 operator, was killed by enemy fire about 40 miles west of Mogadishu. The next year, 26-year-old Staff Sgt. Alex Conrad of the Army’s Special Forces, was killed in a firefight about 200 miles southwest of the capital.

Under the Trump administration, airstrikes in Somalia have skyrocketed, and there has been an increase in civilian deaths. From 2007 to 2017, the U.S. military is known to have carried out 42 attacks. Under Trump, the U.S. military conducted 38 strikes in 2017, 48 in 2018, and 63 in 2019. This year alone, AFRICOM has acknowledged 49 airstrikes in Somalia, more than under the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama combined. The number of CIA strikes is unknown.

According to the U.K.-based monitoring group Airwars, evidence suggests that as many as 142 civilians have been killed in U.S. attacks since 2007, though AFRICOM has admitted to killing only five civilians over the last 13 years.

Despite the increase in U.S. strikes, operations, and personnel, the conflict between al-Shabab and U.S. forces working with a central Somali government has been mostly a stalemate.

The post CIA Contractor Dies in Secret U.S. War in Somalia appeared first on The Intercept.

Anthony Schinella, 52, the national intelligence officer for military issues, shot himself on June 14 in the front yard of his Arlington home. A Virginia medical examiner’s report lists Schinella’s cause of death as suicide from a gunshot wound to the head. His wife, who had just married him weeks earlier, told The Intercept that she was in her car in the driveway, trying to get away from Schinella when she witnessed his suicide. At the time of his suicide, Schinella was weeks away from retirement.

Soon after his death, an FBI liaison to the CIA entered Schinella’s house and removed his passports, his secure phone, and searched through his belongings, according to his wife, Sara Corcoran, a Washington journalist. A CIA spokesperson declined to comment for this story.

As NIO for military issues, Schinella was the highest-ranking military affairs analyst in the U.S. intelligence community, and was also a member of the powerful National Intelligence Council, which is responsible for producing the intelligence community’s most important analytical reports that go to the president and other top policymakers.

The National Intelligence Council is now under the control of the Director of National Intelligence, and has recently gained greater public prominence as its analytical work has been caught up in political controversies surrounding the Trump administration, including this summer’s public firestorm over intelligence reports about Russian bounties to kill American troops.

On June 26,  the New York Times reported that Russia paid bounties to the Taliban to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan, and President Donald Trump quickly faced criticism for having failed to do anything in response to protect American troops. Within days, the National Intelligence Council produced a memo that claimed that the intelligence about the bounties wasn’t conclusive. While the memo was not made public, it was quickly picked up in the press and seemed designed to placate Trump by raising doubts about the original news story about the Russian bounties. The NIC memo appears to have been generated at the urging of John Ratcliffe, the former Republican Texas congressman and Trump supporter who became director of national intelligence in May.

But at the time that the memo became public through press reports, there was no mention of the fact that the national intelligence officer for military issues — the one member of the NIC who should have had the most input into the analysis concerning military operations in Afghanistan — had killed himself just days earlier. In fact, Schinella was considered an expert on the Taliban and its military capabilities. Though he was an analyst, Schinella had deployed to four different war zones during his career, his wife said.

A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a graduate degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Schinella had spent much of his career in the CIA before joining the National Intelligence Council. In 2019, the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, published a book by Schinella entitled “Bombs Without Boots,” a study of the limits of the uses of air power in modern war.

Tim Kilbourn, a friend and former colleague of Schinella, described him in an interview as an “American patriot,” and said that his end was a “tragedy,” but declined to comment further. The Arlington County, Virginia, police report on the incident was not immediately available.

Ashley Savage, a spokesperson for the Arlington County Police Department, said the department’s investigation of the Schinella case remains open. She said the Arlington police notified the CIA about Schinella’s death, and that the Arlington police provided assistance to the CIA. “We will defer any questions related to the CIA investigation to their agency,” she added.

After his death, Schinella’s wife discovered a large collection of bondage and S&M gear that had been hidden in his house, along with 24 guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition. His wife said that one of Schinella’s CIA colleagues contacted her recently and said the CIA has completed an investigation into Schinella’s death, but didn’t provide her with any details.

Schinella had two children from a previous marriage.

The post Senior U.S. Intelligence Official Died by Suicide in June appeared first on The Intercept.

On Wednesday, Robert O’Neill, a former member of SEAL Team 6 who fired several shots into bin Laden during the 2011 raid which killed the Al Qaeda leader, tweeted a photo of himself maskless on a plane with what appeared to be a Delta logo on the seats. “I’m not a pussy,” O’Neill wrote in the tweet alongside the photo.

O’Neill, who spent the better part of two days griping about the attention for his tweet attracted, announced Thursday afternoon on Twitter that Delta Air Lines had banned him from flights.

I just got banned from @Delta for posting a picture. Wow.

— Robert J. O'Neill (@mchooyah) August 20, 2020

The tweet was later deleted. A subsequent tweet said O’Neill’s wife took the picture down. Later, O’Neill said it was an “attempt at a joke,” but he has previously tweeted out that airline passengers on a different flight he was on were “sheep” for abiding by the mask requirement. Later in the afternoon, he tweeted, “I am not the bad guy. I killed the bad guy.”

Earlier, on Wednesday, Delta Air Lines told The Intercept that O’Neill faced a ban. “We’re aware of this customer’s tweet and are reviewing this event,” a spokesperson for Delta told The Intercept. “All customers who don’t comply with our mask-wearing requirement risk losing their ability to fly Delta in the future. Medical research tells us that wearing a mask is one of the most effective ways to reduce the COVID-19 infection rate.”

pic.twitter.com/RqbIcP4IZz

— Jay Arnold (@jayfarnold) August 20, 2020

A spokesperson for O’Neill did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In his tweets, O’Neill has repeatedly cast doubt on the seriousness of Covid-19, the virus that has already killed roughly 170,000 Americans since it began spreading in the U.S., and the efficacy of masks — which he has called a “novelty” — in combating the spread of the virus.

Airlines started requiring masks for travel in the spring, though enforcement was reportedly lax. Airlines have come under increasing pressure to enforce the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-recommended mask mandates for flying, particularly after outraged passengers posted pictures of people not wearing masks onboard to social media. In response, airlines have become stricter in recent weeks about enforcing compliance, as well as dictating what type of masks meet their requirements. In addition to removing noncompliant passengers from individual flights, several airlines, including Delta, have said they will in some cases ban passengers for life.

Last Friday, Delta CEO Ed Bastian told CNN the airline had already banned dozens of people for refusing to wear masks. “We’ve had well over 100 people that have refused to keep their mask on during the flight,” Bastian said.

A consensus has developed among scientists and health experts that wearing a mask is one of the best tools for impeding the spread of coronavirus. But masks have been politicized by right-wing political figures, not least President Donald Trump.

After serving 16 years in the Navy, O’Neill was fired from his team shortly after the bin Laden raid, after SEAL Team 6 discovered he was frequenting Virginia Beach bars and openly bragging that he was the man who killed bin Laden. The Intercept previously reported that O’Neill has misstated and embellished his role in bin Laden’s death.

O’Neill is a polarizing figure even in the tight-knit Navy SEAL community. His former teammates credit another SEAL with fatally wounding bin Laden before O’Neill entered the room and fired several shots into the terrorist leader’s face. Following his separation from the Navy, O’Neill’s name was added to SEAL Team 6’s “rock of shame,” an unofficial list of unit pariahs, and he was banned from the team’s Virginia Beach headquarters.

After he left the Navy, O’Neill became a right-wing celebrity, including gigs as a paid Fox News contributor and popular public speaker. The former Navy SEAL frequently uses Twitter to troll “libs” — liberals — as well as to hit on far-right themes.

These are not protesters. These are terrorists.

— Robert J. O'Neill (@mchooyah) June 2, 2020

For instance, O’Neill has used Twitter to decry social activism in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police in May. During the George Floyd protests O’Neill tweeted, “Rubber bullets might as well be white flags. Shoot. Or you don’t shoot.” He then referred to police who “retreated” during protests as “pussies.” He later compared activists pushing to take down statues of Confederate officers with “ISIS, al Qaeda and the Taliban.”

His tweets against wearing masks amid the coronavirus pandemic have also sometimes been tinged with racism.

Update: August 20, 2020
This post has been updated to reflect that, on Thursday, O’Neill tweeted that he had been banned from Delta Air Lines.

The post SEAL Who Shot Bin Laden Banned From Delta Air Lines for Not Wearing Coronavirus Mask appeared first on The Intercept.

Prince, who is the brother of Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, met earlier this year with a top official of Russia’s Wagner Group and offered his mercenary forces to support the firm’s operations in Libya and Mozambique, according to two people familiar with Prince’s offer.

Wagner officials said they are not interested in working with Prince, three people familiar with their decision told The Intercept.

A lawyer for Prince denied that his client met anyone from Wagner.

The Wagner Group is a semi-private military force that operates in countries or conflicts where the Russian government seeks plausible deniability for its activities. It is often equipped and supported directly by the Russian Ministry of Defense, according to reports and experts who track Wagner’s activities. The U.S. State Department website also lists Wagner as an entity connected to the “Defense Sector of the Government of the Russian Federation.” Any business relationship between Prince and Wagner would, in effect, make the influential Trump administration adviser a subcontractor to the Russian military.

In recent years, the Russian government has deployed Wagner to several African countries, Ukraine, and Syria, where the U.S. military killed dozens of Wagner fighters in 2018 after the Russians and their Syrian allies attacked an oil facility that the United States was defending.

“Wagner Group is an instrument of Russian policy. It works under the GRU, which is the Russian military intelligence,” said Sean McFate, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a former military contractor who has written about mercenaries.

In attempting to do business with Wagner, Prince may have exposed himself to legal liability. 

In attempting to do business with Wagner, Prince may also have exposed himself to legal liability. In 2017, the Trump administration sanctioned Wagner, as well as its founder and head Dmitry Utkin, for having “recruited and sent soldiers to fight alongside [Russian-backed] separatists in eastern Ukraine” during the 2014 Russian invasion. The Russian government denied involvement in the invasion, even as its forces occupied and took control of Crimea, also in Ukrainian territory, in violation of international law.

The sanctions prohibit individuals or companies from providing “financial, material, or technological support for, or goods or services to or in support of, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order.” They also forbid anyone “to have acted or purported to act for or on behalf” of Wagner. The 2017 addition of Wagner to the sanctions list builds on a 2014 executive order signed by President Barack Obama.

“In my experience, the act of soliciting from a sanctioned party would indeed be an apparent violation,” said Brian O’Toole, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council and former senior sanctions official at the Treasury Department. “Whether you make that [legal] case is an entirely separate matter,” he said, adding that pitching business to Wagner “would seem to be a fairly egregious thing to do.”

When Prince met with Wagner leadership, he was already under federal investigation for violating arms trafficking regulations. The proposal to the Russian firm also raises questions about whether Trump administration officials authorized the meeting or were aware of Prince’s efforts to work with the group.

A former Navy SEAL who rose to prominence and notoriety as head of the private security firm Blackwater, Prince has been a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump, serving as an unofficial adviser on military and foreign policy issues in Africa, the Middle East, and Afghanistan. Prince was a Trump donor in 2016 and has worked to support the president politically while proposing private military solutions that would benefit his companies financially.

Early in the Trump administration, Prince proposed privatizing the war in Afghanistan and supplying Trump with a private spy service intended to circumvent the U.S. intelligence community. Neither proposal succeeded, despite having support for some of his ideas from senior administration officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

For years, Prince has tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to win military contracts with governments in Africa and the Middle East. Wagner has become an increasingly visible player in the region as Russia’s influence there has grown, allowing the country to operate under the radar at a time when “plausible deniability is more powerful than firepower,” according to McFate, the mercenary expert.

“The reason why groups like Wagner exist is that modern war is getting sneakier and mercenaries are a great way to get things done in the shadows.”

“The reason why groups like Wagner exist, and the reason why people like Erik Prince [are] succeeding, is that modern war is getting sneakier and mercenaries and groups like Wagner are a great way to get things done in the shadows,” McFate said.

Libya has been divided and in conflict since the U.S. and NATO allies removed longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011. The United Nations and most of the international community, including the U.S, recognize the Government of National Accord in the Libyan capital Tripoli as the country’s official leaders. But the eastern portion of the country is led by strongman Khalifa Hifter, who tried last year to take Tripoli. Both sides are backed by foreign powers that have continually violated a U.N. embargo on military support. Turkey and Qatar have supported the GNA, while Russia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt have backed Hifter.

Last spring, Hifter’s forces, the Libyan National Army, moved to take Tripoli, but were thwarted within days. Hifter turned to Moscow and Wagner. Americans are prohibited from aiding either side of the conflict without U.S. government authorization.

At the same time, Prince sought to provide a force in Mozambique, where the government has been fighting a small insurgency over the past two years. President Filipe Nyusi of Mozambique flew to Moscow to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in August 2019. The countries signed several trade pacts, and Russia agreed to send military aid. Russian military hardware and Russian nationals working for Wagner arrived in Mozambique in September, according to news reports.

After Wagner lost more than a dozen fighters in Mozambique, Prince sent a proposal to the Russian firm offering to supply a ground force as well as aviation-based surveillance, according to documents viewed by The Intercept and a person familiar with Prince’s proposal.

Prince has also served as an adviser to the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, known as MBZ, for more than a decade. Under bin Zayed’s leadership, the UAE, a close regional ally of the U.S., has intervened militarily in several regional wars in the Middle East and Africa. A pariah during the Obama administration, Prince was taken in by the Emirati crown prince and awarded a contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars to create and train a presidential guard for the royal family. He was later removed for mismanagement, among other reasons.

Prince also has ties to China. He is co-chair of Frontier Services Group, a Hong-Kong based logistics company he founded and whose largest investor is the Chinese government. The Intercept has previously reported that the U.S. government has investigated Prince for his ties to China’s intelligence service. The conflicts between Prince’s commercial interests and the goals of the many governments that retain his services have piled up as Prince has tried to sell military and mercenary capabilities around the world. FSG, for example, signed a contract for fishing rights in Mozambique around the same time Prince began exploring defense contracts there. The fishing contract has since been dissolved, according to the company.

“The conflicts of interest are deep and threaten democracy when you have a free agent going between the U.S. and its main power rivals,” said McFate. “It would never clear an intelligence community background check. This is a dangerous thing for any democracy.”

The post Erik Prince Offered Lethal Services to Sanctioned Russian Mercenary Firm Wagner appeared first on The Intercept.

Prince, who once moved to the United Arab Emirates to avoid being caught up in a federal prosecution, immediately dismissed the associate’s concerns. He was untouchable, he bragged, and would face no legal troubles.

“Not under this guy,” Prince said referring to President Donald Trump, according to a person with direct knowledge of the exchange.

That assumption is about to be tested.

Prince, an heir to a billion-dollar fortune who is widely viewed as a shadow adviser to the president, is under federal investigation for his 2015 attempt to modify two American-made crop-dusting planes into attack aircraft — a violation of arms trafficking regulations — two people familiar with the investigation told The Intercept. The planes became part of private military services Prince proposed to sell or use in mercenary operations in Africa and Azerbaijan, as The Intercept has previously reported.

The investigation into the modified crop dusters is one of several ongoing probes targeting Prince. Another focuses on the allegations that he lied to Congress during the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russia’s 2016 presidential election interference; a third concerns a 2017 armed aviation proposal to the UAE, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The investigation of Prince coincides with heightened scrutiny of Attorney General William Barr, who has been heavily criticized for intervening in two other prominent criminal cases involving friends and associates of Trump. The Prince investigations, and decisions about whether or not to charge him, are perhaps the most politically charged of all.

That Prince’s efforts to arm and sell the two American-made crop dusters are part of the FBI’s investigation into his activities has not been previously reported.

The FBI did not respond to a request for comment. A lawyer for Prince also did not respond to a request for comment.

Prince’s connections to Trump reflect the netherworld of deniability in which he operates: He has no official role with the White House or Trump campaign, but appears to benefit from the association. Prince donated $250,000 to help elect the president and worked to help his campaign dig up dirt on Hillary Clinton, according to the Mueller report. Prince also worked closely with Steve Bannon, then Trump’s campaign manager, trying to shape Trump’s foreign policy and national security positions throughout the campaign.

After the election, Trump appointed Betsy DeVos, Prince’s sister, as his secretary of education. Prince then met with a Russian banker in the Seychelles in an apparent effort to establish a backchannel between the incoming Trump administration and the Russian government, according to the Mueller report. That meeting later became the focus of Prince’s testimony before the House Intelligence Committee. The Mueller report described details of the meeting that appeared to contradict Prince’s sworn testimony and triggered the committee’s criminal referral to the Justice Department.

Prince has also visited the White House several times to pitch privatizing wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East, as well as how to confront Iran, according to two people familiar with Prince’s efforts.

Barr, the nation’s top law enforcement official, has faced extensive criticism for his efforts to oversee cases involving Trump’s advisers and associates. Last week, after career prosecutors requested seven to nine years in prison for Roger Stone, a longtime Trump associate, Trump tweeted his disgust, calling the sentence “a miscarriage of justice.” Stone was convicted of seven felony counts of lying, obstruction of justice, and witness tampering related to a congressional investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election; the sentence prosecutors had requested was in line with federal guidelines.

A few hours later, Barr overruled his line prosecutors, seeking a lesser prison sentence for Stone. The move led the four career federal lawyers handling the Stone case to quit the prosecution, and one of them resigned from the Justice Department altogether. More than 2,400 former Justice Department employees have since called for Barr’s resignation. On Thursday, a federal judge sentenced Stone to three years and four months in prison.

Barr also appointed a close colleague as U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., and recently brought in outside federal prosecutors to supervise the work of career government attorneys in several high-profile cases overseen by that office, according to the Washington Post. Among the cases being reviewed are those involving former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn and Prince.

Mary McCord, a former senior Justice Department official during the Obama and Trump administrations who now teaches at Georgetown Law School, told The Intercept that Barr had already damaged the department’s ability to investigate politically sensitive criminal cases when he mischaracterized the Mueller Report before it was released publicly. With Barr stepping into the Stone and Flynn cases, whatever outcome the Justice Department announces in the Prince investigations will be subject to criticism about political interference.

“It’s really troublesome, McCord said. “The approach to any case connected to Trump is now fraught given the appearance that the department is a tool for the president to wield in favor of his friends and against his detractors.”

In 2015, Frontier Services Group, a Hong Kong-based logistics company founded by Prince, hired a U.S. law firm to review the company’s legal exposure to violations of U.S. law on weapons sales and the export of defense services to foreign governments and militaries. The attorneys concluded that Prince had likely violated the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, known as ITAR. The legal assessment, which was conducted by King & Spalding, also recommended that the American personnel at FSG report the violations to the Justice Department, which happened a few month later in 2016.

“The potential violations stem principally from conduct of Mr. Prince, a U.S. person,” Frontier Services Group CEO Gregg Smith wrote to the director of the State Department’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls, which regulates the export of defense articles and services, in a letter obtained by The Intercept.

In 2018, an FSG spokesperson, responding on behalf of the company and Prince, told The Intercept: “Any assertion that FSG or Mr. Prince violated any laws in this matter is categorically false.”

It is unclear why the FBI took more than three years to investigate Prince for the modification of two crop dusters. Prince has long sought to convert the single-engine agricultural aircraft into light attack planes, which he believes can revolutionize how small wars are fought. The two planes, manufactured by Thrush Aircraft in Albany, Georgia, were the first prototypes Prince built in an effort to create a low-cost air force for his vision of privatized warfare.

Prince has never been charged with a crime in the United States. But his career as a private security entrepreneur has been marked by atrocities like the murder of four Blackwater personnel in Fallujah in April 2004 and the Nisour Square massacre of 2007, both of which gave rise to federal proceedings. A civil lawsuit brought by the families of the American contractors killed in 2004 resulted in a confidential settlement; a federal criminal trial against four Blackwater personnel for murder and manslaughter yielded convictions. In each case, Prince escaped personal liability.

In 2012 Blackwater, under a new corporate name, ownership, and management, entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with federal prosecutors and paid a $42 million fine for a series of weapons trafficking and ITAR-related offenses. Prince admitted no wrongdoing and walked away from U.S. government contracts but eventually lost his ITAR license. Despite that, he has since gone on to provide or offer defense services in at least 10 countries, mostly in Africa and the Middle East, according to documents and people with knowledge of the various plans.

The post The FBI Is Investigating Erik Prince for Trying to Weaponize Crop Dusters appeared first on The Intercept.

Rear Adm. Collin Green, commander of the Naval Special Warfare Command, will leave his post in September, two of the people familiar with his decision said.

Green was widely viewed as a reformer who was willing to hold his command accountable. His departure follows two years during which he sought to repair the vaunted military unit’s image after a slew of criminal charges against SEALs, including war crimes, murder, drug use, and sexual assault. Green had publicly told his force that the SEALs had a “problem” and that some members of the unit were “ethically misaligned.”

Green’s departure is unusual in part because it comes as his current tour length of two years is being extended to three, meaning he has effectively declined a final year in the job and won’t seek a third star.

He will likely be replaced by another two-star SEAL admiral, H. Wyman Howard III, a former commander of SEAL Team 6, according to two people familiar with the Navy’s pick. Howard is currently in command of Special Operations Command Central.

Howard has his own questionable past. When he was a squadron commander at SEAL Team 6, Howard solicited donations to procure expensive, hand-made hatchets for his operators, and encouraged them to “bloody the hatchet” on operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, The Intercept previously reported. Later, SEAL Team 6 commanders received internal reports that Howard’s men were using the hatchets to hack dead and dying militants. SEAL Team 6 did not conduct any investigations based on the allegations.

A spokesperson for Naval Special Warfare directed questions about personnel changes to the Pentagon.

Green led the command of roughly 3,000 SEALs, which includes the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, best known as SEAL Team 6, during a period of unprecedented public controversy. Green faced calls from the Navy and Congress to address the ethical and legal troubles plaguing the SEALs. He has said that the stress from his reform efforts, as well as personal issues, have taken a toll, according to two people who have spoken with him in recent months.

His most recent effort to bring what the Navy refers to as “good order and discipline” to his unit failed after he sought to expel Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher, who had been charged with murdering an unarmed ISIS detainee during a 2017 deployment in Iraq. Gallagher was acquitted of that charge and several others, but convicted of a relatively minor charge for posing for a photo with the fighter’s dead body.

Trump took an interest in Gallagher’s case after seeing his story on Fox News. After the Navy confined Gallagher pending his court martial, Trump had him released and tweeted his support for Gallagher. When Gallagher’s rank was reduced as part of his conviction, Trump reinstated it.

After the court martial, Green signaled that he would allow a discipline review board, an internal nonjudicial process conducted by Gallagher’s senior enlisted peers, to hold Gallagher and others who posed with the dead ISIS detainee accountable. The review board could have stripped Gallagher of his SEAL trident pin, the emblem that signifies his membership in the Navy SEAL community.

But Gallagher’s supporters viewed Green’s effort as an attempt to smear the convicted SEAL, who was planning to retire after the case and the public uproar it generated effectively ended his 20-year-career in the Navy. In a humiliating defeat for Green, Trump overruled him, demanding that the review be halted and that Gallagher be allowed to retire with his trident pin.

Gallagher has since posted pictures on social media of himself and his wife with Trump at Mar-a-Lago and started a clothing line. He also recently posted a video that included the photos, names, and current military assignments of the SEALs in his platoon who testified against him at his court martial.

Last year, after an entire platoon from SEAL Team 7 was sent home from a deployment in Iraq amid allegations of sexual assault and alcohol abuse, Green fired the commanding officer, his senior enlisted, and the executive officer. The move was almost unprecedented. Some in the SEAL community applauded the decision, but two of the SEALs who were relieved of duty later filed an inspector general complaint alleging that Green had made them scapegoats after Gallagher was acquitted of war crimes.

The post SEAL Commander Who Clashed With Trump to Leave Early appeared first on The Intercept.

Rogers has met the prosecutor leading the probe, Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham, on multiple occasions, according to two people familiar with Rogers’s cooperation. While the substance of those meetings is not clear, Rogers has cooperated voluntarily, several people with knowledge of the matter said.

Rogers, who retired in May 2018, did not respond to requests for comment.

The inquiry has been a pillar of Attorney General William Barr’s tenure. He appointed Durham to lead the inquiry last spring, directing him to determine whether the FBI was justified in opening a counterintelligence investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election and alleged links between Russia and the Trump campaign, among other matters. What began as a broad review has turned into a criminal investigation, according to the New York Times. Barr has described the use of undercover FBI agents to investigate members of the campaign as “spying.”

Last week, a separate, nonpartisan review of the investigation by the Justice Department inspector general concluded that while the FBI and Justice Department committed serious errors in their applications to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, the investigation was opened properly and without political bias. Barr and Durham took the unusual step of publicly disagreeing with some of the inspector general’s conclusions, with Barr describing the FBI’s justification for the inquiry as “very flimsy.”

Rogers’s voluntary participation, which has not been previously reported, makes him the first former intelligence director known to have been interviewed for the probe.

“He’s been very cooperative,” one former intelligence officer who has knowledge of Rogers’s meetings with the Justice Department said.

Politico and NBC News have previously reported that Durham intends to interview both former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. It is unclear if that has happened. Brennan and the Justice Department declined to comment. Clapper could not be reached for comment.

The Times reported on Thursday that Durham is examining Brennan’s congressional testimony and communications with a focus on what the former CIA director may have told other officials about his views on the so-called Steele dossier, a set of unverified allegations about links between Russia, Trump, and his campaign compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele.

Rogers is no stranger to the controversy surrounding the 2016 election. Shortly after Trump won the presidency, Rogers traveled to Trump Tower in New York, where he provided an unsolicited briefing to the then president-elect. Rogers informed Trump that the NSA knew that the Russians interfered in the election, according to three people familiar with the briefing. Despite delivering what Rogers told a confidant was “bad news,” Trump would keep Rogers on as NSA director while dismissing Brennan and Clapper.

In January 2017 just before Trump took office, the intelligence community released an unclassified assessment concluding that Russia interfered in the election. The assessment was based on a combination of intelligence collected and reviewed by the NSA, CIA, and FBI.

Russia’s initial purpose, the assessment found, was to undermine confidence in American democracy, but the effort ultimately focused on damaging Hillary Clinton’s campaign in an effort to help elect Trump. While all three intelligence agencies agreed on that aspect of the assessment, the CIA and FBI expressed “high confidence” that the Russian government sought to help Trump win “by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him,” while Rogers’s NSA had only “moderate confidence” in that finding.

Trump entered his presidency deeply suspicious of the U.S. intelligence community and skeptical of the assessment. He has spent much of his administration claiming that he is the victim of a “deep-state” coup, beginning with the counterintelligence investigation into his presidential campaign. He has downplayed the intelligence community’s conclusions about Russia’s responsibility for hacking the Democratic National Committee computer system and providing internal emails to WikiLeaks, which published them beginning in July 2016, instead affirming conspiracy theories that blame Ukraine for stealing the emails.

A year into the Trump administration, in February 2018, Rogers testified at a Senate hearing that the White House had given the NSA no orders or instructions for countering further Russian election meddling.

“President Putin has clearly come to the conclusion that there’s little price to pay and that therefore ‘I can continue this activity,’” Rogers said. “Clearly, what we have done is not enough.”

Four months later in Helsinki, Trump said that he confronted the Russian president about meddling in the election. But Vladimir Putin denied that his government was involved, and Trump said he believed him, directly contradicting Rogers and the other U.S. intelligence directors.

Rogers was concerned that his testimony before Congress drew the president’s ire, according to a former Trump White House official who spoke with Rogers earlier this year.

“He asked if the president was mad at him,” the former official said. “I told him, ‘No way, the president has always liked you.’”

The White House declined to comment.

Durham’s inquiry into the origins of the Russia probe has perpetuated the bitter partisan conflict fueled earlier by special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Among Mueller’s key findings was that Russia’s military intelligence unit, the GRU, stole Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s emails, along with emails from the DNC, and delivered them to WikiLeaks. The Mueller investigation led to federal indictments or guilty pleas from 34 people and three companies, but concluded that there was insufficient evidence to charge anyone in the Trump campaign with coordinating with the Russian government.

Yet the Mueller probe, the recent inspector general’s report, and now the Durham investigation have done little to bridge the yawning political divide between Trump and his supporters, who continue to see him as the victim of a politically motivated “witch hunt,” and career intelligence and national security officials, who view the Durham investigation as an effort to punish those who led U.S. efforts to investigate Russia’s election meddling. In May, Trump gave Barr the unprecedented authority to review and declassify intelligence related to the Russia investigation, further inflaming national security veterans.

Durham’s investigation has also sought information from foreign governments. This summer, Barr and Durham traveled to Italy to request information from Italian intelligence officials about Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese professor who first told a Trump campaign adviser that the Russians had “dirt” on Clinton in the form of stolen emails. That claim played a central role in the FBI’s decision to open an investigation into the Trump campaign. But in the conservative press and the right-wing social media ecosystem, Mifsud was portrayed as part of an Obama administration plot to entrap and frame Trump. The inspector general’s report concluded that there is no evidence that Mifsud had any affiliation with the FBI.

Barr’s visit to Italy coincided with Trump’s offer to trade congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine for that country’s help in pursuing the unsupported allegations that Ukraine hacked the DNC and framed Russia. Trump’s efforts to solicit “a favor” from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — that Zelensky publicly announce an investigation into purported Ukrainian-backed hacking and look into alleged corruption by Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joseph Biden on behalf of Biden’s son Hunter — led to Trump’s impeachment in the House of Representatives this week.

The post Former NSA Director Is Cooperating With Probe of Trump-Russia Investigation appeared first on The Intercept.

Gallagher, a sniper and medic, was accused of stabbing an injured and unarmed ISIS detainee who may have been as young as 14 during a deployment in Mosul, Iraq, in 2017. The case had made headlines internationally, and Gallagher had won prominent support from President Donald Trump and Fox News.

During Gallagher’s court martial, witness testimony and evidence made clear that the veteran SEAL, who had eight combat deployments and was the chief of his platoon, had gone to Iraq hoping to get a “knife kill.” The main question during the military trial was whether Gallagher’s stabbing killed the detainee, who was already suffering from internal injuries from a U.S. military rocket attack when he sustained the knife wound.

In July, Gallagher was acquitted of murder, convicted of posing with the ISIS fighter’s corpse, and sentenced to a reduction in rank and time served. Trump congratulated him on Twitter.

After the verdict, senior Navy officials demanded that Green clean up the SEAL command, which had been getting bad press for the Gallagher case as well as a string of criminal allegations against other deployed SEALs, including murder, drug use, and sexual assault. An entire SEAL platoon was sent home from a deployment in Iraq for heavy drinking.

So Green issued a letter and a directive to all Navy SEALs this summer. “We have a problem,” he wrote, adding that a “portion” of SEALs were “ethically misaligned.” With that, Green took the first step to correcting a problem that had been building for years: He publicly acknowledged it. No admiral before him had had the courage to do so.

The sordid tale of Trump’s repeated Twitter interventions on Gallagher’s behalf is both an affront to the rule of law and tragically ironic. The firing of Navy Secretary Richard Spencer last month over the SEAL command’s efforts to pull Gallagher’s Trident pin, the symbol of the SEALs, may be the final chapter in the “Free Eddie” saga. But the Pentagon, Congress, and the American public are now catching on to the fact that the Navy SEALs’ most closely guarded secrets are not their clandestine missions and classified gear but the leadership failures and cover-ups that are endemic to their organization.

Over the last 20 years, the SEALs have moved further from accountability as a result of their battlefield exploits, which have been publicized and lionized by three successive presidents. There was no single moment when the community was cast adrift, but rather a steady string of incidents during deployments in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. SEAL units, and especially SEAL Team 6, became the war on terror’s entire strategy instead of being deployed as an elite unit in rare and specialized cases. Especially in the aftermath of the 2011 SEAL Team 6 mission in which Osama bin Laden was killed, the men who did the killing became the shiny object civilian leaders flashed to distract us from the government’s lack of any strategy beyond waging more war and killing more people.

This was not inevitable. At the risk of oversimplifying a dynamic problem affecting a highly skilled force, the SEAL crisis breaks down into three components: leadership failure, an endless war, and the drive by both previous SEAL admirals and retired operators to profit from the SEAL brand, which has become a highly sought-after financial and cultural commodity.

First, there has been a genuine leadership failure in both the officer corps and the senior enlisted ranks, where accountability and justice have steadily eroded since the post-9/11 wars began. In an effort to be liked, respected, and admired, officers commissioned by the president to uphold good order and discipline have abdicated their responsibility to seasoned enlisted operators who have far more tactical experience on the battlefield.

That happened during Gallagher’s 2017 deployment to Mosul. SEALs in Gallagher’s platoon reported concerns about him, including allegations that he shot unarmed Iraqi civilians, to their platoon commander, Lieutenant Jacob Portier, but the reports went nowhere. Gallagher, who had been Portier’s main instructor at Basic Underwater Demolition/SEALs training, frequently berated the lieutenant in front of the platoon, according to a SEAL on the deployment. The SEALs were asking a young officer on his first combat deployment to stand up to his former instructor, who had an outsized reputation as a “super SEAL.”

Second, Navy SEALs make up a significant proportion of the special operations community fighting the country’s forever wars. The war in Iraq is over and the war in Afghanistan may be nearing its end, at least for U.S. forces, but SEALs are still fighting around the world. Most enlisted SEALs spend their careers exclusively in special operations and rarely experience the military away from their insular world and its self-reinforcing values.

As a result, their killing skills are finely honed, but the historically unprecedented combat exposure of the post-9/11 years has taken physical and emotional tolls that SEAL leaders are just starting to understand. Gallagher was at the center of at least three problematic incidents during his seven previous combat deployments, which, according to a retired SEAL familiar with his record, are now viewed by SEAL leaders as “red flags.”

One of those incidents involved 2010 deployment to Afghanistan during which Gallagher was accused of killing a child. Gallagher shot at a Taliban fighter who was holding a girl in his arms as a human shield, killing both the child and the militant, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported. Gallagher’s lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, told the paper that Gallagher “felt remorse,” adding: “He tried to take a head shot; it went low.” Gallagher was investigated and cleared of wrongdoing in connection with the shooting, according to the Union-Tribune.

But two SEALs with direct knowledge say that Gallagher continued to revel in the story and retell it, using it to promote his image as a tough, battle-hardened SEAL. One of those SEALs told The Intercept that when Gallagher was a BUD/S instructor, another instructor who had served with Gallagher in Afghanistan told a group of trainees about the operation in which the girl was killed. He described a Taliban fighter or other militant who used his small children, including a baby, as human shields in an effort to avoid a U.S. attack. The instructor described two SEAL snipers in his platoon setting up for a shot on a day when the target cradled a very small child against his chest. One of the snipers was a young SEAL, new to the platoon, the instructor said. The new SEAL refused to shoot the target while he held the child. But the second sniper was willing and fired through child to hit the target, killing them both. The instructor derided the young SEAL and told the class, “Thank God we had a real Team guy,” willing to shoot the child. Gallagher subsequently confirmed that he had been the shooter, telling his trainees, “I got him.”

Later, Gallagher told the story again to his new platoon in SEAL Team 7, adding that he shot the very young girl in the skull because “you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet,” according to a SEAL who heard Gallagher tell the story. In hindsight, each “red flag” should have been an indication that Gallagher needed to be disciplined or removed from his leadership position in the platoon.

Shortly after Alpha Platoon arrived in Mosul in 2017, it became clear that Gallagher was troubled. “He’d wake us up in the middle of the night screaming from night terrors,” said the SEAL who served with Gallagher in Iraq. It was well known within the platoon that Gallagher consumed a cocktail of anabolic steroids, painkillers, and uppers during the deployment. Navy investigators later seized steroids and prescription painkiller Tramadol in a search of Gallagher’s home, as well as other evidence of drug use.

Gallagher also suffered a traumatic brain injury, or TBI — a result of being blown up during another deployment, according to a current SEAL officer familiar with Gallagher’s medical status. At his court martial, witnesses and text messages portrayed a grizzled veteran who lusted for combat. When he deployed to Iraq in 2017, he brought along a customized short blade knife made by a former SEAL teammate. And when an opportunity arose — a badly injured young ISIS fighter who had been captured by Iraqi government forces — Gallagher told his team, “Nobody touch him, he’s all mine.” Two witnesses at his court martial testified they saw Gallagher then stab the captive in the neck at least once (two other witnesses said Gallagher did not stab the militant).

Investigators obtained a text message Gallagher sent a friend after the deployment, with a picture of the dead detainee, that said, “Good story behind this. I got him with my hunting knife.”

Parlatore called the text an attempt at dark humor, the Associated Press reported.

Finally, the unwinding of the SEALs has been driven by old-fashioned brand loyalty at the expense of the health and stability of the force. That the SEALs are a commodity is evident in a network television show (“SEAL Team” on CBS), Hollywood’s highest-grossing war film (the Clint Eastwood-directed “American Sniper”), bestselling books of embellished or disputed accounts of operations (“Lone Survivor”), and even more books about so-called leadership based on SEAL creeds. Gallagher and his wife are currently searching for a ghostwriter to shop a book of their own, according to person familiar with the effort.

The fame and monetary success of a few former SEALs has helped build a public myth about the heroism, sacrifice, and overall greatness of the force, whose members often believe the distorted version of reality with greater fervor than the American public. The result, as one member of the SEAL community told me recently, was that many who want to speak out about corruption inside the SEAL ranks are admonished to keep quiet and “protect the brand.”

SEAL operators rely on their “brothers.” Over time, they’ve built a culture in which the primary goal is protecting the man standing next to them. It’s a culture that elevates loyalty to fellow SEALs over all other concerns, such as the need for justice and accountability when SEALs commit crimes.

Trump’s intervention in Gallagher’s case interrupted a rare moment when a SEAL’s peers wanted to mete out discipline for dishonorable acts. When Gallagher was set to retire two weeks ago, Adm. Collin Green saw a chance to restore “good order and discipline” to his force. He needed to demonstrate that the SEALs were capable of calling one of their own to account.

Although Gallagher was the only member of SEAL Team 7 to be tried and convicted for posing with the dead ISIS fighter, several other SEALs also posed with the body. Green determined that those who held a position of rank or responsibility, including Gallagher, would go before a review board of senior enlisted SEALs in a Navy justice process similar to a civil trial, and be judged as to whether they deserved to keep their Tridents. If the board deemed their conduct unworthy of the SEAL identity, all would be stripped of their Tridents and removed from Naval Special Warfare. The measure would allow Green to send a message that Gallagher’s conduct was beneath the Navy SEALs.

“Collin was trying to let the senior enlisted take ownership over Eddie,” said the retired Navy SEAL familiar with plans for the review board. “All he was doing was following a standard military process until the president stopped him midstream.”

Instead of accountability, the elite military unit got the same message from Trump that their leaders had been sending for the last two decades: You’re above the law.

I have reported extensively about SEAL Team 6 and the larger SEAL community for the last five years, and my sources range from senior officers and enlisted men to young seamen just entering the unit. The SEALs include plenty of courageous, honorable officers and operators but that majority (however slim it may be) has been overpowered by a pernicious minority who cling to the “code” of the SEAL brotherhood. Members of this minority took to a private Facebook group to denounce as traitors the six young SEALs in Gallagher’s platoon who reported their chief to SEAL superiors for what they believed were war crimes. The six SEALs, who also testified against Gallagher at his court martial, did so despite being quietly counseled by their own chain of command to back off. They were warned that going up against their Navy SEAL chief would effectively end their careers.

Besides the SEALs who reported Gallagher to their chain of command, and then went further up when they were rebuffed, few involved in the case against Gallagher covered themselves in glory. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service was heavily criticized during the court martial for holding back exculpatory evidence. The lead prosecutor was removed shortly before it began for sending emails containing malware to defense attorneys and others in an effort to track leaks to the press about the case. The prosecution finally fell apart when one of the six SEAL witnesses, Corey Scott, testified that after Gallagher stabbed the prisoner, Scott himself closed a breathing tube that had been inserted in the ISIS fighter’s chest, killing him. Scott had not previously told prosecutors that he’d ended the captive’s life.

Those who have defended Gallagher have described the Navy’s transgression in charging and prosecuting him as “second-guessing our warfighters,” a hollow argument against investigating a case in which an elite Navy SEAL was credibly accused of stabbing an unarmed and dying detainee as an act of dominance. There was no heroism or glory in Gallagher’s conduct.

What the president and Gallagher’s supporters can’t see is they are failing the SEALs they so admire. Domestic violence and suicide within the force have been downplayed or covered up because they challenge the community’s self-image. Some of Gallagher’s friends are concerned that he is a suicide risk, the toll of his brain injury compounded by drinking and drugs — a self-medicating cocktail familiar to many veteran SEALs.

It is the SEALs themselves, and their families, who continue to bear the cost of America’s endless wars, as they struggle, with no preparation, for the horrors of life after years of killing.

Correction: December 5, 2019, 3:47 p.m.
An earlier version of this story failed to credit the San Diego Union-Tribune for being the first to report Gallagher’s killing of a child in Afghanistan in 2010. The story has also been updated to include a statement Gallagher’s lawyer made to the Union-Tribune about the shooting.

Correction: December 7, 2019
An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Gallagher’s attorneys did not dispute that he stabbed a wounded ISIS captive in Iraq in 2017. The story has been updated to reflect that two witnesses testified that Gallagher did not stab the detainee. The story also incorrectly stated that several other members of Gallagher’s platoon posed for a trophy photo with the dead fighter and Admiral Collin Green determined that all of them should go before a review board. In fact, although several other SEALs did pose for a photo with the body, it was only Gallagher and others in positions of responsibility who Green decided should face the review board.

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In a series of meetings in Rome over the past two weeks, high-level Italian intelligence officials have repeatedly told cabinet members and a parliamentary oversight committee that the intelligence services did not have a relationship with Joseph Mifsud, a mysterious ex-diplomat who was a professor at a Rome university in 2016, the two sources told The Intercept.

The Italian inquiries into Mifsud’s role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election were sparked by an unfounded conspiracy theory that has gained currency in the conservative media and been seized on by President Donald Trump and his allies. According to the theory, Mifsud was an Italian intelligence operative used by the CIA or the FBI to entrap the Trump campaign adviser by pretending to act as a Russian agent and offering to share information about Russia’s efforts to tip the election in Trump’s favor. In May, Attorney General William Barr announced that he was assigning a top federal prosecutor, U.S. Attorney John Durham, to determine if the FBI or the CIA had been “spying” on the Trump campaign without a proper legal predicate to open a case. Barr has twice traveled to Italy to ask the Italian government to aid the Justice Department in its inquiry.

But the Italians did not view Mifsud in such elevated terms, according to one of the intelligence sources, who advises the Italian government. The professor “was considered to be of no value or use” by Italian intelligence, this person said. “They viewed him as a fool and saw no point of contacting him. They didn’t even debrief him after he was in the news.”

The inquiry into Mifsud is one of several efforts by the Trump administration to demonstrate that the original grounds for special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation were manufactured by Obama administration intelligence officials to take Trump down. Another conspiracy theory, that one of the Democratic National Committee’s hacked servers is in Ukraine, surfaced in the July 25 call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that was the subject of a whistleblower complaint and has led to a congressional impeachment inquiry. In the call, Trump urged Zelensky to work with Barr and the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to investigate the unfounded server allegation.

Taken together, the efforts to undermine the Mueller investigation reveal the degree to which Trump has integrated conspiracy theories and unfounded assertions into U.S. foreign relations.

Asked on Wednesday about Barr’s meetings in Italy, Trump said he was unaware of the details. “I just know that our country is looking into the corruption of the 2016 election,” he told reporters. “It was a corrupt election, whether it’s [James] Comey or [Andrew] McCabe or [Peter] Strzok or his lover Lisa Page. There was a lot of corruption. Maybe it goes right up to President Obama. I happen to think it does. But you look at [John] Brennan and you look at [James] Clapper, and you get some real beauties.”

Trump added that Barr’s meetings in Italy “would be appropriate because the word is, and you read it in the same papers that I do, that they did go to other countries to try and hide what they were doing. Italy may have been one of them.”

Last month, Barr traveled to Rome with Durham to request information from the Italian government about Mifsud. Barr met with the heads of Italy’s external and internal intelligence services but did not meet with Mifsud himself, according to the two Italian intelligence sources.

Mifsud, who worked at Link University in Rome, played a brief but important role in helping set off the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign when he told Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos that the Russian government had “dirt” on Clinton in the form of stolen emails.

Papadopoulos would go on to disclose that detail to an Australian diplomat, who alerted the FBI, which then opened an investigation into whether the Russian government was working with Trump campaign officials to interfere in the election. That inquiry led to the Mueller investigation, which found many links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government but “did not establish” that their efforts were coordinated or find evidence of a criminal conspiracy.

Papadopoulos pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI about his interactions with Mifsud and two Russian nationals about his effort to set up a meeting between then-candidate Trump and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, and served 12 days in federal prison. Mueller’s prosecutors said Papadopoulos’s lies thwarted their investigation into Mifsud, whom the Mueller report described as having ties to Russian military intelligence personnel involved in the DNC hack. Mifsud, who has largely disappeared from public view since Papadopoulos was indicted, has denied that he is a Russian operative.

Since he emerged from prison, Papadopoulos has said continually and without evidence that Mifsud was part of an Obama administration CIA and FBI plot to entrap him and damage Trump’s presidential campaign. The conspiracy theory, which is rooted in claims by a Swiss lawyer who has said he represents Mifsud, has evolved over the past year and been cited in the right-wing universe as evidence of a so-called “deep state coup” by U.S. intelligence agencies against Trump. Papadopoulos made some of the same claims in his testimony to the House Intelligence Committee last year, citing a story he read in the Daily Caller. Last month, Sen. Lindsay Graham repeated the theory on Sean Hannity’s radio show.

Barr’s requests, and Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte’s demand that his government comply, have led to recriminations from members of Italy’s intelligence community, some of whom feel that the recently elected Italian leader is misusing his country’s espionage apparatus, according to the two intelligence sources. “He’s asking the heads of the intelligence services to speak to foreign justice department officials about what could become a law enforcement investigation,” the senior adviser said.

Italian intelligence officials have quietly accused Conte of trying to score political points with Trump by ordering his government to chase a conspiracy theory. In the days after Barr’s September visit to Rome, senior Italian intelligence officials were called to meetings with both the government and parliament’s intelligence oversight committee, which asked intelligence leaders about any contact they may have had with Mifsud.

While Barr was in Rome, Papadopoulos continued to assert that Mifsud was an Italian intelligence “operative handled by the CIA.” Italy, he said, held the “keys to the kingdom.” According to the Italian intelligence adviser, Mifsud didn’t work with or for either the country’s internal service, AISI, or the external service, AISE.

Italian intelligence officials have been dumbfounded, this person said, that the Conte government has asked them repeatedly for information about Mifsud. “This shows [Conte’s] inexperience, to accept the meeting with Barr,” the adviser said. “In that way, he’s like Trump.”

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Bin Zayed had convened a group of close family members and advisers at the luxurious Indian Ocean resort for a grand strategy session in anticipation of the new American administration. On the agenda were discussions of new approaches for dealing with the civil wars in Yemen, Syria, and Libya, the threat of the Islamic State, and the United Arab Emirates’ longstanding rivalry with Iran. Under bin Zayed’s leadership, the UAE had used its oil wealth to become one of the world’s largest arms purchasers and the third largest importer of U.S. weapons. A new American president meant new opportunities for the tiny Gulf nation to exert its outsized military and economic influence in the Gulf region and beyond.

Prince was no stranger to the Emiratis. He had known bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and de facto ruler of the UAE, since 2009, when he sold the sheikh on creating an elite counterterrorism unit. That deal ended badly for Prince, but Trump’s election had recalibrated his usefulness. As a prominent Trump supporter and close associate of Steve Bannon, not to mention the brother of incoming cabinet member Betsy DeVos, Prince was invited to the meeting as an unofficial adviser to the incoming administration.

Prince’s meeting with a Putin intimate shortly before Trump’s inauguration has drawn intense interest from Congress, the Mueller investigation, and the press.

When Prince joined the Emirati royals and other government officials on a deck overlooking the Indian Ocean, bin Zayed made it clear to everyone there that “Erik was his guy,” said a source close to the Emirati rulers, who was briefed by some of those in attendance. Prince, in bin Zayed’s view, had built and established an elite ground force that bin Zayed had deployed to wars in Syria and Yemen, the first foreign conflicts in his young country’s history. It was because of Prince, bin Zayed said, that the Emiratis had no terrorists in their country. Prince had solved their problem with Somali pirates. “He let his court know that they owed Erik a favor,” the source said.

Part of that favor apparently involved facilitating an introduction to Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of an $8 billion Russian sovereign wealth fund and a close associate of President Vladimir Putin. Prince repeatedly and under oath in testimony to Congress denied that his meeting with Dmitriev had anything to do with the Trump administration, describing it as no more than a chance encounter over a beer.

“We were talking about the endless war and carnage in Iraq and Syria,” Prince told the House Intelligence Committee. “If Franklin Roosevelt can work with Joseph Stalin after the Ukraine terror famine, after killing tens of millions of his own citizens, we can certainly at least cooperate with the Russians in a productive way to defeat the Islamic State.”

Although the UAE has been a very good customer of U.S. arms dealers, bin Zayed had grown frustrated with the Obama administration’s refusal to work with Russia to end the war in Syria. Russia was actively courting the UAE, and from bin Zayed’s perspective Russia was a key player that couldn’t be ignored, according to a current and a former U.S. intelligence official. Trump’s public infatuation with Putin and his apparent eagerness to improve relations with Russia gave the UAE a chance to play dealmaker and diminish Iran’s position in the Middle East, starting with the war in Syria.

Prince’s 30-minute meeting with a Putin intimate shortly before Trump’s inauguration has drawn intense interest from Congress, the Mueller investigation, and the press. The Mueller report established that the meeting was a pre-arranged attempt to establish a backchannel between Russia and the incoming Trump administration and has led House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff to make a criminal referral to the Justice Department for perjury. Yet the focus on Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election has deflected scrutiny from what the meeting reveals about Prince’s unique role in the world of covert services.

Blackwater made Prince an infamous symbol of U.S. foreign policy hubris, but America’s most famous mercenary has moved on. Although he continues to dream of deploying his military services in the world’s failed states, and persists in hawking a crackpot scheme of privatizing the U.S. war in Afghanistan, Prince has diversified his portfolio. No longer satisfied with contracting out former special forces operators to the State Department and Pentagon, Prince is now attempting to offer an entire supply chain of warfare and conflict. He wants to be able to skim a profitable cut from each stage of a hostile operation, whether it be overt or covert, foreign or domestic. His offerings range from the traditional mercenary toolkit, military hardware and manpower, to cellphone surveillance technology and malware, to psychological operations and social media manipulation in partnership with shadowy operations like James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas.

This account is based on interviews with more than a dozen of Prince’s former colleagues and peers, as well as court records, emails, and internal documents provided to The Intercept. An examination of Prince’s time working with the UAE in particular reveals suspicious financial transactions at a moment when his personal finances were under stress and his mercenary ventures were failing. The picture that emerges is one of a man desperately trying to avoid U.S. tax and weapons trafficking laws even as he offers military services, without a license, in no fewer than 15 countries around the world.

Prince’s former and current associates describe him as a visionary, a brilliant salesman with remarkable insight into the future of warfare, who is nonetheless so shady and incompetent that he fails at almost every enterprise he attempts. And yet he endures. Prince is thus, in many ways, an emblematic figure for the Trump era.

Suitcases Full of Cash

Prince’s partnership with bin Zayed got underway, fittingly, with a slapstick moment in early 2010, when two of Prince’s men, a veteran of the Canadian special forces and a Lebanese fixer, were ordered by Emirati security officials to meet at an Abu Dhabi intersection. There, a few government employees helped Prince’s men load the trunk of a Chevy Impala with more than half a dozen carry-on suitcases, most worn and with busted wheels. The two drove back to their hotel, Le Méridian, where they unloaded the bags, returned to their room, and summoned their immediate supervisor, a former Navy SEAL who had known Prince in the military, telling the American that they had a problem. Their new company, Reflex Responses, often called R2 for short, was so new it didn’t yet have a bank account or even an office with a safe.

When the former SEAL entered their hotel room, the contents of the suitcases had been largely removed, much of it dumped onto a bed: bricks of new, sequential $100 bills, in $10,000 stacks, each bound by a green and white band. The three men counted each stack, measuring the height to be sure that they all had 100 $100 bills, until they tallied it all: roughly $13 million. For the first two weeks of the program, the hotel room, always occupied by a security guard or a company employee, served as the Reflex Responses vault. Hotel staff were not allowed to clean the room, and by the time R2 opened a bank account and deposited the money, the room was covered in empty whiskey bottles and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts.

Prince had arrived in the UAE at a low moment. The Obama administration had made clear in its first months that it would not welcome new Blackwater contracts. The company had become infamous after Blackwater security contractors shot and killed 17 Iraqi civilians and wounded dozens more in Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007. By 2010, Prince had changed Blackwater’s name and sold the company, ceasing to work on any U.S. government contracts. As Prince negotiated a settlement with the Justice Department for a series of Blackwater arms trafficking violations,  then-CIA Director Leon Panetta discovered a secret assassination program involving Blackwater operatives that former Vice President Dick Cheney had hidden from Congress. Prince was bitter, blaming the Obama administration for leaking his CIA role and comparing himself to exposed CIA operative Valerie Plame. Prince couldn’t understand why the American public viewed him as a villain. “He was genuinely upset,” said a former colleague who discussed the public scrutiny of Blackwater. “He kept asking, ‘Why do they hate me?’”

A converted Catholic raised by Christian fundamentalists and the scion of a Midwestern auto-parts fortune would seem to be an unlikely ally to the Muslim crown prince of a tiny, oil-rich Arab kingdom, but from their first meeting in 2009, Prince and bin Zayed hit it off. Almost immediately it was clear they shared common enemies: Islamic militants and, especially, Iran. Prince was introduced to bin Zayed after pitching a two-page schematic of a light attack airplane — an agricultural crop duster modified with surveillance and laser-guided munitions — to the Emirati government as the Blackwater sale to a private equity group was being negotiated. When the Emirati ambassador to the U.S., Yousef Al Otaiba, learned that Prince’s legal problems with the Justice Department would mean that he wouldn’t be able to be involved in building, selling, or brokering armed aircraft, the Emirati government approached another aviation manufacturer to help establish an entire air wing of armored and weaponized crop dusters. In exchange for Prince bowing out of the deal quietly, Otaiba introduced him to bin Zayed explicitly in order to find another role in which he could assist the UAE government.

Bin Zayed was determined to bolster the UAE’s sphere of influence and project power in the Middle East. Despite Prince’s tarnished reputation, bin Zayed saw in him a glimpse of the future. It didn’t hurt that “Erik could sell you your own hat,” according to one former associate. The former SEAL and self-described CIA “asset” saw in bin Zayed a willing buyer who shared his desire to play soldier. Prince sold bin Zayed on the idea of creating a half-billion-dollar program in which he would train, equip, and lead an elite cadre of foreign soldiers called the Security Support Group that would serve as a presidential guard for the Emirati monarchies and help quell any internal unrest. Bin Zayed insisted that Prince use non-Muslim ex-soldiers, according to two senior advisers who helped build the unit, telling him that he did not believe Muslim soldiers could be trusted to kill other Muslims. Eventually, Prince also sold bin Zayed on the creation of an armed aviation wing, a team to protect the Emirates from a weapons of mass destruction attack, and a separate force to combat Somali piracy.

One indication of both Prince and R2’s growing value to bin Zayed was that Prince became a favored foreign policy and military adviser, joining bin Zayed’s inner sanctum. Prince told his colleagues at R2 that bin Zayed, whom Prince often referred to as “the boss,” gave him ownership of two side-by-side villas in Abu Dhabi, which were originally worth $10 million each. The wealthy enclave was built as a luxury community, each villa with a private beach, and quickly housed several foreign embassies. Prince’s neighboring houses sat at the end of a residential peninsula and had expansive views of central Abu Dhabi across a sea channel, a pool, and beachfront in the Persian Gulf. Prince built a dock for his sailboat, which has a Blackwater logo across the port side.

Despite Prince’s tarnished reputation, bin Zayed saw in him a glimpse of the future. The former SEAL and self-described CIA “asset” saw in bin Zayed a willing buyer who shared his desire to play soldier.

The $13 million in the suitcases was an advance on $110 million the UAE gave Prince to get Reflex Responses off the ground. The deal gave Prince and his team a guaranteed 15 percent profit margin on whatever the company spent in addition to salaries. Prince had long tried to own a piece of each part of the foreign conflict supply chain: planes, ships, vehicles, weapons, intelligence, men, and logistics. Reflex Responses gave him a blank check to do just that.

Structurally, Reflex Responses became a model for how Prince masks his involvement in selling or providing military services, which was a necessity given that he’s unlikely to obtain an arms trafficking license under the U.S. State Department’s International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). Officially, Prince was never an R2 employee. He officially worked for a company called Assurance Management Consultants, which shared a floor in an Abu Dhabi office tower with Reflex, where he oversaw the entire military program. It was Prince who hired and installed Reflex’s senior management, according to people directly involved in the effort. And it was Prince who recruited and hired the subcontractors who fulfilled Reflex’s contractual requirements. Prince flew to South America, where he helped oversee the recruitment of former Colombian soldiers who served as both hired guns and a training cadre for the fledgling Emirati security force.

Prince’s approach to management created problems almost immediately, issues that would arise again and again in his various projects. In what would become a pattern, Prince’s American colleagues at Reflex were troubled by his directives about ITAR regulations. Prince argued to his lawyers that because Reflex was an Emirati company, working on an Emirati government contract, he was not required to have an ITAR license from the State Department to sell military services. “We’d tell him, ‘No, that’s not how it works. You’re an American,’” said one of Prince’s former colleagues involved in Reflex Responses. “It was stupid, honestly. There was a way to do it legally and make lots of money, but Erik didn’t care. When Erik wakes up in the morning, Erik does whatever he feels like doing. I always assumed that’s how it is when your father is a billionaire.”

In response to a request for comment, a Prince spokesperson stated: “Mr. Prince at all times relied upon the advice of counsel, including both in-house compliance counsel and outside experts, to ensure compliance with ITAR and other laws.”

Prince also hid his financial interest in subcontractors working with R2. Six months into the project, senior executives discovered that Prince had an arrangement with Thor Global, the company that he’d insisted Reflex use to hire the Colombian soldiers. On paper, Thor Global was wholly owned by Robert Owens, a former aide to Oliver North during the Iran-Contra affair, but Prince received a substantial amount of the money R2 paid Thor Global, according to court documents and two former Prince colleagues familiar with the arrangement. “I asked Erik if the crown prince knew he was self-dealing,” said one of the former colleagues. “Erik wouldn’t answer.”

Prince had long tried to own a piece of each part of the foreign conflict supply chain: planes, ships, vehicles, weapons, intelligence, men, and logistics. Reflex Responses gave him a blank check to do just that.

Owens’s involvement and connection to North is not incidental. Prince and North are friends, and Prince has told others over the years that he greatly admires the former Marine officer and Reagan National Security Council staffer, who was convicted on three felony counts during the Iran-Contra scandal. (The convictions were reversed in 1991.)

A former colleague said it took him some time to recognize that Prince generally works to control the entire supply chain of any mercenary or security contract. “Everything he does, he skims,” said the former colleague, who has known Prince for two decades and described how Prince generally operates as a military services provider. “He will run a contract through two companies and then dictate that those two companies have to subcontract out to another eight companies. What he doesn’t disclose is that he owns all or part of those eight companies and will take 25 percent from each company. Then, he can use those same eight entities to make the money disappear.”

After Prince’s first team of U.S. executives quit, he brought in another former SEAL and a former CIA officer. That team conducted audits and quickly discovered financial problems. “There was massive embezzlement going on inside R2,” said a third former employee with direct knowledge of the company’s finances. “Overbilling, false billing, missing cash — millions were gone.”

According to four former Reflex employees and consultants, the alleged graft and embezzlement ran through two of Prince’s lieutenants, who handled logistics and administration for R2. The first was a former Blackwater employee who told colleagues at Reflex that he’d done intelligence work in the Middle East for the Pentagon’s intelligence agency. Internal R2 documents list him as the first employee of the company. Several of Prince’s colleagues confronted him about the missing money and his lieutenants’ conduct, but Prince rebuffed any effort to remove them. Contacted by The Intercept for comment, Prince’s lieutenant denied that he had ever embezzled or stolen money and denied ever working for R2. He said that he had worked for Assurance Management and occasionally “consulted” for R2.

Prince did not respond on the record to questions about the financial improprieties.

While money was disappearing from Reflex Responses’s accounts as a result of these financial shenanigans, Somali pirates were engaging in a more traditional form of robbery off the Horn of Africa, harming UAE shipping interests. Prince had a solution: a sea, air, and land battalion to eradicate the pirates. He established a group for this purpose within Reflex Responses known as Special Projects and hired a former South African special forces officer named Lafras Luitingh, who also worked for Executive Outcomes, a private military company comprised mainly of apartheid-era South African soldiers.

Together, Prince and Luitingh created the Puntland Maritime Police Force in northeastern Somalia, in a semiautonomous region home to the most active Somali pirates. A United Nations monitoring team subsequently documented extensive violations of the U.N. arms embargo of Somalia, including falsifying export paperwork for small arms and attacks that left civilian casualties by Luitingh’s company, Saracen, a subcontractor on the project. The two-year program resulted in “an elite force outside any legal framework … answerable only to the Puntland presidency,” according to a U.N. investigation into the PMPF. Both Prince and the UAE denied involvement, but one source with knowledge of the operation witnessed Emirati intelligence officers providing a suitcase with millions of dollars in $100 bills to Luitingh for his payroll. Citing Prince’s involvement in the police force, the U.N. report said, “This externally financed assistance programme has remained the most brazen violation of the arms embargo by a private security company.”

Although Prince and the UAE’s involvement was meant to be largely clandestine, Prince sought publicity for the program, according to a person with direct knowledge. Prince arranged for a February 2012 Fox News segment from North, then a military analyst for Fox News, who embedded with the PMPF in Puntland and explicitly reported that the UAE was behind the fledgling military unit. The media attention enraged the Emirati government, according to one of Prince’s former colleagues who worked with him at the time, and blamed him for the unwanted publicity.

The program’s lack of legal legitimacy was perhaps the least troubling legacy of Prince’s vision, however. The program shut down shortly after a South African mercenary was murdered by one of the local soldiers hired to fight the pirates during one of the first operations the Puntland force conducted. According to a contemporaneously filmed documentary of the anti-piracy effort, the killer was a relative of a pirate targeted by the unit. The unit had been infiltrated from the beginning, a failure of basic counterintelligence, which a former CIA officer, who was also involved, readily admitted in on-camera interviews. The U.N. would later report “credible” allegations of human rights violations stemming from corporal punishment, which led to severe injuries and a death at the South African-run PMPF camp.

Robert Young Pelton, an author who worked for Prince on the Somalia project and helped write Prince’s autobiography (and recently lost a civil suit against Prince over a contract dispute), said Prince’s efforts were “delusional. He operates with a 12-year-old’s mindset of war. He’s romanticized the South African mercenaries who fought those ugly wars.” Pelton said when Prince first showed him a map with plans for the security force, he realized that Prince had never been to Somalia. Pelton said Prince told him that the idea for an anti-piracy force came from reading “The Pirate Coast,” a book detailing a secret American operation in 1805 to end piracy off the coast of Libya.

As with the Security Support Group, the anti-piracy force suffered from mismanagement. According to two individuals who worked on the program, at least $50 million meant for the anti-piracy force had gone missing by the time the Emirates decided to stop funding the effort. Among the items that were never returned or accounted for were several aircraft, including at least one cargo plane and two helicopters, as well as several ships. Before he was asked by the Emirates to end his involvement in the program, Prince brought in a former intelligence operative to conduct an audit of the PMPF program. The American identified $38 million in cash that the UAE had delivered to Luitingh, for which the former South African mercenaries refused to provide accounting or receipts. “I told Erik, ‘[Luitingh] and the South Africans couldn’t account for $38 million,’” said a former Prince employee. “Erik wasn’t upset at all. He just said, ‘I’m sure they are just saving it for a rainy day.’” Luitingh did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

“When Erik wakes up in the morning, Erik does whatever he feels like doing. I always assumed that’s how it is when your father is a billionaire.”

Over a six month period beginning in late 2011, after the New York Times exposed Prince’s involvement with the UAE’s Security Support Group and the deployment of the anti-piracy force, bin Zayed gradually removed Prince from his multiple projects for the government. The parting of ways came as a result of the unwanted media exposure, U.N. pressure, and ongoing financial audits. The UAE shut down Reflex Responses and rolled what they wanted to keep into new companies with new management.

As his private military ventures with the UAE stumbled, Prince shifted to private equity, establishing an investment fund focused on African natural resources called Frontier Resource Group. But Prince’s income dried up after the UAE stopped funding him and he began having cash-flow problems. One of his personal bankers grew alarmed as Prince cashed out Treasury bonds to fund Frontier Resource. According to tax, banking, and internal business documents obtained by The Intercept, Prince at the time was worth less than $100 million, and much of his wealth was tied up in real estate and fixed-income investments. One of Prince’s creditors, Michigan’s Huntington Bank, refused a request for a $6 million increase on a $17.5 million line of credit, according to emails and other documents obtained by The Intercept. In turning Prince down, the bank reduced his line of credit by $2.5 million.

In late 2011, the Emirati government asked one of Prince’s former colleagues, Reno Alberto, if he would take over Prince’s aviation contract. Alberto was a former Navy SEAL who Prince originally hired to help save the Reflex Responses project. An Emirati general offered Alberto the job on two conditions: Reflex Responses needed to be shuttered so that a new corporate entity could take its place, and Prince could not be involved. Alberto agreed and created a new, temporary holding company called Vulcan Management. Vulcan would take the roughly $100 million resulting from the liquidation of R2 and hold it until a new entity could be established to create a wing of armed helicopters for the UAE air force.

Prince soon came calling on Alberto, however, claiming that a portion of the roughly $100 million left over from Reflex Responses was his and that any future contract for Alberto was a consequence of Prince’s efforts and therefore should result in him receiving a percentage. Prince claimed repeatedly to Alberto that bin Zayed had directed that some of the leftover R2 funding be paid to him. Prince and his business adviser Dorian Barak arranged to structure the payout as a loan from Alberto’s Vulcan Management to one of Prince’s holding companies in Bermuda. Barak, on behalf of Prince, requested that the loan be divided into 10 transactions, which Prince could then call on Vulcan to pay out as needed. Prince told several other colleagues that he felt he was owed upwards of $40 million for his effort in getting bin Zayed to create the SSG and establish R2. Alberto, who stood to make millions in his new venture, reluctantly agreed to pay his former boss through a loan.

On July 26, 2012, Barak emailed Prince, informing him that a wire transfer of approximately $5.9 million was sent by Vulcan, according to an email obtained by The Intercept. The money was wired to Prince’s Frontier Resource bank account in Abu Dhabi.

“That was fast. Well done,” Prince responded.

Prince pitched Frontier Resource to potential investors as a $500 million private equity fund. Fund documents state that Prince would provide 10 percent of the funding. In late 2011 and early 2012, as FRG tried to get off the ground, Prince had soft commitments from investors in the UAE, including bin Zayed’s brother Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, the Emirati national security adviser. But by the time he’d taken his first draw of the Vulcan loan, Prince was toxic, and the outside financial commitments had withered and disappeared. Sheikh Tahnoon, however, appears to have invested at least $5 million, according to internal Frontier Resource documents provided to The Intercept.

Then, in October 2012, Prince directed Alberto and Vulcan to make a second wire transfer. This one, however, was not sent to Prince or his companies. According to documents reviewed by The Intercept, and confirmed by a person with direct knowledge of the transaction, more than $9 million was wired to Zafra Group, the company Sheikh Tahnoon had originally created to invest in Prince’s Frontier Resource. It is unclear why Prince wanted the Vulcan money routed to Zafra Group, but he told Vulcan that the payment had been ordered by “the boss,” according to the person with direct knowledge of the transaction. In effect, Prince had steered UAE government money meant for an armed helicopter wing to one his fund’s investors, a senior member of the Emirati royal family.

When Prince asked for $10 million in the third installment, Alberto refused and subsequently told Prince that no more installments would be paid. According to a person with knowledge of the dispute, Alberto learned that no one in the Emirati royal family had ordered the payments to Prince.

The loan to Prince, which has not been previously reported, was not repaid to Vulcan, and the entire $15 million was written off as a loss by the company in subsequent years, according to a person with direct knowledge of the transaction. Prince did report the $5.9 million payment as a loan on his personal tax returns that year.

The Intercept sent Prince a detailed list of questions for this article. In response, a Prince spokesperson stated that “Vulcan Management’s loan, which was made in connection with FRG’s investment activity, was at all times fully disclosed to both FRG’s auditors and the IRS.” Prince would not comment for the record about the circumstances of the loan, or why he directed the $9 million payment to Zafra.

A New Frontier

Over the next several years, as his speculations in African natural resources turned into losers time and again, Prince looked to China for new funds, creating Frontier Services Group with an investment banker and former Marine named Gregg Smith. For Smith, the business model seemed simple enough: Frontier Resource would find undervalued, distressed assets, and Frontier Services would transport the materials out of Africa. Smith says he saw the potential of a logistics company to move freight and natural resources across Africa, where the Chinese were increasingly active. “We wanted to start a straightforward logistics company,” Smith said recently. “Trucks and planes and that’s it.”

Prince had other ideas, as did some Chinese investors, who made it clear that they wanted a “Blackwater China.” Although Frontier Services attracted a $110 million investment from a Hong Kong tycoon named Johnson Ko and the China International Trust Investment Corporation, a state-owned investment company, Prince’s investment fund lost money, and several projects ended in a total loss, according to three people with knowledge of Prince’s investment portfolio. Instead, Prince would end up directing FSG to purchase companies that Prince had a financial interest in — as well as services from such companies — in an effort to salvage his private-equity fund’s investment. In total, according to documents, FSG spent $8.5 million on Prince-connected businesses. And as he had with Thor Global and Reflex Responses, Prince failed to disclose his financial interest to the FSG board prior to most of the transactions. The board eventually passed a resolution prohibiting undisclosed self-dealing.

For two years, beginning in 2013, while Frontier Services executives ran a legitimate logistics and aviation company, Prince was traveling around Africa pitching paramilitary services under the Frontier Services banner. As reported by The Intercept, Prince proposed creating counterterrorism forces, a private air force, and a “black ops” program for Nigeria to defeat Boko Haram. He made a similar pitch to President Salva Kiir Mayardit of South Sudan to help him defeat rebels there. There were meetings and proposals for Libya, Cameroon, and Kurdish Iraq, none of which found a buyer. Although Prince failed to sell an entire paramilitary force, he did make money across the continent and the Middle East “advising” countries on how to fight wars. According to one of his closest colleagues, over a roughly five-year period, including his time as chair of the board of FSG, Prince earned as much as $10 million from his meetings. Prince’s efforts were nothing if not ambitious. “Erik was trying to create a private JSOC,” said a former senior military officer who discussed many of Prince’s ideas with him. Since he left Blackwater, Prince has sold or pitched his war supply chain in no fewer than 15 countries, nearly all of them with majority Muslim populations.

Since he left Blackwater, Prince has sold or pitched his war supply chain in no fewer than 15 countries, nearly all of them in countries with majority Muslim populations.

Prince tried to hawk surveillance products and services as well. In 2014, he demonstrated for some of his Frontier Services colleagues cellphone geolocation software that he said he had licensed from an Israeli company. At a strip mall diner in Washington, D.C., Prince pulled out a laptop and punched in a cellphone number. The program identified the most recent cell tower the phone had connected with, allowing the user to locate the target within 300 meters and revealing the last 10 calls the targeted user made. Prince, according to one person who discussed the software with him, believed his time at Frontier Services had “cleaned” his image up with the U.S. government enough that he approached both the CIA and the Pentagon, offering to run the software in counterterrorism operations. He was rebuffed. Later, he and one of his deputies claimed that they sold the program to the Saudi and Emirati air forces to locate bombing targets in Yemen.

In 2015, Prince became involved in the ongoing conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the disputed area of Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan spent hundreds of millions of dollars equipping and training their small military. Prince was brought in by a former Russian weapons supplier to help create a training force. Prince would ultimately be kicked off the contract after his business partners accused him of wildly padding the proposed contract by adding a series of unnecessary expenditures that would have been provided by companies to which Prince had financial ties. In an effort to smooth over Prince’s anger at being fired, the Russian weapons supplier offered him $5 million, according to three people with direct knowledge of the offer. Prince agreed to take the money but insisted the payment be made through a complex series of loans between companies that Barak would set up. When his Russian colleague refused the terms and offered a simple check made out to Prince for the total amount, Prince walked away from the deal, according to a person with direct knowledge of the incident.

In response to questions from The Intercept, a Prince spokesperson stated: “FSG contemplated a logistics, construction, and aviation support project in Azerbaijan, but neither FSG nor Erik Prince ever moved forward with it, and neither FSG nor Mr. Prince was ever offered money to abandon the project.”

As The Intercept has reported previously, when Frontier Services Group discovered that Prince had secretly modified two crop dusters to be used as light attack aircraft, and had used an Austrian company he’d secretly purchased a stake in, FSG hired the law firm King & Spalding to conduct an investigation to determine whether Prince had violated arms trafficking laws. (Prince attempted to sell the two weaponized aircraft to Azerbaijan as part of their buildup — another potential violation of ITAR). The attorneys, supervised by current FBI Director Christopher Wray, concluded that Prince had likely violated U.S. law in his effort to sell the crop dusters. In 2016, FSG disclosed the ITAR violations to the Justice Department, which opened an investigation.

The Rise of Trump

Although Prince’s turn in Africa as a mercenary was a bust, he was somewhat successful at recasting himself as a globetrotting businessman through Frontier Services Group. The 2016 presidential election and the rise of Donald Trump now promised a full-scale rehabilitation. The potential for a Republican administration would be an opportunity for new U.S. government contracts and, possibly, something even more lucrative. After Trump had clinched the Republican nomination, Prince told his Chinese business and government contacts that if Trump won, he would be the next secretary of defense.

Prince’s family has a history of supporting right-wing and conservative causes. Edgar Prince, Erik’s father, was a major financial contributor to former President Gerald Ford, and in recent years, the family has supported Mike Pence, first as a member of Congress and later as Indiana governor. While in Congress, Pence helped Prince navigate Capitol Hill in the aftermath of the killing of four Blackwater contractors in Fallujah in 2004. Prince became an enthusiastic Trump supporter. By Election Day, Prince had donated $250,000 to Trump’s 2016 election effort.

During the campaign, Prince solidified his relationship with Steve Bannon, appearing on his Breitbart radio show on SiriusXM less than a month before Bannon formally joined the Trump campaign. Four days before the 2016 election, Prince went on Bannon’s show and smeared Hillary Clinton, claiming without evidence that a New York City police investigation into former Rep. Anthony Weiner had uncovered extensive criminal activity by the Democratic presidential candidate. Prince claimed that the Obama administration had suppressed the investigation implicating Clinton using “Stalinist tactics.”

In apparent coordination with Trump’s advisers, Prince had also begun exploring the world of domestic information warfare. In August 2016, according to the New York Times, Prince brokered a meeting at Trump Tower between George Nader, an aide to bin Zayed, Donald Trump Jr., and Joel Zamel, the owner of Psy-Group, an Israeli private intelligence company that specialized in manipulating elections using social media accounts and untraceable websites. The Trump campaign apparently passed on the offer. Prince already had familiarity with private Israeli intelligence companies through Dorian Barak. Several years earlier, Prince had been offered a financial stake in what was then a fledgling company called Black Cube, run by former Mossad officers. The company gained notoriety during the #MeToo movement when a firm representing Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein hired Black Cube to help stop publication of an account of his abuses. Black Cube hired an operative who used false identities to approach actress Rose McGowan, as well as a reporter looking into the multitude of sexual misconduct and assault allegations against Weinstein.

Prince declined to invest in Black Cube, but appears to have liked the idea of selling a service that provided undercover operatives. During the 2016 election, he became involved with James O’Keefe and Project Veritas, a group of conservative provocateurs who specialize in using hidden-camera footage and secret recordings. O’Keefe, a protégé of the conservative firebrand Andrew Breitbart, describes himself as a “guerrilla journalist” and has used undercover cameras in an effort to expose purported liberal bias in political groups and the media. Trump often promoted O’Keefe’s videos and met with O’Keefe just days after he declared his candidacy. (A few weeks before that, Trump had donated $10,000 to Project Veritas through his foundation.) It is unclear if Trump’s support of Project Veritas spurred Prince’s interest in the group, but in late 2015 or early 2016, Prince arranged for O’Keefe and Project Veritas to receive training in intelligence and elicitation techniques from a retired military intelligence operative named Euripides Rubio Jr. According to a former Trump White House official who discussed the Veritas training with Rubio, the former special operative quit after several weeks of training, complaining that the Veritas group wasn’t capable of learning. Rubio did not respond to requests for comment.

“Erik was weaponizing a group that had close ties to the Trump White House.”

In the winter of 2017, Prince arranged for a former British MI6 officer to provide more surveillance and elicitation training for Veritas at his family’s Wyoming ranch, according to a person with direct knowledge of the effort. Prince was trying to turn O’Keefe and his group into domestic spies. For his part, O’Keefe posted photos on Instagram and Twitter from the Prince family ranch of himself holding a handgun with a silencer attached and wearing pseudo-military clothing. He described the ranch as a “classified location” where he was learning “spying and self-defense,” in an effort to make Project Veritas “the next great intelligence agency.”

“Erik was weaponizing a group that had close ties to the Trump White House,” said the former White House official familiar with Prince’s relationship with O’Keefe and Project Veritas.

In February 2017, O’Keefe and another Project Veritas associate, Seijah Drake, posted photos on their individual Twitter accounts of them training at Prince’s family ranch in Wyoming. Screenshots: The Intercept

It is unclear how much involvement Prince has with the selection of targets for O’Keefe’s stings and undercover operations, but several months after the organization received training in Wyoming, a Project Veritas operative was exposed by the Washington Post after she posed as a sexual assault victim of Roy Moore, who was then a Senate candidate in Alabama.

After Trump won the election, Prince began sending defense and intelligence policy proposals to the Trump team via Bannon, including his plan for privatizing the war in Afghanistan. The plan called for removing all U.S. troops and replacing them with a small cadre of security trainers, a small fleet of light attack aircraft, and a surge of covert CIA operations. In an attempt to appeal to Trump, Prince tweaked his proposal with a plan to secure mining concessions for Afghanistan’s vast untapped mineral resources, an idea with obvious parallels to his failed efforts in Africa. But the national security establishment was uniformly opposed and it failed to gain traction.

Armed with his beliefs about reshaping the Middle East and Afghanistan, and enjoying his new status as an unofficial adviser to the next U.S. president, Prince was invited back to Mohammed bin Zayed’s royal court.

Prince later testified before the House Intelligence Committee that his invitation was linked directly to Trump’s victory. “I think the Obama administration went out of their way to tarnish my ability to do business in the Middle East, and, with a different administration in town, [the Emiratis] probably figured that that downdraft wasn’t present anymore … so it was not a surprise that the meeting happened. And those are the kind of things we talked about, whether it’s Somalia and terrorism there or Libya, Nigeria, and of course all the places that are even closer to the UAE.”

Meanwhile, Prince’s relationship with Bannon has gone from fellow ideological traveler to business partner. According to a former Trump White House official and the former U.S. official close to the UAE royal family, Prince has teamed up with Bannon to offer a newer version of the armed crop duster to the Emirati air force. The pitch includes Israeli-made avionics and surveillance software for geolocating targets on the ground. Prince and Bannon are also offering a different package to the Emirate’s despised rival, Qatar. According to a former senior U.S. official who reviewed the proposal, Prince is currently hawking proposals for preventing social and political unrest from Qatar’s foreign laborers before and during the 2022 FIFA World Cup. The proposal specifically names Project Veritas as a partner and offers the Qatari government an ability to infiltrate the community of foreign laborers, who make up almost 90 percent of the country’s population of roughly 2.3 million. The pitch is designed to appeal to Qatari fears of a popular uprising and to fend off and neuter political dissent leading up to the soccer tournament. The proposal also offers social media monitoring and messaging — something Bannon would be familiar with from his past work for Cambridge Analytica.

In response to questions from The Intercept, Prince’s spokesperson said, “Mr. Prince supports Project Veritas’s mission of uncovering government largesse and corruption, and has allowed Project Veritas to use his family’s ranch in Wyoming. Mr. Prince has no business relationship with Steve Bannon, James O’Keefe, or Project Veritas, and has never pitched a project with Mr. Bannon to the Qatari or any other government.” Bannon would not comment.

To those who know him best, Prince’s latest proposals suggest that he sees business opportunities in services that are closer to political skullduggery than outright conflict. By marrying the two capabilities — social media manipulation and undercover surveillance by trained operatives — Prince has moved further along the spectrum of contemporary warfare. If a government won’t pay him for a heavily armed paramilitary force in a hot conflict, he appears prepared to offer services that utilize a less obvious, but perhaps more insidious, kind of weaponry.

Given his wealth and political ties, it may be that the Department of Justice will never have the political fortitude to thoroughly investigate Prince for defense brokering and trafficking violations, or to challenge his questionable ties to China’s intelligence service. But he does face legal scrutiny. The FBI is currently probing Prince’s work at Frontier Services Group, with a team assigned from the Washington field office. It is unclear whether the investigation is a continuation of the 2016 probe or stems from the Mueller investigation. Three different congressional committees are also investigating Prince, including his relationship with the Chinese government. The FBI declined to comment and would not confirm the existence of an investigation. Prince’s spokesperson stated that “other than his well-documented cooperation with the Special Counsel’s Office, Mr. Prince has had no interaction, directly or through counsel, with the FBI in years.”

Prince’s role in the Trump-Russia affair perfectly encapsulates his latest effort to refashion himself, this time as a self-appointed warrior diplomat. According to the Mueller report, Prince flew to the Seychelles a week before the inauguration, at least in part to meet with Kirill Dmitriev, who was acting as Putin’s emissary and sought a backchannel to the incoming Trump administration. But Prince repeatedly denied in his testimony that he flew to the Seychelles to meet Dmitriev. Prince also failed to disclose that he met with Dmitriev twice during his stay at the Four Seasons.

The Mueller investigation relied on the cooperation and testimony of George Nader, who arranged the meeting at bin Zayed’s behest. Nader testified that Dmitriev was “not enthusiastic” about meeting Prince. To help sell the meeting, Nader described Prince to Dmitriev as Bannon’s chosen representative for the Kremlin-directed meeting: “this guy [Prince] is designated by Steve [Bannon] to meet you!” Which suggests that Prince presented himself to Nader as an influential member of Trump’s circle. Testimony from both Bannon and Prince cast doubt on whether Prince flew to the Seychelles with Bannon’s knowledge or approval. If Bannon’s testimony is accurate, it’s quite possible that Prince oversold his influence with Trump and Trump’s inner circle to get the meeting with Dmitriev.

Although in his congressional testimony Prince described only a single interaction with Dmitriev at the resort bar, there was an earlier, longer private meeting in Nader’s villa. After the first meeting, Prince learned that an Russian aircraft carrier was moving off the coast of Libya, according to the Mueller report. Prince, who has spent years offering his paramilitary services in Libya, was incensed at the news, calling Nader to demand a second meeting with Dmitriev. Prince told Nader that he’d just checked with his “associates” and needed to convey an important message to Putin’s emissary. Prince told Mueller that he was speaking only for himself, based on his three years as a Navy SEAL. In the second meeting, Prince went off-script and warned Dmitriev that the U.S. could not accept Russian involvement in Libya.

As the report describes Dmitriev’s complaints to Nader after meeting Prince, he expected to meet a member of the Trump team who had more authority and substance: “Dmitriev told Nader that [redacted] Prince’s comments [redacted] were insulting [redacted].” As in so many other episodes involving Prince over the last decade, his involvement in the Trump-Russia political scandal is a result of his relentless ambition, combined with his snake-oil salesmanship and his ability to gain entry to rooms with genuine power, even if it quickly becomes apparent that he doesn’t belong there.

The post How Erik Prince Used the Rise of Trump to Make an Improbable Comeback appeared first on The Intercept.

A trio of politically connected Haitians greeted the Americans when their plane landed around 5 a.m. An aide to embattled Haitian President Jovenel Moïse and two other regime-friendly Haitians whisked them through the country’s biggest airport, avoiding customs and immigration agents, who had not yet reported for work.

The American team included two former Navy SEALs, a former Blackwater-trained contractor, and two Serbian mercenaries who lived in the U.S. Their leader, a 52-year-old former Marine C-130 pilot named Kent Kroeker, had told his men that this secret operation had been requested and approved by Moïse himself. The Haitian president’s emissaries had told Kroeker that the mission would involve escorting the presidential aide, Fritz Jean-Louis, to the Haitian central bank, where he’d electronically transfer $80 million from a government oil fund to a second account controlled solely by the president. In the process, the Haitians told the Americans, they’d be preserving democracy in Haiti.

It was too good a deal for the band of semi-employed military veterans and security contractors to turn down.

But a day after the Americans landed in Haiti, they would find themselves in jail and at the center of a political uproar, with Haitians asking what a group of foreign mercenaries was doing at the central bank and who they were working for. Within three days, Kroeker and his team would be released and sent back to the U.S., having somehow managed to escape criminal charges in Haiti.

Many details of the operation remain murky, but based on interviews with Haitian law enforcement and government officials, as well as a person with direct knowledge of the plan, a picture of the clumsy effort emerges. What at first resembled a comedic plot about a group of ex-soldiers looking for a quick and easy mercenary score was in fact a poorly executed but serious effort by Moïse to consolidate his political power with American muscle.

Neither Moïse nor the Haitian Embassy in Washington, D.C., responded to requests for comment.

None of the Americans spoke directly with Moïse or received official paperwork from the Haitian government authorizing them to undertake the mission, according to the person with direct knowledge of the operation. Yet Jean-Louis and the plot’s other key organizer, Josué Leconte, a Haitian-American from Brooklyn and close friend of Moïse, do not appear to have been rogue operators.

The Americans arrived at a tumultuous political and economic moment in a country with a history of unrest. Since last July, when Moïse tried to raise fuel prices by as much as 50 percent, intermittent protests have paralyzed Haiti.

But Trump administration sanctions on Venezuela and financial mismanagement by the Haitian government led the Haitian central bank to halt payments to Venezuela, and the Petrocaribe agreement effectively ended in early 2018. A Haitian Senate investigation found that the fund’s nearly $2 billion had been largely misappropriated, embezzled, and stolen, primarily under Haitian President Michel Martelly’s leadership between 2011 and 2016.

Moïse came to power in 2017, after the Port-au-Prince district attorney accused him of money laundering. The corruption allegations, combined with the end of cheap Venezuelan oil and credit, created a perfect storm of popular outrage. In recent months, Moïse and Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Henry Céant have been vying for power, and Moïse’s decision to back the Trump administration’s recent efforts to undermine Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro set off a new round of popular street protests in Haiti, with protesters calling for Moïse to step down. Under the Haitian constitution, that would have made Céant the country’s leader.

The Americans were told that the Petrocaribe fund is controlled by Moïse, Céant, and the central bank’s president, Jean Baden Dubois. Because of the widening political rift between the president and the prime minister, that arrangement left the $80 million effectively frozen, according to the person with direct knowledge of the operation.

Leconte and Jean-Louis told the Americans that by moving the money into an account Céant and Dubois could not access, Moïse could more effectively lead the country, hence the promise that they would be supporting Haiti’s democracy. The fund was the government’s only significant economic instrument, and the move would secure Moïse’s position and freeze out his prime minister. It is unclear what Moïse intended to do with the money once he gained control of it.

Leconte paid the Americans for the operation, according to the source with direct knowledge. Leconte and his business partner, Gesner Champagne, who also met the Americans at the airport in Port-au-Prince, were acting as cutouts, giving Moïse plausible deniability, the Americans were told.

In return for helping Moïse, the president promised Leconte and Champagne that he would give a nationwide telecom contract to Preble-Rish Haiti, the engineering and construction company Leconte and Champagne run together, Jean-Louis and Leconte told the Americans.

The Americans pulled up in three cars and got out. They were heavily armed and stood protectively around Jean-Louis. The bank was closed, but Jean-Louis told a security guard at the door that they were there on bank business, according to the source with direct knowledge. Suspicious of their intent, the security guard refused to let them in. Instead, someone alerted the police.

A two-hour standoff ensued on Rue des Miracles. Penned in by the police, Kroeker called a seventh member of his team to help negotiate their release. Dustin Porte, an electrical services contractor and former member of the Louisiana National Guard who spoke French, showed up and spoke to the police on his team members’ behalf. The contractors eventually surrendered, telling the police that it was all a big misunderstanding — and that they were there on a government mission, according to the Miami Herald.

The police asked the Americans why, if their mission was legitimate, they hadn’t gone through official channels, a senior Haitian law enforcement source told The Intercept.

“Because the president doesn’t trust you guys,” one of the contractors replied, according to the Haitian law enforcement official, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak publicly about what happened.

Haitian police arrested Kroeker, the team leader; former Navy SEALs Christopher McKinley, 49, and Christopher Osman, 44; former Blackwater contractor Talon Burton, 51; and Porte, 43. They also detained the two Serbians, Danilo Bajagic, 36, and Vlade Jankovic, 40. Photos of their weapons and tactical gear, which included six semiautomatic assault rifles, six handguns, knives, and at least three satellite phones, soon surfaced on social media.

Haitian police sources say that some if not all of the mercenaries brought their arms with them and that the makes, models, and serial numbers of the weapons have been provided to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. U.S. authorities have so far failed to bring charges against the contractors for illegally traveling out of the United States with their weapons, which requires a license.

Jean-Louis had apparently managed to flee during the lengthy standoff. But after the Americans were booked into the jail, Michel-Ange Gédéon, the director general of Haiti’s National Police, fielded calls from Jean-Louis, senior presidential aide Ardouin Zéphirin, and Haitian Justice Minister Jean Roudy Aly, who claimed variously that the Americans were conducting “state business” and there doing “work for the bank,” according to a well-placed police source. In each case, the callers conveyed that Moïse had authorized the Americans and that they should be released. Gédéon refused.

Céant did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Shortly after the Americans were arrested, he took to the airwaves to call the team “terrorists” and “mercenaries” who had been trying to get to the bank’s roof so they could assassinate him and unspecified parliamentarians. He later walked back the statements, saying that they were a “hypothesis.”

On Monday, Haiti’s parliament voted to oust Céant as prime minister, but Céant has remained defiant. “There are MPs who have decided to do something illegal and unconstitutional and that goes against principles, republican traditions, and parliamentary traditions,” he told the Haitian daily newspaper Le Nouvelliste. “I am still in office as prime minister.”

The caper might have been successful had any of the American participants had previous experience conducting a clandestine mercenary mission in a sovereign country. Instead, they were a mixed bag of mostly military veterans, including one former SEAL who had recently been charged with assault for a road rage incident in southern California and another who was a body builder with a sideline as a country music singer. There was Kroeker, who among other ventures ran a truck suspension business; Burton, a former Army military police officer and State Department security contractor; and Porte, the owner of a small electrical contractor that won a one-time $16,000 contract with the Department of Homeland Security.

Kroeker, according to a person with direct knowledge, had assured his colleagues that the mission would be easy. But while the Americans were well-armed, they lacked other basic provisions of a secret security operation for hire: insurance coverage, a medical evacuation plan, legal authority to bring their weapons into Haiti, or an escape plan if things went bad.

“They had no idea what they were doing,” said the person with direct knowledge, who requested anonymity to speak publicly about the clandestine mission.

A list, created by Haitian police and acquired by Haïti Liberté, of the serial numbers of weapons the mercenaries had.

Chris Osman, one of the ex-Navy SEALs and the only member of the team to publicly discuss the Haiti operation so far, wrote on Instagram that he was in Haiti doing security work for “people who are directly connected to the current president.” Osman hinted at the Haitian political intrigue behind the scheme, posting that he and his colleagues “were being used as pawns in a public fight between [Moïse] and the current Prime Minister of Haiti.” Osman has since deleted his post.

Leconte and Champagne had discussed a possible follow-up contract with Kroeker if the money transfer was successful, according to the person with direct knowledge of the mission. It is unclear what that assignment might have been.

The post U.S. Mercenaries Arrested in Haiti Were Part of a Half-Baked Scheme to Move $80 Million for Embattled President appeared first on The Intercept.

The gruesome details of the alleged murder of Army Staff Sgt. Logan Melgar, of the 3rd Special Forces Group, while serving in the West African nation of Mali in June 2017, were released yesterday by the Navy as part of charges against two members of SEAL Team 6 and two special forces Marines. The charges were first reported by the Daily Beast.

The four accused special operators and Melgar were serving together on a counterterrorism task force based at the U.S. Embassy in the Malian capital of Bamako. The unit provided intelligence and training for Malian military forces in their battle against Islamic insurgents affiliated with Al Qaeda.

Melgar’s death in the early-morning hours of June 4, 2017 led to a significant rift inside the military’s special operations community, which viewed the alleged murder and attempted cover-up as a sign of how lawless the elite SEAL Team 6 has grown, according to several current and former members of the community.

The documents released by the military portray a premeditated assault that turned deadly, followed by a multistep, monthslong cover-up by the accused SEALs and Marines.

Although all four of the elite operators were charged with murder, involuntary manslaughter, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and burglary yesterday, the documents paint the Navy SEAL who allegedly choked Melgar to death as the most sinister player. The Navy has not released the names of the servicemen, but The Intercept and other media outlets have previously identified the man who allegedly strangled Melgar as Petty Officer Anthony DeDolph, and the other SEAL as Chief Petty Officer Adam Matthews. DeDolph faces the most charges.

DeDolph, a trained medic, allegedly conducted a tracheotomy on Melgar — a medical procedure intended to open the throat and insert a tube to allow for air passage — in order to “hide evidence of the injuries inflicted” on Melgar’s throat. A crushed throat was later determined by a medical examiner to be his cause of death, according to two people who reviewed Melgar’s autopsy.

The charges say the four servicemen broke into Melgar’s room while he was sleeping and “bound him with duct-tape.” According to sources familiar with the investigation, DeDolph then strangled Melgar “with a chokehold,” while Matthews and at least one of the Marines restrained Melgar.

The documents released by the military do not address the motive for the attack, but sources familiar with the investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service previously told The Intercept that Melgar’s relationship with DeDolph and Matthews was acrimonious at the time of the late-night assault.

Melgar had reported to his chain of command that the two SEALs were stealing money from an operational fund used to pay informants, according to several people familiar with the investigation who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case with the media. (A person briefed on the investigation also said that DeDolph and Matthews denied that they were stealing, and claimed to investigators that it was Melgar who had been stealing the cash and that they had confronted him about it.)

Investigators also discovered that DeDolph and Matthews hired prostitutes during their assignment in Bamako and used their shared embassy housing with Melgar for trysts. Melgar complained that the SEALs had pressured him for not taking part in conduct he considered illegal and inappropriate, according to a person with direct knowledge of Melgar’s concerns.

The charges against the four do not include premeditated murder, and investigators found no evidence that they had planned to kill Melgar.

“It was a beatdown that went bad,” said a retired special operations officer, who was briefed on the investigation.

The four broke into Melgar’s room at 5 a.m., as Melgar was sleeping and began the attack, according to military documents. After they realized that Melgar had died, investigators believe, the cover-up began. DeDolph and Matthews brought Melgar’s body, which had been badly damaged by the tracheotomy, to a French medical clinic in Bamako, where he was pronounced dead.

Part of the initial cover story for Melgar’s death was that he and DeDolph had engaged in “mutually initiate[d]” wrestling, as one of the Marines described it to investigators, at Melgar’s front door at 5 a.m. DeDolph was a professional mixed martial arts fighter prior to joining the Navy, and MMA is part of the required training for Navy SEALs.

The SEALs and the Marines made a series of false or misleading statements over a six-month period, which included the claim that Melgar was drunk when the SEALs and Marines arrived in his bedroom. A toxicology report later determined that Melgar did not have alcohol in his system at the time of his death. Other parts of the cover story began to fall apart, according to people familiar with the NCIS investigation and military documents.

According to a former SEAL Team 6 leader, who still consults for the unit, the command’s leadership quietly encouraged the Navy to prosecute DeDolph and Matthews in an effort to distance the SEAL command from the potential reputational stain stemming from the incident.

Melgar’s accusation that DeDolph and Matthews were stealing from the informant funds led to a larger investigation of potential financial malfeasance at SEAL Team 6 involving the misuse of cash intended for operational and contingency purposes.

“We honor the memory of Staff Sgt. Melgar, our thoughts remain with his family and teammates,” Capt. Jason Salata, a spokesperson for Special Operations Command, said in a released statement. “If these allegations of misconduct are substantiated, they represent a violation of the trust and standards required of all service members. We trust our service members to safeguard our nation’s most sensitive interests and to do so with honor.”

An “Article 32,” the military equivalent of a grand jury proceeding, is scheduled for December 10 in Norfolk, Virginia, near SEAL Team 6’s headquarters.

All four of the accused are on active-duty and remain free, as the Navy has determined that they are not flight risks.

The post SEAL Team 6 Members and Special Forces Marines Charged With Green Beret Murder and Cover-Up appeared first on The Intercept.

Normally, the presentation of the Medal of Honor is a solemn and meaningful recognition of bravery and heroism. But the announcement of the award for Britt Slabinski — and the concurrent decision to give the same award to John Chapman, a deceased Air Force combat controller — came after a yearslong campaign to recognize disputed events 16 years ago on a remote mountain in Afghanistan. The awards have exposed a rift in the special operations community, a long-running argument pitting the Air Force against the Navy SEALs. More significantly, the decision to award a Medal of Honor to Slabinski represents the enduring failure of the SEALs, the Pentagon, Congress, and the White House to reckon with the dark history of SEAL Team 6 in the post-9/11 wars. All these authorities have refused to conduct any meaningful or robust oversight of a group of elite commandos who have committed war crimes abroad and gone to great lengths to cover them up.

On March 3, 2002, a small SEAL Team 6 reconnaissance team led by Slabinski landed atop Takur Ghar, a 10,000-foot peak above the Shah-i-Kot valley in eastern Afghanistan, near the Pakistan border. The mission was part of the U.S. military’s Operation Anaconda, a multi-day effort to squeeze out and kill the last large group of Al Qaeda militants and Taliban fighters hiding in the valley. As it attempted to land, the helicopter took fire from Al Qaeda fighters, and SEAL Neil Roberts fell from the back of the helicopter. The helicopter was heading back to a nearby base when Slabinski and his team realized they had lost a teammate.

For two hours, SEAL Team 6 and officers from the Joint Special Operations Command scrambled a rescue force to recover Roberts. Again their helicopter took fire as it landed near the top. Slabinski and his team, including John Chapman, rushed out amid small arms fire from the Al Qaeda militants. The team split and Chapman was hit two minutes after engaging the militants. With additional teammates severely wounded, and believing Chapman was dead, Slabinski ordered his SEAL team to retreat down the mountain. A quick reaction force, consisting mostly of Army Rangers, then engaged in a pitched battle for control of Takur Ghar, as Slabinski called in airstrikes from his position down the side of the mountain. Ultimately, Roberts, Chapman, and five others were killed over the course of the battle, which became known as Roberts Ridge.

These details are largely agreed upon. Chapman and Slabinski both received service crosses, the military’s second-highest award. After Roberts’s body was recovered, the military determined that he had been mutilated, a horrific act that led SEAL Team 6 operators to engage in a cycle of vengeance against enemy fighters in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

From practically the moment Slabinski and his team returned to Bagram Air Base, others in the special operations community questioned whether he had erred in his assessment that Chapman was dead and retreated with a member of his team still alive.

In 2016, after the Pentagon began reassessing silver stars and service crosses awarded during the war on terror, the Air Force put together forensics and drone video that they claimed showed Chapman got up after Slabinski and the SEALs retreated and continued to fight, alone and outnumbered, before succumbing to his wounds.

The SEALs disagreed, and Rear Adm. Timothy Szymanski, the commanding officer of Naval Special Warfare, pushed for an upgrade for Slabinski’s service cross. Both current and former military members say the inter-service fight between the SEALs and the Air Force special operations command has been ugly and unbecoming. According to a Navy officer, the SEALs made several efforts to block an upgrade for Chapman, infuriating the Air Force.

Presentations of the Medal of Honor are almost always fraught with questions about whether the awards are handed out to make those involved in operations feel better about a loss of life. There’s “always some kind of solace sought in decorating someone with the award,” said one of Slabinski’s former leaders at SEAL Team 6, who spent more than 30 years in Special Operations. “A lot of it has to do with politics and rank and stature and always, in my opinion, the more dynamic and public the screw-up, the more likely it is that someone is going to get highly decorated.”

Another of Slabinski’s former teammates said 25 years of experience as a SEAL convinced him that the award system for valorous action has little integrity. “One of my commanders told me point-blank: The bigger the fuck-up, the bigger the award.”

The retired SEAL leader, who studied the battle at Roberts Ridge extensively for the military and discussed the events with Slabinski, said the issue was not whether Chapman or Slabinski were deserving of a medal upgrade, but why the military was motivated to extend that honor so many years later. “This is the madness of the Medal of Honor,” he said. “Rarely is it granted when things go well.”

By awarding both Chapman and Slabinski the Medal of Honor, the Pentagon presents an impossible version of what happened on Roberts Ridge. By awarding it to Chapman, the military endorses the view that Chapman survived his initial injuries and fought with valor after Slabinski and his SEAL team retreated down the mountain. If that’s true, then Slabinski left his teammate behind, violating the first rule of special operations. By awarding Slabinski the Medal of Honor, the military essentially ignores the Chapman narrative and supports the notion that Slabinski’s actions that day were heroic.

Both versions of what happened at Takur Ghar cannot be true. But the argument over how Slabinski determined Chapman was dead, and when Chapman may have died, is really a distraction from the true significance  of what came down from Takur Ghar after the battle for Roberts Ridge.

As the SEAL Team 6 operations officer at Bagram Air Base, Szymanski was the mission planner for Slabinski’s reconnaissance team. Szymanski and his superior officers effectively limited Slabinski’s options, forcing him to land on what they later discovered was a well-established enemy position, rather than allowing the team to land lower on the mountain and clandestinely patrol the top. The former unit leader who served several years with Szymanski said he had no doubt that his former teammate pushed for the upgrade to assuage his own guilt about putting Slabinski and his team in what became a disastrous position.

Slabinski’s military career did not end on March 4, 2002. He spent another 12 years in the military, almost all of it at SEAL Team 6, where he ended up as a senior enlisted leader. For many, he was a legendary SEAL. Inside the secret world of what the military refers to as a “Tier 1” unit, however, Slabinski is part of another legacy, one which also stems from what happened during Roberts Ridge. That legacy involves Szymanski as well.

In the days after Takur Ghar, Slabinski and others in SEAL Team 6 sought “payback” for Roberts, Chapman, and the other casualties. Slabinski later told author Malcolm MacPherson, in a taped interview obtained by The Intercept, that a few days after the battle, his team ambushed and killed nearly two dozen Al Qaeda fighters headed toward the Pakistan border. After the militants had been killed, Slabinski described a form of “therapy”:

I mean, talk about the funny stuff we do. After I shot this dude in the head, there was a guy who had his feet, just his feet, sticking out of some little rut or something over here. I mean, he was dead, but people have got nerves. I shot him about 20 times in the legs, and every time you’d kick him, er, shoot him, he would kick up, you could see his body twitching and all that. It was like a game. Like, ‘hey look at this dude,’ and the guy would just twitch again. It was just good therapy. It was really good therapy for everybody who was there.

Audio from an unpublished interview with Britt Slabinksi conducted by Malcolm MacPherson, author of a 2005 book on the battle of Roberts Ridge.

For almost four years after Roberts Ridge, SEAL Team 6 intentionally limited Slabinski’s battlefield exposure. The trauma from Roberts Ridge was clear — and Slabinski has said that he still sees fighters moving in slow motion from that day.

In 2007, Slabinski was sent back to Afghanistan as a squadron master chief, which made him the senior noncommissioned officer of Blue Squadron. His two-year assignment at Blue came as the SEAL Team 6 leadership began receiving reports that small groups of SEALs were committing what they believed were war crimes: cutting, mutilating, and otherwise desecrating enemy fighters with knives and custom-made hatchets. In addition, SEAL Team 6 operators were “canoeing” dead or dying enemy targets — firing bullets at close range to the top of the skull, splitting it open at the forehead and exposing the brain matter.

In late 2007, members of Blue Squadron were twice investigated by Naval Criminal Investigative Service and JSOC. The first investigation resulted from allegations that a SEAL had attempted to behead a Taliban fighter in southern Afghanistan after Slabinski told his men he wanted a “head on a platter.” As I reported in 2017, Slabinski told his superiors and later investigators that there had been no beheading, saying there was “no foul play.” A former investigator with direct knowledge of the case told me that it was clear from the beginning of the beheading investigation that SEAL Team 6 had brought in NCIS to conclude that no war crime had occurred. “We knew we’d been called in to give them the result they wanted — that everyone was clean,” the former Navy officer said. The NCIS investigation was part of the cover-up.

Shortly after the beheading incident, Slabinski’s team was accused of killing unarmed men in an operation. That investigation, too, resulted in the SEALs being cleared.

Three years later, in 2010, Slabinski was up for a promotion when SEAL Team 6 decided to re-examine his tour with Blue Squadron. The command confirmed that Slabinski had in fact covered up the attempted beheading. Slabinski also admitted he had given an illegal order for his men to shoot all males on an operation regardless of whether or not they were armed, according to a person with direct knowledge of the investigation. Ultimately, however, the military concluded all the men killed during that operation were armed. As a result of these inquiries, a group of 10 SEAL Team 6 leaders later voted unanimously to ban Slabinski from ever serving at the command again. After Slabinski’s admission, the most senior enlisted member of SEAL Team 6 told him, “That’s not what we’re about. We can’t have you here.”

As I reported in 2017, one of Slabinski’s former superiors said: “To this day, he thinks the guys turned on him. Well, they did. What we didn’t do was turn him in. You will step over the line and you start dehumanizing people. You really do. And it takes the team, it takes individuals to pull you back. And part of that was getting rid of Britt Slabinski.”

Naval Special Warfare has consistently stated that the allegations against Slabinski and SEAL Team 6 are “unfounded,” and that each has been “previously investigated and determined to be not substantiated.” Despite months of my repeated inquires to SEAL Team 6 and Naval Special Warfare, no one would answer a simple question: If no crimes had been committed, why bar Slabinski from SEAL Team 6? Syzmanski and Slabinski did not respond to requests for comment.

The answer lies in how effective and widespread the culture of lies and cover-ups has been at SEAL Team 6. In each of Slabinski’s 2007 investigations, both NCIS and JSOC found no evidence of violations of the laws of armed conflict, as they describe war crimes. But three years later, a small group of unit leaders quickly substantiated the allegations and even secured a confession. The command thus demonstrated that it was perfectly capable of determining the truth for internal purposes — and once again proved it was unwilling to expose even its pariahs to external scrutiny or justice.

After learning that he would never again serve at SEAL Team 6,  Slabinski was thrown a lifeline by Szymanski, then commodore of Naval Special Warfare Group 2, who selected him to be his command master chief. His career should have been over, yet he was given a promotion. Some inside SEAL Team 6 were stunned. From their perspective, Szymanski had willingly requested a suspected war criminal to be his senior noncommissioned officer. When asked why he would bring in Slabinski after he was thrown out of SEAL Team 6 for alleged war crimes, a SEAL Team 6 leader told me that Szymanski told his fellow SEALs that their community could not shun a war hero.

In their time commanding Group 2, Szymanski and Slabinski helped craft what has become the unofficial Navy SEAL creed, which ends with this:

I serve with honor on and off the battlefield. The ability to control my emotions and my actions, regardless of circumstance, sets me apart from other men. Uncompromising integrity is my standard. My character and honor are steadfast. My word is my bond.

In 2015, after he retired, Slabinski gave an on-the-record interview to the New York Times in which he denied giving the illegal order to shoot any man. He also implied that it was his leadership and discipline that prevented the near-beheading in 2007. In the view of senior SEAL Team 6 leaders, Slabinski had lied. Even worse, he’d done so while speaking to the press. For that sin, SEAL Team 6 added Slabinski to the “rock of shame,” a list of former members of SEAL Team 6 who were no longer welcome to visit the command. Already barred from serving at SEAL Team 6, Slabinski was now physically banished.

“That’s what’s wrong with my community,” a former SEAL Team 6 leader told me last year. “Our sense of what’s right and what’s wrong is warped. No one was upset that he ordered a beheading or all the men shot even if they were unarmed. They were mad because he spoke to the New York Times and lied.”

One of the regulations governing military awards, including the Medal of Honor, states that “no medal, cross, or bar, or associated emblem or insignia may be awarded or presented to any person or to his representative if his service after he distinguished himself has not been honorable.”

By the military’s own standard, Slabinski should have been disqualified from the Medal of Honor for his actions in subsequent deployments to Afghanistan. But Slabinski’s dishonorable actions are only a part of a much larger problem. Senior officers of SEAL Team 6 bear the ultimate responsibility, both for tactical failures, such as the decisions that placed Slabinski’s team at the top of Takur Ghar, and for leadership failures, for turning a blind eye to a broad pattern of war crimes and other military misconduct. For 15 years, as SEAL Team 6 senior officers and leaders received reports that their operators were skinning, scalping, canoeing, and otherwise mutilating enemy corpses with custom-made hatchets in Afghanistan and Iraq, they either ignored the warnings or helped cover them up.

“By giving Slabinski the award, you close the door on our criminal history,” said the former SEAL Team 6 leader. “The cover-up wins. You’ve closed this ugly part of our command’s history, and everyone gets away with it. What everyone learns from this is that cover-ups work — don’t say anything bad about your teammates, keep quiet and we’ll get through it. It’s disgraceful.”

Correction: May 22, 2018

A previous version of this article stated that John Chapman’s Medal of Honor was announced by the White House on May 7  along with Britt Slabinski’s. Although Chapman’s medal had been approved, it has not yet been formally announced. 

Top photo: An undated official portrait of retired Master Chief Special Warfare Operator (SEAL) Britt K. Slabinski.

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“A commanding officer and command master chief assigned to an East Coast-based Naval Special Warfare unit have been relieved of their duties overseas due to alleged misconduct,” said Cmdr. Tamara Lawrence, a spokesperson for Naval Special Warfare, the Navy SEAL command. “Naval Special Warfare and NCIS have initiated investigations as appropriate.”

According to two current Navy SEAL consultants familiar with the case, the investigation into the commander and his senior enlisted adviser concerns allegations of sexual assault and sexual harassment of a female service member while deployed in East Africa. Both consultants requested anonymity because they are not permitted to publicly discuss the investigation.

Both the commander and the master chief were sent back to their Virginia Beach-based unit pending the investigation.

Separately, the commanding officer of all Navy SEALs, Rear Adm. Timothy Szymanski, addressed a large gathering Friday, in what the Navy refers to as an “all hands” meeting after the 11 SEALs tested positive for drug use in recent weeks. Lawrence confirmed that Szymanski addressed the SEALs, but would not provide details of his remarks. “During a number of command drug tests from March to April 2018, 11 service members from East Coast based Naval Special Warfare units tested positive for controlled substances,” said Lawrence.

“We have a zero-tolerance policy for the use of illicit drugs and, as such, these individuals will be held accountable for their actions. We are confident in our drug-testing procedures and will continue to impress on all members of the command that illicit drugs are incompatible with the SEAL Ethos and Naval service.”

Last year, a senior SEAL officer told the East Coast SEALs that there had been a “staggering” amount of drug use in the SEAL teams, according to a CBS News report. After several SEALs tested positive for drugs in late 2016, the entire SEAL command was put on a stand-down order and submitted to drug tests.

The larger SEAL command, which includes the elite SEAL Team 6, has struggled with drugs and discipline in recent years, according to several current and former members of the SEAL community.

One of the military consultants said there has been a spike in disciplinary and legal issues for SEALs since the drawdown of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Take warriors out of a war zone and take all their stimuli away and see what happens,” the consultant said.

The SEAL community has been waiting for the results of a NCIS investigation into the strangulation death of an Army Special Forces sergeant last summer. In that case, two members of SEAL Team 6 are considered “persons of interest” after they changed their accounts of how the Green Beret died in their shared living quarters while deployed to Mali.

ABC News first reported that the two SEAL leaders in Africa were removed.

Top photo: A view of Seal Team 6 headquarters at Dam Neck Naval Annex, Virginia Beach, Va.

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