Erik Prince’s Private Wars: The Blackwater founder wants to bring back his company’s glory days — and he’s campaigning for Donald Trump’s help to do it. But he’s haunted by past failures and is facing questions about a mercenary fiasco in Libya – By Seth Hetten (Rolling Stone) / Oct 25 2020
In the spring of 2019, Khalifa Haftar went to a cafe in Cairo to plot a coup. At the meeting, the Libyan general was shown an $80 million plan to overthrow Libya’s U.N.-recognized government. In a PowerPoint presentation viewed by Rolling Stone, Haftar, a warlord with a power base in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi, saw plans for an operation that would use two Cobra H1 attack helicopters, mounted with 20mm rotary machine guns and crewed by foreign mercenaries, to swoop down and kill or capture 11 of Haftar’s political enemies. The plan would inject the soldiers of fortune into a nearly decade-old civil war that — fueled by internal instability and foreign meddling in the oil-rich North African nation — has killed thousands of Libyans and displaced many times more. The general gave the operation the green light.
By June 18th, 2019, the operation, named “Project Opus,” was in the final stages of planning, as the mercenaries and their backers attempted to assemble the equipment Haftar had been promised. But they hit a snag when the Kingdom of Jordan refused to sell military helicopters to the group. The mercenaries’ cover story was that they were headed to Libya to support energy-development projects, but Jordanian military officials had grown suspicious because of the equipment being stockpiled.
Professional mercenaries pride themselves on discretion, but this group’s tradecraft was laughable. A former Australian Air Force pilot sent to Jordan to inspect the helicopters identified himself as “Gene Rynack.” The code name was a nod to “Gene Ryack,” the fictional arms-dealer-turned-heroin-smuggler in Air America, a film about private CIA aviation contractors during the Vietnam War. (Think of a spy with the cover name “James Bonde.”) Rynack — whose real name is Christiaan “Serge” Durrant — suggested to Jordanian officials that he had clearances from “everywhere,” effectively attempting to bluff them into believing he had the approval of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Suspicious Jordanian officials dug deeper and found that the operation was a private one that no country had officially sanctioned, and the sale never went through.
Lacking the Jordanian choppers, the mercenaries and their backers scrambled to find replacements, which included trying to buy equipment from private sources. “Opus are now executing their contingency plan1 for non-government support,” a member of Project Opus wrote in a June 18th, 2019, communiqué seen by Rolling Stone. “This places considerable legal risk on Opus and is beyond the scope of the agreed contract.”
Continue to article: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/erik-prince-libya-blackwater-roger-stone-trump-2020-election-1077089/
